Christmas lights on the Internet

Courtesy Ken and Rebecca-Ellen Woods, everyone out there in Internet-land is invited to play with their Christmas lights via the Internet. I am re-posting that invitation here:

As part of our Christmas tradition, Rebecca-Ellen and I have onceagain connected our Christmas lights to the internet. This year we'rein a new house and have a new baby!

http://christmasinfairbanks.com

This project started in 2010, when we connected our Christmas treelights to the internet and allowed visitors from around the world toturn the lights on and off.

The lights moved outside in 2011, as it was quite annoying to have thelights blink on and off ALL THE TIME inside the house.

The 2012 season offered more lights, but Christmas 2013 brought pressattention. We received over 6.5 million visitors after beinginterviewed by NPR.

We moved into a new house in February 2014. And Kenny and I welcomedour son, Axel, to the world in July. You'll likely see all three of uscoming and going as you turn the lights on and off! You're not goingto break anything by messing with them, so don't be shy.

There might be some delay depending on the number of current userstrying to view the lights. The site works best with Chrome, Firefox,and Safari (it's operational with Internet Explorer, but it takes awhile for the site to load because IE is an awful web browser).

Feel free to send this far and wide. Post on Facebook, twitter, writeit in your Christmas card, whatever you wish. The site will remainactive until mid-January 2015.

Have fun, and a merry solstice to all!

2009 in review

Once again it is that time of year: resolutions and reflections to gird oneself for adventure and mud-slogging for the days of the coming year. In some ways, this was a pretty rough year. So, here's how it looked last year:

January
The Stones' house caught fire.

A letter from Emmonak was published, and all hell broke loose. Sarah didn't notice, though.

I began my descent into ukulele madness, with the purchase of a brand-new baritone uke. Little did I know that this was the start of serious musical obsession. Woo-hoo!

Obama was sworn in to the presidency, and Service was Restored.

I received notice of my 30-year high school reunion. O gads.

February
Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir assumed the post of Iceland's prime minister. This is notable because she is Iceland's first female prime minister and she is openly lesbian.

The Fairbanks North Star Borough School Board decided that bullying on the basis of gender identity was every bit as nasty as discrimination or harrasment on some other basis.

Dave Lacey died of cancer.

March
The Republic's publisher and contributors and fans celebrated ten years of crazed publishing in a MAJOR party with live music (Back Cu'ntry Bruthers and the Slippin' Mickeys) and the Publisher's Picks.

I joined Facebook and set up a page for the Republic. Now it's become a major time drain…WAY too much fun.

I helped organize the first of a series of CSA roundtables at my university job. The group that has arisen from this, the Alaska Community Agriculture Association, gives me a little hope that Alaska may yet feed itself and with good, wholesome food.

I was invited to speak at the Alaska Press Club annual meeting as part of a panel of bloggers. It was quite entertaining, but I got stuck in Anchorage (flight cancellation on account of belching volcano). One of the big topics was Mike Doogan's outing of Mudflats, the resultant fracas, and whether it was appropriate for bloggers to be anonymous. Hans drove down to fetch me, o noble spouse that he is.

April
The Ester Republic got a new office! Photos here and here. Here too.

John Reeves decided to shake things up in Ester a bit with a nuclear power plant proposal. Ester may or may not be a nuke-free zone.

May
Lee Shauer, Dwight Deely, and Linda Patrick committed suicide, all in one week. Ester was reeling.

The Banana Girls Ukulele Marching Band started practicing for the 4th of July. I started taking strum classes with Jean McDermott.

June
The Ester Community Market began its second season.

Emma Creek West reared its ugly head again. Or rather, Land Management did, with an old, previously rejected development plan. They just don't get it.

July
The Ester Fourth of July parade was GREAT. And the Banana Girls were there.

Sarah Palin's resignation speech got edited by Vanity Fair. More hilarity I haven't had in a LONG time.

August
The Onion once again published prophecy, this time on how Congress works not to provide health care.

Our cat Archie died of throat cancer.

September
I found a great song to learn.

Adam and Kelly Hullin of Wasilla embarrassed themselves publicly in an interview in the Frontiersman. Sadly, they probably have no clue just how stupid they made themselves appear. Sigh. Another blow to the Alaskan reputation.

October
Marjorie Kowalski Cole, scheduled to be the first speaker for the Ester library lecture series, was unable to make it but sent in her talk in written form anyway.

Mike Musick ran for borough assembly again and won, but Luke Hopkins and Tammie Wilson had to go through a runoff.

November
I got serious about Facebook.

Monique Musick gave the first lecture for the John Trigg Ester Library, a slide show and talk on her trip to China in 2008.

