Does anyone care? Seems like it's just me.

Well I do care. I'm very upset. And I don't think Obama is doing enough to get us out of Iraq, and I also don't see how it's any different than what Bush did, if he sends more troops over to Afghanistan, like he's talking about.

Feels a little like in the months after 911, frankly. When everybody was all "yea us!" while Bush moved in on Iraq, and everyone assured me that we would do the right thing.

I'll say it again: Waiting a year to close Guantanamo is wrong.

Not even mentioning the sixth anniversary of the war - just plain wrong.

I know the economy is everyone's first priority, but stalling on taking action on Guantanamo and Iraq, when lives are at stake, can't be right.

That's what it feels like is going on right now.

I waited a day, as I often do, to see if I still felt this way, before sharing my feelings with you. But I just felt stronger about it this morning. So there it is :-)

thanks!

lisa

Cylindrian Rutabega -- "Grace" in RL - is playing the Central Perk in El Cerrito tonight (and I'll be hanging around with my guitar -- just in case :-)

She's there for three hours from 7-10 pm. She has a bunch of cool friends coming by and the Central Perk is my new favorite hang out i think. (Directions below photograph.)

This would also be a great time to come by and say hi in human form. I love my new robot and avatar friends, but it is still nice to see and hug the actual carbon-based unit corresponding to the identity of the human I love, during those rare special occasions when such meetings are possible :)

Cylindrian Rutabaga Live Tonight!


Directions: This place is really easy to get to:

- It's 1 block away from El Cerrito Plaza Bart, on the corner of Central Avenue and San Pablo.

- From Highway 80, coming North or South, it's the "Central Ave." Exit off the freeway. Then head east off the freeway for five minutes till you get to San Pablo Ave.

-From the North OR South, just take San Pablo Ave till it hits Central Ave. El Cerrito is in between Berkeley/Albany and Richmond. If you're coming north and you hit Guitar Center, you've gone too far.
Going south, hit the Pete's on the right and you've gone too far.

- Address: 10086 San Pablo, El Cerrito, 94530

-Phone: 866-417-5206

-See you tonight!

Once upon a time, I met a skateboarding, breakdancing Tin Woodsman named Gary Bukowski

Gary is a Wishfarmer.

The Wishfarmers are basically a group of Second Life Wizards.

Now I spend my days and nights on Wishfarmers Isle, often just enjoying the surroundings around me, and trying remember what it was I used to do in that other place "out there."

Our latest creation is Strengths Island, which you are about to hear a lot more about...

So I promised that I would start blogging more -- about everything, but in particular about the projects I've been working on these days, which are mainly in Second Life.

Well, I'll finally start making good on that promise today, and I'm really excited about keeping you more in the loop on what I'm working on, so you can help me make it better.

The Second Life learning curve is a brutal one, but I know that soon, if I keep at it 24-7, I'll eventually absorb all the necessary data to effectively mesh with the grid.

Until then, I'm taking as many notes as I can about all my experiences during this precious time, when I still feel like a "Noob" (a SL new user), so I can incorporate them into my writings and teachings accordingly.

It's been a while since I've really taken on the mission of mastering something new like this. In 1996, although I knew very little about computer programming at the time, I decided I wanted to learn everything about Web Standards -- especially HTML and XML. Thanks to several members of the W3C's staff and its original XML Working Group (who spent countless hours on the phone and writing emails to help me learn all the details), in just a few years, I was teaching XML for UC Berkeley Extension Online.

Then, in 2001, I decided to ramp up on Copyright Law in the hopes that it might somehow combine with my technical skills to perhaps play a role in helping to turn the copyright situation around. That time, although I wasn't even sure myself where my research would take me (and again, as a result of countless individuals taking me under their wing, to help me learn quickly), I found myself a co-founder of Creative Commons, working with Lawrence Lessig.

So, as you can see, these leaps into the void seem to pay off for me, generally, in both the short and long term. I consider this to be another such leap.

This latest endeavor also ties in nicely with the graduate and undergraduate level teaching on social networking and virtual worlds I've been doing for Prof. Michelle Wolf and Prof. Marie Drennan at SF State's Broadcast Electronic Communications Arts Department (BECA). I'm having a blast learning these new interactive education concepts and technologies from The Wishfarmers, and I am eagerly incorporating them into my own bevy of teaching knowledge and materials.

I guess by now it's pretty obvious that I truly believe virtual worlds have the potential to help shape and improve our lives. And not just the lives of those online, but also the those out in regular old "meatspace." It seems clear to me that virtual worlds are no more a fad or passing phase than the Internet itself.

But now I'm getting ahead of myself, and it's usually best to start at the beginning...

I'm going out to go vote right now...... and I've already said "go obama" and all that...

But in reality, I'm much more fixated on virtual reality right now, as I've been working with a group of people called "The Wishfarmers" that you're going to hear me start yappin' about... as is my way... when I get infatuated with a new project.

Come to my metaverse playpen, and click "play" on your video and audio controls.

It's pretty cool, courtesy of
Electric Sheep Artist Spot Draves.

Spot will be doing an exhibit in the
Node Zero Galleries in early March.

Teleport

Hey gang.

I've been promising a lot of people, including myself, that I'd start blogging again soon.

Well the time has come.

It's rather ironic that, right when my life's getting rather interesting -- at least it seems that way to me :-)
-- I suddenly become too busy to blog -- and for like two or three years, I guess.

Well, I'm back. And I'm here to stay, I hope.

There's too much going on. Too much to talk about. Too much to share. Too much to learn.

'nuff said!

Gobble gobble everybody! Have a great day!

Here's to a progressive genocide-free future!

This is just a catch up note from last weekend on how much fun it's getting to be playing parties and events and things again...

I guess I used to get nervous and couldn't allow myself to enjoy the moment as much as I can now, now that my groove has become a second nature.

Now I don't have to think about what I'm doing. I just go into some kind of trance or something...

But what a rush last weekend to notice that everybody in the building I was playing in was smiling and digging it. They had my music piped in throughout the building (it was kind of an office/client party type thing) -- and everyone was moving their heads back and forth...and smiling.

And they'd walk in and out of the room I was actually in and look over at me, and smile, and kinda say "thanks" and "hey what'ssup?" at the same time with a nod of their heads as they were walking through.

It was a peak experience for sure.

Ready for more of those!

link to info on upcoming shows

Hey my show went great! There were lots of people there and the geeky part of the evening I hoped would take place, did!

To my delight and surprise, John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, Annie Harrison and Brian Zisk all stopped by.

There were EFF and Internet Archive folks there too! And lots of other cool friends I'll get around to talking about later.

Anyway huge success.

Next shows at the same place (Ireland's 32, SF) will be:

1) November 11 - my birthday party (b-day the 10th) 9pm - midnight+

2) November 30 - Friday night 7-9 (woot!)

I'll have video going up soon too!

Thanks again to Ron Taylor and my sister for making it all possible.

(I was off playing hookey at the Singularity Summit hanging out with Jamais Cascio during most of what was supposed to be our practice time on Saturday!) (Soooo much more on all that later!)

Wow. That was a long trip. Two weeks of good friends, incredible technology, and serious soul searching.

So good to be home now - but so much to do!

Lots to tell you about everything.

talk soon,

lisa

Me at the Second Life Salsa Party - They're line dancing!

Ok it just happened! Something I'd only dreamed of just a few weeks ago:

I was literally twittered in first life about a party going on in real time in second life. So I clicked on the slurl that was provided in the twitter post, and was teleported to the Salsa party.

(Well yeah, and I had to close SL first to get it to work, because that just seems to be the norm with slurls these days. The "secondlife://" links that go direct seem to work more often than the slurls, but still not often enough. And I find myself having to close SL for whatever doesn't otherwise take to take in the Mapping/teleport process. - That's why this goes under quick tips too.)

This kind of SL/web integration is what I've been waiting for for so many reasons...where do i begin? :-)

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Iladil/167/227/72

I'll put up a little movie I made of it tonight.

But right now, on a more personal note, I must work on some actual paying Second Life consulting work. The transition is complete..w00t!

That's why the a-z index is slow coming together...but it's coming. Don't you worry. It's coming :-)

Ok so some of you may have noticed that there's a Second Life A-Z Index kicking around, but I've been kind of hedging on its existence because it wasn't until late yesterday that I figured out how the indexes are going to best fit together.

So basically, I still need this external document, but it will still link, for the most part, back to blog posts *of indexes* of things. Like the one I just put up for "Places to Go Practice with Objects."

(Note just saying hi to the two or three people on the planet that this level of detail is of interest to.
You rule. The four of us should get together some time. Now back to the rest of the world :-)

Now where was I? Ahem. Yes, so anyway. I think I've figured it out and that's why I've been dinking around on announcing it. I've been sneaking links to it into old posts, so I don't forget to do that later. But it really didn't feel like anything worth announcing until it had some meat on its bones. (And I've got a freezer full!) (no offense to you veggies! I have um. tofu in the freezer too!)

So now I've had a nice sleep, where I remember having a nice dream about my new information architecture, and "how interesting...this *does* seem to fit in there" and, "why yes, I wondered about that too, and I just happen to have a little list of how to fix that right over he-are."

And then I awoke, because it was just a dream. And I, of course, won't know for a week or two if mine's even going to work. But it will be fun trying.

Me parachuting in Second Life

Alright, all my hard drives are completely filled up with video I've taken the time to prepare to blog, and never blogged. (DOH!)

Now I have to throw this stuff up...and quickly. Or forget about it for the time being. (eeek! noooo!)

So I'm gonna try to have a slinging hash video day - where I'm just throwing stuff up without much else.

I might end up going back later and filling stuff in. It will depend.

There's just been so much going on so quickly. I've been able to document it all accordingly to explain to you, but haven't had time to organize it and get it up. This last week, I did get it organized, just still haven't put it up. Now...it's a goin up!

more later... for now.... another song from June 10!

The first time I tried this ice cream, I kinda ate a half pint of it without stopping.

The cone always was the best part of an ice cream cone. How brilliant to break it up, cover it with chocolate, and throw it in with some caramel.

(Shhhh. No worries Steven, my love -- I won't jeopardize your marriage by sitting on your lap like that brazen hussy Jane Fonda did -- we can play footsie under the table during the interview while no one's watching :-)

I know I do this every year or so, but I've been going through a lot of incredible changes and realizations in my life lately, and one of them was *yet another* realization of the piece of me that is missing when I'm not blogging on a regular basis.

I've been getting caught up in a lot of crap lately that ultimately, in the larger scheme of things, doesn't matter, and forgetting the important things in life, like getting the word out to people about important issues that affect their lives -- or, hey, are just plain cool to watch and talk about.

So with that...I bring you the latest episode of
Hometown Baghdad -- in incredible video blog coming out of Iraq that the creators have been nice enough to remind me about every so often.

Here's a brief description:

It shows the aftermath of the US troops killing the innocent uncle of one of our subjects. In the video you can see a cheery, largely US-friendly family turn fully against America and the troops. It is chilling. And perhaps the most moving entry into our series.

Love you all and thanks for waiting around for me to start paying attention again!

Every time I post, the response is so gratifying. You've all become a very important part of my life, and it feels like an old friend I've been neglecting or something...

Let's see if I can keep it going this time. So much going on. So much to learn and share!

I've been to the Castro on Halloween several times, and even on years that I don't decide to go, it's important to me that I know it's there, happening. Just over there, being cultural, historical, and wonderful. And I always get to hear interesting and exciting anecdotes from my friends that make it.

Now we're told the party's over because, it would appear, of some gang incident that happened last year that didn't have anything to do with the festivities.

Merchants are being asked to close early. I hope they don't. They make a lot of money on Halloween. Why should they have to suffer too?

here's the article in the chronicle about it.

How can we save it guys? I dunno. Seems like we should go straight to Gavin Newsome about it. This is a good issue to see where he's at on over-reaching blanket bans on public congregation...

It's like telling the German's "hey, no Oktoberfest this year."

Here's the best quote of the article:

"People are still going to go to the Castro," said Ted Strawser, founder of the San Francisco Party Party, a group that opposes the move. "Without services, they're just going to pee in the street, and without entertainment, mischief will occur."

Updated to provide easy links to The San Francisco Party Party's website on this issue and its party platform statement.

Here's the full text of the article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/06/01/state/n211009D90.DTL

City officials shut down annual Castro Halloween bash

Friday, June 1, 2007

A city firefighter assists a shooting victim, who was amo... A shooting victim clutches his leg in the Castro district... Erika Gruendyke (left) and Lenora Hett get a free, hands-... Gluteus maximus: Many Castro Halloween revelers wore cost...

(06-01) 21:10 PDT San Francisco (AP) --

Halloween revelers in San Francisco will have to find a new place to haunt this year after city officials decided to shut down the Castro district's yearly street party.

The section of Market and Castro Streets usually blocked off for the costumed extravaganza will remain open to traffic. There will be no portable toilets provided and no stages erected for entertainment, officials said.

Merchants are being asked to close early, said Supervisor Bevan Dufty, who represents the Castro, and some have already agreed to do so.

Moving the famous street party — a decades-long tradition in the gay enclave — has been an annual discussion since violence has increasingly defined the event. Last year a gunman shot nine people, and in 2002 four people were stabbed.

San Francisco officials tried to start an alternative party at the Civic Center from 1996-2001. But party-seekers went to the Castro anyway, and police had to patrol both events.

City officials have proposed moving the party to a parking lot at AT&T Park, and luring a top-name entertainer to help private promoters recoup the costs of the event.

"People are still going to go to the Castro," said Ted Strawser, founder of the San Francisco Party Party, a group that opposes the move. "Without services, they're just going to pee in the street, and without entertainment, mischief will occur."

I know they're a man-made superband and all, but hell, some of these songs kick some serious ass.

Here's
some weird version of Slither.... It will get the point across. (Actually you can't hear alot of the cool vocals in it, is some mostly-instrumental version at the end, sorry...)

OK WAIT Here's a BETTER VERSION.

Anyway it's like to good parts of GnR with Stone Pilot's sprinkled on top. I must admit they've got a few ringers :-)

I just love scott's lyrics ....

Anyway I'm up too late in the middle of the night again, but this time I can't blame Second Life, just First Life...

I have a ton of stuff about to go up at the Mefeedia blog...and lots of interesting news to tell you about this week!

Stay tuned :-)

Friend me in SL - I'm Haley Bailey - and I'll send you a Mefeedia T-shirt you can wear in Second Life. So I'm learning how to program and build objects and buildings in Second Life, and I can tell that I've found a new obsession for sure. As I mentioned above, my SL name is "Haley Bailey." I extend the usual offer to "friend me." I'm still hanging out for the most part at my friend Ryce Broderick's place. He's David Meade in meatspace -- Teleport Now - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Gyeongju/106/166/73 I met a lot of other ethnographers and researchers at CHI 2007 last week. We're all going to share data! Yippie!

I don't understand the whole "wasting time in SL" thing though, because I am definitely learning technical and cultural skills while I'm in there.

There's so much culture and social intrigue in world. And it's not necessarily a substitution for meatspace.

I'm getting more into meatspace too! There's a new vlog on the way!

But my point is that it's really the instances of the virtual world's bleeding over into meatspace that fascinate the hell out of me. Why I decided to start writing up tutorials and tours of SL. (Tour index on the way.)

Update! This show has been moved to May 20th!

Hey I just landed another gig next weekend from 10am-2pm on SUNDAY, May 13th at the Kensington Farmer's Market.

Since I've just got oodles of time, I'll probably be going through my whole set. (25+songs)

I'm bringing my sister up from LA to keep things jamming in-between my sets.

We might even perform a few songs together. We definitely will since we get an extra week to prepare!

Anyway come by and say hi, if you're in the neighborhood.

If you can find your way up to the stores along the Arlington, you've found it.

If you take Bart, take the 7 bus from either Berkeley or North Berkeley Bart.

Update 5/7/07 - ok too hard to find a phone that meets everything? or just who cares?

Haven't heard from anyone :-)

Peeps!

My phone from 2003 is literally falling apart now and the time has come to move into the modern age for me.

My cell phone can't take pix or vids and can receive text messages, but can't even send them!

I need to know quickly which phones are best and why, so I can make a good decision.

I don't really want to spend a lot...but I'll spend what I have to to get something decent.

Now I want:
-video capabilities
-video upload capabilities (don't want the vids "trapped" in my phone)
-digi pic (always comes with vid anyway)
-pic upload
-texting...

anything else I need to include?

Thanks in advance for your usual great advice.

washington post on kurt vonnegut's death...

Vonnegut died on Wednesday after suffering brain injuries following a
fall weeks ago, said Donald Farber, Vonnegut's friend, lawyer, agent
and manager.

Here's a transcript of one of his last interviews, with David Brancaccio on PBS, NOW.

Lately, he considered himself a man without a country, as I think many of us have felt lately.

Consistenly now, for many decades, without meaning to, Kurt has spoken for a lot of Americans. (As he rattles on, weaving his way through his fantasy-driven storytelling journals...)

I miss him already.

Kurt Vonnegut dead at 84

By Matthew Robinson
Reuters
Thursday, April 12, 2007; 1:05 PM

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark, satirical vision in
works including "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle" was shaped
by the horrors he witnessed during World War II, has died at age 84.

Vonnegut died on Wednesday after suffering brain injuries following a
fall weeks ago, said Donald Farber, Vonnegut's friend, lawyer, agent
and manager.

Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction, but his 14 novels
were classics of the American counterculture, resonating with the
U.S. antiwar sentiment during the Vietnam War era.

The author's Web site, updated after his death, displayed a simple
black-and-white image of a bird cage -- a symbolic element in his
writing -- empty with an open door. "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1922-2007,"
the page read.

"He was a beautiful man," Farber said. "I never hung up the phone
without having laughed, he always left me laughing, no matter what
the circumstances of the world."

"I last spoke to him the day he fell," Farber said. "He was in good
spirits. Every time he spoke with me no matter what the
circumstances in the world, he had a funny angle on it even if it
wasn't a funny thing."

Despite battles with severe depression, Vonnegut was known for his
witticisms.

"I've had a hell of a good time," Vonnegut once wrote. "I tell you,
we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you
any different."

Irwyn Applebaum, president of the Bantam Dell publishing division of
Random House, said, "By all counts he was one of the great writers of
the 20th Century and continued to be one of the great writers in the
21st Century."

Bantam Dell publishes some of the author's seminal works, including
"Breakfast of Champions," "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle,"
which made him a literary idol in the 1960s and 1970s, especially to
students.

A defining event in Vonnegut's life was the firebombing of Dresden,
Germany by Allied Forces in 1945, which he witnessed as a young
prisoner of war. The bombing killed tens of thousands of people,
mostly civilians.

Dresden was the basis for "Slaughterhouse-Five," published in 1969
against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural
and social upheaval.

"There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre," Vonnegut wrote.

Vonnegut became a cult hero when the novel reached No. 1 on
bestseller lists and even more popular among many young Americans
when some schools and libraries banned the book for its sexual
content, rough language and depictions of violence.

The novel featured a signature Vonnegut phrase, "so it goes," which
became a catch phrase for Vietnam war opponents.

After the book was published, Vonnegut went into severe depression
and vowed never to write another novel. In 1984, he tried to take
his life with sleeping pills and alcohol. His mother had herself
committed suicide.

Vonnegut mixed fiction and autobiography in his work, which also
blended elements of science fiction and touched on authoritarianism
and the dehumanization of man by technology.

Fans said he invented a new literary type but some critics accused
him of recycling themes and characters.

"Cat's Cradle" was published in 1963 and initially sold only about
500 copies but it remains widely read today in high school English
classes.

Vonnegut's last book, published in 2005, was a collection of
biographical essays, "A Man Without a Country."

A fourth-generation German-American who was born in Indianapolis,
Vonnegut is survived by his second wife photographer Jill Krementz,
their daughter and his six other children. Two of his children are
published authors.

Mark Vonnegut, named after Mark Twain whom his father admired and
bore a striking resemblance to, wrote "The Eden Express: A Memoir of
Insanity" about his own descent and eventual recovery from mental
illness. He speculated the illness was partly hereditary.

Daughter Edith Vonnegut, an artist, wrote "Domestic Goddesses," which
takes issue with traditional art imagery in which women are shown as
weak and helpless.

A friend has recently inspired me to begin riding a bike again. I think I'm hooked.

Tonight will be my first Critical Mass.

6pm, Justin Herman Plaza, San Francisco.

See you there!

Okay so I got a new macbook and I'm having a blast with the Photo Booth feature -- when I'm not getting weirded out about having a built-in camera in my laptop. (Yes I'm keeping a post-it note over the lens...)

And if we're not careful, 2007 will be the equivalent of a "same shit different day" kinda year for this country.

So let's make sure we do a couple important things:

We need to put pressure on the Dems to BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!

We need to CODIFY NET NEUTRALITY INTO LAW.

And, if you can believe it, I think we all need to have MORE FUN,

and get MORE SLEEP.

Those are the equivalent of my new year's resolutions.

Thanks in advance for your help in accomplishing any of them :-)

p.s. "play more music" was in there too - but I already started that one in december...lots going up soon on that front soon, promise! :)

The details don't matter.

