Saturday, September 20, 2003

Election 2004: Founding the Sufficiency Party Do you think the good folks in New Hampshire and Iowa so smart that you're willing to let them filter the field for worthy President candidates? I think no. Screw the primary elections. I'm starting a new party right now. It's called the Sufficiency Party and we're using Instant Runoff Voting to determine our Presidential candidate for 2004. Our online convention - The Crucible - will be held in June 2004. As the founding member of the Sufficiency Party, I submit the following people for your consideration: Dennis Kucinich Hillary Clinton Howard Dean Philip Greenspun Wesley Clark Anyone can submit a request for consideration. However, as founder and chairman of the Sufficiency Party, I may require details before I put you in The Crucible. Send your requests to candidates@crittjarvis.us. Just trying to diminish the role of Kingmakers, you know? 9:32:56 PM by Critt Jarvis | permalink  |  |

Watching the tide roll in... weblogs are about flow, weblogs are about flow, weblogs are about flow... Unsolicited advice: weblogs are about flow. I've noticed this thought trend among technologists to want to contain, control and constrain the weblog information space. Some want the content to have more structure so that it can be searched using advanced methods. Some think about establishing uniform style rules so that every piece by every author looks and feels the same. Some exert special effort to craft each post into a work of genius. Some want to track each news message that they read, "keeping" some, marking others as read, deleting others. The way I see it, these folks are thinking about weblogs in a static way, like a mid-90s era homepage or a Government database that gets distributed on CD ROM. But weblogs are about flow. They are closer to jazz improvisation than Beethoven's fifth. To really get into weblogs as a writer, try to keep moving to stay with the flow. The old advice to a budding jazz musicians applies: "If you make a mistake and hit a bad note, don't stop! Hit it again and keep going". Too much worrying will make a burden of posting, making work of what should be fun. To really get into weblogs as a reader, try to avoid micromanaging each weblog post. Holding your posts too closely will often lead to one of two outcomes: a) you'll have a narrow subscriptions list, maybe 4 or 5 sites, because you can't possibly follow more (experienced readers can follow dozens); b) you'll wind up with thousands of unread posts in your aggregator (the horrors of email all over again). I've written about this elsewhere. In short, free your mind, and your weblog will follow. [Andrew Grumet's Weblog] 1:50:28 PM by Critt Jarvis | permalink  |  |

Cool stuff: Boston Localfeeds Gone GEO... 1:05:06 PM by Critt Jarvis | permalink  |  |

Transforming the Pentagon Vision of the Global Security Environment That ole Tom Barnett. He just keeps getting better and better. Force Transformation? What are your thoughts? CAPT Coderre: What direction do you think we need to take now in post-war Iraq? Dr. Barnett: We can't mandate types of government and how much they open that government onto the outside world in terms of accepting different leadership ideas or how they conduct their activities. The minimal thing we need to shoot for though is connectivity on an individual basis.        People argue that the Truman and Reagan administrations were the key in defeating communism. If you really look back at the Soviets, what defeated them was the onset of connectivity. The administration most responsible for that was the Nixon administration with détente. What it did was settle the question of "we're not going to get you; you're not going to get us." That let a certain amount of connectivity ensue.        This corrected the Soviet system by letting money, that had real value, and ideas, and all sorts of other things flow onto the system. And once people got enough connectivity with the outside world, they became unmanageable in an authoritarian sort of sense. The only way you can really have a true authoritarian government is to maintain very strict control over your public's access to outside information and their ability to travel abroad. This is the big stick used on them.        So, again, as a bare minimum, I think what we want to get in an Iraq, what we want to encourage elsewhere is freedom - of connection, of travel, of information flow. We may very well end up with a one party state in Iraq and there is nothing wrong with that. Japan had a one party state for a long time … so did South Korea, so did Mexico until recently. You can develop in this manner as long as the leadership is rotated.        As long as we promote connectivity and the feeling of rotation of leadership on a regular basis, then I think we've put into play the minimal "rule sets" needed for good things to happen. This is going to entail us getting involved in a way that would seem quite dramatic compared to past efforts that have been pretty much sitting off the shore, coming in when need be, slapping down bad actors on occasion but never really showing staying power. Read the whole thing... 8:03:38 AM by Critt Jarvis | permalink  |  |

Playing with the template in Radio Working on the template again... not sure where this is going yet. Posted to Home page and Test. 6:47:43 AM by Critt Jarvis | permalink  |  |

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