I've always thought the name of this bar is perfect for a refuge of
last resort. The plywood and the dumpster, which is conveniently
located in front for easy disposal of those whose last hope expires,
lend it a certain something extra and I hope they keep them there even
after the construction on the building is completed. :)
Over the past week I started noticing that there were an awful lot of
idiots linking back to images in my archives. One guy was using a
photo of mine for the background for his webpage. I mean, sure,
it's nice to know someone likes my photos, but should I have to become
a content provider for random bizarre web pages and blogs to know
that? In fact, 2 blogs liked the same photo, a Christmas star, and
both of them were in Arabic which I thought was a little curious and
idly wondered if they were related somehow and if they had both
inherited the same stupid gene. Fark users like my political anti-bush
pics and some churchy types on a jesus bulletin board liked a cross
from Effingham for their avatars [Hey! Jesus doesn't approve of
bandwidth theft in his flock you morons! There is evil in my
domain name, too. Maybe the bible needs to be updated for the digital
age.].
I first tried the subtle approach by replacing the images with an
image of a hot tub full of naked, fat white guys brandishing a shotgun
bearing the message, 'image linking verboten'. It would seem that the
churchy folk unlinked rather quickly and are probably already leeching
their new avatar from some other unsuspecting victim. The picture of
the Effingham [F-ingham to the locals. Oh, the irony!] cross was so
popular that I think the christians might be either stupid or terribly
cheap [or both] when it comes to buying space on the web for their
homepages since it seems that so few of them are willing to host a
tiny 25kb image on their own site. Instead they prefer to let someone
else pay for hosting their content. I wonder if I should write to the
Pope and see if I can get in the queue for some kind of divine
blessing for hosting this stuff for those whom Jesus hasn't given
either clue or cash enough to provide for themselves. Maybe the new
mission of the 21st Century is to go online without having to pay for
anything!
The most galling offender was a cheeky asshole who liked one of
my bitter candy valentine hearts and who, after I moved/replaced it,
came looking for it and linked to the moved file instead. So, as a
last resort, I've just gone ahead and used mod_rewrite to punt
everyone, including google's image search, who try and link to images.
I'll make exceptions, but the idiots who inline the background for
their homepage from another host that isn't theirs just need a boot to
the head and possibly something more gratifyingly visceral. I'm sure
that this is very common around the net, but why do people do it so
shamelessly and why are there so few sites who seem to know how to
punt them and who indulge them? It ranks right up there with spam in
terms of stealing bandwidth, rudeness and outright stupidity.
The Last Hope04/10/2004 08:56 AM The Last Hope 0.1.3 Beta 3 released!
too linear? I hope so
too linear? I hope so02/10/2004 02:53 AM Dave accuses
me (in the most constructive way possible) of thinking too
linearly about responsibility and Nader. I'm sticking to my line,
because it is precisely the line Nader (rightly) took when arguing
against, e.g., car manufacturers.
Book of hope
Book of hope08/17/2004 09:21 AM Paul Loeb may be coming to your town soon to publicize his anthology,
The Impossible Will Take a Little While, a book on political hope that
includes pieces by Nelson Mandela, Tony Kushner, Cornel West, Vaclav
Havel, Alice Walker and other moral and literary legends. JOHO
Challenge: Show up and see if you can depress him....
There's Hope Yet for Iomega06/01/2004 03:26 PM Iomega could make a comeback, thanks to the rapidly growing market for
simple networking products.
Kicking Up Hope
Kicking Up Hope04/16/2005 05:09 AM In Colombia, a dance academy in the slums of Cartagena offers
children, including boys, a way out of the tumbledown life.
A new hope for BitTorrent?
A new hope for BitTorrent?01/05/2005 08:14 AM Unreleased Exeem could make BitTorrent more lawsuit-resistant, but
questions remain.
I am Not Optimistic But I Do Have Hope02/10/2004 02:50 AM A lecture I gave in 1993 distinguishes between optimism and hope,
journalism and The Media. Those are apt for today. Also appearing:
Tabitha Soren of MTV, Octavio Paz of Mexico, Leonard Downie, Dan
Rather, Max Weber, Jefferson & Hamilton, Bill Clinton, Major League
Baseball, the Charlotte Observer, democracy and Christopher Lasch.
Hope for Hubble
Hope for Hubble04/29/2004 03:11 AM USA Today Apr 29 2004 7:24AM GMT
Yes, I know I liked John
Gray's book,
found it liberating in fact, but I still believe people are good at
heart, and their instincts are right if they can re-learn to listen to
them. And remember Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of
thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it
is the
only thing that ever has."
So
your argument is that we're going to save the world either by some
massive act of collective altruism, even though such a thing is
unprecedented, or by some subversive act by some clever noble clique
of
do-gooders. You know, some people would say that Bush's neocon
born-again cabal fit Margaret Mead's 'small group of world-changers'
definition perfectly. If that's what she was referring to, small
groups
of nazis and megalomaniac idealists, we're in trouble. Or is your
'small group' going to put birth control in the water supply and
sabotage civilization until we have anarchy and chaos? -- which is
actually the neocons' dream situation, since if that were to happen
they'd just take over and feel self-justified in doing so, as they
would see you as terrorists.