It's all good, and I wish Dabble nothing but success :-)

The important thing is to use lisa@lisarein.com from now on, for everything for me. Forever.

(And do drop me a line - this will be the first chance I've had to catch up with people in years!)

thanks!

lisa

Yeah this year was a mixed bag to say the least.

(I know it's not over for another month, but it always feels like the year's already over by the time Thanksgiving rolls around.)

Somehow, William S. Burroughs was able to make me feel a little better:

And, of course, I already got the best present (s) ever on Wednesday :-)

Hey I just got another present -- we just took control of the Senate!

Rummy and Mehlman are history too. wow.

I'll be on a panel October 17th at the Digimart Conference going on in Montreal October 16-18.

The panel I'm on is called
Your Space On My Tube - How to Engage with the Online World and Make Money, hosted by Scott Kirsner of the Cinematech Blog.

Scott's really bringing together a neat group of people, including the Eepybird guys, who did the Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments.

I'm really looking forward to it.

It will be great to be in Montreal again. I used to go to Montreal every year for the small, uber-geeky XML conference that used to go on there every year. I haven't gone to that conference since 2000 or so, and I had really missed Montreal.

Getting ready for the conference also forced me to write up an updated bio.

A couple of you have bugged me about this over the years, and I just didn't have time to think about it until recently. Sorry!

I'm finally going to go back and bring it all up to date. There's a lot going on, and I want you to know about it, so you can help me do better at everything. (Like always :-)

So a lot is going on lately. There's so much going on, that I don't know where to begin in explaining it. So I'll just start putting stuff up...

It's all good, in different ways. On the creative musical and video front, I've been preparing a lot over this last month that I'm ready to start rolling out over these next few weeks. On the Dabble front, we're ready to roll out some new features and are adding a ton of new content collections from all sorts of cool websites. On the Wide Hive Records front, we have a number of new releases, and I sing background vocals on three different tracks on one of them: Salsa Blanco.

On the political front, I finally made time for a political fundraiser last Friday night, to meet a number of Congressional Candidates in this upcoming election, and I was instantly rewarded when none other than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stopped by to say hi.

I'm quite a fan of Bobby's lately, as he has been one of the few people to speak out about the 2004 Election irregularities in two different Rolling Stone articles (Was the 2004 Election Stolen? and Will the 2006 Election Be Hacked?), and on numerous television programs.

It was great to be able to hand him a copy of Stealing America. (There are a several clips of him included in the film.)

It was also a big reminder of the unprecedented attack on the environment by the Bush Administration - another critical reason why we have remove this administration and all the professional crooks that are running it at our earliest opportunity.

My new focus on social networking applications quickly seduced me into creating a Flickr stream.

I'm mainly going to be uploading a backlog of pictures from the last few years -- lots of wide hive stuff, two trips to europe, SFSU peeps, etc. (And I'll try to keep things current too.)

Enjoy!

There's a Discovery shuttle launch today at 11:38 am PST. (for you west coast types)

Here's a link to the NASA TV site.

Here's another NASA TV link.

It should be broadcast live from there. Launching at 2:37pm EST.

Here's a
NY Times article on it.

There may be better ones. I just wanted to make sure you knew about it, cause I just found out.

Have a great day guys!

Hey I'm actually venturing out into the world again
(now that I've overcome my post post-education burnout :-)

I'm hoping to show everyone the new application I've been working on with Mary Hodder:
Dabble.

Dabble is a video search and remix community. You can use it to bookmark all the videos you like on all the different hosting sites and keep them organized all in one place.

We're still in a closed beta, but I'm allowed to invite my readers -- and anyone going to
Vloggercon. So send me an email and I'll hook you up.
(And then you can invite your friends.)

Email me your RSS feed too, so I can add it to our search engine.

Hope to see you this weekend. I'll be the tall girl with the long hair wearing a "dabbler" t-shirt.

see you there!

Hey guys. I'm trying to find:

1) Barbara Boxer making a statement on (i think) Jan 6, 2005, when the votes were being certified.

2) any footage of the December 8, 2004 hearings put on by John Conyers.

Thanks in advance if you have either of these.

Okay so it had been a long time since I'd been to a large concert. Like, I dunno, 5 years at least.

So I'm at the Paul McCartney concert at HP Pavillion last November 8, 2005. I always carry my Canon Exlim S3 in my pocket, and I had forgotten about it being in my pocket till we were 5 blocks away from the car and in line to get in.

"Well I just won't use it." I say to myself.

So then, right when Paul kicks in to "Drive My Car," I start feeling guilty that I didn't get a ticket for one of my favorite cousins, who recently played and sang the Beatles "I Will" in one of her recitals. I should take a little movie for her, I say to myself. Then the scientist in me kicked in. "I wonder what the sound would even be like on this thing? Would it just be distortion, or would its condensor microphone kick in and do its job?"

Then I started looking around. Wow. It seemed like everybody was using their phone or camera to take a little movie or picture. Oh. I get it. Things have sure changed, I thought to myself. I can't believe I was worried about having this thing in my pocket.

So I start taking a movie, and then my dad noticed what I was doing and bumped into me and kinda wrecked my shot. (You can see at the end of the clip.)

"Oh dad." I tell him. "It's not a hassle anymore."

"No, I don't think you're right." He said.

About 15 minutes later, a guy a few rows in front of us starts recording with his little photo/video camera. Sure enough, after a few minutes, an usher called him on it, and escorted the guy from his seat -- and confiscated his camera I think, because we saw him return to his seat later sans camera.

Ok. So things aren't so progressive.

Well, at least I got my little experiment file. (I'm a grad student experimenting with digital media and this movie constitutes research for my grad exam.)

I am continually amazed at the sound quality I am able to achieve with this fairly-reasonably priced tiny little camera. (casio exlim s3)

So anyway, here it is:
30 seconds of Drive My Car

Just FYI, often if you hit a bad link from my old archive.org account, like this:

http://ftp.archive.org/movies/lisarein/radio/kqed/crowdestimation.html

just replace "http://ftp.archive.org/movies/lisarein" with:

http://www.lisarein.com/videos/

So this:

http://ftp.archive.org/movies/lisarein/radio/kqed/crowdestimation.html

would become this:

http://www.lisarein.com/videos/radio/kqed/crowdestimation.html

but please do email me and let me know to fix the page itself
(as you always do)

Hey guys.

I know I've said this in the past, but I'm really going to try to stick with it this time and start blogging more regularly again. Lord knows there's a ton of stuff going on -- personally in my own life, and in the world at large -- that I mean to keep a record of, and this is the only way I know how to do it.

I think this last year, in 2005, I probably got more information from you than I ever gave out!

Thanks again for your continued interest and support. It really means a lot to me.

Ok...let's get this party started...

So this is the first day I've had in months to try to get organized, and man, oh man, is my stuff all over the place.

As a result, I'm going to be posting a bit of "backlog" today -- stuff from the last 6 months I never got around to linking to, even though I had already uploaded it. (Doh!)

Please let me know if any links don't work, etc.

thanks!

Well it's time for another family purchase, and, as always, I'm depending on you to help me make the right decision.

We need something with either firewire and rca outputs, if possible -- so they can hook it in through their VCR or download to a computer.

Good sound is important too -- of course :-)

thanks in advance for the usual great advice!

remember my email is:
lisa@lisarein.com

Hey guys - I could use your help regarding the best XML Editors and Parsers as of late. Right now, I need an XML Editor with an XSLT parser -- and preferably an XML Schema validator, built in.

I'm also interested in php modules for XSLT.

And for XSLT tutorials -- so I can ramp back up!

Thanks in advance for your usual great advice.

lisa

Update 9/27/05 - video can be found here.

Beware that it requires Quicktime 7.

Or dispell the myth that it exists.

thanks!!

Here's what I have on it:

Camera phone enters new creative territory

That record's been out for a year already, so I guess it's a new video for the old song? Help me out here...

NEW YORK--Billboard magazine has learned that rock band the Presidents of the United States of America shot its latest video using only mobile phone cameras. The video for the track "Some Postman," culled from the band's last studio album, "Love Everybody," was filmed in Seattle in just one day using a variety of Sony-Ericsson mobile video phones.

Director Grant Marshall of Film Headquarters said he had spent 18 months looking for a band willing to go along with the mobile-only film concept. The band currently is playing limited U.S. dates and is planning to tour in Australia in October.

Hi gang,

So I'm pulling together as many resources as I can on Music Distribution (traditional) and Digital Distribution (itunes, napster, bittorrent, free mp3s etc.).

Please email me at lisa@lisarein.com with any you can recommend.

I'm looking for background stuff as well as current/recent articles on trends.

more on this soon!

lisa

So one of the reasons why I've been so bad about blogging lately is that I'm quite obsessed with learning everything there is to know about running a record label -- in this case, the everluvin' Wide Hive Records.

It's part of my graduate research at SFSU, and my experience will also supplement a couple books I'm in the process of writing...

Anyhoo, our latest release is dissent's

Primal Deconstruction.

There are three different tracks you can check out in MP3 format.
It has been our experience during the course of my research that our downloads only increase as we increase the number of free mp3 tracks samples we give away on our website. (just to be clear, these are complete versions of these songs :)

Also, our number one and number two itunes downloads for the month of May 2005, were the two we've been giving away for free for almost a year. Interesting.

Anyway, more on all that later...just give it a listen for now, and tell me what cha think.

interested peeps: I'd be happy to send you an advance cd. Email me at lisa@widehive.com

Well, I didn't plan it that way, but July was a month off for me and my blog.

Well I'm back. I'll be blogging more regularly and podcasting in a week or so. I'm real excited to be back.

For the first time in my life, I had to rearrange things so I could spend more time in front of the computer!

I see all hell has broken loose in the mean time - with Bolton's confirmation as UN leader and Roberts up for a Supreme Court spot, so it's not like I don't have anything to talk about...

But I'm also getting back in to one of my previous missions of helping Americans understand how they are being cheated out of their side of "the copyright bargain." I've decided that we need to be more aggressive about this issue. Instead of just stopping the term from being increased, we need to start rolling it back to something reasonable, like 50 years or something.

I'll also be publishing some of my research papers from school that I've been working on this summer (the other reason I went A.W.O.L. last month.)

ok talk soon!

lisa

Hey I'm wondering if anyone knows how to generate special characters in Adobe Illustrator.

thanks!

Update 7/7/05 9:53 pm -- you guys are the greatest - by 1:51 am this morning - I had the answer to this. (Thanks Carl and Bill!):

é option-e followed by e
è option-` followed by e
ê option-i followed by e
ç option-c
á option-e followed by a

what would I do without cha? :-)

I'm producing a new weekly podcast for RU Sirius' new venture, Mondo Globo. The focus will be a combination of Copyright developments and Creative Commons licensed works.

I've been fishing around all the directories for good stuff, and I've found a few gems, but it's slow moving listening to every track one by one.

Then I remembered that I should ask you to send me links to CC-licensed stuff you already know is good.

Hand it over! :-)

Okay thanks,

lisa

Okay, so, like I said, I'm trying to be constructive about the fact that I'm going to be homebound for a few days, so I'm going to try to bang out this and last week's Daily Show clips for starters.

Can those with available mirror space please email me at lisa@lisarein.com so we can proceed?

I'm really sorry for being so swamped these last few months and flaking out on my Daily Show responsibilities. I'm trying to re-org my schedule so I have at least a few hours a week to get those suckers up.

Thanks for being patient. (Only a few of you have been politely nudging...which I don't mind at all :)

thanks!!

lisa

P.S. Will those of you that kindly donated mirror space in the past that I never linked to please re-connect with me so I can get that stuff up too? It amazes me how, what should be a quick thing to link to (once I've done the hard part - generating all the clips and uploading to the various servers) can get back burnered when things start picking up at the record label. I appreciate it so much that you would mirror clips for me, and I don't mean to be careless with your time and energy. Many apoly-logies for that.

Hi guys. I'm trying to help my dad out with a technical problem, and we just need to save jpg scans as pdf files, and I'm having horrible luck with the shareware I've tried to download so far. Any suggestions?

thanks!

I've sold Finetuning.com, so you should email me from now on to:

lisa@lisarein.com

(although all my mail will be forwarded for a while)

Also, if you want to access anything from my old finetuning.com website, you will always be able to get it at:

http://www.lisarein.com/finetuning/

thanks!

Hi guys. I'm just a bit caught up in another project transition period right now. I should be able to put things up this Sunday (or so).

Sorry for the hold up!

thanks guys

Well, it's that time again folks. Time for me to ask you guys about a couple things I'm looking for, so you can save me a bunch of time looking.

The first thing I'm looking for is some advice on a Family Tree program.

You know the kind, it lets you enter in a bunch of relatives and then generates a family tree map from the information.

Thanks in advance for the great advice :-)

lisa

lisarein@finetuning.com

Update 3/3/05 - Wow! Has a week gone by already! Tonight's the night guys. We'll be there from about 7pm on. Cubik and Origami are on from 8-11pm.

These guys are really cool. Their equipment consists of three turntables, a couple laptops, and even a bass and other instruments that they play live -- all blended together in their set.

Hope to see you there!

Hey gang! I'm having a party next Thursday night (not tonight, but next week - March 3, 2005).

Well actually,
Wide Hive Records is having a party, but I'm taking the opportunity to invite all my friends and readers since I haven't seen so many of you for so long.

Cubik and Origami is the latest offering from Wide Hive. Their first EP (vinyl only) is due out in May. Their second EP (vinyl only) and first CD will be out in June. Here's a sample that's not even up on the website yet.

We'll be there from the early evening on.

I've got about 50 test pressings available. Djs should Email me at lisa@widehive.com to let me know you're coming and would like a test pressing so I don't run out on ya.

See you there!

Hey, I just upgraded to a new Movable Type version, and I see I have email notification list capabilities now. So any of you who want to be on it, send me an email at lisarein@finetuning.com.

thanks,

lisa

Hey I got busy this week and kinda didn't check mail all week.

I'm just going through it now.

So if you wrote me a letter and I didn't respond. That's why. I'm catching up now.

I love to hear from you guys, so I didn't want you to think I wasn't writing back.

talk soon!

lisa

Update 1:55 pm: A reader suggested I turn my machine off for a minute, then restarted holding down the "C" key so it would try to boot from the disc, when it didn't find the system disc it was looking for, it asked me if I wanted to eject it.

Thanks again for being such great readers that always seem to be willing to help me out when I get stuck. What would I do without ya :-)

Hey guys, Tech support question here.

I put in a DVD and was trying to use utilities to burn an image and make a copy, when (all of a sudden...pow!) no seriously, it wasn't quite that exciting, but it is holding me up on a number of projects now: my dual G4 can't see the Superdrive.

How do I reinstall the drivers? I tried to eject it from the firmware and reboot holding down the mouse and all the stuff that "help" suggests. I googled till I was blue in the face, and now I ask for your wisdom to save the day.

Thanks in advance for emailing me at lisarein@finetuning.com with a possible solution.

lisa

So let's see how many of these suckers I can link to today.

They are all already available here, by date, in my archive (where you can always look for them in general). (The new ones are from late November and all of December.)

But, as you know, I like to include metadata with them in my posts here, so you can find them later when you're looking for a specific clip. (And so I can find them later when I'm looking for a specific clip.)

These all have mirrors too, but only for a month or so, so if it's after February 2005 and the mirrors don't work anymore, that's why.

Try to use the mirrors while they're there though, because I imagine bandwidth will get pretty scarce over the next few days as this stuff gets accessed all at once.

Thanks in advance for letting me know if any of this stuff isn't working properly, or if I have any bad links. I'll leave these clips on my hard drive for a couple days, to make sure everything made it. Then I gotta start clearing off my hard drives to get ready to install my home recording studio. (I got a Digi 001 and I'm quite excited about it!)

I also have a few tech issues that have been plaguing me that I'm going to need your help with.

Anyway, major catch up day today.

peace,

lisa

Hi gang.

I hope I'm not boring you guys with this latest onslaught of personal updates. I'm in the process of reorganizing my life and my focus as of late.

I've been getting ready for my last semester of graduate school, moving forward with a bunch of projects in my capacity as President of Operations at Wide Hive Records, moving forward with making my blog entries available as podcasts, setting up my home protools studio so I can start making my music available again, catching up on my Daily Show clips, rewriting my sadly outdated bio, and getting ready for a new year of fighting the horrible Shrub et al.

It is my hope that this will be the last year or two of the Shrub, not the first of four more years. I truly believe that there is enough criminal activity going on for something or other to turn into a watergate of sorts and enable us to impeach this group. (Or have enough stacked against them so they will step down before an impeachment occurs, although I don't seriously anticipate such an honorable move from such a dishonorable bunch.)

That said, I did want to let you know that I haven't forgotton about the video of Senator Barbara Boxer, Rep. John Conyers, Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, and the other notables that stood up last week for every American's right to have their vote counted. I spent most of the weekend dubbing those clips and getting prepared to put them up. It's just that this "Gonzales the lunatic becoming Attorney General" thing is pretty important and I've decided to make trying to stop that from happening my first priority this week.

We need to do another letter writing campaign like we just pulled off for the Electoral Challenge. Gonzales is enemy of the people of the world #1. It's hard to imagine anyone worse than
John Ashcroft in the position of Attorney General of the US of A, but there it is: a man who recommends torture and offers a legal justification for doing so, potentially in charge of the criminal justice branch of our country. (Update 1/23/05 - write your senators asking them to oppose Gonzales.)

Yikes!

So there it is. Gotta run. Goodies to follow...

Hi gang.

I'm in the process of figuring out what actually got accomplished yesterday. I'll let you know whatever I can figure out as soon as I've done enough homework to be sure I'm correct. But here's a couple of things that happened, for starters:

1. History was made in that a challenge hasn't happened since 1877. So that's something.

2. Looks like the house and senate each spent two hours debating the issues surrounding the Ohio election and recount, and that there is supposed to be some kind of congressional investigation. So that's something.

3. The House Judiciary Democratic Staff has published a report saying some pretty strong things about Blackwell's involvement, including, but not limited to:

With regards to our factual finding, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.

I think this is the lead that needs following up on. (Via the congressional investigation and the other pending lawsuits.)

Like I said earlier -- I will publish my results in a similiar fashion to the last report for easy reference, once the facts manifest themselves.

Just wanted to touch base. That and many Daily Show clips on the way.

thanks!

This is from the December 30, 2004 program of ABC's World News Tonight.

Sorry for the hold up, better late than never :-)

Boingboing's Xeni Jardin is in this piece too.

Thanks to the Pete for his help with this.

Bloggers As Person Of The Year On ABC World News Tonight (5 MB)

Update 1/6/05 - Here's the video clip:

Bloggers As Person Of The Year On ABC World News Tonight (5 MB)

Hey did anyone record last night's ABC World News Tonight? I did, but the recording's kinda screwy. (My new cable really sucks here in the East Bay.)

I'll put it up later anyway, but just in case there's already a better version floating around, please let me know!

It's nice to finally get a little credit from the "traditional" press.

The story had an 11-year-old girl who they're calling "the world's youngest video blogger." I love it.

Happy New Year everybody!

I've been using T r u t h o u t a lot lately, and I just remembered to send them some cash.

I'm sure they need it, because they are a really small organization that runs on the fumes of hope that I run on most of the time. The hope that somehow, someway, we're going to fix our broken country and restore some of the ideals that it was founded on.

People write me all the time and ask if they can send me money. There are a lot of reasons why I can't accept cash from anyone, and even more reasons why I can't explain why right now. ("It's a long explanation and I'm too swamped to take the time" is the main reason.)

So if you get the urge to send me money, send it to them instead.

William Rivers Pitt, Marc Ash, and the other folks over there are doing a lot of my work for me right now by sending me important updates right to my mailbox.

Life would kind of be over for me right now if they weren't around, so, if you can afford it right now, let's all keep them alive.

thanks!

I just asked my readers-at-large what the best MP3 Player was, and there was only one other suggestion -- otherwise all email and comments said the same thing: IPOD wins.

So if you're making that last minute gift decision -- make the right one.

Thanks a lot guys. You're the best.

Peace,

lisa

I need to find out what the best MP3 player is out there, and fast :-)

I wanna say the IPOD, but not there's a Pocket DJ or something from Dell that someone told me is comperable (and can actually play more formats than the IPOD).

I have a feeling you guys can set me straight in an afternoon, so I thought I'd ask you.

lisarein@finetuning.com is my email to send suggestions to.

Thanks!

lisa

Hey sorry I haven't been posting much this week. You can get the Daily Show from November 10th here in the mean time, but I've been busy with our latest Wide Hive release, Dissent's
Swap Meet Seers.

There are 3 different songs available in their entirety
on the website.

Check it out! I'd love to know what you think.

I'll be back getting more stuff up tomorrow, or the weekend.

I've decided the world can live without me for a day. See you guys Wednesday night.

peace!

lisa

I decided that this wasn't a good time to take off for a couple days, birthday or no.

So I'll be right here keeping track of the post-election and shrub war developments going on.

Just a heads up.

Karl Rove is on Meet The Press right now, and I'll have it up around noon today.

I gotta say that it's rather frustrating watching all of these people talk about the Election as if all of these miscount reports didn't exist.

Obama, Illinois' new Democratic Senator, just said that he "shared a million votes with President Bush." There's no way that a million Democrats in Illinois voted for Bush.

