Bob Morris @ Oct 27th 2005 20:49 - Category: Unfiled ;
Twas the night before Fitzmas, and in the White House
Every one was scared shitless, and Bush was quite soused.
The indictments were hanging like Damocles’ sword
As verminous oxen prepared to be gored.
The perps were all sleepless, curled fetal in bed,
While visions of prison cells loomed in each head.
And Dick in his jammies and George in his lap
Were sweating and swearing and looking like crap.
Bob Morris @ Oct 27th 2005 17:11 - Category: Unfiled ;
An Arab News editorial: Contrived Fury
It was certainly undiplomatic of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to call for Israel to be "wiped off the map" at a conference on Zionism in Tehran. But the wave of Western fury, with countries such as Canada, France, the UK and Spain hauling in the Iranian ambassador and protesting, looks contrived.
Is this the same France that four years ago ignored the comments of its then ambassador in London, Daniel Bernard, who called Israel “that shitty little country”? Is this the same UK that likewise turned a deaf ear? Nor is it the first time an Iranian leader has used such language. Four years ago, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, regarded by the West as a moderate, called for the nuclear annihilation of Israel. The West did not blink an eye. Ever since the 1979 revolution, Iran has been consistently and vehemently anti-Israel. The rest of the world has known it and lived with it. It lived with the knowledge because it also knew that Iran was not in a position to wipe Israel off the map.
So why the apparent anger at something known? And why is it that only the West is making a fuss?
This response has far more to do with Western fears about Iran’s nuclear intentions than with its views about Israel. Washington, which does not have diplomatic relations with Tehran and so could not haul in the ambassador to protest, let the cat out of the bag when it said that the comment showed it was right to be concerned about Iran’s nuclear program.
…This, of course, is Ahmadinejad the radical speaking, Ahmadinejad the politician who perhaps wants to divert attention from his government’s failure so far to deliver on his promises to Iran’s poor. That is where he needs to concentrate his energies and his passion. The danger is that with such rhetoric he gives his nation’s enemies the chance to act.
Bob Morris @ Oct 27th 2005 09:24 - Category: Unfiled ;
Mr Ahmadinejad told some 3,000 students in Tehran that Israel’s establishment had been a move by the West against the Islamic world.
True enough. (Update: This is true in the sense that Western powers want dominance over the Middle East and have never been friendly to Muslim/Arab countries in the first place.)
He was addressing a conference entitled The World without Zionism and his comments were reported by the Iranian state news agency Irna.
"As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map," he said, referring to Iran’s late revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
No. Never. Saying Jews should be killed because one opposes the Zionist policies of Israel is like saying Christians should be killed because one opposes the policies of George Bush. It’s insane, bigoted, vicious, and beyond counter-productive. One can oppose Zionism and not be anti-Semitic, and proof of that is the thriving peace movement in Israel headed by Jews. Anti-Semitism is grotesque and must be opposed, as should any form of racism.
In a seriously Orwellian moment, as Israel continues to decimate the Palestinian population, Ariel Sharon responded,
"A country calling for the destruction of another people cannot be a member of the UN," Mr Sharon said.
Does that mean Israel will withdraw from the UN? What a monumental hypocrite.
Bob Morris @ Oct 27th 2005 08:55 - Category: Climate change ;
With heavy weather upon us and even boring, established news conduits like CNN talking apocalypse, we consulted the Viridian Pope-Emperor, WorldChanging ally #1 Bruce Sterling, to get his take as he was leaving for Europe and Art Futura.
With Arctic ice melting and the worst hurricane season in recorded history, are we past the point where mitigation of global climate change is going to have much of an effect?
The climate crimes we’ve already committed aren’t much compared to what’s coming down the pipe. It’s pretty cynical to write off mitigation when we haven’t as yet even tried it. It may well be that the roof is on fire, but that doesn’t make it good policy to chop up the walls and floors and add them to the blaze.
Should we be building an ark or two?
The planet IS an ark.
Where do you propose to hide or construct such a thing? There’s no place to hide from the sky.
