Scratch notes from PDF:

1. A great vibe and great people. I suggest that PDF is to IPDI as SXSW is to most tech conferences: Beyond the standard kabuki of vendor-pitches and celebrity presentations, there's a smart idealism and subculture that is excellent.

2. An extra mega interesting-looking book, heartily recommended by Noel and Beka: Dream: Re-imagining Politics In The Age Of Fantasy. From the dust jacket: "What do Paris Hilton, Grand Theft Auto, Las Vegas, and a McDonald's commercial have in common with progressive politics? Not much."

3. Aldon showed me a hack to synch his blog with his twitter with his Facebook status, using TwitterFeed.com. Twitter also became an ad-hoc back-channel chatroom when Confabb, the "official" conference web presence, didn't work. Consensus was that Twitter should add some kind of grouping/tagging capability to make networked microblogging more effective. I'm not sure I agree. Hoppin is excited about a new similar service called Jaiku.

4. Also buzzing: Freebase.com, an open repository for structured data. Change.org, which I never caught what exactly it IS, but everyone seemed really excited by it. Bokardo.com looks smart.

5. A good conversation lead by Winer about open hardware/software platforms. Worth investigating: OpenMoko, which claims to be an open mobile platform, and Rockbox which ditto for music.

1. Surprise #1: Holy crap, Lamont gets to fight Lieberman in a primary! Amy has the NPR coverage. Paul Krugman explains succinctly why this is so cool.

2. Surprise #2: Malloy beats out DeStefano for gubernatorial candidate! It's not over yet, but this is still a real upset-- A few months ago, DeStefano was conventional-wisdom's surefire winner, with Byceiwicz out of the race and Malloy reeling from corruption charges. That being said, Rell is still the nation's most popular governor, so this all may well be elementary.

3. My man Chris Dodd may be running for president??! (If it's true, it's the 08 race's first Drupal-powered candidate, wooooo.)

Since moving to DC, I've picked up Michael and Emily's weekly ritual of reading the Sunday New York Times every week. The problem is that I tend to naturally seek the most enraging and righteous-adrenaline-inducing articles I can find.

For instance! This weekend's NYTimes Magazine has a horrorshow frontpage article on The War On Contraception. The seriously deranged quotes from Christian Evangelicals ("I cannot imagine any development in human history, after The Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the (contraception) pill,") are merely surprising. What's enraging is the massive amount of federal funding ($205 million in 2007, up from $80mil in 2001) for the farce known as "Abstinence Education", aka plying teens with blatantly false misinformation. (E.g., "Condoms fail to prevent HIV approximately 31 percent of the time.")

Meanwhile on page A1, The CIA is being recleansed into an institution focused on "the primary task of supporting the agency's spying operations, rather than producing broad intelligence assessments for policymakers." In other words, it doesnt matter that we don't actually have any real intelligence on Iran-- The new CIA will still have the impressive ability to find WMDs there when asked. (Or at least, to not not find WMDs there.)

So when I read the NYT (or any news outlet), these are the kinds of articles I focus on. I'm not sure whether it's really a healthy or productive way to spend my time. At least I finally unsubscribed from Atrios and Americablog RSS feeds last month, so my net useless-political-rage-per-week is hopefully less now than it used to be.

We've just launched the new IndependentCourt.org, one of the key stars in the growing constellation of posses gearing up to combat the Samuel Alito SCOTUS nomination.

This marks my first web launch as a solo freelancer. Look out, world.

Some other good Alito links:

• Alito's America is CFAP's main Alito website, which has easily the coolest political logo of 2005.
• Tuesday's NYTimes had an Alito article titled-- I am not making this up-- "Alito's Grit Is A Plus". Bizzare headlining aside, it's a somewhat fascinating chessmove of expectations-setting political theater from the Administration. Terrance's and Scott's deconstructions are both good reads.

I remember digging through my Dad's old blues records a few months after I bought my first turntables in 98, asking him what was good and what wasn't. The first one he handed me was an extraordinarily warped and well-loved copy of Oscar Brown Jr.'s Sin And Soul. I remember listening to the album in my bedroom, hearing the bouncy shrieking sounds through a haze of nasty old-record-static, and wondering how many times Dad had stayed up late doing the same thing with the same piece of vinyl.

This record is a freakin classic, hands down. Crazy and smooth and fun and horrifying and deep-- hillarious and catchy-as-hell songs about slave auctions and chain gangs and death and love and kids at the zoo. I bought the repress from Dusty Groove a few months later, and it's been one of only a few vinyls I've taken with me wherever I've moved.

Here's a track: "But I Was Cool"

A few years ago, I finally saw him in person-- he was singing "Bullshit", a song he wrote about the Iraq war, to a Not In Our Name rally at NYU. And then, last week, he passed away at 78.

The obituaries in the mainstream media have done a good whitewashing job on the man's life, with a self-congratulatory good-thing-America-has-moved-past-all-that-injustice-nonsense-from-the-60s attitude that makes me ill. To read NYT or WaPo, you'd believe OBJ did nothing post-1969 besides sitcom cameos. Zero mention that almost all of his performances in the final ten years of his life were at rallies protesting the War On Terror.

Here he is in 2002 on Democracy Radio:

Certainly, terror terrifies me, I don't want to be anyone's damn collateral damage, I don't care what the cause. But on the other hand, I want them to fight all the terror. Not just this perceived terror that scares Bush and his oil interests, but the terror that terrifies the neighbors in my neighborhood in Chicago Illinois, where the police will jump on you and the gangs have been organized to terrorize the communities.

So yeah! Let's have a war on all the terror, and let's have that be an intelligent war that the considers consequences! There are consequences of all these things we're about to do! And when you say 'either you're with us or against us'... that's too simplistic. And so somebody needs to speak up.

The squares are running it. And what we need is hip people. And by hip I mean Human Improvement Potential, that sees that the human race could get better, and not try to beat it down into submission.

Human Improvement Potential. Oscar Brown Junior, Rest In Peace.

Bonus track: "Brother Where Are You"-- OBJ remixed by fellow musicopoliticist, Matt Herbert

Go

From East Bay Express. Cover story about the man behind The Daily Kos. That is, Kos. Interesting stuff.

Apparently, NYC's MTA has banned unauthorized photography in or near Grand Central Station.



Bluejake has photos.