We
overcame slavery, we gave women the vote, we invented written language
and a lot of other amazing things, including birth control
technologies, we've made democracy, an improbable way of running the
world, work, and we've found ways to strike a balance in the economy
between complete totalitarianism and complete laissez-faire. We're
learning what doesn't work,
we have unprecedented peer-to-peer grassroots communication and
organization, and we have more knowledge available to a larger
percentage of the population than ever before. And instead of just
writing dystopias, many people are actually proposing practical ways
to
bring about massive change.
The
last century featured more murders, more imprisonment, more torture,
more war deaths, and greater extremes in distribution of wealth and
power than any in our history. Every technology we've invented has a
dark side that has been more effectively exploited than its positive
applications. And as for communication, the digital divide is wider
than ever. You shouldn't judge the state of the world by the view from
your rosy little corner of it.
Stories
are all we are. When we have learned new stories, we have become very
different creatures very quickly, in a generation or two. It's our
ingenuity, our ability to change and respond to new and intuitively
better, healthier, happier ways to live, and learn from each other
peer-to-peer that makes me optimistic and hopeful, not new
technologies, which I admit are a double-edged sword.
Stories
also allow fanatics and maniacs to raise huge and bloodthirsty armies,
and allow cults, including most modern religions and political
parties,
to brainwash people to act against both their personal and collective
interest. Myths and other stories allow people to tolerate and live in
denial of atrocities going on all around them. Religious stories have
prompted most of history's most brutal and protracted wars. And we're
so adaptable that we learn to live a life of never-ending oppression,
subjugation and deprivation, and we delude ourselves that our pathetic
lives are good, healthy, deserved, getting better and the only way to
live.
But we
are also capable of forgetting, forgiving and moving on quickly, when
a
better story, a better way of living, is told to us. And in the last
decade a significant minority of the population is on a roll -- better
informed, more inventive, more attuned to and knowledgeable about
that's needed, what's happening and what's possible than ever before.
They're able to use networking technology to make creative, synthetic,
analogical and metaphorical leaps, collaboratively,
in ways that would have been almost unimaginable even a generation
ago.
We have already witnessed, in the 1960s, a huge shift in mainstream
thinking and worldviews occurring in an astonishingly short period of
time, and if we could do something like that again now we have much
more powerful tools and much greater knowledge to do it with, so it
might actually endure this time.
Pure
romanticism. The 1960s weren't nearly as rosy and liberated as you
remember them. Many guys jumped on the bandwagon in complete ignorance
and indifference to the peace and liberation movements -- they were
merely attracted by the promise of cheap dope and easy sex. Your faith
(and it's nothing more than faith, since there's no solid reasoning
behind it) that we could start a similar movement in this century and
this time it would endure and bring about ubiquitous change, is simply
the left-wing version of the right-wingers' Rapture. People don't
change, cultures don't change, and there's an unprecedented level of
investment in maintaining the status quo working against any little
movement that might threaten that. We are programmed by our DNA to
spend almost all of our time and energy living moment to moment and
distracted by the minutiae of constant and trivial decisions. And even
if this were not so, as Gray argues so articulately we have no 'free
will' or collective consciousness. Even as 'individual' creatures we
are merely collections of cells, molecules and organs, each doing what
they do, largely for mutual benefit, and almost entirely (99.9999%)
subconscious. So belief that we can somehow get our personal
act together, let alone one at the level of some higher social order,
and transform ourselves into what we are not, seems to me the height
of
folly, a form of leftist religious fanaticism.
There
you
go, relying on science again, that collection of unreliable and creaky
models of reality, to make your argument. The whole, at every level of
aggregation, is always greater than the sum of the parts. Gaia is much
more than just all individual life on Earth. We as individual and
wondrous creatures are more than a mere collection of our cells,
molecules and organs. And I'm not being spiritual here. Forget about
'consciousness' and these other academic and utterly meaningless
concepts. We as individuals, and our planet as an organism of a
different order, are mostly what happens between our composite parts.
We are sensation, reaction, communication, learning, understanding,
and
the stories that recall them. Most of what we are at both the creature
level and at the Gaia level are what is happening in the
intersections,
margins and edges around the component parts. That is where our true
sense of self and meaning resides, that is where our instincts draw
their wisdom, that is what our DNA remembers and tells us to do. Your
myopic science, looking at individual organisms in isolation, is no
more able to understand the great truths of life, and the nature of
our
existence, than a collector dissecting dead monarch butterflies is
able
to comprehend the astonishing transformation of that creature's life,
or how it could have 'learned' where and how to migrate when three
generations have transpired since the last generation, or how sun and
flowers and smells make a butterfly happy and inform its understanding
of the purpose of its life.
