Category Archives: Culture

The Surge

I keep hearing that the surge is working. It’s hard, but I have a trillion dollar argument against this. The battle is also economic, blasted to start against the Twin Towers.

Everything is linked.

Equity

It was close, but I’m proud of this ruling for CT.

With the ruling, Connecticut joins Massachusetts and California as the only states that allow same-sex couples to marry. Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire and New Jersey have civil unions, while Maine, Washington, Oregon and Hawaii have domestic partnership laws that allow same-sex couples to receive some of the same benefits granted to those in civil unions.

Landscapes

A clever post from Geoff Manaugh at Worldchanging:

In a related vein, it’s often said in the U.S. that certain politicians simply “don’t understand the West”: they’re so caught up in their big city, coastal ways that they just don’t get – they can’t even comprehend – how a rancher might react to something like increased federal control over water rights or how a small-town mayor might object to interfering rulings by the Supreme Court. Politicians who don’t understand the west – who don’t understand the rugged individuality of ranch life or the no-excuses self-responsibility of American small towns – are thus unfit to lead this society.

But surely the more accurate lesson to be drawn from such a statement is exactly the opposite?

One could even speculate here that politicians from small towns, and from the big rural states of the west, have no idea how cities – which now house the overwhelming majority of the American population – actually operate, on infrastructural, economic, socio-political, and even public health levels, and so they would be alarmingly out of place in the national government of an urbanized country like the United States.

Another New Deal

As I write this big budget cuts are coming and will hit Connecticut Higher Ed pretty hard and, of course, everyone else. Indeed, slender funds will hurt much of my plans for the coming years on the subject of hyperdrama and hypertext literature.

It’s been bugging me that nationally the country has yet to be thinking deeply about infrastructures that will take us deep into the century. The current campaign business is pure typicality. I read things here and there about electric cars, about mass transit. I’d love to take a train or a bus to work. What about national commitment? Real knuckles to the wrench sort of thinking.

I’m reminded that Tinderbox is infrastructure.

On another note, John has set up a You Tube area for the mashup students and the student videos will be going up very soon.

Also, a link to the Watchmen trailer.

Craziness

When Obama gets into office I hope he scraps this kind of crazy idea. The Feds can confiscate “information”? While interesting, I find the basis for the reversal opinion garbled behind weird and complex analogies.

The basic question holds: what constitutes reasonable search at the airport?

Life

My heart goes out to David Roy and everyone touched by the loss. Again, we knew Alyssa Roy as a wonderful person even in our limited experience with her two summer’s back.

I think about this when ever my 17 year old, my wife, and I head out.

Here’s to the art of life.

Feeds and more Feeds

In semantic and social web news, information control–how to get all those feeds into an “online” service and to manage even more, typically via the metaphor of the bookmark–continues as the rush. Twine may be the answer to all these troubles. Or maybe not.

On the platform of the web, it seems to me that the rush has to do with what can contain it all first or what can contain and control most. What will happen to bookmarked content in 5 years, 10 years?