I want to give my most heartfelt apology to all of you for things I failed to apologize for before. I also want to thank all the people I was too internalized to thank -- I'm very poor at taking compliments, and I don't often give people who lift me up the credibility and recognition they deserve. And I want to pre-emptive offer my deepest regrets for what is about to transpire.

I'm a participant. That is now the best way to describe my philosophy. It is an aggressive philosophy, visceral and active and curious; but it is not about domination or even (necessarily) competition. Rather this philosophy is centered around engagement: the whole-hearted soulful committment to life, to the moment, to what it is you're doing.

I've been doing a lot of shit lately, what I think might really be pretty important shit, but I've also been distant, removed, selfish, overriding, overly critical, haughty, preachy and in a few very regrettable instances, downright mean. For all these things and more, I'm sorry.

This paradigmatic shift, radical change in lifestyle and undetaking of a rather massive responsibility weren't planned to coincide, but they have. I'm under pressure, as they say. This isn't meant as an excuse for any of the above -- though it is an explanation of sorts. But really it's not even a bad thing. Sometimes great things happen under pressure; phase shifts, diamonds in the rough, the big bang and all that jazz. Pretty pressurized times.

Back to the point: the real reason I bring this up is that it's about to go to another level. I've been campaigning for some time, but the next two months are going to kick it into performance gear; we have to execute over the next 10 weeks. That means planning, following through, getting feedback and staying focused. That means I might become even a bit more distant and selfish, so in advance I'm sorry.

And so with all this the final lap begins. As things go to the next level, I'm going to lean on all of you I know quite a lot. I'm going to ask you to volunteer, I'm going to ask to crash on your couch, or even with your parents in Salt Lake City as the case may be. I'm going to be irritable some of the time, and if you cath me in the wrong moment from the wrong angle, I might snap a little. This happens. I'm generally conscious of it, just powerless to stop. Although I don't admit it as often as I should, I make mistakes just as frequently as anyone.

But it won't be all bad. You're going to see a lot from me in the coming months. I'm pulling out all the stops, committing to the campaign trail 100%. I'll do any interview, travel to any festival, work with any organization, do whatever needs to be done to make everything I've worked for in the past two years worthwhile. I'm going to do it all with flair, should be real grand fun, and I'll do my best to tell you all about it.

So that's that. The quest is on, and goddamnit the quest is on. Decompression date: November 3rd 2004

The Sea Collective -- Adventures In Piracy

My old roommate Molly's amazing pirate adventure. Kind of puts my forrays into the square world to shame. Also, they wrote a great tutorial on knots.

When it comes to cutting through the hysteronics of the radical right with movement, Margaret Cho is like a laser:

Also the apology Corsi made is questionable, as I can't imagine that he would be really sorry for what he said, because he is so flip and arrogant about it. The casual nature of his hatred is evidence of his absolute devotion to this kind of non-thinking. He is not sorry for what he said, rather, he is sad that people are calling him on it, because in order to appear as one of the dutiful Americans of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, he must not be what he is, a ruthlessly immoral, adolescent, irresponsible, cowardly and unfunny bigot.

The backstory: Jerry Corsi wrote a book full of allegations about John Kerry's service in Vietnam and was being bathed in the warm loving glow of the Republican Noise Machine until it was revealed that he liked to write really awful things on the internet. Freerepublic.com is truly a spirit-crushing site to visit, and Corsii was a particularly ugly participant.

This is an example of why the net is ultimately going to be unfriendly to right-wing movement politics; transparency and memory are two things their movement has never had to contend with before. They've relied on small-circulation paper newsletters and talk radio, but once there's an institutional memory of what was said, and anyone can access it and bring statements to light, relying on prejudice to motivate people becomes a loosing political strategy in a society which has a consensus against prejudice.

Apropops yesterday's obsession with Venezuela, Chavez cleared it by a good margin. The opposition had a pre-set plan to cry foul; it looked like they had pre-printed signs saying "fraud!" Winning by more than a million votes in an election with 75%+ turnout isn't really fraud. The opposition says its argument is based on exit polls, but I also read yesterday that both parties both swore off exit polling. Kind of a bad-faith move if you ask me.

Bonus question: how long will it take the rabid right to trash Jimmy Carter for observing the election and certifying this result? Looks like negative 8 hours.

On exit polling, The LA Times has it:

Official results were expected today. Although Venezuelan regulations forbade release of results from independent voter surveys until the outcome was announced, the New York-based polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates forecast a landslide vote to oust Chavez.

The firm's exit poll of more than 20,000 voters suggested that 59% of an estimated 8 million votes cast by early evening were against Chavez.