We're now finding out that this is exactly what we're supposed to believe: that millions of Democrats took it upon themselves to vote for Bush. This concept is laughable to say the least. (Here's an article that deals with this specifically.)

I just wanted to drop you guys a note and say "no worries." This strange episode of the Twilight Zone will continue, but it may just have a happy ending, eventually. There seem to be a lot of folks paying attention to the facts now, and the hard math is on our side.

The question is: what will the Democrats do when it's been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the election was faulty. A recount is in order, to say the least, but I don't hear anybody asking for one.

But don't dispair. We're in this together guys. Thanks for sending me all the great links. I'm committed to archiving them here.

It's my birthday on the 10th., and I'm taking a few days off to rest up a bit. So if you don't hear back from me, that's why. But I'll catch up on everything when I get back, and I'm here all day today, so now's a good time to send anything over. I cancelled my trip. I'll be right here :-)

Okay, so I'm having trouble posting because of all the traffic on the server -- which is GOOD, I suppose, except that it's making it hard for me to post.

(Don't worry! The video should play back fine, we bought a larger pipe this week just for the occasion.)

So I'm just going to fight to get this post up for a while, with links to the directories of everything. And then I'll try to get the posts up one by one later today.

Frontline: Rumsfeld's War
(How Rumsfeld used the poor tactics that screwed up the military in Vietnam to screw up the military in Iraq. Really, except for, of course, the innocent people of Iraq who were killed/tortured by some of our troops, the rest of our troops are in the process of being screwed over worse than anybody right now.)

Frontline: The Choice 2004
(This chronicles the lives of Kerry and the Shrub from Yale on.)

Patrick Miller On 60 Minutes
The real hero of the Jessica Lynch story, and how the Shrub Administration actually covered up his heroism in order to peddle their false story about Jessica Lynch's rescue.

Well, after watching Sunday's "Meet the Press," it's becoming obvious what the Repub's angle is going to be this time around.

I'm watching the head of the Republican party talk about how there are too many people registered now. More registered voters than they are people eligible to vote.
Bet you 100 bucks that they are going to contest the election if Kerry wins on these grounds. He's talking about people like "Mary Poppins" registered to vote. Wonder who signed her up? Hmmm.

The Repubs are also talking about Provisional Ballots as if they were something questionable. The Provisional Ballot is a voter's only line of defense when their name isn't on the roster when they show up to vote. Lack of provisional ballots is one of the things that went terribly wrong in Florida in 2000. They are a good thing, not a bad thing. They can be counted (and re-counted) by hand.

It's obvious that this election ain't gonna be over when it's over folks. I'll be here at my post trying to bring as many pertinent clips as I can straight to you.

Well I'm busy preparing the Bill Moyers Now episode on the 911 Commission Report. After that, I've got to put up the Frontline I saw last night on "Rumsfeld's War." After that, I'll put up the Frontline on Bush/Kerry that I blogged about the other night.

Lots to do. Lots to do. Hope any of this will help.

For those of you who were wondering, (I assume the rest of you just knew I was confused and would figure it out), I did realize that the electorate votes do go with the popular vote on a state-by-state basis -- except for 1 or maybe 2 states where it's proportional.

So that means I just have to wait and see what happens in two weeks. Whew.

I've got the TIVO working, and I also just bought a Panasonic DMR-E858 DVD recorder that will allow me two burn DVDs, and, if necessary, when combined with my TIVO and a cable splitter, record two channels simultaneously. Hee haw!

Many of you are sending me clips now to archive, and I'll be getting those up as fast as I can. Weekends are better for that stuff now, as I am Wide Hiving and schooling during the week most of the time.

peace,

lisa

My Dad has asked me to help him pick out an HDTV this afternoon.

Only problem is, I don't know diddly about HDTV.

Can you guys help me out here? What do I want to look out for?

We're leaving this afternoon around 2pm, CA time.
(So if you read this after then, s'ok.)

Thanks in advance!

Lisa
lisarein@finetuning.com

Hey folks, just a few words to sort of check in with everyone.

I've been in Europe for the past few weeks, and have made a move from San Francisco back to the East Bay right before I left. So I just came home to an apartment full of boxes and, needless to say, no Tivo or computer hooked up yet. The cable guy comes today, so I should be back in business soon.

My sister and her fiancee, Pete, were kind enough to record all of the Daily Shows and Presidential debates for me while I was away, so those should all be up soon. Bill O'Reilly was on the Daily Show last week, and that will be up next week (it will be on the next DVD they send me, along with tonight's debate).

I'm also taking the plunge and learning how to make .mov files from a DVD source (read: Lisa enters the present -- I know many of you have been trying to help me get there for over a year :-)

So I just wanted to let you know where the hell I've been -- many of you have expressed interest, and perhaps a little concern. Things are well. More than well. I've just been busy doing this european distribution thing for my latest project, Wide Hive Records.

Now, back to the issues at hand...

Last night, on Frontline (PBS), I watched a two hour documentary on John Kerry and George Bush. Damn. I wish I had been recording it. Perhaps one of you have it and can send it to me so I can put it up for everyone. Perhaps it will re-air this weekend or something and I'll have a chance to put it up...but anyway it was an incredible piece.

The show parallelled the lives of John Kerry and George W. Bush from their time at Yale through to the present. Kerry goes to Vietnam, in good faith, even though he knows it's bullshit. He does a great job, but feels horrible about the War and his part in it, and comes back to the states full of information that nobody wants to hear. George W. is basically a networking guy that knows how to take visitors out on the town for a good time, while pumping their heads full of whatever ideas are on his agenda at the time. Admittedly, a useful and valuable skill -- in any industry.

He did get special treatment by several members of our government and Texas National Guard folks by being let into the guard and not having to go to Vietnam. I really wouldn't have a problem with this, to be honest (anyone in their right mind at the time was trying to get out of Nam, and rightly so), HOWEVER, he was still talking like Nam was the right thing to do the whole time, and that pisses me off. If Nam was the right thing to do, he should have suited up and gone over there himself.

His actions strongly parallel the situation now, where we've got Hawks in our government saying Iraq is the right thing to do, while none of their children or people they care about are actually over their fighting it. Plus, these hawks aren't treating the soldiers they've sent over there properly -- not paying them enough, giving them enough supplies, taking care of their families, or even giving them proper medical care when they get back. (See my category Against The War, Support Our Troops for specifics on this.) I don't think there's a single person on either side of this war that would agree with this behavior. It's just plain wrong in the truest sense of the word.

Meanwhile, back to last nights documentary. In the late 60's and early 70's, Kerry is touring the country and talking to Congress and going on talk shows and doing whatever he can to put an end to the war through education and information and public awareness of the situation. He talks about things like "Free Fire Zones" (where soldiers are allowed to shoot anything in the area -- including civilians, women and children, entire villages, you name it) -- and how these zones, by definition, violate the Geneva convention.

This situation also hits home right now with the Iraq war, in that many of the acts that our soldiers are being ordered to carry out can be likened to these Free Fire Zones. We're fencing villages in, leveling them entirely, torturing prisoners, and imposing marshall law where death is the legal punishment for any crime the government sees fit to apply it to. We are the terrorists of Iraq right now, and our boys and girls want no part of it, and they are also literally trapped over there -- in many cases serving against their will, even though their tour of duty has officially ended. At the same time we're sending virtually untrained National Guard troops over there like lambs to the slaughter.

Again, just plain wrong in the truest sense of the word. Oh, and don't forget that the whole war was based on a series of lies -- namely the one big WMD lie, much like the Gulf of Tonkin incident that never happend which enabled us to righteously enter Vietnam in the 60's.

But back to Kerry. It was really the second half of the program I watched last night, combined with a dream I had that I just awoke from moments ago -- when I was sort of hanging out with Kerry at some political event, much like I used to converse with Howard Dean during events last year before this year's primaries. The dream made me want to get up and write some words to you about him. (My server was actually down at 5am this morning when I wrote this, hence the discrepancy in the time stamp on this post.)

Kerry was very involved in the Nuclear Freeze campaign in the 80's. He made it the centerpiece of his political platform, and had some political disappointments as a result, due to his seeming like such a lefty. Incredible that stopping the planet from destroying itself through the use of nuclear weapons is seen as a 'left wing' stance. You would think it was in everyone's interest to not blow ourselves up, but go figure. Anyway, he's on the right side of that issue, and, as the story progressed, he seemed to be on the right side of every issue. Now I know that he hasn't come out as strong as some of us would like on some of the issues, but I have a feeling that he will do so when the time is right, when he doesn't have to play it safe so as not to freak out the moderate voters he's trying to attract away from Bush.

All I'm trying to say is that I feel better about Kerry now that I know more about his history. And I don't feel that he's only the lesser of two evils. Admittedly, that's how I've been feeling these last few months, and why I haven't been more vocal on the subject, to be honest. Well, I don't feel that way any more. I feel like Kerry is a good guy and will make a great President. His morals are in the right place, and you can't say that about many politicians these days.

So I'm getting my equipment back up and running over the next few days, and I'll be posting a ton of important stuff to help get the word out about the issues and help you guys make your case to any moderates you know -- perhaps in your family, for starters. I myself have some moderates on the fence that I am trying to gently persuade. We have two important things on our side: (1) the facts, and (2) their lies coming to light. Nobody likes to be lied to, especially by their leaders, and especially about life and death situations, but Bush and Cheney have been lying to us about life and death situations since their first days in office.

Whether they are lying about the reasons for entering the war, or making up stories about Jessica Lynch that never actually happened, in order to give us some false hero to worship (while ignoring the real heroes of this war -- and yes there are a few, like Sergeant Patrick Miller -- whose story will go up later today). The point is they lie. They lie, and kill people for money, and do it all for personal gain, and now we're back into territory that everyone can agree on is just plain wrong.

But I digress -- which I get to do if I want because it's my blog. And I guess I didn't realize how much I've missed blogging and talking to you guys. It's a form of therapy really. And I'm back on therapy, for the time being :-)

Long story short - these next few weeks are a very critical time. It's a time when we need to get every person over 18 over to the polls on November 2.

Which brings me to my last two points. One is that a number of folks in Europe told me that there are a million plus ex-patriots that are mobilizing to vote for Kerry to help him win. It's actually more than a million -- I think a couple million -- but I can't remember the exact number and I like to round down when I'm not sure about a statistic -- so I can't be accused of embellishment. (There's also the Howard Stern vote -- over 8 million people -- this statistic I'm sure of. Howard is an unlikely ally in this fight - certainly not someone I ever saw myself aligning with - but there he is, speaking the truth about Bush and Clear Channel, and mobilizing his army of listeners to do the right thing.)

BUT -- and here's my last point -- as many have brought to my attention. We are on the electorate system. What does this really mean? How do we get to these people? Assuming that the popular vote is under control, how do we secure the electorates? I'm not sure yet. But I'm going to try to find out. Perhaps you can help me -- and I can publish our findings here.

So that's it guys. I just wanted to catch up a bit, and let you know where I've been, and where I'm going -- on several different fronts. I'm actually going to put my music stuff on hold a bit to take care of what's really important over these next few weeks, and I hope you'll do the same. I'm here if you want to talk -- and please let me know if there's anything I can do to help you help the situation.

We're all in this together.

Peace,

Lisa

P.S.
Side note: I blew it as far as signing up as a poll worker. I hadn't considered how leaving for three weeks in September/October would kind of ruin the chances of being a poll worker. So I apologize for failing in that regard, but I hope that those of you that I might have inspired to be poll workers won't be too mad at me about it. I would of done it if I was able, so if you've signed up, I hope you'll follow through on it. (And please let me know about your experiences so I can chronicle them here.)

Hey I'm about to post most of last week's Daily Show Clips and I know the server's going to be hit pretty hard, so I'm asking in advance for those of you who have emailed me in the past with bandwidth offers to give me a ping if you can this weekend so we can divvy up the load.

Thanks in advance!

lisa

So as you may have figured out by now, I've got a smaller scale slashdot-effect going on here -- a ""Boing Boing Effect," if you will.

This is great as far as I'm concerned, because it allows me to test out the new server and figure out how to accomodate the bandwidth accordingly.

Mirrors help too, so I'm looking for folks to host single clips for me. I'm trying to make it so I have at least one mirror for each clip. (Interested parties will contact me I'm sure :-)

I also discovered that much of my music site had become un-linked. So I'm fixing that now.

Fixed my 60 Minutes Archive too, so that stuff is back up in place. (Including Leslie Stahl busting Halliburton's fake Caymans operation and the Shrub ex-Counterterrorism Zsar Richard Clark explaining why the Shrub can't be trusted to protect our country if there's oil revenue to be generated somewhere else.

The other project that's taking a lot of my time lately (besides all the cool stuff I've been working on at Wide Hive) is my Masters Thesis for SFSU's BECA Department:
A Guide To Online Music Distribution.

So if you know of a good service, assume I know nothing about it, and send me the scoop!

If you are personally affiliated with a particular system, so much the better. (Then I can get the inside scoop:) I won't get mad at you for trying to sell me something. I'm starting from scratch here, and I really want to create a comprehensive directory.

Let me know what systems you don't like too. That's just as helpful.

In a few months, I'll need a group of testers to implement my tutorials on the subject. Now would be a good time to sign up for that too, if you're interested.

Thanks in advance for all the great leads and info guys. You're the best.

lisa

Hey guys, I need your help.

Let me know about any particular footage that isn't where it's supposed to be on my archive, or anything else screwy on my various sites, so I can fix it.

I'm gearing up for new pre-election info seekers, and I don't want anyone to get turned off from bad links and the like. (Especially for non-tech people that may be searching for answers.)

Also a reminder that I will host video for anyone with video of important footage who can't afford to serve it.

Four more months to change the direction of the world guys.

These next four are the most important of all.

I know I've been slacking off a bit over here in the fight against the Shrub while I've been concentrating on my new music career. But I'm back, and all set up to do both now.

So let's do this thing :-)

Peace,

lisa

So I've got my archive up till about March 2004 back up online here:

http://www.lisarein.com/videos/

I've done a global search and replace to fix the links in my blog. Hope it worked ok.

Do let me know!

I'll be catching up on the last few months over the next few weeks.

Please alter your links accordingly by replacing this:

http://ftp.archive.org/movies/lisarein/....

with this

http://www.lisarein.com/videos/

Peace,

lisa

Mirrors are up now!

Here's the first mirror of the highlight clip:

http://synthesize.us/~leif/weblog/mirror/05-16-04-colin.html

Thanks Leif!

First mirror of all three clips:

Colin Powell On Meet The Press - Part 1 of 2

Colin Powell On Meet The Press - Part 2 of 2

Colin Powell On Meet The Press - WMD and Press Aide Interruption Highlights

Thanks Dave!

Second mirror of all three clips:

Colin Powell On Meet The Press - Part 1 of 2

Colin Powell On Meet The Press - Part 2 of 2

Colin Powell On Meet The Press - Apology for Bogus WMD Evidence and Press Aide Interruption Highlights

Thanks Reid!

Third mirror of all three clips:

Colin Powell On Meet The Press - Part 1 of 2

Colin Powell On Meet The Press - Part 2 of 2

Colin Powell On Meet The Press - Apology for Bogus WMD Evidence and Press Aide Interruption Highlights

Thanks Steve!

In case you haven't noticed, my entire server went down (again) this last week (this time for a different reason than the usual reason).

No worries though. I'm moving my entire archive to another server with a bigger pipe for easier distribution. Everything should be moved over in a few days.

After the move, I'm going to really need your help looking for bad links. So please, when I give the word (after a big global replace in Movable Type), go to your favorite categories and verify that all of the videos are linked OK.

I'm also very interested in working with others to create some kind of P2P distribution network that might take some of the load off of the server to begin with. It is my hope to be reaching thousands upon thousands over the next few months leading up to this year's presidential election -- when distribution of these materials will be more important than ever to help educate voters about the issues affecting their lives.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

After the move my archive should be "bigger, stronger, faster..."
--That kind of thing :-)

Sorry for the hold ups. I know how important access to this material is for many of you. It should be smoother sailing from this point on.

Peace,

lisa

This is just a note to anyone (I know there are at least 3 of you) that I have promised a reel of footage to over the last few months. If you haven't received it in the mail yet, I have "forgotten," and it's not coming.

Please email me again and I'll put it in the kitty for next weekend. I'm trying to catch up on everything, and I'm sure that I've dropped the ball on a thing or two (or three). So please, feel free to drop me a line and remind me.

In general, if I tell you I'll send you something in a week or two, and it's not there after two weeks, it's not coming. Even if I am just about to send it, you're never bothering me too much sending me an email reminder. I know a lot of you are working on projects that I heartily support, and I'm happy to contribute footage to them. It's really the whole reason I started this archive!

So thanks! (And sorry if you're one of those people still waiting for footage!)

I've had last week's Daily Show since last weekend, but haven't had time to link to the clips. (Doh!)

They're all dated accordingly in My Archive.

There's also an interview with Arianna Huffington in there...

Sorry guys. I'm off in music/gradschool land and the time really flies.
(More details on this soon :-)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

Everything seems to be OK again on my archive.

This guy fixed some of my links, but the links that work from his page won't work if I try to use them independently in my browser (as opposed to clicking on them from his page). I'm so confused :-)

Thanks for any insight anyone has...

For now, go to his site to get to my Condi Rice links (weird).

It would appear that my server has already been taken out from these clips today.

The "Condi Rice testifying before the 911 Commission" clips are named accordingly in the directory I linked to earlier -- if you're looking for them.)

So I'll link to these individually tomorrow...

If you can't wait for me to describe and link to them, there's a bunch of new clips in the Daily Show - March 2004 and Daily Show - April 2004 directories.

Otherwise, hold tight and I'll be linking to all of them in the order they appeared.

Hopefully, I'll get them all up today!

Just got back from London, Paris and Amsterdam. Pics and movies up soon.

I see there's been a lot going on while I've been gone. I'll be crunching news and Daily Show clips accordingly...

If you've written me in the last two weeks, I'll be getting back to you soon.

Peace,

lisa

I'm going to London and Paris in a week, and I'm looking for cool record stores to hit while I'm in town. (I'm also looking for Drum and Bass and Hip Hop Clubs.)

I just found what seems to be a cool website with information on London recordstores, but I have no way of knowing if the information is current or not.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me!

I'm including the list I'm currently working from below. As the list improves, I will update it here (note the working date at the top).