Bruce Sterling is the Pope-Emperor of Viridian Design a design movement about global warming. I’ve been a member since Day One.
Bob Morris @ Oct 27th 2005 08:48 - Category: Unfiled ;
No official news until Friday, however major media is all but saying Rove and Libby will be indicted. Manwhile, Harriet Miers has withdrawn her nomination, an obvious sign of a collapsing administration. Ordinarily this would be huge news, but Indictment Watch is the bigger story.
And nothing of substance will be accomplished in DC once the firestorm of indictments hit.
Bush is, of course, trying to deflect attention from the coming indictments.
The prosecutor hasn’t announced any indictments, but President Bush’s aides and their allies in Congress are working on strategies to counter the blow if White House officials are accused of crimes.
The basic plan is familiar to anyone who has watched earlier presidents contend with scandal: Keep the problem at arm’s length, let allies outside the White House do the talking, and try to change the subject to something — anything — else.
This strategy didn’t work for Nixon and it won’t work for Bush.
Bob Morris @ Oct 27th 2005 08:39 - Category: Unfiled ;
From Dave Winer, formerly of Radio Userland, on Typepad having serious performance problems of late.
Science, art, voodoo and luck.
Ben and Mena Trott explain why they’re having performance trouble on their Typepad service. Maybe our theory about putting the content management on the workstation wasn’t so bad after all. That’s the approach Radio took in 2002. After a while it became clear people preferred to have someone else manage the content management for them.
I’m sure SixApart will get the problems sorted out, but no one should underestimate how hard it is to keep a service like TypePad running as it’s growing. I sure don’t, having lived with EditThisPage.com and Weblogs.com. Scaling is a science, an art, voodoo, and more than a little luck, as Ben’s story reveals.
As detailed in the following post, the drawback with having the content on the workstation is that you are then tied to blogging from a particular PC rather than from any PC with net access.
Bob Morris @ Oct 27th 2005 08:01 - Category: Unfiled ;
Well, Polizeros is up and running well on the new Wordpress platform. Wahoo! Wordpress is open source, has dozens of plug-ins, an intuitive interface, and a growing user base. Plus, it has built-in support for podcasting. The more I use it, the more I like it.
Our previous platform, Radio Userland, is getting creaky. They only have one employee (plus several who help when they can) and while Radio, through Dave Winer, invented blogging and RSS, they’ve not been able to keep up with new developments. Not because they don’t want to, not because they don’t have the expertise, but I think because of a lack of resources.
However, the primary reason I left Radio was because it, unlike other blog platforms, lives on a PC and publishes to the website. Thus you always need access to that specific computer to be able to blog. However, Wordpress (and Movable Type, and Blogger) are server-based, you can access them from any computer with net access, a huge difference indeed.
The entire Radio Userland blog of Polizeros, from Aug 2005 - Oct 23, 2005, now exists here exactly as it was as an archive. Getting it here was, um, complicated. Because I published it from my laptop to here into a different folder from where it existed on the old site, lot of links got broken. This is because Radio doesn’t use relative paths, and meant, among other things, that I had to go through all six thousand posts looking for ones that displayed images I’d uploaded, then manually edit the path to the image so it would display correctly and not show the broken image symbol. This was not my idea of fun.
The most complicated part of any blog is tweaking the look and feel, AKA the template or theme. Wordpress and Movable Type use PHP and CSS. Radio uses a homegrown system with CSS. All take serious geek skills to change. And, don’t forget, always backup up the files before trying something new else you might end up with a mangled looking blog.
PS I will continue to use the RSS reader in Radio, as it is, hands down, the best news aggregator out there. I track 88 news feeds in it, and this is how I read most of my news. If you’re not familiar with news aggregators, they allow you to subscribe to rss feeds. Thus, I can read news from 88 sources in one place, with new news flowing in all the time. This includes major media like BBC and NYTimes as well as blogs.
So, Radio served me well for over three years,and I have no real complaints about it. However, it was time to move on.
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