December
Marjorie Kowalski Cole died of cancer. I sent her book of poetry to the printer.

Addendum 1/5/10: (I never did a 2008 in review post), 2007 in review, 2006 in review

Yes Men muzzled by my old ISP

Hurricane Electric used to provide hosting for my website. I've since been on another host, and it's a good thing. Hurricane Electric doesn't know that parody is protected speech. From the Yes Men:

US Chamber Shuts off TheYesMen.org and Websites of Hundreds of Other Activist Groups

Free Speech, Free Commerce Threatened by "Free Trade" Champion

Hundreds of activist organizations had their internet service turned off last night after the US Chamber of Commerce strong-armed an upstream provider, Hurricane Electric, to pull the plug on The Yes Men and May First / People Link, a 400-member-strong organization with a strong commitment to protecting free speech.

"This is a blow against free speech, and it demostrates in gory detail the full hypocrisy of the Chamber," said Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men. "The only freedom they care about is the economic freedom of large corporations to operate free of the hassles of science, reality, and democracy."

After suffering embarrassment at the hands of the Yes Men on Monday, the Chamber immediately threatened legal action, then followed through Thursday by sending a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice to Hurricane Electric Internet Services. In the DMCA notice, the Chamber claimed that the parody Chamber website operated by The Yes Men constituted copyright infringement, and demanded that the site be shut down immediately and that the creator's service be canceled.

But the Yes Men are not served directly by Hurricane Electric, but by May First / People Link. And when Hurricane Electric shut down the fake Chamber of Commerce site (now relocated), they also took down the websites of 400 other organizations.

May First / People Link fought back. They immediately "mirrored" the site, and then quickly negotiated with Hurricane Electric to restore service to their other members.

"The DMCA attacks the critically important right we have to effectively comment and criticize institutions and companies," said May First/People Link Co-Director Alfredo Lopez. "It's an undemocratic, backwards law, a perfect example of how the government shouldn't intrude on our lives. But the Chamber was perfectly happy to use it to stomp on the Yes Men's rights to free spech, and the rights of hundreds of other organizations to operate on the web."

The 400 May First / People Link members weren't the only victims of the Chamber's action on Thursday. Today is the start of the national release of the Yes Men's new film, The Yes Men Fix the World. The film is being released in a number of independent theaters - who, not being part of a chain, are heavily dependent on the Yes Men website for selling tickets to the film. The Chamber's actions thus impinge on the ability of these small businesses to turn a profit.

"The Chamber claims to represent 3 million businesses of every size, yet their actions undermined a fair number of small businesses," said Mike Bonanno of the Yes Men. "The Chamber is clearly much less interested in actual freedom, economic or otherwise, than in the license of their largest members to operate free from the scientific consensus." (The Chamber has opposed or refused to endorse a climate bill, the absurdity of which the Yes Men's Monday action was designed to highlight.)

This isn't the first time a Yes Men site has found itself targeted by a DMCA complaint brought by a large corporation. The Yes Men have in the past received DMCA notices from Exxon, Dow Chemical, DeBeers, and the New York Times. In each case, the the Yes Men (represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation) refused to comply, and prevailed. Even the George W. Bush campaign sent a complaint to try to interrupt service to GWBush.com, in 2000, resulting in extensive ridicule that culminated in Bush's mind-boggling gaffe that "There ought to be limits to freedom."

Given that I regularly run parody, satire, and even the occasional press release by the Yes Men, I have to say that I'm glad I am not hosted by Hurricane anymore, and after this, I recommend that anyone looking for an ISP avoid them like the plague.

We're screwed

Yep, that's what the headline reads in the New York Post. Well, the edition published by the Yes Men, that is. From the press release:

Early this morning, nearly a million New Yorkers were stunned by the appearance of a "special edition" New York Post blaring headlines that their city could face deadly heat waves, extreme flooding, and other lethal effects of global warming within the next few decades. The most alarming thing about it: the news came from an official City report. [74-page PDF]

Distributed by over 2000 volunteers throughout New York City, the paper has been created by The Yes Men and a coalition of activists as a wake-up call to action on climate change. It appears one day before a UN summit where Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon will push 100 world leaders to make serious commitments to reduce carbon emissions in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate conference in December. Ban has said that the world has "less than 10 years to halt (the) global rise in greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences for people and the planet," adding that Copenhagen is a "once-in-a-generation opportunity."

Although the 32-page New York Post is a fake, everything in it is 100% true, with all facts carefully checked by a team of editors and climate change experts.

Climate change is no joke, folks, and it's stunts like these that are attempting to get through the massive cultural denial we have about it. Humor is often effective at reaching people so they can bear to think about a horrible thing—and maybe do something about it.

