We all owe a debt of gratitude to Jimmy Carter. This is a man that has consistently tried to do what others in the political arena seem unable to do, and that is to live up to their own expectations, regardless of the political costs. His recent trip to the Middle-East was Carter at his finest. While he understood all to well that the compromised, immoral regimes of both Israel and Washington did not support his mission and were unlikely to approve anything that came out of his meetings with Hamas, he chose to go in order to illustrate to the world what these two governments are really about. I believe Carter was successful in illustrating that neither America nor Israel want to pursue a realistic solution for peace. If anything, his visit proved once again, that Israel seeks not peace, but capitulation.

I have been writing about the same things for years now. I have been writing against the loss of our freedoms, the draconian laws that have been enacted in order to “protect” us from people that “hate us for our freedom”, I have written about the corporations that have tied this nation to war and more war. Even though my message has been the same, I find that my writing has fallen on deaf ears as of late. In fact, my writing, because of my criticism of this phony two-party system that has led us to where we are now, I have been banned from OpEdNews.com, DailyKos.com.TPMMuckracker.com, and left me with a small sidebar on SmirkingChimp.com.

My stepson Patrick had a blogger in Iraq Friend his LiveJournal some years ago and I marveled that the people overseas were actually allowed such web latitude. It was a silver lining in the mire to me. It wasn't long ago now though that I read all that had been curtailed. Apparently whatever I had read was incorrect or at least not completely correct. I'm a bit lost now on what the truth is.
    Then today I come across this ThinkProgress piece on the military's contemplation of how they might blog their message across:

Military report: secretly 'recruit or hire bloggers.'

Excuse me if I offend anyone in this article, but I would like to know what happened to the Democratic Party? I always thought of Democrats as those that supported Unions, workers, the middle-class, civil liberties and silly things like that. One thing I was also taught to do was to follow the money when it comes to whom really is supporting who in things such as criminal enterprises and of course, politics. I have been around for a while now, and I believe that I’m just as aware of what’s happening in my own country as anyone else. In fact, I believe that I’m really more aware of what’s happening than most. I am a voracious reader and I have a lot of time on my hands and I actually try to dig behind the rhetoric I hear. What I have found amazes me.

Mick Fealty, one of my favorite bloggers, has a great post up on the virtues of blogging:

Doris Lessing, a novelist of great emotional intelligence . . . appears to back [a] latter day Luddite agenda saying the Internet has "seduced a whole generation by its inanities" and, worse, "even quite reasonable people may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"

It strikes me that if all journalism was to be judged by its lowest common denominator, you might come to the same conclusion about print newspapers. But there are intimations that actually, whoever you are, or however badly you do it, blogging is good for you.

Well said. More here. For the record, I am a fan of Lessing's work and always viewed her as a far-sighted novelists in many ways. So, this attack on blogging is strange.

In 1994, I began my Internet experience, buying my first modem, purchasing my first domain, the WWW was still first generation, and Internet society was largely BBSs and mailing groups.

That modem was a 2400 bd, not state of the art at that point, but that is what was available to the layperson.

Wow did it take off. Everything improved, got better, faster, more graphically intense, faster, more content options, faster, and faster still.

Then the blogs, and at the same time of the advent of blogs, corporate interest in advertising to the masses via blogs.

Enter Yieldmanager.Com, and, concurrently, a backslide to the days of the modem, here in the time of WiFi, Wii, and Korea's absolute - and embarrassing - excellence in Internet speed and accessibility.

At this pivotal moment the Internet is becoming evermore subjugated to commercial interests of a cartel of domineering big media corporations.

Read on here: http://coanews.org/article/2007/our-web-not-theirs">http://coanews.org/article/2007/our-web-not-theirs

(h/t The Vast Jeff Wing Conspiracy)

Richard Aregood | Nov 12 | The Guardian

Beijing denied a story about an Olympic Bible ban spread by the rightwing media but it was actually a Catholic news service that shut it down

The story had everything going for it. It was outrageous. It was emotionally laden. It involved suppression of religion by godless communists. The flurry of attention in the comments section of rightwing political and religious websites was instantaneous. The problem was that it wasn't true.

