Web

And it's in the form of a website:

Obama and Biden have hit the ground running. If you notice, the site is barely finished.

Just wondering if anyone would like to try out a small web project I've created. It's a kind of "experimental" people powered political debates/discussion. On my web site, http://www.buzztopix.com/ people can hookup with each other in real time, and then using Skype (a "web telephone" thing that EBay does), they start talking with each other on conference calls.

I'm actually trying to get some bloggers from either side of the political spectrum to put up a little widget I've created on their blogs that does the same thing... I figure that when visitors to these blogs get hooked up with each other and enter into conference calls it will result in some particularly interesting debates around subjects that both sides are equally passionate about. I asked Liza if she was interested and she suggested I post a note to her users about it.

If you want to give it a spin just go to http://www.buzztopix.com/
You don't have to sign up, or register, all you have to do is click on the "Joinups" you see in the center of the screen and you will get hooked up with other people who also want to start a conference call.

A few weeks ago I mentioned the coming on an article written by Lakshmi Chaudry in which this blog is mentioned on the cover of In These Times and in passing in the article itself.

It irritates me that I feel the need to tackle this article when I still have not responded to Peter Daou's ideas on triangulation. It also irritates me when, even if in passing, it presents culturekitchen in a positive light.

As a former literature critic with a penchant for deconstructing rhetoric though, I have to address it's structural inconsistencies. There is something about the way this article was put together that bothers me. It reads as a good article overall. There are sides quoted, in a "he said, she said" sort of way. The article reads as neutral. And that's what's bothering me. It reminds me of Jay Rosen and his ideas on the production of innocence in journalism.

Rosen's article is important for understanding the rhetorical dynamics at work in Chaudry's article. He starts and spends a good deal of time on his essay talking about the interest groups such as Independent Women's Forum and People For the American Way's "preparing for the war", of the ideological kind, that would ensue around the Supreme Court nominations.

Rosen outlines what I consider an economics of dissent. Economics comes from the greek workds oikos,'house', and nomos, 'rule'. Housekeeping, house management or the rules of "keeping it in da house". The way interest groups like NARAL take care of their business is by finding an opposition and using it for self-definition.

[PressThink: The Production of Innocence and News of a Vacancy on the Court]:

How do the leaders of the Independent Women’s Forum know that the president’s choice for the Supreme Court is “mainstream

When it comes to technology companies, especially Google, I take their "benefit to mankind" with a huge boulder of salt; especially with my current experience with GoogleNews. They dropped culturekitchen from their rotation because it was not "newsy" enough. Meanwhile, they go out of their way to include such beacons of truthiness like LifeNews, ScienceDaily and my all time favorite, Men's News Daily.

Seth Finkelstein is the man I read daily for all things truthy about Google. I thought I was paranoid about the run around the search company has been giving me since December --basically, since the site was switched to a new platform. Then I read his post, British national Party and Google News. Real eye-opener in view of the next two kerfuffles involving Google in the last month.

The first one being the alleged "fight for privacy rights" that many netopians claim is what behind Google's fight to not release query information to the Justice Department. Yeah, right. They are fighting for the right to privacy but not of the regular citizen :

My name is Liza, and I ... I ... I am voogle addict.

I went looking the clip where Isaac Mizrahi molests Scarlett Johanson's boobies and for some reason I ended up seeing a bunch of Danish clips and this one caught my eye :

Jens and Anders (sounds like an Ingmar Bergman movie) are spoofing a Backstreet Boys video ... but ... but ... their spoofing a voogled spoof done by two guys only described as two Asian college guys. May I add they are hysterical :

When I said Video Google is going to be, I meant it just because of this. This is one of those baby steps we will need to take to make the web a truly diverse and viable multi-media platform.

What we need now is a non-proprietary, open-source version of Google video widget.

Google Video still is a good start.

Something amazing happened last night. I was going to sit down and write this post. The working title was, "Look Back In Anger", and homage to John Osborne's 1956 play. Then, I did some yoga. More exactly, I did the Ali MacGraw - Yoga Mind & Body exercises.

I've been studying yoga on and off for 15 years. I don't do yoga in the sense of a scheduled daily practice; but I do yoga everyday throughout the day as I stand, as I walk, as I breathe. But I did do yoga on a a weekly basis, up until I had Thing #2. There was a time I used to be able to do the exercises in video sequence without batting an eye. I can't these days.

My body, my mind and my soul are living parallel busy lives and have very little time to commune. Mind is cluttered with the cacophony of ideas, anxieties, dreams. Soul has been bettered and bruised with the pain and misery around her but also with the reality of growing old and the heaviness of not knowing if everything she wants is everything she needs. And that has encumbered Body, putting weight and pain and stiffness all around it.

Girl needs quiet, lightness, flexibility. She needs to learn how to move into serenity.

[This is your cue to scream, serenity now.]

