Machination.org

Tonight I quietly resurrected my attendance at Refresh DC. The first one I went to took place in a meeting room at the Library of Congress. My former colleague Jackson Wilkinson spoke at it, evangelizing Microformats — something he had recently encountered and gotten us both interested in as an extension of our shared desire for extra cases to prove web standards were more than just pedantic rules enforced by annoying geeks. Eric Meyer happened to be in the audience that day.

That one visit, with me lurking in the back (as I always do when I show), made Refresh instantly valuable as a meaningful connection to a range of professional insights into a community I care about because I want to use the fruits of its labor (even more than I want to build it — I got into building it so that I could use it).

Tonight’s Refresh session was a panel discussion, with Jackson moderating. The topic was start-ups, and the participants ranged from just-out-of-college but-already-veteran partners of Publi.us, who started out with FantasyCongress.com, to a veteran who had seen many start-ups mature and is trying to create a new service, LaunchBox, to help others through the same process. Within that range there was Eric Rupert, who I met by accident as I greeted Jackson — and who turns out to be behind the re-launching of Odeo.com. Odeo, coincidentally, I got to try out early in its first incarnation via a long-time long-distance acquaintance Rabble was working on it in its very early days.

I’m not sure I have a point. This is the selfish trumpeting of a wallflower.

I have managed to plug a bunch of things I can say have piqued my interest at various points and that I’m keeping an eye on — but I’ve got no dramatic insight or particular endorsement to give. I’ll just echo that, anecdotally, DC is feeling like a pretty vibrant new media community. It’s gratifying, also, to see how simply paying attention and making connections can give even a gadfly or a bystander (I consider myself slightly more than that in this realm, but maybe not too much more) a unique insight as how incredibly small the world can be.

It also makes me think about how large the world remains for others, in other contexts. But that’s a heavy tangent to jump onto tonight and, for the moment, I’m weighed down by too much to really get and distill that perspective.

Tags:   community · DC · Refresh · web developmentNo Comments.

A declaration that something is not political in itself will highlight the politics of the thing.

The New York Times quotes a Chinese Olympic official, Qu Yingpu, in response to the protests of the Olympic torch tour as saying “This is not the right time, the right platform, for any people to voice their political views.”

His own apparent belief that he can say that with any authority is politics.

Never mind the inherent nationalism that is always present at the Olympics.

What is poorly articulated in the most well-intentioned statements of this sort is a widely shared desire for the Olympics to be a unifying experience, despite the nationalistic undertones, and generally not a polarizing sort of experience.

That’s great, but there is no getting rid of the politics.

I get the feeling that not all the statements are well-intentioned, and I don’t just mean the ones from Chinese officials this year. I think the Olympics are something of a business, and business is always political too.

That aside, it seems futile to to me to achieve an ideal by proclamation, attempting to exclude voices of the real controversies and atrocities of the world—particularly those in which the hosts, and implicitly more powerful than most other participants in the given year’s games, have a role.

Tags:   China · free speech · ideals · Olympics · Politics · sports · Tibet · torch runNo Comments.

My friend Sam Husseini shared this news with me, from a CBS News report:

So CBS News did an investigation - asking all 50 states for their suicide data, based on death records, for veterans and non-veterans, dating back to 1995. Forty-five states sent what turned out to be a mountain of information.

And what it revealed was stunning.

In 2005, for example, in just those 45 states, there were at least 6,256 suicides among those who served in the armed forces. That’s 120 each and every week, in just one year.

This comes during the same weekend as the group Iraq Veterans Against the War hold their Winter Soldier summit just outside of DC. Veterans who have signed-up with the group are gathering together to share with each other, and the media, critical anecdotes from their experiences in the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. The Post story notes counter-demonstrators accuse the event of being too vague and unverified, but The Real News reports on IVAW’s verification process.

Meanwhile, a group called “Eagles Up!” brought a few hundred people to the National Mall in support of the wars. This coming week will bring anti-war demonstrators to the Capitol for a Wednesday rally on the 5th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

Tags:   dissent · Iraq · veterans · warNo Comments.

It has been hard to write.

Many drafts with not just incomplete thoughts, but incomplete sentences, sit neglected in the queue right now.

In just this past week, I’ve been paying attention to Eliot Spitzer’s resignation from the office of governor in my home state; the security culture here in Washington as more CCTVs go up, as more allegations of three-letter agency abuses of power breaks (and with two false alarms in DC with an “airspace violation” and a bomb scare); and the state of independent media as Brian from Alive in Baghdad visited (he came to town to contribute material to IVAW’s “Winter Soldier” summit) and I host a Brazilian Indymedia filmmaker in my apartment today.

We’re also approaching the fifth anniversary of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. When the news broke 5 years ago, I was in downtown DC that night, and ran out of the Metro back to my internship at the Institute for Public Accuracy.

I have been able to take photographs. That’s been easier and more natural. I don’t share them all, but some. The most significant ones this week are of a tragedy in my neighborhood. A large apartment building, a home to mostly immigrant tenants went up in flames. Allegations of neglect by a landlord eager to convert to condos are swirling about, and don’t seem far-fetched. Whatever the cause and contributing factors, about 200 people (maybe many more) are without a home.

Tags:   DC · fire · Mount Pleasant · Washington · writingNo Comments.

The only thoughts I can finish these days seem to be belated ones. Here I am slightly expanding on a “tweet” of mine in reaction to the news of arch-conservative William F. Buckley passing away.

Mostly fond and polite remembrances were aired across the media.

But in an often included common clip, which I heard it on NPR and others heard or saw elsewhere, was an excerpt from a debate between Buckley and Noam Chomsky on Buckley’s Firing Line program.

[Read more →]

Tags:   Buckley · Chomsky · debate · obituaryNo Comments.