Iraq is gonna be procesed by our culture very differently than any previous wars. Exhibit A -- The War Tapes:

You can get a sense of the whole project a little better from the trailer. This will be worth checking out I think.

USA Today of all places has broken the news that the NSA has a massive database of domestic US phone calls. The legal authorization? None. As Glenn Greenwald put it:

We now learn that when Americans call their Aunt Millie, or their girlfriend, or their psychiatrist, or their drug counselor, or their priest or rabbi, or their lawyer, or anyone and everyone else, the Government is very interested. In fact, they are so interested that they make note of it and keep it forever, so that at any time, anyone in the Government can look at a record of every single person whom every single American ever called or from whom they received a call. It doesn't take a professional privacy advocate to find that creepy, invasive, dangerous and un-American.

I also find it worth noting how the government got this information: they asked for it, and every big telco (with the exception of Qwest) just turned over the records.

We are living in a society where the power of the State is increasingly being concentrated into a single entity (the Decider in Chief). At the same time, enormous undemocratic organizations called "Corporations" administer most of the ins and outs of our daily life, and function as both a perverse/corrupting influence and aider and abetter of wrongful State action.

It's like the worst of both worlds! This is what happens when you concentrate wealth and power, and remove checks, balances and real competition: mega-suckage. Big government and Big Business are in bed alright, tag-teaming the little guy.

UPDATE: In another perverse twise, the NSA effectively stomped out a Department of Justice investigation into their wiretapping programs by denying their lawyers security clearance. You can't make shit like this up.

I have to learn to pay my webhosting bills on time it seems.

Yesterday's birthday dinner was fab. Julia made some amazing chicken and greens and carrots and slaw and macaroni. And there was grazy, praise be.

I haven't seen the new Lost yet, but it's in the torrentfeed.

The ratio of seeders is real good (maybe 15k seeds for 35k downloaders), and I got the whole thing downloaded in under an hour. For anyone who's wondering whether widespread use of bittorrent will work for releasing video content: the proof is in the pudding.

Warner Bros is doing a half-bright partnership here, and it blows my mind that people continue to miss the boat. Here's the deal, fuckers: you can eat Netflix's lunch and be poised to score big on the next generation of content that's going to suck the life out of cable networks, all without impacting your existing bottom-line. Get it? Good. Now keep it.

UPDATE: Hollywood may be in for an indie-shellacking soon: participatory culture style.

On this day 27 years ago I was born. Huzzah for life.

It's a new era. I no longer reflexively think of myself as 24, but I don't yet have a new age-identity to roll with. I'm in a middle ground between the Eriksonian crises of Intimacy vs. Isolation and Generativity vs. Self-Absorbtion. I think I'm doing well on both counts -- a bit snobby on the Intimacy tip and only truly Generative in fits and starts -- but I'm very much starting to feel the lack of a well-defined career path. Where, exactly, am I going with all this?

For the past half-year, I've been working, living, and loving pretty steadily: Trellon, Park Slope, the Belle du Mois. These things have been good, but I'm about to let them go. In three weeks or so, I'll get on an airplane and fly West, there to live for the summer with my friend Mark -- and compadres Kelly, Zya, and associated nerdowells -- at the Country Soul Carnival in Westhaven, California, State of Jefferson. I'm stepping down as Lead Developer to focus on creative works and speculative projects, freeing up my schedule and scrambling a life that's been comfortable, but also somewhat confining. I'm trying for another run at the unknown and impossible.

I sense a fork in the road. Do I buckle down and try to become a "sucessful professional" in some sense or another? I could, you know. I have a lucrative trade, a pretty keen analytical mind, and I can talk with the best of them. I'm teaching a workshop this weekend and speaking at a conference on Monday. I got skills, yo. Play the game. Play to win.

Or do I want to follow the other fork, the one marked "get a life, not a job?" The hard truth is that I don't have much of a stomach for ladder-climbing. I'm not excited by money. I long for a community-oriented lifestyle, rich in human connections and creativity and the like. I also crave adventure, the buzz of new things and new people and challenges.

Bob Frost is right that the road less traveled is the one worth taking, but I wonder whether I'm not falling into another well-worn rut by setting up this kind of dichotomy in the first place? Isn't it a cliche either way? The one-time artist who packs away his bohemian leanings to join the workaday world is just as much a architype as the dropout hippy who skates by on talent and luck in his own Pirate Utopia.