Updated 3/19/04

Here is the full text of the entire page:

http://music.hyperreal.org/london/

central london rave shops - record stores

bottom of page | other London shops | flyer collectors | Hyperreal

BANGING TUNES - 15A Little Portland Street, London W1W 8BW
email: info@kinetec.com
tel: +44 (0)20 7323 5303
fax: +44 (0)20 7323 5909
Psych, Drum & Bass, Tech-House, US Techno, Gabba, Hardcore

BLACK MARKET - 25 D'Arblay Street, London W1V 3FH
email: mailo@blackmarket.co.uk
tel: +44 (0)20 7437 0478
fax: +44 (0)20 7494 1303
swing, rap, hip-hop, house, garage, jungle

CITY SOUNDS - 5 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS
tel: +44 (0)20 7405 5454
fax: +44 (0)20 7242 1863
house, garage [long established, new location]

CYBERDOG - 9 Earlham St, London WC2
email: sniff@cyberdogworld.demon.co.uk
tel: +44 (0)20 7836 7855
trance-techno [CDs only, in atmospheric clothes shop]

DEAL REAL - 6a Noel St, Soho, London W1V 3RB
tel: +44 (0)20 7734 8689
fax: +44 (0)20 7734 8979
hip-hop, soul, jazz, r&b, swing

EUKATECH - 49 Endell Street, London WC2
tel/fax: +44 (0)20 7240 8060
house, techno, trance, drum + bass

FLYING RECORDS - 94 Dean Street, London W1V 5RB
tel: +44 (0)20 7734 0172
fax: +44 (0)20 7287 0766
house, garage [above Major Flava's]

HAND SPUN - 31 D'Arblay Street, London W1V 3FG
tel: +44 (0)20 7734 7845
hip-hop

KOKON TO-ZAI [= "old-new-east-west"] - 57 Greek Street, London W1V 5LR
tel/fax: +44 (0)20 7434 1316
house, techno, groove, euro-trance [in intriguing shop]

KOOBLA - 17 Berwick Street, London W1F 0PT
email: tim@kooblarecords.com
www: http://www.kooblarecords.com
tel: +44 (0)20 7287 9909
fax: +44 (0)20 7287 9919
house, soul, techno, funk, electro, electronica

MAD RECORDS - 2 Silver Place, London W1F 0JP

email: info@madrecords.net
www: http://www.madrecords.net
tel: +44 (0)20 7439 0707
hard house, hard trance & nrg, progressive, trance, tech house, techno

MAJOR FLAVA'S - 94 Dean Street, London W1V 5RB
tel: +44 (0)20 7434 1406
fax: +44 (0)20 7287 0766
r'n'b, rap [downstairs from Flying Records]

MR BONGO - 44 Poland Street, London W1V 3DA
email: webmaster@mrbongo.com
www: http://www.mrbongo.com/
tel: +44 (0)20 7287 1821
fax: +44 (0)20 7439 1828
hip-hop, drum and bass, disco, techno, breaks, funk, jazz etc

PLASTIC FANTASTIC - 35 Drury Lane, London WC2B 5RH
email: shop@plasticfantastic.co.uk
www: http://www.plasticfantastic.co.uk
tel: +44 (0)20 7240 8055
fax: +44 (0)20 7240 7628
pumpin' house, progressive house, trance

RELEASE THE GROOVE - 20 Denman Street, London W1V 7RJ

email: release@music8.freeserve.co.uk
www: http://www.releasethegroove.co.uk/
tel: +44 (0)20 7734 7712
fax: +44 (0)20 7734 7713
jazz, r&b, drum&bass, house, London underground, garage

SILVERBACK - 40 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2SA
email: info@silverbackrecords.co.uk
www: http://www.silverbackrecords.co.uk
tel: +44 (0)20 7404 9456
house, progressive, techno, breaks, drum n' bass, r&b

SOUNDS OF THE UNIVERSE - 7 Broadwick Street, London W1F 0DA
tel/fax: +44 (0)20 7494 2004
soul, funk, jazz, drum + bass, hip-hop

TRAX - 55 Greek Street, London W1V 5LR
tel: +44 (0)20 7734 0795
fax: +44 (0)20 8551 8525
euro dance specialists

UPTOWN - 3 D'Arblay Street, London W1V 3FD
tel: +44 (0)20 7434 3639
tel: +44 (0)20 7434 3650 (nail order)
fax: +44 (0)20 7434 3649
r'n'b, rap, garage, underground, house [promo specialist]

VINYL JUNKIES - 9 Berwick Street, London W1V 3RG
tel: +44 (0)20 7439 2775
fax: +44 (0)20 7287 2608
house, garage, techno, down tempo, miscellaneous beats [+ sitting area]

WYLD PYTCH (RECORD SPECIALISTS) - 51 Lexington Street, London W1R 4HL
tel: +44 (0)20 7434 3472
fax: +44 (0)20 7287 1403
hip hop, r&b, funk, soul, garage

XSF RECORDS - 39 Berwick Street, London W1V 3RE
email: records@xsfrecords.com
tel: +44 (0)20 7287 2496
Deep, Funky, Prog/Tribal House, Techno, Trance, Hard House, Breaks

u can check how to find them at UK Street Map or Multimap top of page | bottom of page | flyer collectors

other London rave shops & outlets

24 Carat, Caledonian Rd tel: +44 (0)20 7607 3334
Access All Areas, Camden NW1 tel: +44 (0) 20 7267 8320
Bassline Records, Kilburn tel: +44 (0)20 7372 5330
Body Music, Tottenham tel: +44 (0)20 8802 0147
Criminal Records, Walthamstowe tel: +44 (0)20 85033 2165
Deep Freeze, Camden tel: +44 (0)20 7424 0574
Hummit Records, 309 Kings Rd, Chelsea SW3 tel: +44 (0)20 7823 3584
Hype Records, Whetstone N20 tel: +44 (0)20 8445 5222
Paradox, 321 Upper Street, Islington N1 tel: +44 (0)20 7226 8530
Psychedelic Dream Temple, Camden NW1 tel: +44 (0)20 7267 8528
Pure Groove, 679 Holloway Rd, Archway N19 tel: (0)20 7281 4877
Record Village, 256 Hoe St, Walthamstowe E17 tel: (0)20 8520 7331
Remix, 247 Evershot St, Camden NW1 tel: (0)20 7387 2208
Rhythm Division, 391 Roman Rd, Bethnal Green E3 tel: +44 (0)20 8981 2203
R.O.A.R. Records, Elephane & Castle tel: (0)20 7708 3001
Rugged Records, Deptford tel: (0)20 8692 3311
Scream Records - 12 Ashfield Parade, Southgate N14 tel: +44 (0)20 8886 2317
Section 5, 121 Kings Rd, Chelsea SW3 tel: (0)20 7351 6853
Shed Records, 32 Western Hill, Crystal Palace SE19 tel: (0)20 8761 5080
Sonic House Records, 247 Evershot St, Camden NW1 tel: (0)20 7387 6440
Spin City Records, 374 Edgeware Rd, Paddington W2 tel: (0)20 7258 0300
The Mess, 225 St Johns Hill, Battersea SW11 tel: (0)20 7207 1276
The Vibe, 91-95 Brick Lane, Bethnal Green E1 tel: (0)20 7247 3479
Total Music, 2A Ellsworth St, Bethnal Green E2 tel: (0)20 7473 3000
Trakheadz, 117 Kentish Town Road, Camden tel: +44 (0)20 7428 1845
Trix Trax, Battersea tel: (0)20 7223 1995
Ultimate Dance Music - 30 Southbury Rd, Enfield EN1 1SA tel: 020 8366 5422
Vinyl Mania, 214 Northfield Ave, Ealing W13 tel: (0)20 7566 5244
Wired For Sound, Hackney tel: (0)20 8985 7531

and some other UK outlets

Hard To Find Records - Lonsdale House, 52 Blucher St, Birmingham B1 1QU
Mixa-Ma-Tosis - 14 The Triangle, Bournemouth BH2 5RY tel: 01202 319770
Nine Bar Records - 45 Upper High St, Epsom KT17 4RA tel: 01372 729861
Phat Trax - 2 Lower Road, Loughton, Essex IG10 2RS tel: 0208 508 1431
Sound Zone - 25 East Walk, Basildon, Essex SS14 1HA
Streetwise Music - 76 King Street, Cambridge CB1 1LP tel/fax 01223 300496
Vinyl Express - 210a High Street, Bangor, Gwynedd LL15 1NY tel: 01248 354535
Vinyl Underground - 80 Abington St, Northampton NN1 2BB tel: 01604 634433

A few people have written me to make sure I was OK. So I thought I'd better put up a few words and let everyone know that all is well and I've just been really, really busy lately. (I'm in sort of a transitional phase right now in my life, finishing up old projects, and taking on new ones :-)

Also, alas, my camera is off getting fixed (finally). But rest assured, I ran that thing into the ground these last two months. -- I haven't been entirely asleep at the wheel. I managed to grab some good stuff. But it was all I could do to keep capturing shows while I was (am still) working on my graduate projects.

I was really trying to get a lot of work done in a short time in the end stretch there, and there was really no time to generate the files or write anything up about anything I felt like linking to. So I decided to just wait until I had time to do things right, and I just haven't had time.

I also took advantage of this month's static nature to change hosting and upgrade and reconfigure my blog at bit (including implementing some comment spam solutions -- some of which I still can't tell if they're working or not).

I've also been writing and collaborating a lot on music lately -- which can really burn up the time! But when you hear the new stuff, perhaps you will agree that it's worth a little less blogging. (But certainly a month off is over-doing it :-)

So that's it. Just wanted to check in and let you know all is well and I'll be back soon :-)

Peace.

After receiving numerous letters and offers of solutions and technical expertise, I've decided to implement a few technical solutions rather than taking comments down completely.

Apparently, my blog without comments is a completely unacceptable scenario for most of you. This warms my heart, for it is indeed a cornerstone of this community that anyone can post and contribute to the discussion.

So this week I'll be implementing the MT-Blacklist module, among other techniques that have been passed on to me. I'm going to document the process from beginning to end -- even though doing so my help the spammers try to beat it. We've all got to work together and learn from each other on this one.

Talk soon...

lisa

ps. I'm still getting my act together in general this month, but the Daily Show Clips, Bill Moyers Clips, and other goodies will be up soon!

I am forced to turn off comments on my site because they are being abused by spammers. So sad to have to do that :-(

lisa

So obviously, I'm back to blogging again. I'm actually not done completely with all of my school projects, but I feel good enough about completing them shortly that I've decided to treat myself to blogging again.

I can't tell you how good it feels to be back on the case. I really missed blogging and being part of our little community. Thanks for being patient and hanging around 'till I came back. I can tell you've been hanging around because my numbers didn't go down any the whole time I was gone. (Go figure:)

The first thing I'm going to do is catch up on some old stuff. I'm kinda hanging around with relatives doing the holiday thing, so I should have plenty of time to catch up. I didn't think I'd have any connectivity over the holidays, but I was wrong!

So anyway, there's my long winded way of saying that I'm glad to be back, and I love you guys!

Peace!

Knitwitology has just posted a great page with all the information on it I was just about to take the time to create links for:

Of Spiderholes and Spiderwebs

Thanks, Morgan for letting me off the hook!

Remember to not let any of this stuff get you down people! Things just keep getting stranger and stranger. But we're all in this together, and we're gonna get out of it together!

Happy Holidays and Remember to Be Careful About Driving Tired, Wasted or in Bad Weather. When in doubt - chill out and wait till later.

Peace and Love Ya'll!

(I'm probably out for the next few days...connectivity uncertain.)

I'm in the midst of "school hell" right about now :-)

A few little items going up today. Hoping to catch up on Daily Show clips over the weekend.

Just a heads up -- in case you were wondering what the deal was :-)

Thanks!

lisa

I think the time has come for me to start mirroring my archive.

A few of you have emailed me in the past with offers to store some or all of my video footage on various servers you have available, but I didn't save the emails.

Please, please, email me again so we can start the ball rolling :-)
(lisarein@finetuning.com)

Thanks!

I've registered olrr.net to provide a shorter URL to point people to when they want to check out my blog.

Hope you find it useful!

Spread the word!

(Thanks for the great idea, Kevin!)

Bill Moyers and friends have been outdoing themselves lately on NOW With Bill Moyers.

The last two programs on November 7 and November 14, 2003 have been so shocking and relevant that I find myself saying "damn" out loud over and over again with my mouth hanging open.

I really am going to have to ease up on my blogging over the next few weeks so I can concentrate on my graduate work (which, ironically, I will also be blogging about shortly). However, before I take that plunge, I decided I had to get this stuff up first so the ball could get rolling on properly exposing this stuff. (Stuff = Mistreatment of Shrub War Vets and The Connecton Between Certain Shrub Administration Officials and "Gold Rush" Iraqi reconstruction contracts.)

I don't know what exactly can be done about these situations, and I'm certainly in no position to do anything personally about them anytime soon. But I have to believe that somehow, some way, there's someone out there that has the power to help fix things, if only they knew about them.

Maybe now they will know.

Have a great day everybody!

This is from the November 2, 2003 program.

I'll be blogging this proper-like later in the day, but I gotta go to tai chi and band practice so it's gotta wait till later.

However, for those of you that have been waiting for this, and don't need my charming commentary to get what you need out of it, here's the directory where everything's already uploaded:

Rummy On Meet The Press

See you later today. Lots of goodies in the kitty...

Sorry to be asleep at my post for the most part this week (except for my San Francisco pre-election coverage - which I'm guessing doesn't mean Jack to most of you, considering you're scattered out all over the world).

This week, my over-impacted schedule kind of bubbled over and burned me a bit -- I'm still about a week behind on everything, but at least I might actually be caught up in a week. (Which would be nice.)

While doing inventory, I realized that I'm about two weeks behind on my Daily Show clips -- yikes! There's some timely stuff in there too!

So I've decided to block out the rest of the afternoon to catch up on those.

I'm going to wait to capture tonight's Daily Show, and then I swear I'm going to send off my camera to be serviced. What does this matter to you? Well it means no new Daily Show clips for two weeks. (gasp!)

I can live through it if you can...

Alright, enough yappin and time to do some linkin...

So I haven't even found out how much of the election turned out yet, but, for me, this election was really all about the experience of it all. I had a great time voting yesterday. I had some great conversations with the poll workers in my precinct, and decided to go home and get the camera and interview the lot of them.

So Matt Gonzales it is then.

The music video shoot went well last night. I got to wear all black and shiny boots and an eye patch and a funny agent hat. It was great hanging out with Gregory from widehive records and I interviewed Azeem, who is an independent artist in his own right, as well as the lead singer for the band Variable Unit on Under Surveillance (and the star of the video).

I'm almost finished with my pre-election info coverage. Just a few more clips to go and the rest will be up to you.

Thanks for paying attention. I had 1,600+ people on my site yesterday, and that's a good day for me, so I guess somebody saw this stuff. Hope it was helpful.

I'm going to finish up the Ammiano interview -- just because I'm trying to finish what I start these days. Then I can get to those other clips I promised (Dean on 60 Minutes and on BET and in SF last week, Rummy spouting off the usual rubbish on Meet The Press about his memo), and I also have a special message of faith from the South Park kids about filesharing I can't wait to get up.

Someone sent me a really important article about scary shit like the reinstatement of the draft that you can bet will get more of my attention in the near future. (Once the dust clears from all this election stuff.)

Soon I'll need to get my "Agent" attire together for the music video that Ryan Junell is shooting tonight for the Mayhem Mysitcs. As far as I know, he is still looking for other people to be Agents (and Agents w/video cameras), so if you're interested, shoot me an email and I'll give you the details. He's shooting tonight and tomorrow on location here in San Francisco. (lisarein@finetuning.com)

Well I'd better get to work!

No, I don't have it up yet, but I did get it, and after I finish with the election stuff (things must happen in order, or they, like, don't happen) I promise I'll get the Rummy stuff up next.

I just want you to be sure it was in the kitty. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm assuming he is responding to "the memo."...

Okay, so, I'm obviously back and about to go on a video rampage. I'll have to get the Dean on 60 minutes up soon too. And, jeez, what else, just a stack of stuff...Last Saturday's protest (Oct 25, 2003) still hasn't gone up yet (it's captured though...). There's Dean in SF Wednesday (October 29, 2003) (also captured). There's Laura Splan's recent blood painting opening (just in time for halloween...doh!)...and I don't know what else....but if it's uploaded to the archive, it's a-gettin-a-linked.

I've fallen into that stupid trap of not taking enough time to blog clips I've already crunched and uploaded -- and that's just plain stupid. So allow me to catch up a bit over the next day or two...

Hey guys, I wasn't able to get as much up as I wanted to this morning, and now I've got to go to school. But I'll be catching up on everything I promised tonight.

Have a great day!

I'm BEAT with a capital everything tonight guys. I managed to get out and record the Dean rally, but last night was one of those late one's that I mentioned are known to happen on occasion, so I'm going to go to bed early-like, and I'll put up a bunch more foo clips, and Daily Show clips, and Howard Dean on 60 minutes, and other goodies in the AM.

A fellow student asked me a question this morning that I get a lot (at least twice a week, lately): Do I ever sleep?

Yes I sleep at least 7-8 hours a night, or my whole world falls apart. Thanks for asking.

Oh, okay. Sometimes I have to work late, or I'll start writing a song and get kind of obsessive about not going to bed until I finish the lyrics, or I'll go to a concert or an event get home at dawn, or whatever. I'm not a saint.

At Foo Camp, for example, I was just too excited most of the time to get to bed before 2 or 3 in the morning, even though I knew I had to be up early in the morning to work on my movies.

But for the most part, during the week. Sleep is a fundamental requirement that I very rarely compromise.

To those of you operating on less than 8 hours a night, I highly recommend either going to bed earlier or waking up later, depending on your other obligations. It may seem like you're getting less done at first, due to time constraints, but I predict that your productivity will increase by as much as 25% in the short term and as much as 50% in the long term (how it worked out for me).

I'm about to post a bunch of interviews and articles about our mistreated soldiers -- both here at home (as Iraq war veterans start to come home) and our troops that are still over in Iraq.

I hope that you guys understand that I'm just trying to raise awareness about how badly are boys and girls are being mistreated by our own government. Some of this stuff is really shocking and painful to read, so don't read it if you've got to go be upbeat somewhere anytime soon, ok?

No seriously. Read it when you can be alone for a minute, because you're not going to be in a very good mood afterwards. And for a minute, life seems kinda pointless and stuff.

I'm not expressing myself very well right now, most likely, but I did want to preface this next round of articles with a few words:

I'm torn about what to do at this point about Iraq. I realize that "now we're committed" and all that and that "now we just can't pull out and leave the Iraqis hanging" and all that, but if these stories from the troops -- from our own side are true, I wonder if it wouldn't be better to just pull out than to let any more of our troops die for nothing. Or rather, than to let more of them die so that the few entities that are profiting from this war can continue to do so.

I just don't know guys, so I won't pretend to have any answers. But I did think it was important to bring you this next round of information -- for your own edification. You can draw your own conclusions. Maybe you can help me figure it out.

thanks!

I just have to catch up on my article blogging today or I'm going to drive myself crazy. The other night, during a conversation with a friend, I kept referring to articles I thought I had blogged that I, in fact, had not blogged yet -- although I've had them all prepped and ready to go for, in some cases, weeks on end.

So bear with me if some of this morning's posts are kind of rough -- I have to clean house for my own sanity at this point. (Yes, I do realize that's already a lost cause :-)

Okay, theoretically I should be offline doing homework today, before I teach in the afternoon, but by day's end I reckon I'll finally get to uploading the rest of those Foo clips and last night's Daily Show with....(drumroll please) Henry Kissinger!

I was just telling a friend of mine last night how it was the Daily Show's clip of Henry Kissinger fronting the 911 investigation that started it all. (Meaning what made me want to start my Daily Show archive.

I think it's absolutely in-credible that Kissinger was on the Daily Show last night.
He's got a book out he's promoting, and I guess he figured if the Daily Show was good enough for Madeline Albright's book tour, it was good enough for him!

The Daily Show is really growing up :-) (and I can remember when it was just a young tike...)

Okay I've got another 10+ foo movies and interviews, 2+ new music tunes, and a few more news clips and things all ready to go, but I just gotta finish my homework first!

Tomorrow I've got school all day and plans for the evening, so I'll make sure to stay up late if I have to and get it all up tonight.

Back soon!

lisa

So I just got back from O'Reilly's Foo Camp yesterday and will be posting a bunch o' stuff early in the AM.

The first movie is titled "
Concentrated Foo" -- and encapsulates the spirit of the conference in many ways. The film is unedited and shot entirely in sequence.

Foo Attendees: This film must not be confused with the footage of the "Wandercam" -- a handheld that was roaming around the conference on its own from 9am on Saturday morning on. I myself have not looked at this footage yet, though I have digitized it.
That's tomorrow's little task :-)
More on the Wandercam soon...

I've also created an
A-Z page for both my little foo movies and the interviews themselves within the movies, so we can keep track of them all. I'd hate for any of it to be "lost" because I had forgotten to link to it. So I'm linking to it from there first, and then if I have time I'll link to stuff from here too.

Yeah all the above stuff I mention will be linked to in the am. Plus three movies from the "making of the RetarDEAD theme" video I shot in Seattle last weekend.

But now I gotta catch some zzzz. Lotsa great stuff I tell ya. I just can't believe how great some of it came out.

But I'm a sentimental fool...

Back soon,

lisa

Well guys, we tried hard, but we were outnumbered by the sheep.

However, it's not over. If I understand correctly from the little birdies I know, the next step is Recalling Arnold. People will start collecting signatures soon so keep an eye out.

This isn't over yet. We won't just hand our state's future over without a fight.

It may seem a little silly to go around and around like this, but they started it.

In the mean time, try to keep your spirits up. At least Prop 54 didn't pass!

I've got to go to a meeting this morning at my local elementary school, where I'll be starting soon as an SF School Volunteer (more on this later). Then I'll be back to upload some more new music to help get our minds off of this negative stuff.

Peace,

lisa

Hi guys. I'm off to Seattle for a few days to record the theme song for the sequel to Monsturd, The "RetarDEAD." So I probably won't be posting as much 'till I get back on Monday night.

FYI, I have already loaded up a bunch of new Daily Show clips that I'll try to get around to posting individually on the blog should I get a hold of a good connection up there. (The "new" clips are dated from 9-17-03 on.)

You can always peruse my archive for yourself to see what I've got going in there. Often, I upload stuff that I don't get around to blogging for days, so feel free to poke around and link to whatever you like.

Anyway, have a great weekend!

Drat!

I couldn't get anything up this morning before I had to go teach my class.

But I wanted to let you know that I've got 8+ Daily Show clips going up today tomorrow.

Back soon!

lisa

Hey I've got some kind of weird bug going on when users get an error message before the comments sends anyway. Has anyone else seen this problem? Wanna shoot me an email and help me fix it? (Please :-)

Okay I missed that the Daily Show had an incredible set of recall clips tuesday night -- so i'll be getting those up now.

Then there's the rest of the week of the Daily Show, the rest of the Dick Cheney clips (yes! there's more!) -- Jesse Jackson's speech from the protest Tuesday -- and whatever else I've still got in the kitty from last week...

So I am in graduate school, and I finally had to do some reading and homework this week.

I've also upgraded my Movable Type so my RSS feeds should be in better shape.

Try to send a few comments, if you don't mind, so I can check out the new install.

Check back tonight when things should be back to normal...

Thanks!

Okay so I'm not going to be doing much more with the Presidential Debate stuff unless somebody emails me this morning and wants something specific before I erase it from my hard drive. There's too much else to do. (Oh, alright, I'll get the Dean clips separated out and uploaded first -- I'm not heartless...but otherwise I gotta MOVE ON, so to speak.)

I say this because Dick Cheney was on Meet the Press yesterday morning in rare form, dodging questions with answers that don't make any sense, as per usual, about the war mostly -- and I think putting those clips up has to take priority right now.

