So this is the ethic: start something.

If you have an idea, put it out there. You don't have to make it on your own; start a damn project. Get your friends involed. See who else in the work is doing things that are similar or connected. Be the first node on your new network.

One thing I want the larger effort around The Book to be is a thing to hook into, a portal for networking, but in a smaller trusted way rather than the huge MySpace way. Fundimentally it's the internet's value at large, the global always-on citizen's band, but people need a little help making the most of it. So we're here to make it happen. We need to grow it, to push around the margins. Value exists at the edges. There are a lot of exciting projects online... and a lot of exciting projects in bringing more of the world on board.

It's imperative that we see the 1st amendment in 21st Century terms as the right to puublish online. A citizen's right. May take a while for us to get a supreme court ruling, but the truth is that we'll never get that if we don't create the facts on the ground.

This is the first step towards participatory media since they regulated Citizens Band and Shortwave radio into obscurity.

It's a big deal. Read this now.

So this is the ethic: start something.

If you have an idea, put it out there. You don't have to make it on your own; start a damn project. Get your friends involed. See who else in the work is doing things that are similar or connected. Be the first node on your new network.

One thing I want the larger effort around The Book to be is a thing to hook into, a portal for networking, but in a smaller trusted way rather than the huge MySpace way. Fundimentally it's the internet's value at large, the global always-on citizen's band, but people need a little help making the most of it. So we're here to make it happen. We need to grow it, to push around the margins. Value exists at the edges. There are a lot of exciting projects online... and a lot of exciting projects in bringing more of the world on board.

It's imperative that we see the 1st amendment in 21st Century terms as the right to puublish online. A citizen's right. May take a while for us to get a supreme court ruling, but the truth is that we'll never get that if we don't create the facts on the ground.

This is the first step towards participatory media since they regulated Citizens Band and Shortwave radio into obscurity.

It's a big deal. Read this now.

The Go! Team, which I just discovered thx to SomaFM. It's getting me amped. A great mix of old-school R&B sounds, mixtape breaks and indy-noise pop. Oddly enough I'm not huge fans of any of those on their own, but together it just works.

Also, this is interesting:

Originally issued in the U.K. last year, "Thunder, Lightning, Strike" was recently released in a new edition in the U.S. through Columbia Records. Because of sample clearance issues, some of the songs needed to be reworked, but the band also had the opportunity to add two new tracks.

"There were three or four [sample] denials, but it wasn't too bad; there were a few melody changes, which I actually prefer in a way. A lot of the samples come from thrift-store, nothingy records that no one would think of looking at anyway. There's something about those Bollywood soundtracks that I've always loved: You have a 50-piece string section that is always out of tune with each other, and that's a sound you could never recreate."

Apparently their live show is a hoot too:

Lollapalooza may have had it all over the Intonation Music Festival in terms of sheer spectacle, but for me, the winning moment of the summer concert season came when the Go! Team took the stage at Union Park and a dozen preteen girls from the surrounding neighborhood, fresh out of the swimming pool, joined the absurdly energetic English dance-rockers onstage to gyrate, shimmy and frug.

It's definitely going into heavy rotation for the Bike Mix.

An NPR editor shot her mouth off on the air about citizen speech online, pretty stupidly. Steve Gillard has the most two-fisted response, especially considering he takes the additional step of rebuffing her racially-loaded charge that blogs are "white-guy backslapping networks." Aramando at Kos has a series of examples of where The All Important Editors dropped the ball.

On the other hand, everone knows I really would benefit from a copy desk, and there's a difference between readers who can comment and editors. Reader/commenters are below the writer in terms of power; editors are above. That matters.

I really can't wait until the Corporate media, the Independent for-profit media and the Amateur media realize that no one has a lock on the Truth, and everyone has a important role to play in creating Public Intelligence in the 21st Century. I'm not holding my breath, though.

We're in the early stages, and a lot of people who are very comfortable with the way things were are going to kick and scream against change for years. Likewise many who are bitter at having been long shut out of the public debate are going to revel in every bloody takedown.

My own position is ticklish. I'm with the invaders, no use denying that. At the same time, I disagree with some of the things they're doing. Mainly, I'm finding that I don't really care about institutional legitimacy. Too many compromises, not enough payoff. My philosophy is much more along the lines of HST's experiment with Freak Power. Go balls-out at the swine and see how many people jump on board.

That's the story of the early Howard Dean, by the way.

To break it down, I believe that the A-list bloggers and the Media pundits are fighting over turf that is decreasing in value, and will continue to do so. It's still the most important single piece of turf out there, but my own calculus says it's not worth investment. I think it will work out better for some of us new-schoolers to build our own power bases, to construct our own consensus engines, to grow the market for Public participation, activie citizenship, politics and democracy.

Hence The Book. Because lord knows there's a lot of room to expand this bitch.

An NPR editor shot her mouth off on the air about citizen speech online, pretty stupidly. Steve Gillard has the most two-fisted response, especially considering he takes the additional step of rebuffing her racially-loaded charge that blogs are "white-guy backslapping networks." Aramando at Kos has a series of examples of where The All Important Editors dropped the ball.

On the other hand, everone knows I really would benefit from a copy desk, and there's a difference between readers who can comment and editors. Reader/commenters are below the writer in terms of power; editors are above. That matters.

I really can't wait until the Corporate media, the Independent for-profit media and the Amateur media realize that no one has a lock on the Truth, and everyone has a important role to play in creating Public Intelligence in the 21st Century. I'm not holding my breath, though.

We're in the early stages, and a lot of people who are very comfortable with the way things were are going to kick and scream against change for years. Likewise many who are bitter at having been long shut out of the public debate are going to revel in every bloody takedown.