In fairness, there was another exit poll done by a Venezuelan PR company that showed Chavez winning by 55%. And then there's also this, from the Christian Science Monitor:

Before the referendum, many observers had also questioned the electoral council's decision to use an electronic voting system which had not been used in any previous election, and which they said was vulnerable to manipulation. As well, they decried the revelation that a government agency owned an interest in the company which developed the machines' software and had an employee on the company's board of directors. The government later promised to sell its interest and remove its employee from the board, though it is unclear if they actually did.

At least their electronic voting machines print paper recipts. Seems like with the margin of victory in the million-votes range that any fraud would have to be truly massive, and it aught to be tough to either pull off that kind of fraud, or credibly frame anyone of falsifying that many ballots. Real election fraud happens when the margins are closer, or where the system is obviously biased (e.g. cops harassing people as the go to polls, poll tax, etc). Unless a manual spot count of paper recipts shows disagreement with the electronic tally, it would seem like this election is settled.

I'll be making a run to Utah on the 22nd to speak at SLUG Magazine's Sabbathon. Should be fun!

Watched Amelie with roommates tonight. Damn beautiful romantic French films, bringing out all my latent and un-attended personal needs. Two more months, and then there's a lifestyle overhaul. Oh yes, who knows what tomorrow brings.

Venezuelan elections have been extended to midnight to cope with unprecidented turnout.

There's been a little trouble:

Voting was mostly peaceful but a 28-year-old woman was shot dead and 12 others were injured when an unidentified gunman opened fire on people outside a polling station in a poor east Caracas neighborhood, emergency service officials said.

No one seems to be paying much attention to the games this summer -- symptoms of our growing isolation, methinks -- but this caught my eye:

The New York Times: Puerto Rico Upsets United States Men

I don't want to sound unamerican, but there's a hint of justice about all this. The US "dream team" always seemed a bit haughty to me. I like the idea of the Olympics a lot, and building an all-star team of pro-ballers seems a slap in the face of the Olympic tradition.

Of course, the Puerto Rican team was led by Carlos Arroyo, who plays for the Jazz, so it's not a cut and dry situation. Nevertheless, the instinctual part of me which always roots for the underdog is pleased.

Record turnout is expected in Venezuela as the people go to the polls to decide whether or not to keep populist Hugo Chavez in power.

The election pretty much breaks along class lines. The media/political consensus in the US is pretty anti-Chavez, not surprising considering he's bucked Washington's policy priorities and is buddies with Fidel. On the other hand, if you look at the relative conditions in places that went along with US Central/South American policy -- Nicaragua, El Salvador, Argentina, etc -- vs places that directed their own affairs -- Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, et al -- it's pretty hard to argue that the advice coming out of DC was sound.

It will be interesting to see what happens. There's a lot of hype on either side of this, but it seems to me that most of the negative stuff about Chavez seems to be scaremongering, fear about "what he might do" rather than problems with what he's actually done so far. Venezuela has a lot of oil wealth, and he seems to be attempting to use this to bring up the general standards of living.

Here's some more interesting perspective in an interview on the state of politics throughout Latin America. I found this exchange particularly interesting:

The Global Justice Movement is wary of Chávez’ populism, his military background, and what they fear may become a top-down ‘revolution’ that excludes the grassroots. How do you think the GJM and Chávez can be reconciled?

As long as the poor in Venezuela support this government it will survive, when they withdraw their support it will fall. But I think it will be useful if the Global Justice movement—and there are many different strands in it—came and saw what’s going on here. What’s the problem? Go into the shantytowns, see what the lives of the people are, see what their lives were before this regime came into power. And don’t go on the basis of stereotypes. You cannot change the world without taking power, that is the example of Venezuela. Chávez is improving the lives of ordinary people, and that’s why it’s difficult to topple him—otherwise he would be toppled. So it’s something that people in the Global Justice movement have to understand, this is serious politics. It’s pointless just chanting slogans, because for the ordinary people on whose behalf you claim to be fighting getting an education, free medicine, cheap food is much much more important than all the slogans put together.

So I'm interested to see the results, and even more interested in seeing if they can resolve the divisions, if real progress can happen. In this country we think we're divided, but people have died in Carachas in political streetfights. Here's hoping that democracy allows people to steer their destiny with other means than violence. I think it's dead-on that unless shit happens people get turned off to the political process really quick.

That's what we've got a lot of in the USA, I think. After three decades of innefectuality on the left and a highly organized media campaign from the radical right, here's a broad class of people who don't believe there's really any such thing as good government. Millions are apathetic, thousands are radicalized beyond the point of vesting in any structured systemic progress. My work really comes down to reconnecting people to the idea of the Public, but without results it's going to be a hard sell going forward.

The Girth is back from South East Asia. Spent some time chasing the dragon in Cambodia, trecking the Laotian mountains and scuba diving in Thailand. Came back with a Travis Bickle look and some bad-ass pictures:

Lots of good stories too, like what the customs agents thought of this photo when they saw it while searching his stuff coming back into the US.