So that's how I'll be spending my day after I catch up with an old friend over lunch.

But first, the rest of last week's
Daily Show clips. My friend Jeff Suttor is going to loan me his camera next week while I'm sending mine away to be serviced, so I won't miss a beat.

So you can all say: "Thanks, Jeff!"

Back in a flash!

So this is your warning ahead of time that today's going to be one of those "slinging hash" kind of days. Grad school is kicking in and if I don't catch up today, I'm not going to.

It also seems kind of stupid for me to go through all the trouble of capturing video and making movies out of it and uploading it and then forgetting to link to it on my archive, which is what I've been doing a lot of lately. So I need to link to that stuff and move on...

ALSO, I need your help. I've been working on my video index and it's actually starting to look like something useful. However, it's been really hard just sitting around and thinking about all the stuff that needs to be linked to from it, so I ask you: is your favorite video from my site on this list? If not, shoot me an email and remind me to put it in there. I'm adding links at the rate of about 10 a day. There are, of course, hundreds to go, because it's been a year now that I've been doing this. But that means that in a couple months, I might actually be up to date and to the point where you can see something on my blog and know that you can always just go to the index to look it up. (Like a real library!)

My email's lisarein@finetuning.com. (And I'm not afraid to put that on my site because I've got an awesome spam filter.) I like hearing from you anyway, and I've been getting a lot of great suggestions from you folks that will also be going up today.

Sorry for the hold up folks! Thanks for making this so much fun. You're the reason I do it, and it's been very gratifying lately.

Peace,

lisa

A very sad morning indeed. I went from tearing up over the beginning of last night's Nightline (sept 11 remembered), to crying over the afghan locals working for a Danish peace organization that were shot it the head in Afghanistan on Monday (more nightline), to momentarily freaking out about Ben being in Afghanistan (yes -- he's fine -- entry included below), to outright bawling at the news of Johnny Cash's death.

Anything else? Come on! Let it at me.

I'll pull it together because I have a lot of good stuff to bring you today...

from http://www.benhammersley.com, September 5, 2003

Ok, one final Afghanistan anecdote, which may only make sense to a Brit. One morning late in the week I had to get up really early in the morning, so I set the alarm on my shortwave radio to wake me with the BBC World Service. Come 430am, the radio kicks in. I lie there listening to news of Alastair Campbell’s resignation, and watching the sun rise through the crack in the dirt covering the windows, when suddenly the radio drops to static in mid-sentence. The World Service has dropped off the air.

Now, it’s early, I’m very tired, and not a little paranoid given where I am. Ah, shit, I think, London has gone. Al-Qaeda. It has to be. A day after my wife was due to arrive to see our bank, the city has gone - there can be no other explanation.

No, no, come on, I think. Tune around a bit - maybe the local transmitter has lost power. So I do: Voice of America is still there. The local music stations are still there. But no BBC. shit shit shit.

Nothing to do, I go to the bathroom and clean my teeth, run water through my hair and come back in and get dressed. Let’s try it again. Up and down the dial: everyone is there, no one is panicking. Right: to the BBC frequency.

Squeeeeeeeee Squeeeeee The radio goes mental - it’s like rubbing sheep with cheesegraters. Like a thousand nails on a blackboard. London is screaming.

What the hell is that? Sabotage? The effects of an EMP pulse? Major power spiking at Bush House? They’re all dead! What’s going on? Then….a voice…

“…I’ve always been partial to a bit of German techno…”

John Peel. That Bastard.

Wow I've got so much stuff in the kitty I'm a bit overwhelmed. I'm trying to get some of it up before I have to leave to teach class today at USF...

Last night's Daily Show was a keeper from beginning to end. I've already prepped everything -- Al Franken was the guest!

Then, for you Deannies, we've got Howard in SF last weekend and Howard raging on the Shrub's sunday night begging session for more cash for Iraq.

Next, I've got the EFF talking about the RIAA's Shamnesty program on three different channels.

Lemme try to at least get the Franken stuff up...(Yeah, like, quit yapping and start linking already....I know...I know....)

thanks!

Today's going to be all about quantity, hopefully. I'm so backed up.

Maybe if you're in the bay area, you'll
check it out.

See you there!

Okay, lemme see here...looks like I've got quite the back log of goodies here, but I'm ready to tackle them.

I've got the rest of ILAW, the whole Spectrum conference from March, Spam Tech Cybersalon, more SXSW 2003, more Etech 2003, lots of great "Where the f&*^% are the WMD" clips from reputable-type news sources, more Bill Moyers, more of the Democratic Candidates, more Daily Show...

More, more, more!

And I just got a new hard drive! So that will speed things up a bit!

Yikes! Tragedy strikes! Multiple disk failure!

And then the backup kicks in! (YES!)

So things are back up!

Thanks to Kelly, Shaun, Brad and Brak at the Internet Archive!

But we need to do some more maintenance before I can upload more stuff.

So hold tight!

No ILAW or any other goodies until it's back up.

I'll be crunching away until then -- so there will be lots to upload when I am able!

(Already have the first session with Larry in the kitty...)

I've got some ideas about what might make some nice reading for the July 4th weekend, but I'll have to expand upon such ideas after the final morning ILAW sessions...

I did want to say, however, that I am feeling a little better about the future of my country this Fourth Of July. People are really starting to realize that taking care of each other and looking out for each other, not just ourselves, is really the way to go.

Hopefully, by this time next year, we'll be well on our way to taking our country back and becoming world citizens again.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Although I have already made my endorsement for Howard Dean for President, you'll notice that I'll be posting video from all of the candidates over the days and weeks to come.

That's because I didn't want to be a party to the typical Media Monopoly practice of not giving the other candidates any time. In the TV and Cable "airwaves," you can bet that we're going to be seeing a lot of the Shrub and no one but the Shrub because he's the only one who can pay for all the time he wants.

I also didn't want to be the "all Dean and only Dean all the time" channel or anything -- I'm already worried about alienating those of you haven't made up your mind yet -- and you're the people I most want to reach!

So I won't say I'm going to be giving them all "equal time," because that means I'll have to get my calculator out to keep things even. I also plan on collecting all the great things Howard Dean has said and done in one category -- and he's done a lot of great things in the past and he keeps saying great things about what he'd do in the future -- so I'm pretty sure there will still be more Dean here than anything else.

However, a friend of mine reminded me earlier this week (as she was checking "none of the above" on her MoveOn Primary Ballot) that it's important to keep the debate going on these issues in order to make the public aware of them -- and to not just get behind one candidate early and let the issues take a backseat to the campaign.

So, although I still feel that Dean is the obvious choice at this point, and so much more than the other candidates I just had to say something, I do agree with her point about keeping up the debate on these so very important issues.

That means I'll be covering all of the candidates to a certain extent -- should one (or all) of them say something worthy (or damning) that I feel the public needs to hear.

That means that on my little media monopoly, we'll be hearing from all of the Democratic candidates.

I just felt compelled to explain my strategy a bit here.

Peace y'all.

Barbie and I are both mentioned in this nice little intro about blogging by Deirdre Clemente.

I sure never thought me and Barbie would be mentioned in the same breath about anything...

Wow I didn't realize that 35 of bloggers are women now. Great start.

Blogging. It may sound like a fraternity hazing ritual but these days, everybody is doing it. Disoriented new moms, disgruntled teens, and somewhat sickening thirtysomethings are enthusiastically creating and maintaining weblogs or “blogs” --online journals that feature everything from boyfriend bashing to baby food reviews. Even Barbie has a blog.

Although they’ve been around since the mid-nineties, “blogs” had been reserved for techies and professional writers. In 1999, there were only an estimated 100 blogs in existence; today, the number is around one million. In a traditionally male forum, a whopping 35 percent of these blossoming bloggers are women.

Just trying to clear off my TO DO-BLOGGING list today!

Hi guys. I had to make a decision with regard to what I could actually get done this weekend and what clips were important for people to see. It turns out they're all pretty important, so I'm going to give you guys "Small" versions of all of them, and see if I get around to posting pictures and Hi-res versions later.

I didn't want to risk not getting them all up today (there are like 8 of them)...So that's why there's a lot of links and not much explaining going on today (kinda like Friday night).

It's subtle, but I believe there is a lot of important information in these clips, and I wanted to post them on a Sunday, when you guys might actually have a chance to look at all of them.

I would appreciate it if you guys would post news articles regarding these stories to my comments if you run across any. (Well, in general, I really like that, but especially regarding any of these stories.)

Thanks!

I don't have a link for it, but I do know that Patti Smith is giving a free concert today (like an entire set, w/opening bands and everything concert type concert) from 1-4pm in the middle of Berkeley at McLaren Park. Patti wanted to thank everyone for their hard work these last few months.

That's my local stomping ground, so I thought I'd provide some directions.

Directions:

BART: Just get off at the Berkeley Bart station and walk two blocks AWAY from campus. Ask someone if you don't see it immediately :-)

Driving - Don't. No really. You're whole day will be easier if you don't. At the very least, park at another bart station (like Coliseum Bart - where there's lots of parking always) and take Bart in. (Coliseum Bart is off the 66th St. or Hegenburger exits off of 880 south).

No really: the trick if you're going to drive in (if you're coming from far away and you can't help it) is to get there at least an hour or two before the show with at least 10 bucks for parking money. Parking is pricey in Berkeley.

Get on 80 North to Berkeley/Sacramento or South to Berkeley/Oakland/San Francisco. Depending on which direction you're coming from here are directions:

If you're coming from the south on 80, or from San Francisco, I would take 580 to 24 to the 51st/Martin Luther King exit, and then stay to the left to get on MLK. Take MLK all the way past Ashby street and park if you can. Otherwise look for parking lots that might be around.

If you end up on 80 north (easier to figure out), get off at "Ashby" and continue along Ashby until you have crossed Sacramento Street. Then start looking for parking and take it if you see any. Otherwise, when you get to Martin Luther King Jr. Way, make a left and pay for the pricey parking lots that will start showing up that I mention above. My guess is that MLK will be blocked off at some point.

If you cross MLK (on Ashby) make sure you turn left on the next intersection (Shattuck). After you take a left there, if you see parking, take it. (Shattuck and MLK run parallel.) If you cross "Haste" street, you'll want to park or turn off of Shattuck immediately because my guess is that driving right next to the Bart station (from Durant north) will be messy.

From the north take the University exit off of 80, and continue on University for many blocks. After you've passed Sacramento Street, if you see parking, take it. Otherwise, make a right on Martin Luther King Jr. Way and look for the pricey parking.

Hope this helps.

Sorry I can't be there today. I'm taking to day to catch up on my iLaw homework. (It's labor of love, believe me -- I am really digging the program!)

If you came from out of town to go to the concert, you should hang around in Berkeley for the evening and head up to the spam cybersalon for dinner afterwards. (See you there!)

I'm on a catch up mission tonight so I'm just going to be throwing stuff up here and depending on links or the music/movies themselves to do most of the explaining.

I'm also updating my Video Index tonight. (So it won't be worthless anymore.)

Thanks!

I went to sleep last night and woke up this morning thinking the same thoughts:

Never in a million years would I have ever predicted that I would be living in a world where I feel the need to take photographs inside of a Starbucks store in an attempt to somehow prove that I am still living in a free society.

Yes, the absurdity of it all does kick me in the teeth sometimes. Thanks for asking.

Everything is back up and running now!

right now for some reason. Try back in a few hours...

All fixed as of Sunday, May 4 at 6:00 am PST...

Many apologies for taking so long to get the Alan Kay presentation up.

I wanted to present all of the elements of Alan Kay's talk and presentation -- as exhibits in my library, if you will.

I've been pondering the different possibilities for some time. How should I organize my library for those who prefer to browse through history, rather than have it flung at them in numerous lengths and file formats.

So, with this presentation, I bring to you the advent of my "tour" pages. Pages that I hope to place in every directory of my Internet Archive Library that will provide you with a little more information about what's on the page, as well as the licensing info and any other relevant information for those works, as more information is made available to me.

Two of my readers reminded me to upload Monday night's
"Bush v. Bush" debate that The Daily Show was nice enough to put together for us.

(The Shrub now vs. himself the year he was running for President.)

I'd forgotten about it already when I realized how many other things I promised you guys yesterday.

But it really does deserve to go up first...

Here's a Real Feed of it. (Quicktimes are still on the way.)

Okay so I had time to crunch a bunch of my audio and video from last week, and chop everything up into nice, digestible chunks. But then I didn't have enough brain power to link to it and describe it all until I finished another project that was due today for school.

So that was today. Now I've got my life back for a couple days.

I know you're all just hanging around waiting for the Alan Kay and Howard Rheingold and all the other goodies I promised from E-tech last week.

(Yeah, like, enough yappin' already lady -- kick with the video!)

Well I've got that and more -- Daily Show Clips from last week and last night -- the last week of news stories from other publications around the world that I was too busy to blog while E-teching -- A video news clip of Lawrence Lessig and Zoe Lofgren talking about their new anti-spam bill on last night's news...and....more....

My next deadline isn't till Monday so I basically have the next 48 hours to catch up on everything else before things get ugly again school-wise.

Alright enough talk. Video on the way.

If you don't know what movie I'm talking about, don't worry about it :-)

If you do and you know where it is, please let me know so I can download it and add it to my Internet Archive Library.

The page I link to from this post has gone bad.

Thanks!

I'm out of town with crummy connectivity all weekend.

That's why there won't be much going on here 'till Monday.

See you then!

Mike Hawash did not get released yesterday.

I've got more on that, yesterday's alleged attacks on protesters and innocent longshoreman by Oakland police, and a bunch of other stuff in the kitty.

But first, I've got to get a good portion finished by mid-morning
(self-imposed deadline) on a Marxist analysis of the Simpsons tv show that's due in a few days in one of my classes.

Anyone know of any good online resources for either subject? :-)

I'll be back here with bells on sometime after 10 am...

We'll have to learn together about this stuff, because the more I learn about "it", the more I realize I know even less about it than I thought I did.

How interesting that it's tied back in with the Alien Registration Act of 1940.

I was thinking the Shrub Administration has been sucking us back thirty years with regard to foreign policy and nuclear power. But now I realize, regarding our policies at home and the way we've been treating people of color, we've actually gone back sixty years.

As far as separation of church and state go, it feels like gone backwards at least a hundred years!

The bad news is: this isn't an episode of the Twilight Zone. This is the United States.

This is my country. Right here. Right now. April 6, 2003.

I must admit, I'm still in a bit of shock over the last six months.

Who woulda thunk it?

Oh well, time to get over it and fight back...

In the mean time, I promised some history so here's a good start:

McCarthyism.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAmccarthyism.htm

The Alien Registration Act passed by Congress on 29th June, 1940, made it illegal for anyone in the United States to advocate, abet, or teach the desirability of overthrowing the government. The law also required all alien residents in the United States over 14 years of age to file a comprehensive statement of their personal and occupational status and a record of their political beliefs. Within four months a total of 4,741,971 aliens had been registered.

The main objective of the Alien Registration Act was to undermine the American Communist Party and other left-wing political groups in the United States. It was decided that the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), that had been set up by Congress under Martin Dies in 1938 to investigate people suspected of unpatriotic behaviour, would be the best vehicle to discover if people were trying to overthrow the government.

In 1947 the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), chaired by J. Parnell Thomas, began an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry. The HUAC interviewed 41 people who were working in Hollywood. These people attended voluntarily and became known as "friendly witnesses". During their interviews they named nineteen people who they accused of holding left-wing views.

One of those named, Bertolt Brecht, an emigrant playwright, gave evidence and then left for East Germany. Ten others: Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Samuel Ornitz,, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson and Alvah Bessie refused to answer any questions.

Known as the Hollywood Ten, they claimed that the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution gave them the right to do this. The House of Un-American Activities Committee and the courts during appeals disagreed and all were found guilty of contempt of congress and each was sentenced to between six and twelve months in prison.

Larry Parks was the only actor in the original nineteen people named. He was also the only person on the list who the average moviegoer would have known. Parks agreed to give evidence to the HUAC and admitted that he had joined the Communist Party in 1941 but left it four years later. When asked for the names of fellow members, Parks replied: "I would prefer, if you would allow me, not to mention other people's names. Don't present me with the choice of either being in contempt of this Committee and going to jail or forcing me to really crawl through the mud to be an informer."

The House of Un-American Activities Committee insisted that Parks answered all the questions asked. The HUAC had a private session and two days later it was leaked to the newspapers that Parks had named names. Leo Townsend, Isobel Lennart, Roy Huggins, Richard Collins, Lee J. Cobb, Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan, afraid they would go to prison, were also willing to name people who had been members of left-wing groups.

In June, 1950, three former FBI agents and a right-wing television producer, Vincent Harnett, published Red Channels, a pamphlet listing the names of 151 writers, directors and performers who they claimed had been members of subversive organisations before the Second World War but had not so far been blacklisted. The names had been compiled from FBI files and a detailed analysis of the Daily Worker, a newspaper published by the American Communist Party.

A free copy of Red Channels was sent to those involved in employing people in the entertainment industry. All those people named in the pamphlet were blacklisted until they appeared in front of the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and convinced its members they had completely renounced their radical past.

Edward Dmytryk, one of the original Hollywood Ten, had financial problems as a result of divorcing his first wife. Faced with having to sell his plane and encouraged by his new wife, Dmytryk decided to try to get his name removed from the blacklist. On 25th April, 1951, Dmytryk appeared before the House of Un-American Activities Committee again. This time he answered all their questions including the naming of twenty-six former members of left-wing groups.

Dmytryk also revealed how people such as John Howard Lawson, Adrian Scott and Albert Maltz had put him under pressure to make sure his films expressed the views of the Communist Party. This was particularly damaging to those members of the original Hollywood Ten were at that time involved in court cases with their previous employers.

If people refused to name names when called up to appear before the HUAC, they were added to a blacklist that had been drawn up by the Hollywood film studios. Over 320 people were placed on this list that stopped them from working in the entertainment industry. This included Larry Adler, Stella Adler, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Joseph Bromberg, Charlie Chaplin, Aaron Copland, Hanns Eisler, Carl Foreman, John Garfield, Howard Da Silva, Dashiell Hammett, E. Y. Harburg, Lillian Hellman, Burl Ives, Arthur Miller, Dorothy Parker, Philip Loeb, Joseph Losey, Anne Revere, Pete Seeger, Gale Sondergaard, Louis Untermeyer, Josh White, Clifford Odets, Michael Wilson, Paul Jarrico, Jeff Corey, John Randolph, Canada Lee, Orson Welles, Paul Green, Sidney Kingsley, Paul Robeson, Richard Wright and Abraham Polonsky.

It was now decided to use the Alien Registration Act against the American Communist Party. Leaders of the party were arrested and in October, 1949, after a nine month trial, eleven members were convicted of violating the act. Over the next two years another 46 members were arrested and charged with advocating the overthrow of the government. Other high profile spy cases at the time involving Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg, helped to create a deep fear in the United States that a communist conspiracy was taking place.

On 9th February, 1950, Joseph McCarthy, a senator from Wisconsin, made a speech claiming to have a list of 205 people in the State Department known to be members of the American Communist Party. The list of names was not a secret and had been in fact published by the Secretary of State in 1946. These people had been identified during a preliminary screening of 3,000 federal employees. Some had been communists but others had been fascists, alcoholics and sexual deviants. If screened, McCarthy's own drink problems and sexual preferences would have resulted in him being put on the list.

McCarthy also began receiving information from his friend, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). William Sullivan, one of Hoover's agents, later admitted that: "We were the ones who made the McCarthy hearings possible. We fed McCarthy all the material he was using."

With the war going badly in Korea and communist advances in Eastern Europe and in China, the American public were genuinely frightened about the possibilities of internal subversion. McCarthy, was made chairman of the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate, and this gave him the opportunity to investigate the possibility of communist subversion.

For the next two years McCarthy's committee investigated various government departments and questioned a large number of people about their political past. Some lost their jobs after they admitted they had been members of the Communist Party. McCarthy made it clear to the witnesses that the only way of showing that they had abandoned their left-wing views was by naming other members of the party.

This witch-hunt and anti-communist hysteria became known as McCarthyism. At first Joseph McCarthy mainly targeted Democrats associated with the New Deal policies of the 1930s. Harry S. Truman and members of his Democratic administration such as George Marshall and Dean Acheson, were accused of being soft on communism. Truman was portrayed as a dangerous liberal and McCarthy's campaign helped the Republican candidate, Dwight Eisenhower, win the presidential election in 1952.

After what had happened to McCarthy's opponents in the 1950 elections, most politicians were unwilling to criticize him in the Senate. As the Boston Post pointed out: "Attacking him is this state is regarded as a certain method of committing suicide." One notable exception was William Benton, the owner of Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a senator from Connecticut. McCarthy and his supporters immediately began smearing Benton. It was claimed that while Assistant Secretary of State, he had protected known communists and that he had been responsible for the purchase and display of "lewd art works". Benton, who was also accused of being disloyal by Joseph McCarthy for having much of his company's work printed in England, was defeated in the 1952 elections.

In 1952 McCarthy appointed Roy Cohn as the chief counsel to the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate. Cohn had been recommended by J. Edgar Hoover, who had been impressed by his involvement in the prosecution of Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg. Soon after Cohn was appointed, he recruited his best friend, David Schine, to become his chief consultant.