My own position is ticklish. I'm with the invaders, no use denying that. At the same time, I disagree with some of the things they're doing. Mainly, I'm finding that I don't really care about institutional legitimacy. Too many compromises, not enough payoff. My philosophy is much more along the lines of HST's experiment with Freak Power. Go balls-out at the swine and see how many people jump on board.

That's the story of the early Howard Dean, by the way.

To break it down, I believe that the A-list bloggers and the Media pundits are fighting over turf that is decreasing in value, and will continue to do so. It's still the most important single piece of turf out there, but my own calculus says it's not worth investment. I think it will work out better for some of us new-schoolers to build our own power bases, to construct our own consensus engines, to grow the market for Public participation, activie citizenship, politics and democracy.

Hence The Book. Because lord knows there's a lot of room to expand this bitch.

Drummy tells it like it is in a video interview. Rock on Drummy.

As a tangent: there's building hype around the concept of "Web 2.0." This is mostly a phenomena of marketing, in spite of all the efforts to put engineers and geeks front and center. That effort itself is a sales tactic: geeks have more credibility than execs and VCs, and execs and VCs aren't stupid. They know when to get out of the way. Anyway, it's not like all this will really matter in a few years. Implicit in the notion of anything 2.0 is that 3.0 should be along real soon now.

Which isn't to say that a new consciousness about users and interactivity online isn't breaking over many commercial enterprises. That's real. But I don't think it's going to make anyone rich in the long run because really it's raising the common denominator. Stuff that people call "Web 2.0" will soon be assumed, like air conditioning in the South. It enables a whole slew of other things to happen, yeah, but in and of itself it's not a huge profit center.

And in a way, I think that's good. Infrastructure is about Value, not Profit.

Things are rumbling. Lots of work. I've been hanging out at Aaron's to work, which has better internet and company than the coffeeshop.

This weekend I get a bed! Winter is coming on, and I need a better place to sleep. May also try to clear out that old storage locker while I've got the cargo van rented. We'll see. Could have a stereo too...

Yeah. Not much to report. Had a nice little second date the other night. Book proposal is being drafted. Nothing finalized, but all is in motion.

So rumors about Bush are (booze) starting to make the tabloids, and then there's this from the Washington Times and Matt Drudge, founding newspapers and websites of the Republican Noise Machine.

Essentially they all say that the Prez is isolated, bitter, sulking, not really talking to anyone other than his wife, his mom, Condi and Karen Hughs. And he's estranged from his Father.

Who knows if its true, but given that I talked before about the possibility of impeachment, I think it's worth mentioning that if things don't get better (or if they continue to get worse), there's the slightly more likely possbility that he'll quit. Bush has 38 months of being president left. That's a long term to serve under the circumstances.

The obvious parallels are to Nixon and his "final days" of drunken solitude, but it makes even more sense for Bush to throw in the towel. As far as I can tell, he doesn't have the kind of Will to Power that you usually see in a president; sure he wanted it, but he was always at the head of a rather large political machine which supplied him with a lot of Chi. The parts of that machine not headed for jail or early retirement are currently being disassembled and redistributed among GOP stalwarts. Bush is largely on his own, facing the growing wrath of a nation he hoodwinked -- probably an uncomfortable position for him.

It's also not outside Bush's history to quit when the going gets tough. He's done it before, and if there's any truth to the rumors that he's back on the Sauce we can only hope he does it again. I don't really fear that Bush will do something totally out of control, because in real terms the President is not a powerful figure in our republican democracy unless the other elements around make him so. I think if Bush tried anything really outlandish he'd find himself checked and balanced. I also don't think it's in Bush's character to take the initiative like that, so I'm not worried about him starting another war or anything crazy.

But still, it would be nice not to have a lonely boozer in the Oval Office.

David and Jessica's wedding was really nice, and instead of doing anything else I went home and talked with my Mom until 1:30 in the morning. Wedding-talk, you know. The kind of conversation that comes with a little boozy lubrication and the looming shadow of a socially-significant event.

"Do you think you'll get married?"

I do. I like the idea. I like being in love. I like children and want to have some when my life is stable enough to responsibly do that. I've also not had a relationship that's lasted more than a few months, and plenty that lasted only a few days, so it's no wonder why people wonder.

Anyway, I've been thinking about these things for a while, and I intend to write about 'em; but I sort of think that means rewriting a lot of my static content, so I keep rolling that into the idea of overhauling this old website and so it gets put off.

And now I have a plane to catch. So there.

Posted a little while ago about the possibility of impeachment. There's a good post from a couple days ago by Markos explaining the political logic behind not wanting to go that route.

I pretty much agree. Vengence is petty; better to be forward-looking. However, I think it's important to point out that the very real potential for impeachment can work for us. It spices things up. I think the term "impeachable offense" might have some currency. It juices the atmosphere, heightens the circumstances, creates drama. Those are all things that will need to happen if the Democrats are to build a narrative that can re-align American politics.

That's really what I'd like to see: a new political consensus that repudates the "conservative" movement and its propagandists, breaks up the existing Republican coalition of (Big Business, Big Jesus and the War Freaks) puts non-machine Democrats in positions of power, and lets honest people take charge of the GOP for God's sake. Having an unpopular President Bush to "kick around" for three more years will help this effort greatly.

Once we can force Rove out of Washington, Bush really becomes a tool for us. His visage will be a brutal implement with which to whip the fatbacks, greedheads, pentagon cabalists and creepy preachers into submission. These people somehow got the idea that they're entitled to run this country into the ground just so they can get One More Fix, so that they can get off and be "proven fucking right" before retiring to their gated paradises of choice. Fuck that. They need to be shown the revolving door on a one-way basis. Many careers must end, not just the President's.

Let's not turn Bush into a scapegoat. He's part of the disease, but cutting him out isn't the cure.

And yeah. President Cheney? I'll pass.