Honestly, today is one of those days when I do not know how to start but this bit of news from Spain's El País caught my eye because it sums up the world-wide web of repression that is being built around us : [via Condenado a seis años de cárcel por descargar de Internet manuales para fabricar explosivos - ELPAIS.es - Tecnología]:

El argelino Abbas Boutrab, supuestamente vinculado a la red Al Qaeda, ha sido condenado a seis años de cárcel por delitos de terrorismo por el Tribunal de la Corona de Belfast. A Boutrab, de 27 años, se le condena por de descargar de Internet manuales con instrucciones para elaborar explosivos con fines terroristas.

Boutrap fue arrestado hace dos años y medio en la localidad norirlandesa de Newtownabbey por delitos de inmigración, pero la Policía encontró después en su domicilio 25 disquetes informáticos con manuales para la fabricación de bombas caseras en aviones.

El tribunal que lo ha juzgado afirmó que la información hallada en su poder, descargada de Internet desde un ordenador de la Biblioteca Central de Belfast el 23 de enero de 2003, podía ser usada por terroristas.

El juez instructor del caso, Ronald Weatherup, aseguró que ese material "son instrucciones para la construcción de explosivos improvisados, cuyo objetivo es derribar un avión y acabar con la vida de todos aquellos a bordo".

El magistrado recordó, además, que las modificaciones efectuadas por Boutrap en el circuito electrónico de un radiocasete delataban su intención de cometer acciones delictivas. La Policía norirlandesa (PSNI) también halló en el domicilio del terrorista instrucciones para la construcción de un silenciador de rifles de asalto, así como varios documentos de identidad y pasaportes falsos.

[...]

El argelino es el primer supuesto miembro de Al Qaeda juzgado en Irlanda del Norte de acuerdo con el sistema de tribunal sin jurado conocido como "Diplock", con el que hasta ahora se ha venido procesando a terroristas republicanos y unionistas.

Abbas Boutrab was found guilty of intent to commit terrorism. He was arraigned 2 years ago on illegal immigration charges but when the Northern Ireland police did a search of his flat, they found 25 CD-ROMs filled with instructions on how to make homemade bombs for airplanes. They also found information on silencers for assault rifles, various ID papers and false passports.

The tribunal says he is guilty because edits made on a section on one of the CDs betray his intent to commit illegal activities. Here's the kicker: All of this judging was done by a juryless tribunal created by the English government. Called "Diplock", this tribunal was created by the United Kingdom and it was set up in Northern Ireland to handle Irish republicans terrorist activity; but since its inception it has actually spent quite some time labor union activity as well.

Here's what's just come in from the BBC:
[via BBC NEWS | UK | Northern Ireland | Al-Qaeda terror suspect is jailed]:

"I am satisfied that his possession of the material was not out of curiosity but was for terrorist purposes," the judge said.

The FBI built a bomb at a Virginia test centre using the instructions and illustrated the devastation it could cause on a plane.

At Tuesday's sentencing, the judge said Boutrab should be deported once he is released from prison in Northern Ireland.

"Now we find the terrorism threat is subsiding (in Northern Ireland) and a new threat is emerging," said the judge.

"This new threat has an added horror because the terrorist stands amongst the innocent men, women and children.

"That's a feature in the material that was recovered here. It provides instructions for improvised explosives with the objective of bringing down an aircraft and the lives of all those on board."

Where to start with this? I mean seriously. Ok, let's start with the diplock courts. These courts were creted back in the 1970's after the Diplock Report stated the need to address paramilitary violence against juries in Northern Ireland. But the report started the blurring of the lines between political violence and/or activity and regular criminal activity.

I have not done much research on these courts but two little details just jumped right out to me while scouring the web: The Diplock Courts were supposed to be phased out as part of the Nortern Ireland peace accord that culminated in the July 28th call for disarmament by the IRA.

Now there is an alleged terrorist sentenced to six years in jail, with the aide of the United State's FBI, for crimes he could have committed but did not. Sentenced by a judge who declares there is a new terrorist that stands among "out there" not just the physical out there of the world but, with the downloaded materials, the in the potential terrorist world of the Internet.

Again, it's not the crime of illegal immigration or false passports that bothers me. It's the little detail of saying that through the edits of a CD-ROM one can somehow find the origins of intent.

This bit of news, along with the blatant spying of US peace activists and political dissenters and the use of torture rooms and secret prisons that George Bush is so upset about not because he deemed them illegal or unnecessary but because they were leaked to the press, ought to raise the alarm in more ways than one.

We're talking about a world-wide web of coersion, control and punishment being weaved across nations; using the conceit of "the war on terror" to build an infrastructure not "to spread the American values of freedom" but to stamp it out completely.

In my review of A History of Violence I mention how violence is in the details of the acting. Well, in these news articles we can see how the devil is indeed in the details.