Alaska, like the city of New York, is actually looking at the effects of climate change, rather than pretending it's not happening. Alaska, of course, is already feeling the effects—the Scenarios Network for Alaska Planning at UAF has produced several reports and projections on climate and how things like hydropower projects, water availability, growing season length, and permafrost will be affected by it.

Desperate Househusband makes the News-Miner

Dan Darrow got himself the spotlight article this week at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. And, speaking as his regular publisher, I can attest to the truth of this little tidbit:

“I wait for the deadline to come and panic,” he said.

Yep, that's my cartoonist.

The article describes his lampoons of Sarah Palin. This month's is a doozy…

Metablogging on WAR investigations

In response to this question from Phil Munger at Progressive Alaska: "What is the most important thing I learned about our on-line community during the Ross nomination process?" here is a little metablogging:

One of the topics I frequently blog about is that of community--community in the physical sense and also in the virtual sense. A community is not made of people who all think the same way, it is people who share a space. Bloggers share the blogosphere, although they are, figuratively and literally, all over the map. The community of Alaska bloggers is connected by links and the readers who traverse those linkages--and by the effect their words have on the rest of the world. Wayne Anthony Ross' nomination brouhaha further emphasized for me that Alaska bloggers are a VERY powerful force for investigative journalism, essentially because we work together, piecing together parts of a story, confirming research by others and catching errors or refuting rumor or lies.

This is not to say that blogging is journalism--it's a different animal--but by taking advantage of the biases or interests or skills of the different bloggers out there, a group of bloggers can focus in on all aspects of a situation in a rapid, in-depth, interconnected way. Rather than one tight story with all the loose ends tidied, one gets a big tangled knot of a discussion/investigation with lots of threads leading off into other arenas. And some bloggers, of course, have a penchant for trying to make sense of the whole, so we get overviews, too. (I think the medium lends itself to being succinct. Mostly.)

With Ross, we discovered several people and issues, emphasizing and researching that which interested us--so a full picture developed of who Ross was, what this nomination might mean for many different groups (Natives, gays, women, children, lawyers, gun collectors, hunters, legislators, etc.) as well as the overall state overall, what the process of nomination entailed, the relationship of the governor to her nominee, and so on. And by developing this picture over many days and many blogs, many people learned about him—and obviously decided that he wasn't making a pleasant view. We achieved influence.

There was an interesting news story on Democracy Now! this morning about how an investigation into the murder of a journalist was solved by newspeople from different media and papers working together. The Chauncy Bailey Project was, to the reporters working on it, a novel sort of collaboration (rather than a competition to, say, get the story out first), but this happens all the time on the web. Bloggers rely on collaboration, in fact, through linking and quoting other bloggers, through the people who comment, through anything on the web or that can be placed on the web. And these days, that's pretty much anything.

When we make a conscious effort to collaborate, to make, in effect, a temporary intentional community, we've got a good chance of discovering the truth of things--and that, I think, speaks for itself. Certainly it did in this case.

Still in Anchortown

Well, my flight got canceled. Rather than spend five hours at the airport waiting for a flight that might or might not actually go anywhere, I decided to stay another night and attend some more of the Alaska Press Club conference. I had to catch the bus as Dimitra had already left. I'd forgotten what it was like, it's been so long since I've used a bus. All kinds of interesting people.

It's snowing. Big fat fluffy flakes that turn to slush fairly quickly.

Last night's blogger panel was pretty lively. It was especially interesting meeting people I've only known or heard of via the internet: Phil Munger, Andrew Halcro, Shannyn Moore. I've met Amanda Coyne and I think also Tony Hopfinger in the flesh.

Today the conference has been fairly low-key, given the dearth of speakers and attendees (volcanic ash in the vicinity does tend to put a damper on get-togethers like this), but good. Tonight is the Anchorage Press party, which ought to be fun.

Panel o' bloggers

Yours truly has been invited to participate in an Alaska Press Club J-Week panel titled "Yoda Sez: Always in Motion is the Future." The panelists include bloggers Andrew Halcro, Shannyn Moore, Tony Hopfinger, Amanda Coyne, me, Kyle Hopkins, and Dan Fagan. The moderator is Jay Barrett, the news director at KMXT Radio in Kodiak. What I'm doing in with this bunch I can't figure out, but hey, it appealed to my ego and I had the money, so (assuming Mt. Redoubt doesn't belch again) tomorrow morning I will be flying down to Anchorage to bluff my way with the best of them.

Guess I'd better renew my membership.

Neil Davis on Sleep in Saturdays with Matt Want

Matt Want hosts a local talk show on 660-KFAR on Saturday mornings from 10 to 11 am, choosing a different topic each week. This Saturday's topic is the US health care system and Neil Davis has been invited to be on the show. You can call in with questions or ask for advice; the phone number is 907.458.8255 (458-TALK).

