Nader in Omaha

Tuesday afternoon, I was privileged to be able to attend a speech by Ralph Nader, followed by a question-and-answer session and a book-signing. He was promoting his new book, Only the Super-rich can save us! If you weren't aware that he has a new book out, you aren't alone. In fact, his presence in Omaha wasn't well-publicized. I managed to see this article in the local paper which alerted me to both the fact that he had a new book out, and that he was in Omaha. I was fortunate enough to be able to arrange for some time off work, and went to the 3:00 session at McFoster's Natural-Kind Cafe. Unfortunately, I completely forgot my role as a blogger and so I was woefully unprepared to take notes or photos. So rather than direct quotes, I'll discuss some of the main themes of his speech, as well as the question-and-answer session. Nader was scheduled to speak at 3:00 p.m., but didn't actually take the podium until about 3:15, largely due to the enthusiastic crowd gathered around him peppering him with questions and having their books signed. He spoke for about a half-hour, then took questions for roughly another hour. I estimated the crowd to number about 80, and it was standing-room only in the small upstairs room at McFoster's. His speech stuck pretty closely to the themes of the book, which asks us to re-imagine the last several years. The book begins with the disastrous fumbling of Hurricane Katrina, and a fictionalized Warren Buffet aghast at the apparent inability of a former first-world country to provide relief to its own citizens. Using his vast economic resources, he marshals the needed supplies and delivers them to a devastated New Orleans. The experience haunts him though, and he decides to convene a group of billionaires to solve some of the most pressing crises confronting American democracy. Using untold billions of their own, they are able to finally provide an effective foil against the big-money interests that would continue using the system to unjustly enrich themselves.

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New Direction in the World Wide Web

The U.S. Government is considering loosening the hold on the group created by the U.S. Government to oversee internet naming for the world. This recent PC Magazine article describes how ICANN Begins Moving Away from U.S. Control. One big milestone will be to allow alphabets other than Latinate (English) in website names. This is a big change; going from one-byte letters to unicode two byte letters to accommodate the thousands-of-letter alphabets of pictographic languages. You browser already can handle this. And the next billion new internet users won't need to first become fluent in the Roman Alphabet. But the change that has the business community abuzz is that they are opening up the Top Level Domains. You know, .com, .org, .us, etc. Back when they added .com and .org there was some sputtering about the lack of need. After all, we had .gov, .org, .edu, and all the country domains. Why have specific virtual realms for-profit and non-profit suffixes? Then the web took off, and "everyone" soon associated the commercial superdomain (.com) with "the web". Eventually, even government entities gave up on .gov, and made .com their native home, like usps.com. Now, businesses are worried that opening up these suffixes completely will get expensive. One likely suggestion being debated is ".food". Will McDonalds have to pony up to buy its suite of names in .food as well as in .com? What if someone opens up .burger? Want dot fries with that? It could get expensive and confusing to have dozens or hundreds of names for any given website. Will this become a new boom time for cyber-squatters, those who buy up names and hold them for ransom? And what about "www"? 15 years ago, there still was a subtle distinction between hyper-text transfer protocol (http://) and the Web (www). The former originally applied to text-only Bulletin Boards. But this has long evaporated, and www has become an artifact that remains mainly because it is easier to type than "http://" as an indicator to a browser of what you mean by a URL.

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Jon Stewart remains my hero –

As I have not been around DI of late, I thought I'd pop in just momentarily to reiterate my adoration (no, that's not too strong a word) of Jon Stewart. His show recently won an Emmy and in a poll conducted by Time Magazine over the summer, he was once again named the most trusted journalist in America. Some find that appalling, that a comedian doing "fake news" would be trusted - but not only do I not find it a surprise, I find it emblematic of what is great about our country. Yep, strangely enough, I believe that beyond all of the nonsense foisted upon us by the fear-mongers and the naysayers and the hand-wringers, above the greed and corruption, the re-emergence of public racism and class-ism that has knocked the very wind out of us over this last year - we, as a culture, have maintained one vital component of our identity as a nation.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
America: Target America
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview
We still have a senses of humor. Most importantly, we can still poke fun at ourselves. Stewart takes on the rightwing nutjobs with LMAO-level attacks, but he just as willingly puts Obama and the Democratic congressfolk smack in their liberal places. He brilliantly points out the hypocrisy by putting videos back-to-back in which politicians completely contradict themselves. He forces us to see the political blustering for what it is, and gives voice to sanity in the midst of complete crazy. He makes sure we never forget our humanity. Last week, he took on the absurdly ridiculous overreaction to the elementary school in New Jersey in which children sang a song about the new President during Black History Month. As he points out, no one complained about it at the time. And Stewart's lampooning of the way the rightwing media turned this non-story into something murky and evil became especially potent when he pulled out video of school children in New Orleans singing a song in which they THANK THE LORD for Bush and FEMA!!! Good grief. The twinkle in Stewart's eyes as he reads the lyrics that group of kids sang is priceless. Carry on -

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Too Many Rooms, Too Few Doors

That poor guy who got tied to a tree in Kentucky was on my mind last week. Census takers have, in certain parts of the country, been lumped in with so-called "revenooers" (to use Snuffy Smith jargon) and generally threatened, shot at, occasionally killed by folks exercising their right to be separate. So they assume. Appalachia, the Ozarks, parts of Tennessee and Kentucky, Texas...a lot of pockets, populated by people who have, for many reasons, acquired a sense of identity apart from the mainstream, and who feel imposed upon if the gov'ment so much as notices their existence. They'd have a point if they truly did maintain a separate existence, but they don't, and hypocrisy is the least amendable vice to reason. At one time it was bootlegging, today it's drugs, either marijuana or meth. They don't seem to get it that if they contribute to the erosion of the public weal then they forfeit the "right" to be left alone. I really believe they don't understand this simple equation. Nor, in fact, do they care. But do I believe that poor man was killed over some disagreement over political hegemony? No. He knocked on the wrong door at the wrong time and asked the wrong question and some good ol' boys killed him. Scrawling "Fed" on his chest was probably an afterthought, and means about as much as had they written "Cop" or "Fag" or "Stranger." Whoever did it probably thought he was being cute. [more . . .]

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