A recent editorial in the conservative New York Sun kicked off the fuss by citing a report from the Catholic News Service asserting that the Chinese government would bar athletes from bringing Bibles to the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games. Pajamas Media, home of many a rightwing blog, followed up with a report, also citing CNS, and adding the strange cavil "if true".

more after the jump

Humpback whales have "human" brain cells

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Humpback whales have a type of brain cell seen only in humans, the great apes, and other cetaceans such as dolphins, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

This might mean such whales are more intelligent than they have been given credit for, and suggests the basis for complex brains either evolved more than once, or has gone unused by most species of animals, the researchers said.

The finding may help explain some of the behaviours seen in whales, such as intricate communication skills, the formation of alliances, cooperation, cultural transmission and tool usage, the researchers report in The Anatomical Record.

Clare Dyer | London | October 22

The Guardian - Disgruntled fans of Sheffield Wednesday who vented their dissatisfaction with the football club's bigwigs in anonymous internet postings may face expensive libel claims after the chairman, chief executive and five directors won a high-court ruling last week forcing the owner of a website to reveal their identity.

The case, featuring the website owlstalk.co.uk, is the second within days to highlight the danger of assuming that the apparent cloak of anonymity gives users of internet forums and chatrooms carte blanche to say whatever they like.

In another high court case last week, John Finn, owner of the Sunderland property firm Pallion Housing, admitted just before he was due to be cross-examined that he was responsible for a website hosting a scurrilous internet campaign about a rival housing organisation, Gentoo Group, its employees and owner, Peter Walls.

I came across this piece in the NY Times by Katharine Seelye, "Women, Politics and the Internet."

What really caught my attention was the mention of Momocrats, a progressive community blog of online mothers who are pooling their resources to effect political change.

Momocrats was started last month by a group of mothers who are all noted bloggers in their own right and who cross-post on each other’s blogs (CityMama, TechMama, LawyerMama, PunditMom and the Silicon Valley Moms Blog), which are generally about daily life with a dose of politics.

“We belong to this community of mothers who blog and we see the need to bridge the gap between the campaign and the community,”

Godwin's law states: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

A corrollary says that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically "lost" whatever debate was in progress. Why? Because almost always the comparison is laughably hyperbolic. And the few isolated cases where the comparison is accurate are simply and effectively dismissed as being hyperbolic because all the other comparisons are.

But, you say (and you know who are), it's so clear, it's undeniable, the parallels are so obvious!

Last week's discussions on the Agonist about current events in Burma veered, not suprisingly, into discussions of non-violence.

So I was struck by how well the Lawrence Lessig interview on government corruption that I posted earlier illustrates one of Ghandi's key concept of non-violence: satyagraha.

In his Statement to Disorders Inquiry Committee January 5, 1920 (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi vol. 19, p. 206), Ghandi describes satyagraha this way:

Its root meaning is holding on to truth, hence truth-force. I have also called it love-force or soul-force. In the application of satyagraha, I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself.

The three characteristics of Satyagraha are:

1. Satyagraha is a weapon of the strong;
2. it admits of no violence under any circumstance whatever;
3. and it ever insists upon truth.

So what on earth does this have to do with Lawrence Lessig and non-violence in modern day America?

During the many online discussions concerning Jena, La., there was a recurring theme among many bloggers concerning the demonstration held there. The theme revolved around two issues; the first being that because Mr. Bell was not pristine as a defendant then the cause of the protests were somehow tainted and didn’t live up to the marches of the 60’s. The second issue was that there were bigger issues that should have also brought out protests in the black community that are happening without a whimper. I think to dismiss these issues out of hand would be a mistake and would damage the credibility of not only the case in Jena, but any future cases as well.

Yesterday night we came within a whisker of the Senate de facto declaring war on Iran. If it were not for the courageous leadership of Senators Jim Webb and Dick Durbin, notorious Vice-presidential henchmen and self-appointed armchair generals Senators Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyl could very likely have pulled off the stunt to commit the Senate to regime change in Iran and cater the Vice with more preemptive obedience than he could have ever asked for. With such a Congressional carte blanche, a trump to lead whenever suitable, the path to war would have been irreversibly trodden, its apologists afterwards being able to refer to full Congressional support for their warmongering.