McCarthy's next target was what he believed were anti-American books in libraries. His researchers looked into the Overseas Library Program and discovered 30,000 books by "communists, pro-communists, former communists and anti anti-communists." After the publication of this list, these books were removed from the library shelves.

For some time opponents of Joseph McCarthy had been accumulating evidence concerning his homosexual activities. Several members of his staff, including Roy Cohn and David Schine, were also suspected of having a sexual relationship. Although well-known by political journalists, the first article about it did not appear until Hank Greenspun published an article in the Las Vagas Sun in 25th October, 1952. Greenspun wrote that: "It is common talk among homosexuals in Milwaukee who rendezvous in the White Horse Inn that Senator Joe McCarthy has often engaged in homosexual activities."

Joseph McCarthy considered a libel suit against Greenspun but decided against it when he was told by his lawyers that if the case went ahead he would have to take the witness stand and answer questions about his sexuality. In an attempt to stop the rumours circulating, McCarthy married his secretary, Jeannie Kerr. Later the couple adopted a five-week old girl from the New York Foundling Home.

In October, 1953, McCarthy began investigating communist infiltration into the military. Attempts were made by McCarthy to discredit Robert Stevens, the Secretary of the Army. The president, Dwight Eisenhower, was furious and now realised that it was time to bring an end to McCarthy's activities.

The United States Army now passed information about Joseph McCarthy to journalists known to be opposed to him. This included the news that McCarthy and Roy Cohn had abused congressional privilege by trying to prevent David Schine from being drafted. When that failed, it was claimed that Cohn tried to pressurize the Army to grant Schine special privileges. The well-known newspaper columnist, Drew Pearson, published the story on 15th December, 1953.

Dwight Eisenhower also instructed his vice president, Richard Nixon, to attack Joseph McCarthy. On 4th March, 1954, Nixon made a speech where, although not mentioning McCarthy, made it clear who he was talking about: "Men who have in the past done effective work exposing Communists in this country have, by reckless talk and questionable methods, made themselves the issue rather than the cause they believe in so deeply."

Some figures in the media, such as writers George Seldes and I. F. Stone, and cartoonists, Herb Block and Daniel Fitzpatrick, had fought a long campaign against Joseph McCarthy. Other figures in the media, who had for a long time been opposed to McCarthyism but were frightened to speak out, now began to get the confidence to join the counter-attack. Edward Murrow, the experienced broadcaster, used his television programme, See It Now, on 9th March, 1954, to criticize McCarthy's methods. Newspaper columnists such as Walter Lippmann and Jack Anderson also became more open in their attacks on McCarthy.

The senate investigations into the United States Army were televised and this helped to expose the tactics of Joseph McCarthy. One newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal, reported that: "In this long, degrading travesty of the democratic process McCarthy has shown himself to be evil and unmatched in malice." Leading politicians in both parties, had been embarrassed by McCarthy's performance and on 2nd December, 1954, a censure motion condemned his conduct by 67 votes to 22.

McCarthy lost the chairmanship of the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate. He was now without a power base and the media lost interest in his claims of a communist conspiracy. As one journalist, Willard Edwards, pointed out: "Most reporters just refused to file McCarthy stories. And most papers would not have printed them anyway." Although some historians claim that this marked the end of McCarthyism, others argue that the anti-communist hysteria in the United States lasted until the end of the Cold War.

Daniel Fitzpatrick, St Louis
Post-Dispatch (23rd February, 1947)

(1) Freda Kirchwey, The Nation (October, 1939)

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of democracy. We have not gone to war, and no excuse exists for war-time hysteria. Neither Communists nor even (German-American) Bundists are enemy agents. They deserve to be watched but not to be persecuted. The real danger is that general detestation of Communists and Bundists will lead to acts of outright repression supported not only by reactionaries but by disgusted liberals. Democracy was not invented as a luxury to be indulged in only in times of calm and stability. It is a pliable, tough-fibered technique especially useful when times are hard. Only a weak and distrustful American could today advocate measures of repression and coercion, or encourage a mood of panic. Now is the time to demonstrate the resilience of our institutions. Now is the time to deal with dissent calmly and with full respect for its rights.

(2) Freda Kirchwey, The Nation (April, 1940)

At what moment does it become necessary to limit the freedom of everyone in order to suppress the danger lurking in a disloyal handful. The moment for drastic repression has not arrived, and the task of liberals in America is difficult but clear. They must fight to preserve the democratic safeguards contained in the Bill of Rights, while applying to Nazis and their supporters the equally democratic methods of exposure, counter-propaganda, and justified legal attack. Otherwise the Nazi invasion of Norway is likely to end in a victory for Martin Dies in America.

(3) Jessica Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict (1977)

The soil for the noxious growth of McCarthyism had been well prepared by the Truman administration, and the anti-Communist crusade was well under way, long before the junior senator from Wisconsin himself appeared on the scene. Joseph McCarthy was virtually unknown outside his home state until 9 February 1950, when he made his celebrated speech alleging that the State Department was in the hands of Communists, which catapulted him into the national limelight he enjoyed for the next five years.

Some signposts on the road to McCarthyism: 1947, Truman establishes the federal loyalty oath, barring alleged subversives from government employment. States and universities follow suit. The Attorney General, under authority of a Presidential executive order, publishes a list of subversive, proscribed organizations. 1948: Ten Hollywood screenwriters sentenced to a year's imprisonment for refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities about alleged subversion in the film industry. Mundt-Nixon bill introduced in Senate, requiring registration of Communists and members of 'Communist fronts'. Henry Wallace's campaign for the presidency on the Progressive Party ticket, into which the CP had thrown all its energy and forces, ends in disastrous defeat. 1949: Twelve top Communist leaders found guilty under the Smith Act of conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the Government by force and violence. Alger Hiss tried and convicted of perjury. Several of the largest left-led unions expelled from CIO.

Four months after McCarthy's opening salvo, the Korean War broke out, bringing Truman's foreign policy into harmony with his domestic drive against the Left and furnishing McCarthy with more ammunition for his anti-Communist crusade. In this climate most liberals turned tail. Senator Hubert Humphrey proposed establishing concentration camps for subversives, and declared on the floor of Congress: "I want them (Communists) removed from the normal scene of American life, and taken into custody." The American Civil Liberties Union, supposed guardian of First Amendment rights, instituted its own loyalty purge excluding from membership those suspected of harbouring subversive ideas.

(4) Archibald MacLeish, letter to Paul H. Buck (1st January 1953)

My radio reports that various Congressional Committees plan to investigate colleges and universities to determine whether they are riddled with Communists. Senator McCarthy is reported as including "Communist thinkers". Since he has already told us that he regards Benny de Vote and young Arthur Schlesinger as - Communist thinkers we have some notion of what that means.

You will recall that I am to be away the second half year. You will recall also that Senator McCarthy has already attacked me as belonging to more Communist front organizations than any man he has ever mentioned. He - or one of the other committees - can be expected to attack me again when he or they get around to Harvard - should be early in the campaign. It I am away in the British West Indies at the time I should like you to have the facts.

But before I set them down I should like to ask a question which must be in your mind and in the minds of many others. Has not the time come for the believers in the American tradition intellectual liberty - above all the believers in positions of responsibility on the faculties of the free universities - to take a firm stand on the fundamental issue? There is no disagreement, I take it, on the issue of Communists in teaching. No man who accepts a prior loyalty to any authority other than his own conscience, his own judgment of the truth, should be permitted to teach in a free society. That view I take it, is held by those responsible for the selection of teachers in all colleges and universities in this country. It is also applied in the case of Communists at least - though it is notoriously not applied in certain cases at the other extreme.

I have not been told what Communist-front organizations the Senator has in mind but I assume they include the League of American Writers and various other organizations of an antifascist character to which I belonged at the time of the Spanish War and during the rise of the Nazi danger and from which I removed myself when I entered the Government as Librarian of Congress in 1939.

My own personal position on the issue of Communism has been clear throughout, and the record is a matter of public knowledge. I was, I think I can say without immodesty, one of the first American writers to attack the Marxists. This was, of course, on the literary front since it was on the literary front I met them. In the early Thirties the Marxist position was, as you know, a fashionable position among the critics. Attacks on Communism were not the pleasant and profitable exercises they are now when all politicians and most publicists fall all over themselves and each other to demonstrate their detestation of everything Communism is or stands for. In the early Thirties, to attack the Communists was to bring the hornets out and the stings could hurt.

(5) Lee J. Cobb was one of those who was originally blacklisted but eventually agreed to do a deal with the HCUA.

When the facilities of the government of the United States are drawn on an individual it can be terrifying. The blacklist is just the opening gambit - being deprived of work. Your passport is confiscated. That's minor. But not being able to move without being tailed is something else. After a certain point it grows to implied as well as articulated threats, and people succumb. My wife did, and she was institutionalized. In 1953 the HCUA did a deal with me. I was pretty much worn down. I had no money. I couldn't borrow. I had the expenses of taking care of the children. Why am I subjecting my loved ones to this? If it's worth dying for, and I am just as idealistic as the next fellow. But I decided it wasn't worth dying for, and if this gesture was the way of getting out of the penitentiary I'd do it. I had to be employable again.

(6) In his autobiography, Timebends, Arthur Miller, wrote about the blacklisting of Louis Untermeyer (1987)

Louis Untermeyer, then in his sixties, was a poet and anthologist, a distinguished-looking old New York type with a large aristocratic nose and a passion for conversation, especially about writers and to become a poet. He married four times, had taught and written and published, and with the swift rise of television had become nationally known as one of the original regulars on What's My Line?, a popular early show in which he, along with columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, publisher Bennett Cerf, and Arlene Francis, would try to guess the occupation of a studio guest by asking the fewest possible questions in the brief time allowed. All this with wisecracking and banter, at which Louis was a lovable master, what with his instant recall of every joke and pun he had ever heard.

One day he arrived as usual at the television studio an hour before the program began and was told by the producer that he was no longer on the show. It appeared that as a result of having been listed in Life magazine as a sponsor of the Waldorf Conference (a meeting to discuss cultural and scientific links with the Soviet Union), an organized letter campaign protesting his appearance on What's My Line? had scared the advertisers into getting rid of him.

Louis went back to his apartment. Normally we ran into each other in the street once or twice a week or kept in touch every month or so, but I no longer saw him in the neighborhood or heard from him. Louis didn't leave his apartment for almost a year and a half. An overwhelming and paralyzing fear had risen him. More than a political fear, it was really that he had witnessed the tenuousness of human connection and it had left him in terror. He had always loved a lot and been loved, especially on the TV program where his quips were vastly appreciated, and suddenly, he had been thrown into the street, abolished.

(7) When Lillian Hellman appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951 she willing to talk about her own political past but refused to testify against others.

To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.

(8) Budd Schulberg was interviewed by Victor Navasky when he was writing his book, Naming Names (1982)

These people (those he named), if they had it in them, could have written books and plays. There was not a blacklist in publishing. There was not a blacklist in the theatre. They could have written about the forces that drove them into the Communist Party. They were practically nothing written. Nor have I seen these people interested in social problems in the decades since. They're interested in their own problems and in the protection of the Party.

(9) Whittaker Chambers, was one of those who helped provide evidence to support the idea of a communist conspiracy. However, in a letter to Henry Regnery on 14th January, 1954, he explained why he was having doubts about Joseph McCarthy.

All of us, to one degree or another, have slowly come to question his judgment and to fear acutely that his flair for the sensational, his inaccuracies and distortions, his tendency to sacrifice the greater objective for the momentary effect, will lead him and us into trouble. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder which will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come.

(10) Max Eastman, The Necessity of Red Baiting, The Freeman (1st June, 1953)

Red Baiting - in the sense of reasoned, documented exposure of Communist and pro-Communist infiltration of government departments and private agencies of information and communication - is absolutely necessary. We are not dealing with honest fanatics of a new idea, willing to give testimony for their faith straightforwardly, regardless of the cost. We are dealing with conspirators who try to sneak in the Moscow-inspired propaganda by stealth and double talk, who run for shelter to the Fifth Amendment when they are not only permitted but invited and urged by Congressional committee to state what they believe. I myself, after struggling for years to get this fact recognized, give McCarthy the major credit for implanting it in the mind of the whole nation.

(11) After a tour of Europe in the summer of 1953, Philip Reed, head of General Electric, wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower (8th June, 1953)

I urge you to take issue with McCarthy and make it stick. People in high and low places see in him a potential Hitler, seeking the presidency of the United States. That he could get away with what he already has in America has made some of them wonder whether our concept of democratic governments and the rights of individuals is really different from those of the Communists and Fascists.

(12) Walter Lippmann, Washington Post (1st March, 1954)

McCarthy's influence has grown as the President has appeased him. His power will cease to grow and will diminish when he is resisted, and it has been shown to our people that those to whom we look for leadership and to preserve our institutions are not afraid of him.

(13) Harry S. Truman, New York Times (17th November, 1953)

It is now evident that the present Administration has fully embraced, for political advantage, McCarthyism. I am not referring to the Senator from Wisconsin. He is only important in that his name has taken on the dictionary meaning of the word. It is the corruption of truth, the abandonment of the due process law. It is the use of the big lie and the unfounded accusation against any citizen in the name of Americanism or security. It is the rise to power of the demagogue who lives on untruth; it is the spreading of fear and the destruction of faith in every level of society.

(14) Dalton Trumbo, speech to the Screen Writers Guild when accepting the Laurel Award in 1970.

The blacklist was a time of evil, and that no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil. Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control of mere individuals, each person reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions, and his particular circumstances compelled him to. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides.

When you who are in your forties or younger look back with curiosity on that dark time, as I think occasionally you should, it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some grew and some diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things that he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why none of us - right, left, or centre - emerged from that long nightmare without sin.

(15) Albert Maltz, one of the Hollywood Ten, was interviewed by the New York Times in 1972.

There is currently in vogue a thesis pronounced by Dalton Trumbo which declares that everyone during the years of blacklist was equally a victim. This is factual nonsense and represents a bewildering moral position.

To put the point sharply: If an informer in the French underground who sent a friend to the torture chambers of the Gestapo was equally a victim, then there can be no right or wrong in life that I understand.

Adrian Scott was the producer of the notable film Crossfire in 1947 and Edward Dmytryk was its director. Crossfire won wide critical acclaim, many awards and commercial success. Both of these men refused to co-operate with the HCUA. Both were held in contempt of the HCUA and went to jail.

When Dmytryk emerged from his prison term he did so with a new set of principles. He suddenly saw the heavenly light, testified as a friend of the HCUA, praised its purposes and practices and denounced all who opposed it. Dmytryk immediately found work as a director, and has worked all down the years since. Adrian Scott, who came out of prison with his principles intact, could not produce a film for a studio again until 1970. He was blacklisted for 21 years. To assert that he and Dmytryk were equally victims is beyond my comprehension.

(16) Archibald MacLeish, The Conquest of America, (1949)

Never in the history of the world was one people as completely dominated, intellectually and morally, by another as the people of the United States by the people of Russia in the four years from 1946 through 1949. American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic politics were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn't like it. American political controversy was controversy sung to the Russian tune; left-wing movements attacked right-wing movements not on American issues but on Russian issues, and right-wing movements replied with the same arguments turned round about.

All this took place not in a time of national weakness or decay but precisely at the moment when the United States, having engineered a tremendous triumph and fought its way to a brilliant victory in the greatest of all wars, had reached the highest point of world power ever achieved by a single state.

Last updated: 16th August, 2002

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAalien

The Alien Registration Act (also known as the Smith Act) was passed by Congress on 29th June, 1940, made it illegal for anyone in the United States to advocate, abet, or teach the desirability of overthrowing the government. The law also required all alien residents in the United States over 14 years of age to file a comprehensive statement of their personal and occupational status and a record of their political beliefs. Within four months a total of 4,741,971 aliens had been registered. The main objective of the act was to undermine the American Communist Party and other left-wing political groups in the United States. One of the first men to be arrested and imprisoned under the act was James Cannon, the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party.

After the Second World War it was now decided to use the Alien Registration Act against the American Communist Party. In October, 1949, Eugene Dennis and twelve leaders of the party were arrested and in October, 1949, after a nine month trial, eleven members were convicted of violating the act. Over the next two years another 46 members were arrested and charged of advocating the overthrow of the government.

(1) Statement issued by Eugene Dennis ( March 21, 1949)

We eleven defendants will prove that the very time when we allegedly began this menacing conspiracy we were in fact advocating and organizing all-out support to the Government of the United States. We will prove that all of us taught the duty of upholding the United States Government and of intensifying the anti-Axis war effort and we defendants will put in evidence the honorable war record of the 15,000 American Communists who, in accord with what we taught and advocated, served with the armed forces in the military defense of our country.

We will show with what peaceful intent we taught and advocated, amongst other things, to oppose American support to the unjust and criminal war against the Chinese people waged by the miserable Chiang Kai-shek, to oppose the civil war against the Greeks, waged by the monarchist-fascist puppet of the American masters, with the American people footing the bill, to oppose the Anglo-American oil lords against the new State of Israel, and the people of Indonesia, and to oppose the restoration of the German and Japanese monopolies and war potential under the new management of the American cartelists.

You will see that our Communist Party Constitution acknowledges not only that we learn from Marx and Lenin but that we owe much to and learn from the teachings of men like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, William Sylvis, and Eugene V. Debs.

The prosecution asks this jury for what amounts to a preventative conviction, in order that we Communist leaders may be put under what the Nazis called protective custody. I ask the jury to weigh the prosecution's case against the proof we defendants will offer to establish that we have taught and advocated the duty and necessity to prevent the force and violence of Fascism, imperialists of war and Iynching and anti-Semitism. I ask you to weigh carefully our sincere offer of proof which demonstrates that we Communists are second to none in our devotion to our people and to our country, and that we teach and advocate and practice a program of peace, of democracy, equality, economic security, and social progress.

(2) Louis Budenz, testimony at the trial of Eugene Dennis and the leaders of the American Communist Party (March 29, 1949)

The Communist Party bases itself upon so-called scientific socialism, the theory and practice of so-called scientific socialism as appears in the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, therefore as interpreted by Lenin and Stalin who have specifically interpreted scientific socialism to mean that socialism can only be attained by the violent shattering of the capitalist state, and the setting up of a dictatorship of the proletariat by force and violence in place of that state. In the United States this would mean that the Communist Party of the United States is basically committed to the overthrow of the Government of the United States as set up by the Constitution of the United States.

(3) Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980)

In 1940, with the United States not yet at war, Congress passed the Smith Act. This took Espionage Act prohibitions against talk or writing that would lead to refusal of duty in the armed forces and applied them to peacetime. The Smith Act also made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence, or to join any group that advocated this, or to publish anything with such ideas. In Minneapolis in 1943, eighteen members of the Socialist Workers party were convicted for belonging to a party whose ideas, expressed in its Declaration of Principles, and in the Communist Manifesto, were said to violate the Smith Act. They were sentenced to prison terms, and the Supreme Court refused to review their case.

Last updated: 16th August, 2002

Okay sorry for the light postings yesterday. Sometimes it's easier for me to crunch more video clips if I do a bunch of them at once and kind of get into a rhythm of sorts.

In the kitty: Chris Rock on the Daily Show, Paul McCartney chills out a bit for the Pope (but gets in a funny), more Daily Show updates on my country's beligerent Secretary of Defense and new found McCarthyesque trends, and a clip from a 1974 Rockford Files episode that won't need any explaination once you see it for yourself.

I've got a bit of reading to do for school (that I won't do if I don't do it before I start posting because I know how I am) and then the games will begin...

She doesn't mince too many words, either.

I always thought a lot about Lisa Marie when I was a little girl growing up because she had (partly) the same name as me and was born the same year as me and I was told we looked a little alike (at the time).
(At least my relatives thought so :-)

I remember when Elvis died. I was like 5 or 6 years old, but I remember.

I remember that the first thing I thought of was Lisa Marie. I hoped she was going to be okay. Not just right at that moment, but in general.

I've pretty much been worried about her ever since. Some crazy emotional attachments you never outgrow, perhaps.

Anyway, I found this interview pretty interesting. Maybe you will too.

‘Love Makes Me Go Haywire’
Lisa Marie Presley talks frankly about music, marriage—and suspicious minds
By Lorraine Ali for Newsweek.

I was so astounded by the hundreds of thousands of people who were clearly in mourning. They were having these violent reactions in front of me. Thousands of people were coming through my house to look at his body. I remember watching them all and being so confused. I couldn’t really have my own grieving time. It wasn’t until a month later at camp—where my mom sent me to get away from it all—that I lost it...

No, it wasn’t mutual. He (Michael Jackson) was in the hospital, and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. I started asking questions, and it was always a different story. He said I was “causing trouble” and “stirring up problems.” He told me, “You’re making my heart rate go up,” and asked me to go home, and I said, “Good. I want out.” This person is one of the biggest entertainers out there. He is not stupid. He’s very charming when he wants to be, and when you go into his world you step into this whole other realm. I could tell you all about the craziness—all these things that were odd, different, evil or not cool—but it still took me two and a half years to get my head out of it.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/891807.asp?cp1=1

IMG: Lisa Marie Presley
Four lives in one: Lisa Marie Presley
‘Love Makes Me Go Haywire’
Lisa Marie Presley talks frankly about music, marriage—and suspicious minds
By Lorraine Ali
NEWSWEEK
April 7 issue — Lisa Marie Presley has been a de facto celebrity since she was born to Elvis and Priscilla 35 years ago. But the L.A.-based mom—she had a son and daughter with her first husband, musician Danny Keough—has avoided the spotlight, marriages to Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage notwithstanding.