Let's
look at this argument. You're saying, I think, that almost all of what
we are is subconscious, and that an important part of what we are is
our relationships with 'others' outside ourselves. Yes? OK. So then
you're saying that what can/will save us is something in our collective unconsciousness or subconsciousness?
That deep down 'we' intuitively know what needs to be done, what is
happening, and what is possible, and will use that knowledge to
collectively do what is in our collective interest. Well, at least
that's better than relying on gods. But if we had this great
collective
unconsciouness or subconsciousness, wouldn't we have been able to
figure out, even before Einstein did, that almost all human
inventions,
notably in the media (since the invention of writing and the printing
press), in transportation (since the invention of the lever, the
inclined plane, the sledge and the wheel) and in the tapping of stored
energy (since the invention of controlled fire) would have more
negative consequences for our planet than positive ones, and hence
prevent them from emerging? No, don't give me that nonsense that the
global population is leveling off because we somehow 'know' it must,
since people have repeatedly told researchers the only reason they don't have one or
two more
kids each is that they can't financially afford it (for now). If we
('we' being either all humanity or all creatures on the planet) are
our
own collective guiding hand, that guiding hand has done a pretty lousy
job over the last 30,000 years. Just because we've lost touch with
nature and Gaia, you say? I think it's more likely that we're just an
exceptionally fierce and adaptable species which emerged by random
accident from the primeval soup and, like all fierce and adaptable
species in Earth's history, plagued (in the literal sense of the word,
not the moral one) the planet until a meteor came along, or a climate
change or new species evolved that preyed on excessive numbers of the
plague species, and restored equilibrium and the selected preference
of
known life for biodiversity. Disequilibrium is neither new or
unnatural
in the universe. And that, more than the crown of creation, more even
than the sum of our 'stories', is what we humans really are.
AT&T CEO Dave Dorman -- for my money, one of the two best
CEOs in telecom -- tells the Bos
ton Globe what he thinks about VOIP:
"I often wonder if AT&T had gotten out of the blocks sooner with
WorldNet,
how many dial-up Internet subscribers could we have had? Part of that
was a lack
of recognition on the part of AT&T management at the time - not to
be too
critical - about how big this was going to be. I don't suffer
from any of those things with respect to voice over IP. I
think it's going to be huge. I think it's going to be pervasive. We
are going to
be leaders here."
Football: Ranieri given hope
Football: Ranieri given hope05/11/2004 11:47 PM Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon says the club has not decided
Claudio Ranieri's fate.
Payout hope for Hep C patients
Payout hope for Hep C patients07/05/2004 01:21 AM Patients who contracted Hepatitis C through infected blood products
can claim "compassionate payments".
Cricket: England hope for win
Cricket: England hope for win07/01/2004 02:05 AM England need to beat the West Indies to rekindle their NatWest Series
hopes.
ABC News reports that there may be hope for stroke victims thanks
to the brain cells taken from fetuses. The brain cells in question
come from fetuses that were aborted a long time ago. The brain cells
are not the same as the embryonic stem cells that we see on the news
from time to time. Still, even though reports state that this is some
how different than stem cells, they are still coming from…
Davies gives Eriksson hope
Davies gives Eriksson hope08/02/2004 03:17 AM The FA's acting chief hints the England coach might keep his job in
the row that has seen the chief executive quit.
Little Hope Seen for Rainier Climber (AP)
Little Hope Seen for Rainier Climber (AP)06/19/2004 09:17 PM AP - A helicopter rescued two stranded climbers from Mount Rainier on
Saturday, two days after they called for help, but rangers held out
little hope for a third man missing since an accident that killed his
partner.
Hope for an Alzheimer's vaccine
Hope for an Alzheimer's vaccine08/05/2004 03:53 AM Scientists are developing an experimental vaccine which could treat
Alzheimer's disease.
Great White Hope is On the Way
Great White Hope is On the Way08/07/2004 03:43 PM Congress is just a stepping-stone for eugenicist James Hart: "We are interested in competing with Jesus
Christ and Buddha for the destiny of man."
I really hope that it isn't true, but I have no reason to believe it isn't
I really hope that it isn't true, but I have no reason to believe it isn't06/13/2004 04:03 AM A thirdhand report on a talk by Sy Hersh, hero of My Lai and now Abu
Ghraib: He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out
of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the
Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then
trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women
prisoners, as the cameras run." But I'm afraid the we are far from the
bottom of this pit. When will the American people rise up and throw
out this government that has taken America so far away from its core
values? November isn't soon enough....
Spy plane 1,000 jobs hope05/17/2004 01:30 AM A £21m investment will turn a Welsh business park into a centre of
excellence for unmanned aircraft and a major employer.
Triumph of Hope Over Reason
Triumph of Hope Over Reason09/01/2004 01:57 PM A frighteningly expensive drug of marginal efficacy begets
triple-digit multiples? Bring on the miracles.
"Final Cut Pro HD made it very easy to create an offline project by
capturing and compressing the footage on the fly, using the offline
photo-jpeg codec." By J. Russell Kliegel, Apple
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