Matt Bai has a very interesting piece in the LA Times; Democrats, look West

"A new breed of 'progressives' is shifting the party's center of gravity from the South and Northeast.

This new progressive movement, which now exerts a strong gravitational pull on the direction of Democratic politics, is a national phenomenon, but much of its financing and intellectual energy comes from the West."

I think Bai is spot on with this last statement. Much of the "new progressivism" has emerged from a very tech savvy online community which has much of its roots on the West Coast. I've always considered that the early (1980's) online communities and ideologies represented two distinct traditions; libertarian and communitarian. Much of those early online political and cultural values have shaped the modern online progressive activist ideology.

On Friday I met with an acquaintance who is a prominent business blogger. We had lunch, and we chatted about blogging and the internet in general, and how it has changed both of our lives. At one point he asked me "is there a middle in the political blogosphere?" I averred that while there was one, it was pretty darn small. He then went on to ask if the lack of a middle meant that two solitudes; two echo chambers, had come into play. Did I even read the right wing blogs (answer: not much.) The question, of course, implicitly suggests that compromise, a middle - a connsensus is good and that extremes are bad.

It's a common question, and here's how I answered it.

I don't have anything to say to people who think that torture is acceptable.

Tim Craig | Richmond | Sept 22

WaPo - A Republican state legislator from Fairfax County has launched an attack ad on cable TV against his Democratic opponent that features unidentified, unverified quotes from a blog.

The ad by Del. Timothy D. Hugo points to a new form of negative campaigning in which information for an attack ad is sourced to comments posted on the Internet instead of more authoritative sources such as news reports or public records.

Hugo's ad highlights critical comments about his Democratic opponent, Rex Simmons, that someone with the screen name "Pitin" posted on the Democratic blog Raising Kaine.

Ads that quote from blogs, on which it is often difficult to identify the author, represent a benchmark in increasingly negative political campaigns, several political analysts said.

Chris Wilson | August 27

US News - The idea of reading a thousand political blogs every day might seem like Geneva-worthy torture, but it's hard to deny that there's some sort of useful information coming out of the blogosphere. Now the good news: you needn't actually read the blogs to find out what it is.

please read on....

80 dollars to read a guys blog?

it's a great blog but.......what?

Online 'hooligans' casting a dark cloud over the blogosphere
IHT

At the height of the presidential election season in France this year, Loïc Le Meur, a popular blogger, was receiving 300 to 400 comments a day from opponents of Nicolas Sarkozy, whose eventually victorious campaign Le Meur supported.

Many of these comments were spreading false rumors about Sarkozy and his wife, Le Meur said, potentially causing him difficulties in a country where even politicians' private lives are protected by law.

So Le Meur turned to an outside firm based in Mauritius, called Modero, which now scans every comment that is posted on his blog, 24 hours a day, filtering out potentially defamatory material, personal attacks or other objectionable content.

for the Blog Reader Project by Blog Ads, Pamela Leavey is my new heroine! And 3/4 of all Agonistas should be very proud of the fact that within the last month they have not shopped at the world's largest retailer.

Sean Paul--I have listened to you on the Chris Duell show, even spoken you on one occasion. I do not understand why your opinions, and like minded individuals who many refer to as "liberals", speak and write with such seeming hatred toward people who differ in your beliefs? I know "conservatives" are quite critical of liberals, but I don't hear the absolute hatred in their voice or written word. Some of the comments I read on this web site and The Huffington Post when Chief Judge Roberts fell were appalling. If I were the judge I think I would honestly fear for my life. It's truly scary what some liberal thinking people say. I really have not seen that kind of hatred on other sites. I'm not saying there is not hatred toward liberals, but it is truly amazing how some of your comments on KTSA 550 are dripping with venom toward conservatives.

Don Mitchell CBE QC, former Justice of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court and the man behind the excellent Corruption Free Anguilla Blog is being Sued by 4 ministers who feel libeled in a post he wrote a couple weeks ago.

Also Do you think Anguillan politicians are corrupt?

Comments and support would be welcome at Don's site.

Caribdude