NOW THE RELUCTANT pop heiress is set to release a debut CD of bluesy rock, “To Whom It May Concern.” The album is hard-hitting in spots, middle-of-the-road in others, but her lyrics are honest and revealing, and Presley has an appealingly deep, smoky voice. In one of her first solo interviews ever, she talked candidly about life with Michael and living in the shadow of the true king of pop—her father.

Your parents divorced when you were 4, and your father died when you were only 9.
I feel like I’ve lived four lives in one. I dealt with death early on. It wasn’t just my father, it was my grandma, my grandpa, my great-grandfather, my aunts—all in a two-year period. I didn’t have much of a runway into life. I was, like, a deep, dark kid who was always melancholy.

Regardless of what your dad meant to the world, he was still your dad.
I was so astounded by the hundreds of thousands of people who were clearly in mourning. They were having these violent reactions in front of me. Thousands of people were coming through my house to look at his body. I remember watching them all and being so confused. I couldn’t really have my own grieving time. It wasn’t until a month later at camp—where my mom sent me to get away from it all—that I lost it.

Were you there the night that your father died?
I was, but I won’t go into it. I just won’t go there.

You grew up singing at the kitchen table at Graceland. Why did you wait to make an album?
I always avoided singing in public. I just felt I would get crucified. I thought of acting—maybe playing some whacked-out psychopath to shock and scare people, but that lasted, like, two weeks. I got over that and started singing again. There are those who will say, “She’s actually got some of her own talent, or some credibility as an artist,” versus those who will say, “She’s not her father, she never will be—and who the hell does she think she is?” That’s why I named it “To Whom It May Concern.” It’s kind of a sarcastic thing.

It’s an awful lot of pressure for your first album.
It’s intimidating. I hate it. But there must be people who are interested in getting beyond the superficial tabloid bulls—t. Because of no direct communication from me, there is this funnel of b.s. that travels straight to the public. It has a life of its own. When I meet people, I know they’re trying to sift what they’ve heard. But if they listen [to my album], I hope they will hear somebody who’s being pretty damn honest and not throwing up smoke screens.

Your dad’s stardom wreaked such havoc on your family. How did your mom feel about you getting into music?
The one time we talked about it she said, “Those are some serious shoes you are going to have to fill.” I think she was afraid of what I was gonna run into, crucifixion-wise.

Lisa Marie Presley on:
• Jitters about performing live
• Why she chose to become a recording artist
• Her revealing lyrics

You’ve been in plenty of surreal situations by now, like being married to Michael Jackson. You must have known that it was going to be a circus.
I was naive on that front. I was in this constant struggle that went something like this: a man who’s with me who has nothing is gonna be stomped on and have no identity left by the time [the press] get done with him. He’ll be Mr. F—kin’ Presley. I thought, I need to be with someone bigger than I am—or at least comparable—so they don’t get trampled. Michael wanted to meet me earlier in my life, and I said, “No way.” I thought he was a freak, and I had no interest in meeting him. But when I finally did, he immediately dashed any preconceived idea I had about him. We had a perfectly normal conversation, and I completely forgot who he was within 20 minutes. I actually did fall in love with him, but I don’t know what was on his menu.

You married Michael at 26. You seemed miffed that people didn’t believe the marriage was real. Now can you understand why everyone thought it was weird?
Absolutely! But at the time I was like, “What the f—k is the problem? Why am I getting all this bad press? They think I married him because I want to be a singer or I want publicity? All I ever did prior to the marriage was stay the hell away from that!” It took me a while to realize that maybe he manipulated stories or did things for public reasons, and that I was getting dragged into it. I can see that now.

Do you think he was truly invested in the marriage? [Jackson married Presley only months after he was accused of child molestation.]
I can’t say what his intentions were with me, but I can say it was the most real thing I think he’s had. My mother was like, “Timing—hello! Wakey, wakey!” But I rebelled against my mom, of course, and tried really hard not to think like that, not to believe that.

Was it a mutual decision to break it off?
IMG: Weekend

No, it wasn’t mutual. He was in the hospital, and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. I started asking questions, and it was always a different story. He said I was “causing trouble” and “stirring up problems.” He told me, “You’re making my heart rate go up,” and asked me to go home, and I said, “Good. I want out.” This person is one of the biggest entertainers out there. He is not stupid. He’s very charming when he wants to be, and when you go into his world you step into this whole other realm. I could tell you all about the craziness—all these things that were odd, different, evil or not cool—but it still took me two and a half years to get my head out of it.

You say you were naive, but you seem tough and savvy in person.
Well, when it comes to love I’m naive. I’m a noodle. I go haywire. I’m getting better at it, though. I’m getting faster at coming to the conclusion that something’s not right.

What went wrong with you and Nicolas Cage?
With people like me and Nic, it’s difficult because there’s the camps. You’ve got 15 people around. That’s something that contributed—same with Michael. They may be claiming to love you or seemingly happy you’re together, but any minute they can throw a wrench in, they do. They’re so dependent on that person that you may be raining on their parade.

You and Nicolas were only married two months.
We dated for two years before that, but Nic and I were just two pirates, and pirates can’t marry each other. They need to marry someone in another profession—a nice little quiet mermaid. Otherwise they sink the ship. Which is what we did.

Is it difficult doing interviews after avoiding the press so long?
I’ve been so candid, I hope I don’t end up getting grossly misquoted and decide I’m not gonna talk anymore. I don’t want to be one of those people that’s willing to be cool, then gets slammed and has to have the publicist in the room yelling, “No comment!”

The city is replacing two telephone poles on my block, so, this morning, without any notice, my main video station (TV, TiVO, VHS, video editing machine) is out of commission.

Luckily, I had already captured the blogging segment from NBC Nightly News w/Tom Brokaw last night from my TiVO into my video camera, so I'm over at a friend's out on my laptop crunching away. So stuff should be going up soon :-)

Hi guys.

I found myself stopping and taking a deep breath for a minute and being thankful to be safe at home reading this stuff on a computer...Everything's still okay...

Okay. It's not okay. Obviously. This stuff is getting crazier and crazier.

But we're still gonna work hard together and beat it! We'll take our country back and make the world safe again.

I know I must sound like the ultimate optimist right now. But I feel that we have to remain positive, yet determined, in the face of these horrors.

From the "move along, there's nothing to see here" department, my last posting reminded me that a friend pointed last week that my email isn't actually located anywhere on my radar site.

Um. Sorry about that -- I've added it (lisarein@finetuning.com) to my A-Z listing.

There. Now re-read my last post and pretend that my email was actually available on my blog site when I posted it... (DOH!)

Hey guys, how's it going?

Sorry I haven't been blogging much the last few days. You probably already know that there's just a ton of stuff going on this week -- and many of you have been sending me great stories and I'll be catching up on blogging them today.

I've spent the last two days going to films here at the SXSW Film Festival and attempting to crunch the video from the SXSW Interactive conference.

I'll be here in Austin for the protest Saturday, and will, of course, be filming it.

More soon...

Having a blast here in Austin at SXSW.

I'll be uploading footage of Lawrence Lessig's talk, a blogger panel, a Creative Commons panel and more...

But first I need to link to a bunch of stuff I uploaded before I flew out Saturday of Colin Powell, the Daily Show, etc. from last week.

Back in a flash...

So I was planning on being on a plane all day today, but I decided to wait a day and rest up a bit before this week's SXSW Conference in Austin, TX.

I didn't get into the Music Showcase as I had hoped, but I'll still be there all week and I'm going to bring my guitar just in case any of you with gigs feel like letting a girl with a guitar sing a quick 3 minute song or two before your set. (Or perhaps in the middle of your party -- I only have two songs so I can't take it over -- and I need zero preparation or set-up -- just let me sit down somewhere with the guitar.)

Shoot me an email if you're interested: lisarein@finetuning.com.

Attention: Speakers and bands. I've got my camera and a relatively flexible roaming schedule. There's no reason why I couldn't roam over you're way if you'd appreciate some footage of your work. Just drop me a line.

Okay so what's in the kitty for today: Raving at the Feb 16 march, The Daily Show takes a look at the Shrub's "Faith-based Aid", Pelosi finally speaks up (a little), and Colin Powell continues to say close to nothing at all...

Plus some clips of the Senate arguing about the war and addressing the issue of the potential future (or lack thereof) of a Kurdish nation under American rule.

Lots of incredible developments over the weekend on the Peace front.

Turkey said no to 6 billion dollars and a Major U.S. Diplomat sent his resignation letter to Colin Powell.

We also found out here in California that several energy companies conspired together to fake power congestion so they could sell us power from other sources at higher prices.

Meanwhile, I've got highlights from last weekend's Spectrum Policy conference at Stanford, last week's DRM conference at UC Berkeley, more footage from the Feb 15 protest (really cool footage and MP3s of the mix from the rave that went down on the corner of Polk/Grove all afternoon).

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) - Judiciary Committee Ranking Member is on CSPAN right now talking about the Estrada nomination.

Not a whole lot has changed. Estrada won't answer any questions from the Senate Judiciary committee and they are plenty pissed about it.

I'll grab some of this and put it up.

I also have another installment of my February 16th adventure going up today.

Then I have to cool it for a day or two while I finish up my grad school application before I miss the deadline...

I'm going to need as many people as I can get to participate in an online survey about how people interact with their TiVO's.

Should you decide to participate, you'd be answering a page or two of questions online and perhaps a few follow-up questions afterwards via email.

This is for a graduate "Seminar in Media and Society" class I'm taking at San Francisco State this semester.

Please email me at "lisarein@finetuning.com" if you're interested.

(Oh yeah -- please be interested :-)

Put "Media Survey" in the subject line so I'll see your email quickly!

Thanks!

More movies a little later today -- after I catch up on about a million backlogged stories for ya'll. (The comments will be sparse, if any -- I just feel bad enough dumping all of this reading on you guys on a Friday afternoon :-)

So let's see.... What do I have in the kitty for the next few days?

How about:
-more protest stuff (of course) -- my little adventure continued...

-Dana Robinson and Matt Haughey explaining
why they're looking forward to SXSW 2003

-Cory Doctorow reading from his new novel at
Borderlands Books last weekend

And that ain't all folks!

I'm swamped today with life n' stuff but I've got a bunch more footage already captured so I can get the next round of Sunday's little adventure up later this evening.

I could really use some suggestions for software for making these video files smaller. I've been using 10 MB chunks, but am told that I should be able to get more minutes of footage for the MB sizes of the downloads that I have.

I'm already compressing them down to 10% in Premiere and I don't have the funds to blow $600 on Cleaner right now (the most obvious solution).

Anybody know of some cool open source tools for video compression on Mac OSX?

pick an email and let me know (some are easier to remember than others): lisarein@finetuning.com, lisa@creativecommons.org, lisa@xml.com, lisa@lisarein.com...

Back later today!

Wow - I put this out there at 8:44 am this morning:

(Reminds me that I'm pretty lame for not making my music files available as Oggs yet....Tsk. Tsk. Time to look for a good encoder for OSX. Any suggestions?)

And had my answer by 9:17.

Thanks Blogistan! (Thanks, David.)

I really regretted not going to last year's O'Reilly Bioinformatics Conference -- so when it became time for this year's conference, I remembered not going to make the same mistake twice.

Jim Kent (who rocked last year's OSCON will be one of the Keynote's next week.

I'll be there Tuesday-Thursday next week and video taping the keynotes and some of the speakers and press conferences.

If you're interested in learning how to use your computer programming skills to like, save the world and stuff, you might want to check it out.

Oh yeah -- these companies are hiring too. They're always hiring, and growing.

Friendly bunch too :-)

Anyway, I'll be posting some pre-conference info here after I finish my other back up of projects (like the radio show on crowd control, which I am still working on, but which turned out to be more work than I bargained for editing everything together nicely and providing good information about who's on the tape, etc.)

Things are really getting interesting now that I have my camera hooked up to the stereo (with an analog cassette player).

Fifteen years of cassette archives. Yowza.

Here's Timothy Leary leaving a message on my voicemail in August 1995 to thank me for the work I did on his graphic novel, Surfing the Conscious Nets: A Graphic Novel.

(Note: this file is an MP3 from a cassette tape I managed to record the voicemail on to in 1995 (through a crude patch into a friend's computer) -- and then back out from his computer onto a cassette tape.

And all that -- only so I could play it back into a video camera and recapture it into a computer seven years later. Funny, isn't it?

I'm making those MP3s of the KQED radio show on crowd estimation, and then I'll be linking to a ton of stuff I've been working on this last week, including an interview from MLK Day with Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (that I recorded off of my local news channel), an interview with Bill Gates Senior speaking out against abolishing our country's death tax (and catching the Shrub in another bunch of lies) on Bill Moyers' NOW show -- along with just a ton of news articles I've been collecting over the last few days.

So yeah I'm still pissed off about the Eldred decision , but the style of this weblog is really more of a technical and design issue for me to iron out over the next few days.

I'll be upset about the Eldred decision for at least the next 18 years (until things start going into the public domain again -- and that's if we're lucky and more extensions haven't been passed by Congress before then).

I've decided to upgrade a number of things about my style and templates while I'm at it.

I'll also be updating the video index over the next few days (which doesn't deserve to be linked to at this point, being so out of date.)

Sorry for the delay - but I will be putting together a single page on my peace site devoted to last Saturday's protest.

I'll also be updating my INS Detainee Protest site with updates from the last week of special registrations.

(Note: All this after I do some "real" work and pay a few bills updating things over at the XML.com Resource Guide...)

I'm also very serious about making a movie about how many people were present at last weekend's protest. I need a group of about 50 people to do it right (because there were at least that many people across Market Street at Embarcadero for 3-4 hours. I just want to show the photographic evidence, and have fifty people saying they were there and everything's on the level, etc. So we can come up with a figure that at least most reasonable people can be happy with. Email me at lisarein@finetuning.com if you're interested in participating or in filming the activity yourself when I put it together for your own website, film or tv program.

A lot going on today. I'm already overwhelmed as usual :-)

Lots of great stuff going up here today. Shrub a plenty -- with a little Ozzy Osbourne thrown in for flavor.

And of course footage from Tuesday and from later today of the
INS Detainee Protests. (Tomorrow's the big day for nationwide protests at INS Buildings across the country.)

I'll be adding a letter soon to the site so you can FAX/email/call
Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.

I've decided that if Nancy Pelosi won't listen to thousands of letters from concerned citizens all across the country over this issue, perhaps no one will.

As the leader of the Democratic Party, it seems like a great issue for Nancy to step up to the plate on.

Also I'll be launching a new category that I hope will become one of my most popular yet (giggle).

Back soon.

Did you send me email Sunday night? I probably never got it then. My email sys admin told me yesterday about a small mishap.

Note: In general, if I don't write you back within 48 hours, something's gone amiss (either with my mail or with my brain :-) -- so if it's important, I hope everyone knows to just send me another note reminding me about whatever it is...

John Perry Barlow has come up with a great idea for what to call this decade: THE Uh-Oh's.

As in: Total loss of privacy. Uh-Oh. The death of copyright. Uh-Oh. Children more powerful than their parents. Uh-Oh. Bill Gates ruling the world. Uh-Oh. Ten million Americans in prison. Uh-Oh. Black market plutonium. Uh-Oh. Absolutely everyone packing a cell phone. Uh-Oh. And constantly talking to everyone else. Uh-Oh...

I mean, I ask you, how many times in the last two years have you found yourself thrust into a ripe opportunity, whether public or personal, to say "Uh-Oh?" Or, at the very least, something that translated into "Uh-Oh?"

Like, first plane. Uh-Oh.

Second plane. Uh-Oh.

America turning into a mad, homicidal bully with 7000 nuclear weapons and a stated willingness, as well as a proven ability, to use them. Uh-Oh.

As I said back then, you get my drift. I sure as hell don't need to spell it out now. Nor need I detail, Dear Friends, all the pending Uh-Oh's visibly in the pipeline. And I refer merely to the ones we can predict without going as orthogonal as things like to get these days. Uh-Oh, indeed.

So, the next time you're looking to refer to this decade by a name, please consider my proffered suggestion. I think it's a meme that bears spreading, and not merely because I dreamed it up. We have to call them *something.* Might as well be a name that requires no adjective - as in Psychedelic Sixties or Roaring Twenties - to evoke their essential flavor.

Here is the full text of the email:

THE Uh-Oh'S

Exactly two years ago today, I peered into the thickening fog that was the decade we now uncomfortably inhabit and proposed a name for it. It didn't take. This weird period remains unnamed. So I'm going to take another run at it.

I suggest once more that we call them The Uh-Oh's.

As I wrote in the embers of the 90's:

I predict changes that will to cause so much consternation among the traditionalists and ambiguiphobes that such creatures as the Unibomber, Pat Buchanan, or the Ayatollah Khomeini may become common as laptops.

The weird will turn pro, in the words of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, and the pros will turn weird.

I could go on, and at length, but you get my drift. For these and many other reasons, I therefore propose that we call the coming decade The Uh-ohs.

As in: Total loss of privacy. Uh-Oh. The death of copyright. Uh-Oh. Children more powerful than their parents. Uh-Oh. Bill Gates ruling the world. Uh-Oh. Ten million Americans in prison. Uh-Oh. Black market plutonium. Uh-Oh. Absolutely everyone packing a cell phone. Uh-Oh. And constantly talking to everyone else. Uh-Oh.

Hey. as it turns out, I didn't *even* know from Uh-Oh back then. I was kind of like The Grateful Dead thinking it had already been a long, strange trip in 1969.

I mean, I ask you, how many times in the last two years have you found yourself thrust into a ripe opportunity, whether public or personal, to say "Uh-Oh?" Or, at the very least, something that translated into "Uh-Oh?"

Like, first plane. Uh-Oh.

Second plane. Uh-Oh.

America turning into a mad, homicidal bully with 7000 nuclear weapons and a stated willingness, as well as a proven ability, to use them. Uh-Oh.

As I said back then, you get my drift. I sure as hell don't need to spell it out now. Nor need I detail, Dear Friends, all the pending Uh-Oh's visibly in the pipeline. And I refer merely to the ones we can predict without going as orthogonal as things like to get these days. Uh-Oh, indeed.

So, the next time you're looking to refer to this decade by a name, please consider my proffered suggestion. I think it's a meme that bears spreading, and not merely because I dreamed it up. We have to call them *something.* Might as well be a name that requires no adjective - as in Psychedelic Sixties or Roaring Twenties - to evoke their essential flavor.

And they certainly do have a flavor. They are, it seems to me, one huge pop quiz from God in the matters of Love and Faith.

Whether as a species or as individuals, we are all getting our faith tested at the moment. I don't know anyone who hasn't been sorely challenged in the last two years, and I know a lot of people well enough so that when I ask them how they're doing, they actually tell me. Good relationships have exploded. Serious illness, particularly cancer, has become incredibly fashionable. Death has not been taking a holiday .And just about everybody - save for the plutocrats we allowed to steal our country - is broke.

We are also getting plenty of opportunities to assess our actual capacity to love. In this, I refer to what Gandhi was getting at when he said, "It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business. "

Both George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden have taught us a lot about that kind of love in the last two years. (I also remember that the Dalai Lama, asked who had been his greatest teachers, replied, "The Chinese, of course.) Nor do we have to turn to televised bogeymen for such teaching. Most of us have lately found excellent faculty far closer to home.

Of course, not everyone is willing to make himself available for class. The American people, taken as a group, appear to be truant. We seem unhesitating in our willingness to hate whatever villain du jour the Administration and CNN designate, whether it be Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, or the rising new star, Kim Il Jung.

Our faith seems faithless. Rather than actually trusting in the God we so loudly profess to worship, we trust military force alone to keep us safe, even if it means staging unprovoked assaults on countries that have in no way proven themselves capable of harming us, nor even expressed any interest in doing so.

Actually, I have finally figured out what's going on with a great many of us. Shocked into a kind of political catatonia by the multitudinous Uh-Oh's of the Uh-Oh's, we are pretending to be asleep. This is the only explanation I can think of for our political passivity.

If we were actually asleep, we would have been shocked into alertness by the wanton ruin of our economy in only two years, the overnight establishment of an oligarchy that makes Mexico's look enlightened, the detailed repudiation of the Constitution enacted by the USA PATRIOT Act, and the breezy willingness of our government to commit us to simultaneous wars in separate hemispheres.

If we had really been sleeping, these and many other shocks to the conscience would have us bolt upright by now. The real patriots would be well out of bed, rushing to defend America against the Junta, rather than ratifying it with their absence from the polls.

But there is an old Navajo proverb you've heard me quote before: "It's impossible to awaken someone who is pretending to be asleep." Never has that phrase seemed more bitterly and poignantly true than now. It is also impossible to teach someone who's pretending to be asleep. And, finally it is impossible to administer a pop quiz to possum players.