It seems to me that the real road less traveled is the fusion route, the uncompromising stand. That kind of scares me, which my internal Allen Ginsuburg quote-machine reminds me is how you know when you're getting into something good.

Fascinating.

50% of surveys Americans say the Democratic party "comes closer to sharing their moral values," compared to 37% of Republicans.

That's a bit of a monkey-wrench in the tired conventional wisdom of "values voters," but it shows that people may be waking up to the fact that health care, wages, and well-funded education have more to do with the well-being of families than whether or not Steve and Jerry down the block have legal recognition of their lifelong live-in love.

Digby Sez:

Baby boomer elites are now that creepy old guy muttering at the kids to stop walking on his lawn or he'll call the cops.

Hey, I've been saying it for a while. We Millenials were the only age group to break solidly against Bush in 2004. Frankly, the "adults" in this country have been part of the problem all along.

To put it another way: Give me the keys, dad. You're drunk.

Is it just me, or does anyone else want to read for themselves this 18-page letter that Mahmoud "The Passionate Persian" Ahmadinejad sent Mr. Bush?

I find it somewhat unlikely that someone who was in fact elected president would declare that "democracy has failed worldwide," as the AP led with. There's a quote a bit later on that says "Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the Liberal democratic systems," but it's quite unclear whether the subject is "democracy worldwide" or specifically our style of democracy in Iraq.

It seems to me that the press is playing along with the administration here, giving them cover for not engaging Iran in bilateral talks and, let us not forget, throwing former president Mohammad Khatami (who was a real reformer) under the bus with all that "Axis of Evil" crap, a huge softball for hardliners and clerics. One thing to remember as the war-talk with Iran ratchets up is that as an institution the media probably wants war. It makes for great television and helps them feel very important.

http://www.myspace.com/thepartyingpersian

Ha!

Took a yuppie (pink dress shirt) SUV door this evening on my way to my man Kevin's birthday dinner in the West Village. I almost dodged it, but there wasn't a lot of room to maneuver, traffic pretty tight for a sunday evening. I tried to break and cut around when I saw the door starting to open, but the edge clipped my front wheel, which stopped the bike, spilling me sideways and over the bars.

I came through without much damage. No fancy photos to show like before. Just a little bruise and scrape on my arm.

These things happen. It's part of the deal of riding in the city -- which I still think is safe. People are going to open their doors into traffic without thinking. We can't let that scare us off.

This guy who hit me was in the wrong. People are not supposed to open up their car doors into traffic. Since I was pretty sure when I got up that I didn't have any real physical damage, I just let it go, but I could have waited for the police and used my TransAlt spoke card (which has the specific laws you need to reference) to get him to write up an incident report. The pink-shirted yuppie guy would probably get a ticket and I would have a chance to collect something through his insurance agency should I have medical bills or need to replace part of my bicycle.

Still, I'm not gonna call the law on this guy. Maybe if he'd been a horrendus asshole I would have, but he was spooked and apologetic. I didn't want to be a dick about it, so I didn't try to guilt trip him into money for my wheel or anything either. Just walked it off and went to dinner. Selah.

So I'm fine, but the bike is going to have issues. The front wheel is a total loss, and there may now be enough damage overall to render it kaput. It's been through three real falls, a lot of rough riding and years of being locked up on the street, and that's just since I got my hands on it. The frame dates from the late 80's/early 90's, and it was originally owned in Hawaii, which I know because it still has the Honalulu bike registration sticker. I bought it from Pedal Revolutions, a used bike barn in the Mission, so it may have had other owners in California as well. Then I brought it to New York City, and now this.

Lately, it's been really pulling to the left and I've realized that the core triangle of the frame is out of whack. The headset is also coming loose, requiring daily hand-tightening. Now I think it might not be worth sinking any more money into. It's been my plan to give it to Frank to strip for parts when I take off in June anyway, so it seems like the bell is tolling.

Ok for now. Next week I'll be 27. Oh man.

Reading the preface to Glenn Greenwald's new book reminds again that a lot of people, smart people, are just now realizing that the emporer has no clothes.

This revelation is relatively fresh for a good third of the country, and because the revelation -- that many members of this Republican administration and Congress are incompetent, corrupt and duplicitous -- is "the truth," they're in for more of it as the GOP continues to reap what they have sewn.

Out here in the reality-based communty, we're so tired of looking at the emperor's wang it almost seems normal. The clusterfucking of everything, almost routine.

Don't forget: we can do better.