explodedlibrary.info

Sydney Morning Herald perspective on the world's best blogs

I wasn't surprised to find that I hardly knew any of these blogs. And the ones that I did know - Slashdot and Kuro5hin aren't standard single-author blogs according to my understanding of the term - which says nothing about their quality or anything. I was most interested in their Australian blogs section, which was where they listed What's New Pussycat? This caught my eye because it was by an expat Aussie living in a northern country - in this case Scotland. I did find it very amusing and may keep reading it. I didn't try any other new ones from that, although I may later. I tend to be a little sceptical of lists like this which try to be definitive and all things to all people

following up on the investigation of Fox

Well, I guess that they got off. I'm not too surprised. The idea that they have a conservative bias isn't what bugs me about them - it's that they claim to be "fair and balanced." Of course nobody takes that seriously any more, especially after the Franken lawsuit debacle. They need a new slogan that admits their bias - what about "NeoCon Mouthpiece of the Bushies"?

light blogging this week - of new material, that is

This week I'm going to be spending most of my blogging time on re-posting the May-July 2003 entries which were inadvertently eaten by Radio during my switch-over to TypePad.

new TypePad blog - PDF for Lawyers

Click here for a glimpse of the new home of PDF for Lawyers site. I plan to make this a multi-author blog and invite my lawyer friends who know a lot about PDF to share their insights here as well. Check it out. [Ernie the Attorney]
Non-lawyers might wonder if there's enough material here to sustain a blog. Who knows, but it's been very interesting so far and I think it will do well. Blogs are certainly becoming specialized. Multiple-blogs by a single author is possibly another trend (faciliated by tools such as TypePad, and indeed Radio - if one can put up with its idiosyncracies).

Ashcroft agrees to supply the number of FBI fishing expeditions in libraries

Cheshyre reports in the LiveJournal Library Lover's community that John Ashcroft stated that "The federal government will disclose how many times the FBI has sought records from libraries and businesses under the Patriot Act anti-terrorism law."

which is more important - using your laptop on a flight or arriving safely?

The truth about your laptop computer and landing safely - National - smh.com.au

...Over the past decade there have been more than 100 incidents in Australia of navigation system failures, autopilot malfunctions, interference with radio transmissions, incorrect readings from flight management computers and false alerts from engine warning systems - all due to portable devices.
..."You've got to ask, do you want to get there, or do you want to use your laptop?"

more doublespeak from Ashcroft

Ashcroft denounces Patriot Act "hysteria"

In a speech Monday to an American Restaurant Association conference, Ashcroft said people are being wrongly led to believe that libraries have been "surrounded by the FBI," with agents "dressed in raincoats, dark suits and sunglasses. They stop everyone and interrogate everyone like Joe Friday.

"Now, you may have thought with all this hysteria and hyperbole, something had to be wrong," Ashcroft said. "Do we at the Justice Department really care what you are reading? No." [AP as reported in Salon]

Basically, this is John Ashcroft saying, "trust us, we're neither able or willing to track what everyone reads." This is meant to be comforting, I suppose. That if you're a normal law-abiding citizen, you don't have anything to worry about. But the devil is in the details. I bet that in Ashcroft's book, Muslims aren't normal Americans, neither are recent immigrants (especially from the Middle East), nor peace activists or other left-wing activists. So already the scope of who may be spied upon is greater than it appeared from Ashcroft's words.

It's true that your average suburban Republican-voting church-attending family of 2.4 probably doesn't have a thing to worry about - yet. Civil liberties are first eroded on the fringes, not in the middle. It's easier that way, because it's someone else's problem. But that doesn't mean that it's going to stop there. What about political opponents?

John Ashcroft, if you really want to reassure people, give us the numbers of how often you use these expanded police powers in libraries. Make it so that there's real judicial oversight based on a standard of at least probable cause. Ensure that there's accountability when these powers are abused. Or if libraries are really so unimportant in the War Against Terror, and these powers so insignificant, then drop them altogether!

final post in the Salon / Radio version of this blog

new address: http://explodedlibrary.typepad.com/salonblog/
I'm also switching the explodedlibrary.info domain redirect so that it goes to TypePad

The link to the RSS feed is at the very top right. Please subscribe to it!