True as this may be of the American Collective, it doesn't seem at all true of the many of you I've encountered recently. Despite the slings and arrows you've each absorbed, despite the outrageousness of your current fortunes, despite the undeniable truth that the Uh-Oh's suck huge, I see growing in you the same groundless hope I've been attempting to nurture in myself, with spotty success, since Cynthia died years ago.

Back then I wrote that "groundless hope, like unconditional love, may be the only kind there is." I understand those words far better today than I did then. Now I can find very few rational supports for my optimism. Every curve I plot, macro or micro, plunges toward an abyss of war, pestilence, famine, and terror. But now I know in my heart what could only have moved there in times like these, that hope with a logical basis isn't hope at all. It's just planning. I've pretty much given up on planning. "Man plans, God laughs," goes the Yiddish expression, and It must be laughing a lot these days.

No, the hope I feel now, the hope I feel in many of you, is a blind and crazy hope that deserves the holy name of Faith.

There is also Love.

As I've written this little sermonette, I've been passing over Donner Summit in the Sierras with daughter Leah at the wheel. Also on board are the other two Barlowettes, Amelia and Anna, as well as a young man, Eli King, who's been a surrogate son since he was literally half his current height. We've been driving all day from Salt Lake City on our way to join up in San Francisco with our larger "family" in the String Cheese Incident for New Year's. The weather over the pass has been vile as is customary this time of year. We're all exhausted and wedged in this heavily laden little car like early astronauts.

But there is a lot of love in the manifest as well. Each of us has just endured one of the hardest years of our lives, but we have been mostly gentle with each other on this drive. We've laughed a lot, even if some of the humor was a little dark. We just found out that that the hotel reservations we thought we had in San Francisco never got made owing to a miscommunication on my part, so our immediate future is a little sketchy (though by the time I actually dispatch this, it will have sorted itself out). Love has seen us this far. Love will see us through.

May Love and Faith see you through tonight as well. And through 2003. And through the all the Uh-Oh's that sill await us.

Unconditional Hope,

Barlow

--

*************************************************************
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School

Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow

**************************************************************

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

Yes I am getting a kick out of this. Thanks for asking:
Ms. Musings

She is wary of generalizations, however, admitting that many women, such as Leslie Veen, Lisa Rein, and Lynne Kiesling, are writing about current political, legal and economic issues. Guernsey, in fact, sees her own blogging about technology as “a chance to bend sexual stereotypes.”

Wow! I got a mention in the New York Times. How totally cool.

Telling All Online: It's a Man's World (Isn't It?)
By Lisa Guernsey, for the NY Times.

But women's blogs about current events are out there too. Leslie Veen writes about politics in California, when she is not musing on baseball. Lisa Reins makes regular postings promoting online freedoms and ways to avoid war with Iraq. Lynne Kiesling writes about economics and energy deregulation. (She also links to a knitting blog.)

Ms. Sessum and Elaine Frankonis, her co-pilot at Blog Sisters, say they are already witnessing some slippage between the stereotypes as both men and women get comfortable in the new medium.

"I think that what's happening is that we're meeting in the middle," Ms. Frankonis said. "The men started by writing about technology and opinion and the women were writing personal diaries. Now the men are putting more of their hearts into their Weblogs and women are talking about the issues."

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/28/technology/circuits/28blog.html

The New York Times The New York Times Technology November 28, 2002

Telling All Online: It's a Man's World (Isn't It?)
By LISA GUERNSEY

A FEW months ago I joined legions of other online narcissists and decided to start a Weblog, one of those personal Web sites where people spout their thoughts for the world to read. Within a few days I was browsing through other Weblogs, commonly called blogs, for inspiration. And within a week, it hit me: the sites I was visiting were all run by men.
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The bloggers I knew of, to name a few, were Andrew Sullivan, a writer; Scott Rosenberg, the managing editor of Salon.com; Glenn Reynolds, the force behind Instapundit.com; and Jim Romenesko, a monitor of the media. The sites they linked to were also mostly written by men. Articles in mainstream publications, like one that ran in Newsweek last summer, dropped some of the same names, all male. Garry Trudeau even tackled blogging recently in "Doonesbury," and the blogger he created turned out to be a man.

Where were the women?

Over the last few years blogging has become an international pastime, embraced by Web aficionados around the world. Its popularity was spurred by new software that enabled anyone to build a site and post commentary without knowing a lick of Web code. It is impossible to count exactly how many blogs have sprung up (let alone how many have an audience), but Rebecca Blood, the author of "The Weblog Handbook," reports that the number has swelled from a few dozen in early 1999 to hundreds of thousands today.

The allure of blogging lies in the thrill of circumventing the establishment, of being able to publish worldwide without having to be an op-ed columnist or a famous writer. Blogs can be nurtured at all hours of the day and night - an advantage for anyone juggling work and children. Virginia Postrel, one of the few women who is commonly listed among well-known bloggers, points out that blogging is actually quite friendly to women.

"You don't have to be part of quite literally an old boys network," said Ms. Postrel, a former editor of Reason magazine (and a contributor of monthly Economic Scene columns for this newspaper's business section).

Her point made the seeming dearth of women all the more a mystery. Was there really a gender gap in Blogville? The answer, I soon learned, was complicated. And it was wrapped up in knotty issues like the power of celebrity, the male tilt of the computer industry, the grip of sexual stereotypes (women keeping diaries, men droning on about politics) and the preciousness of time - specifically, the fact that women with children and jobs have almost none to spare.

I, for one, was probably feeling the disparity with hypersensitivity. I became a mother last spring and started my blog to keep up my writing. (The fog of sleep deprivation made me crazy enough to think I would have the free time.) After spending hours dealing with technical glitches and typing with one hand while trying to soothe a colicky baby, I started to assume that women who blog, particularly mothers who blog, were a rarity.

But women are, in fact, blogging in big numbers. Mr. Rosenberg, who keeps an eye out for new bloggers and links to them from his Salon.com blog, estimates that the ratio of women to men is something like 40-60, or perhaps 50-50. Once I dug around, I found plenty of company. Blogs typically publish links, known as blogrolls, to kindred blogs. So whenever I found a woman's blog, I would find links to another handful, which led to another dozen, and so on.

There are even sites designed to showcase female bloggers, like the Blogs by Women home page and Blog Sisters, which has 100 registered female bloggers.

Why didn't I find these sites to start with? Web experts assign some blame to the mainstream media, which has focused its attention on a predominantly male group of bloggers who write about terrorism and Iraq and have come to be known as the warbloggers. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, for example, is the one of the most frequently cited warbloggers, and his blogroll is heavily weighted toward men.

Mr. Rosenberg, whose Salon.com site has become a gateway to blogging for many newcomers, keeps a list titled "Some blogs I read." All but one (Virginia Postrel's) are written by men. Many are opinion writers with journalistic backgrounds, a group that is understandably of interest to Mr. Rosenberg, given that he is a journalist himself. (Media types often write about other media types, skewing the sample.) Others are gurus of technology, like Marc Canter, the founder of the software company Macromedia, who is often called a "founding father of multimedia." Mr. Rosenberg conceded that the list needs updating, and he has linked to several new women's sites in the last month.

Ms. Postrel said that the imbalance was probably a holdover from the world of print, where men continue to dominate the opinion pages.

Continued
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The New York Times The New York Times Technology November 28, 2002

Telling All Online: It's a Man's World (Isn't It?)

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And that is where things get touchy. People who track blogs hate to make generalizations, but many acknowledged that female bloggers often have more of an inward focus, keeping personal diaries about their daily lives.

If that is the case, the Venus-Mars divide has made its way into Blogville. Women want to talk about their personal lives. Men want to talk about anything but. So far the people who have received the most publicity (often courtesy of male journalists) appear to be the latter.
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Why men are more likely than women to write about news and politics is a question that existed long before the dawn of the Web, and the answer is rolled up in cultural trends that span centuries. Men's continued dominance in the software industry, where they are apt to fiddle with a new computer art form, stacks the roster too.

But some women see the tables turning.

It was the sense of male blog domination that led to the birth of Blog Sisters, a site where female bloggers come together to support one another, talk about gender issues and spread the word about their existence.

Jeneane Sessum, who has been blogging for a year and who started a blog called Baby Blogger for her daughter, Jenna (now age 5), awoke in the middle of the night with the idea for Blog Sisters last February. "At that time, I wasn't reading as many women's blogs as I was men's and I wondered, 'Where are all the women like me?' " she said.

Julie Powell, who runs a blog called the Julie/Julia Project, had a similar question. "When I started, it did seem more like a guy thing," she said. Nevertheless, she kept writing. Her site cropped up on Salon.com's list of most-visited blogs this fall. (In it she regales readers with what she calls a "deranged assignment" to make every recipe in Julia Child's classic "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." )

Some sites where women are raising their voices do reflect traditional roles. (Blogs about knitting are popping up everywhere.)

But women's blogs about current events are out there too. Leslie Veen writes about politics in California, when she is not musing on baseball. Lisa Reins makes regular postings promoting online freedoms and ways to avoid war with Iraq. Lynne Kiesling writes about economics and energy deregulation. (She also links to a knitting blog.)

Ms. Sessum and Elaine Frankonis, her co-pilot at Blog Sisters, say they are already witnessing some slippage between the stereotypes as both men and women get comfortable in the new medium.

"I think that what's happening is that we're meeting in the middle," Ms. Frankonis said. "The men started by writing about technology and opinion and the women were writing personal diaries. Now the men are putting more of their hearts into their Weblogs and women are talking about the issues."

Ms. Sessum concurred. "Men are getting riskier too with what they are telling," she said. "There are many who dare to tell what is going on in their family and their hearts and their everyday lives."

Ms. Postrel said she had noticed some of that heart-baring too. "I'm seeing men writing about their kids," she said. "It is something that happens in blogs but does not happen very much in regular journalism."

As for me, I'm still in awe of anyone - man or woman - who has time to blog and be a parent at the same time.

I think of the hours that I have so far spent setting up my blog, learning the software, combing the Web for links, fiddling with graphics. Each minute I have been vaguely conscious of the things I should have been doing instead. I should have been reading Dr. Spock, gazing at my snoozing child, vacuuming the dog hair off the rugs, finding a child-care provider, doing research for work, paying bills, talking to my mother-in-law, writing thank-you notes, washing dishes, making dinner.

Heck, I should have been sleeping.

But the chance to bend sexual stereotypes is all too tempting. And I can't pass up what is starting to feel like a parallel form of motherhood: the experience of raising a Web site that I'll soon feel guilty about neglecting.

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Notes I forgot to upload from November 6, 2002:

I had no idea until this afternoon that an aquaintance of mine was a poll volunteer for every election. I, of course, wish that I had known that before yesterday's election, so I could have asked him about the process ahead of time. (Or, for that matter, I wished I'd have asked the volunteers at my polling precinct more questions about everything, in retrospect.)

He said that everything went pretty smoothly at his station yesterday. They didn't run out of ballots or anything like that . He did, however, "have to keep telling the other volunteers to stop sending people away."

He said that it was his understanding that, even if your name is not on the list, that they are supposed to give you a "provisional" ballot and let you vote and include an explanation of the circumstances. When the people that count the votes get the ballot, they can look you up in the database, and if they can verify that you are currently registered in the database, your vote will count.

The number one question I am asked on a regular basis from people is what to do if they move and didn't re-register at their new address. Just yesterday I told a lady in a coffee shop that I didn't know what to do in that situation and that she "might be out of luck." It seems like this is believed to be the case by most of the General Public -- although I am going to need to find out for sure.

Well my poll volunteer acquaintance (who asked that his name be witheld because he was worried about getting into trouble if he was wrong about any of this) believes that this is not the case. That you can vote with a provisional ballot and they can look you up in the database, if you were registered previously, and just changed addresses, you should still be registered.

RE: ID -- It was his understanding that they are NOT supposed to require ID for anyone whose name is on the list. ID was requested as a means of providing a current address for the people who hadn't re-registered under the new address. If the people didn't have ID, they could provide two pieces of mail to show they had received mail at the address they claimed to reside at.

Even if the person cannot provide any of these things, it was his's understanding that you have to let people vote. You can't turn anyone away.

This all just reminds me that I need to register to be a poll worker, so I can understand more about how everything works.

I sent a small donation to truthout today, and it reminded me that I hadn't donated to the EFF for a while, so I paypal'd them an equally small amount.

I know that these are tough times for everyone (me included!), but please do the same, if you can swing it.

If we all contributed just a little bit each, we could really make a huge difference!

Thanks!

I've got a ton more footage that I'm editing and compressing that I'll be uploading over the weekend.

I'll also be creating MPEG versions of the footage I've already posted...

(The Eldred stuff goes up this weekend too!)

I'm hanging out in the Student Union here at San Francisco State University before speaking to the Broadcast Electronic Communications Arts (BECA) 200 class (as I do every fall).

I've connected to a wireless network simply titled "bogus."

Free, universal access rules!

of movie editing and metadata research and ready to take a peek at what's been cooking the last two days in the outside world...

I'll finally writing up my little account of the Supremes experience and am also compressing an extremely rough cut of all of my usable video footage as we speak (as I write...as you read...whatever...right now! this instant!)

Don't worry -- we're only talking about 12 minutes or so of footage...

Drat! I didn't get much of the stuff from the Senate transcribed over the weekend due to my having to get ready to fly to Washington DC today for Wednesday's Eldred argument.

Just know that on Friday in the House and Senate in particular there was a lot of talk about accountability to the people -- about how questions about this War have not been answered to the members of the House and Senate's satisfaction and therefore not to the people's satisfaction -- and that many of the committees put together to discuss and decide on some of the most critical issues surrounding the exact details of the situation still have not yet been provided with the information promised to them by the Defense and Intelligence Agencies that were assigned to the task.

There was also a strong urgency from the Senate to at least wait until we could invade with a proper international coalition. Also we would be going against the advice of a number of our own War experts if we invade now.

Damn I wish I had time to transcribe a bit more of the tape. I'm bringing it with me, maybe there's a library or something somewhere I can use this week...

I'll fish around for links online backing this stuff up, once I'm back online this evening.

Bush is going to come on television tonight and try to scare you into believing in this War. Don't be fooled.

Still watching the House and Senate on CSPAN waiting for something to happen on any of the war/anti-war and/or internet radio bills.

Now everyone's all giddy about some Sherman Amendment. (Looks like the same ill-defined war on terror-type legislation to me...)

Well there seems to be a lot of good stories up today, so let me get back to posting them for you...

I haven't been able to post for the last day or two due to some bizarre tech problem on my server that has now been fixed (theoretically).

Thanks!

Sorry to be away fro so long...meat space took over for a while there....but I'm baaack!

Okay my "to blog" pile is taking up two tables and starting to talk shit about me behind my back...so it's time to just start throwing stuff out there...

And yes I'm still writing my OSCON 2002 weblogs! Thanks for asking!

So today I'm tranferring my email and hosting. That's why yesterday was such a quiet day. (That and finishing up a neat interview for the Creative Commons website...)

I'm back and quite enthused from last night's event.

If you've emailed me over the last few days, about anything, and I haven't emailed you back, please resend. Thanks!

I need to decide if I can get a good quality DV for around $1,500-$2,000 or if it's worth it to make the jump to a more expensive camera.

Please mail me at lisarein@finetuning.com if you have any specific advice. About digital video editing equipment software/systems too.

I'm about to re-enter video/filmmaking and I'm going to need all the help I can get catching up on the last few years of technological advances :-)

Thanks in advance!

I've decided that Richard Stallman is right about "Intellectual Property" being a poor choice of words for lumping together several very different subjects (Copyright, Patents and Trademarks).

With that in mind, I've renamed my Tales of Copyright Royalties and Copyright History categories appropriately.

I'll tell you one thing: it sure takes more effort to describe them correctly. I had to do a lot of reading and thinking and stuff when I used to just be able to say "IP".

So I'm still sorting out the new blog, but it looks like I'll be doing that for a while still.

Packing up tonight and heading down to San Diego for OSCON.

Rael has put together a Blogger Gathering for Thursday night at 7pm. See you there.

Bear with me this weekend as I get everything up and running smoothly in between postings.

I've decided to make my Blog the central location for that which is me, rather than just another one of several off shoots that never seem to connect in the middle: http://www.finetuning.com, http://www.lisarein.com, etc.

Talk soon!

I spent the weekend in Tuscon, Arizona -- my first time to the anywhere in the "Southwest." (Not counting Las Vegas -- although one thing that both cities have in common is that I'd last about 10 minutes in the outside heat in July :-)

Anyway, my friend put the car top down on the way back to the airport this morning (4:30 am) -- and I had a chance to see what a totally beautiful place it can be at night! It's pretty in the daytime too, but you can't tell, really, because you're either inside breathing cool air or outside trying to make it to your car, or to a pool or lake or some other kind of water source -- which makes everything OK again untill you get out of the water.

What if you don't have air conditioning or a water source? Wow. I'm pretty sure I'd be dead before long.

I hear you can go outside in the Winter, though.

(Later that morning...)

Of Interest: the Tuscon and LAX airports still don't have wireless networks. Bummer. Get with the program guys.

Jim Griffin, his royal phoness, has assured me that email subscribers are not required to subscribe to the new Pho features to continue receiving the list.

Email from Jim:

Dear Lisa and others:

I did not write the paragraph in question, but I can tell you that the pholist website is an additional offering, not mandatory for phosters.

There will continue to be a pho list, just as there is now, and if you do nothing you will continue to be subscribed to it. I highly recommend the pholist web site -- JP's building it to supplement and enrich the Pho experience, and like any summer shakedown cruise it's likely to have its moments, like these, but stick with it and give it a chance.

The pho list will continue as is and there is no requirement with which I am familiar that requires any current pho list participant to register with the web site. Over time it may well prove a good interface to which we can migrate, but I can't imagine ridding the list of people who choose otherwise. My servers at onehouse.com will continue to operate this list as always, and John's web site as I understand it seeks to offer a more enriching community experience, which I support wholeheartedly.

Jim

I'm totally bummed. My favorite mailing list now has a terms of agreement and wants me to login and accept a bunch of cookies just to continue participating on the email list. Why does everything simple and useful have to get complicated and intrusive once it gets popular. It just doesn't seem fair. (John Parres, pho list admin, clarified a few points later: "Some of you are going to have fun with the legal page. I bet I can predict who you will be. Nothing is set in stone. The language has yet to be 'pholosophised.' I am not a lawyer. If some of the eagles want to help tighten/clarify things I will be most appreciative for the assistance. Please know that Jim and I have the utmost respect for your privacy and are making best efforts to ensure that this always remains true.")

To learn more about the new Pholist features, check out a text file of E-mail sent out to phosters this morning.

Excerpt from above email that started all of this (that Griffin refers to above.):

No one is required to list any information on the site, however, everyone is required to activate their account as a condition of remaining on the Pho list. Yes, the site utilizes cookies so this function must be enabled in your browser for the site to work for you. Please don't complain, that's just the way it is.

Happy Birthday to the Radar!

(You may now go back to your normally scheduled activities.)

During our celebratory Creative Commons dinner a few weeks back, Cory and Aaron were arguing about the randomness of numbers that come after the first billion numbers after the decimal in pi (3.14nextbillionnumbershere...then what dammit?) (Specifically, they were arguing about whether the distribution of digits in a non-repeating number is also Gaussian -- the answer is no, because of distributions such as 1001110011001010 -- Aaron won :-)

At one point, Matthew Haughey commented: "Oh my god, they're arguing over pi over dessert."

I'm in Cambridge, MA for a Creative Commons meeting. What a cool little town.

Unfortunately, I'm not having the same kind of luck that both Cory Doctorow and Aaron Swartz were able to have with finding wireless networks while putzing around in Harvard Square.

A few months ago, Cory was able to reach three different wireless networks from his hotel window. Just last Thursday night, Aaron (who was also in town for our meeting) went war walking and was able to quickly locate a network.

I spent a good half hour searching around Harvard Square for a network, to no avail.

It was still fun walking around Harvard Square and the Harvard Campus. There are a ton of musicians and lots of smiling people. It made me wish I had brought my guitar.

Blogger Pro has finally implemented its RSS service!

My RSS feed can now be located at:
http://lisarein.blogspot.com/rss/lisarein.xml.

My mail has been out of commission for going on two days now. It's been intermittent, so I haven't been able to determine for sure that this was happening until today.

Email me at lisarein@fastmail.fm until further notice.

Please resend! I think I might have lost the last few days worth of mail...

Joey De Villa loans me his hat long enough to take a picture.

People keep asking me who "Lulu Press" is, since they are throwing our Creative Commons a little announcement afterparty this Thursday at ETech 2002.

Turns out that LuLu Press is owned by Bob Young (of RedHat Fame) -- here's an article that explains more.

Several unedited ponderings that were supposed to be "posted" and not "published" today were indeed published prematurely. I grumpily add this incident to the list of reasons that I'll be switching to Moveable Type soon....

Okay. I'm back for real this time.

Wowza. What a week!

I've been knocked out with the flu all week. But I'm starting to feel better and have a lot of little goodies I've been collecting all week.

Thanks for checking back! There seem to be a lot more of you on a regular basis.