Sunday, October 10, 2004

The thing that scares me about the adminstration's policies and Condoleeza Rice's statements on Iraq is the similarity they bear to Ashcroft's approach to crime - that we need to pre-empt any crime by arresting or eliminating anyone who has the potential to commit a crime, or intent alone. Holy moley. 11:09:04 PM

A really interesting piece of social software would be on online Etch a Sketch, were the drawing result would be determined by consensus. You could even set up private rooms for collaborative exercises. 10:36:04 PM

I guess the one thing about the Farmer ad that may be smart is that it's so corny that it may actually generate some free press. And hence get the message out and repeated without having to buy the air time. But still... Still boggles my mind that they so missed the boat, so completely and utterly missed the boat on her potential use of the web. I wish I hadn't worried as much about which of Farmer and Russ could most benefit from the web, and focused on both of them, or some of my more direct connections with Russ to do his web work more effectively. Potentially would have been a more likely hire, and maybe helped us get creds to help another Farmer in some other state the next election cycle. Oy vey. 2:59:35 AM

I wonder if the Farmer campaign accidentally hired The Daily Show to write and produce her first campaign commercial. Oh my. 2:44:30 AM

My first reaction to this was that I was surprised it hadn't happened before. My second was how grisly and sad, the whole sordid story - that people are dead because they wanted to go someplace else to gamble money, as if that is a different experience elsewhere, qualitatively - you may be able to win more or have better odds, but qualitatively, the experience varies little, like the varying terrain one might experience hiking various places within a twenty mile radius, but not mountains or oceans, literally, of difference. My third - what are the odds? Literally. Are people driving to gambling locations more or less likely to be fataly injured? Maybe if the statitistics for people who travel to gamble, accidents per passenger mile, or by some other measure, especially if it's the one that favors gambling least - like number of departures, not even looking at passenger miles, is drastically better than it is for the rest of the population, maybe then they're on to something. 2:36:55 AM

I lost my precious tonight - the very, very last of my stainless steel crumbers, that 59 cent Excalibur. Money is just one measure of scarcity, but not complete. It was cheap, quantities are high, utility is low, but while I wouldn't pay much more than 59 cents for one - I won't create a black market for the item here, or create a crumber crisis ala the Dutch bulb phenomenon, but the fact that I know of no place to reliably replace the sturdy stainless steel ones, cheaper than the anondized aluminum ones, made the clink on the ground in the dark corner of the market attach itself to my gut, sinking to the ground with it. 2:28:53 AM

Another thing just dawned on me regarding the fear driven, the limbic brain reaction of people to this potential stage in human development., when I was trying to ponder the immediate significance of the stupidity factor at work in people not getting how idiotic their president is compared to Bush. That when Kerry makes Bush look stupid, he makes THEM look stupid too, or feel stupid, so they react to Kerry with hostility, the way a grade school class who has long looked up to their golden boy student might completely disregard the obvious superiority of a new kid in school, opting instead to denigrate him or her. That person may never actually be fully engaged in the community's social fabric, although the hostility will diminish over time. But even seeing some of the subtle differences in outlook between Kerry and Bush, since Kerry isn't representative of an out their enlightenment, just that, hey, war might be bad and the world has changed way too much for unilateralism to ever be effective, even with military and nuclear might (how scary is that to wake up to one morning), is scary. It represents accepting subtlety, vulnerability, moving beyond our primitive state towards something better, that light that has inched us along so far, to the point where a backward step towards bellicosity could actually, unlike spears or tanks or atomic bombs, pretty quickly reduce our species to nothingness. And what organism survives and benefits as a result? The meme of hatred and fear and destruction that will keep this universe from potentially having its poets for billions of years if ever. I think that's one thing we need to keep in mind is that maybe we are the only species sentient in the way we are, and if that's the case, wouldn't it be a royal f-up if we ended up wiping ourselves out? What a tragic irony. And so sad that no one else will be around to write up the play. 2:10:46 AM