TypePad has been my primary blogging tool for the last few weeks. I've been very impressed with it. During this time Radio version of the blog has just been a glorified mirror of the TypePad version. Still, it takes extra work to maintain this - especially when I already have a LiveJournal mirror. So that's why, with some mixed feelings, I'm saying goodbye to this Salon blog and the Salon blogs community server. (There isn't a way that I can tie my TypePad blog into the Salon community server, is there? Please let me know if there is) I'll also be on the Salon blog web ring.

Please bear in mind that my TypePad blog is still a work in progress. I haven't finished my blog rolls yet - which will be more extensive. I had planned to convert all of my Radio blog to TypePad, but I'm not sure if it's really worth the effort - which would involve recategorizing all of my posts. So my main focus is on cutting loose the Radio version of this blog. Doing that will give me more time (and more importantly, energy and enthusiasm) to continue improving the TypePad version of my blog.

So far as I know, the Radio version will continue to exist as a static cobweb - so the links to those postings will continue to work.

recently updated: the About Me page

In preparation for my impending move from Radio, I thought that it was time to update this. There will eventually be a photo there, but I'm having dsl problems which makes it a pain to upload images right now (if you have dsl, do not switch local phone companies without first checking that they "support" your 3rd party dsl provider!)

11 September 1803, 1973, 2001 + why do things fade into history?

September 11. This automatically bring most of us back to the terrorist attacks of 2001. It seems that this is not just a day, but a shared emotion and the beginning of a new epoch.

But this is not universal. For the supporters of those responsible for the atrocity, this day is a glorious victory.

And for others, 11 September 2001 is dwarfed by what happened on that same day in other years.

There's 11 September 1973. Thirty-years ago, Chile's democratically-elected leader Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup staged by Augusto Pinochet. The coup was supported by the Nixon administration, and led to Pinochet's 16.5 years of harsh dictatorship, during which time over 3,000 citizens were killed for political reasons and many others were tortured.

For the Tasmanian aborigines, 11 September 1803 is remembered as the day that whites first settled in Tasmania, which lead to one of the most devastating attempts of genocide made against any people.

musing about the role of erosion and cataclysm in history

There's a danger in dividing events between what's current/relevant and what's historic/old, because really everything should be in the past tense, whether in an event is only seconds old, or hours, years or centuries old. Also, everything in the past is somehow relevant to the present, in some way or another.

Still, people tend to forget and ignore the past, and focus on current events So even if it's not the best way of viewing happenings, I want to explore how "news" becomes "history."

So when does an important event become relegated to history? Although it happened two years ago, 11 September 2001 seems very much like a present event, because it was the cause of so much that is happening in the world right now. What started on that day is still playing out right now.

What about the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989? I imagine that its impact would be more enduring and relevant to people in the former Eastern bloc, because that was when their world underwent a seizmic shift and it hasn't really changed to such an extent since then.

But as the strains in the trans-Atlantic alliances between the US and Western Europe are showing, World War Two seems like a long time ago now. Was this caused by the passing of time or the end of communism - or both?

I want to explore this geological view of history for a moment. Most of the time, the landscape is continually being changed by gradual erosion. But every so often, an extraordinary event happens such as an earthquake, volcano, meteorite which tears up the existing landscape and remakes it in its own image. The impact of this event will persist until the next extraordinary event happens, or if enough time passes to allow erosion to erase almost all of its traces.

Applying this to history, an extraordinary event like 11 September 2001 will stay current and relevant until the next cataclysmic occurence or enough time passes (50 years? 100 years?) to wear down its importance and relevance.

Just as in geology, what's relevant and current will vary from place to place. The big event of one place is not going to be the big event of another place. It's the same with people and history.