(Cross-posted on the Health Care Morass blog)

Apparently a lot of Want's regular callers are a fairly conservative lot, and not pleased with the idea of socialized medicine, so it should be a lively discussion.

Any Old Time for your main peace and love man

Lori Neufeld, volunteer coordinator on KUAC, asked me to post this message about Dave Lacey:

We will miss Doctor Dave dearly here at KUAC. The past and present Oldies hosts are planning a memorial show for Saturday. Any Old Time will also be in honor of Dave's amazing contributions to our community. So tune in to KUAC starting at 7pm for music and remembrances of our dearly departed Dave Lacey, your main peace and love man.

The KUAC tribute to Dave ought to be something special; Dave's voice and choice of music enlivened many an evening here. Any Old Time starts at 7 pm and the Oldies Show starts at 10 pm on Saturday night.

Emmonak: this is outrageous

The rural-urban divide in Alaska has never been more stark. Here's a village in the middle of economic/subsistence meltdown, so to speak, and there's hardly anything in the news about it. The villages are starting to have to choose between food and fuel oil. Back in the bad old days, people starved and died if there wasn't enough food. There was no alternative. However, we're supposedly living in modern times, in the richest state in the richest country in the world. This isn't supposed to happen in the safety net that civilization should provide.

How the hell can this occur?

Well, for one thing, our whole civilization, and in particular our state, is geared toward dependence on nonrenewable fuels and extraction and exploitation of natural resources--again, in particular the nonrenewable ones. We aren't geared toward sustainable practices and renewable resources. In some ways, the plight of this village could very well be the plight of Alaska in relation to the rest of the world: we're a colony, utterly dependent on Outside to keep us going. Emmonak's situation is a grim microcosmic example of what Alaska could find itself foundering in should we find our economic or transportation links to the Lower 48 cut or reduced.

Part of the issue here is that Palin doesn't seem to think it too urgent to keep the position of rural advisor filled. She left it unfilled for the first year of her administration, and it's been vacant again ever since Rhonda McBride resigned last October.

Another part is that it isn't like no one saw this coming. Emmonak's been jumping up and down about problems ever since the barges couldn't get through last fall. Remember that? But even before that, there's been rumbling of a building emergency. When even Hugo Chavez down in Venezuela was able to tell that heating fuel prices were having a serious effect on the villages of Alaska, why couldn't we do something about it? Chavez sent emergency supplies a year ago. Did Palin?

Well, as Kodiak Konfidential points out, Chavez is saving the villages' bacon once again. Oil state Alaska, getting foreign assistance from Venezuela:

Venezuelan government officials wasted no time in reinstating the program, which saved some 180,000 US households around $260 apiece in 2008. That covered about one month's heating bill.

Among the beneficiaries of the 100 gallons of heating oil per household were 65 Indian tribes, including those in Alaska, Montana, and South Dakota.

Alejandro Granado, the chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Citgo Petroleum, the Venezuelan government's Houston-based oil subsidiary, said he discussed the plan to renew the program with Chávez on Wednesday morning.

The decision "is the result of a strong commitment and a big effort on the part of Citgo and our shareholders in light of the current global financial crisis and its impact on the oil industry in general," Mr. Granado said in a press statement.

Pretty humiliating, wouldn't you say, Sarah? Too bad so little was done about this after the first oil handout. Maybe if we'd had a rural advisor in office this might have been anticipated and SOMETHING DONE ABOUT IT.

Here's some posts about Emmonak:

Alaska Real quotes from the original letter to the editor, and gives a followup.

Progressive Alaska has also been spreading the word across the blogosphere.

Mudflats rightly asks if anyone is listening.

And Denis Zaki of Alaska Report is flying out to Emmonak to film.

If you want to help, you can contact any one of several organizations in Emmonak:

City of Emmonak, (907) 949-1227/1249
Emmonak Sacred Heart Catholic Church Pastoral Parish Council Chairman, (907) 949-1011.

To assist with offsetting heating fuel costs, call Emmonak Corporation, (907) 949-1129/1315/1411

For distribution of food, contact the tribal council:
Emmanok Tribal Council
P.O. Box 126
Emmanok, AK 99581
(907) 949-1720

You can also donate to Dennis Zaki to fly him there so he can cover the story; anything beyond the cost of the trip will go to the emergency relief.

Of shoes and chimps

As a fellow journalist, my hat is off in a gesture of deepest respect for that shoe-flinging member of our trade, who knows a chimp standing in for a president when he sees one. Well, a dog is what he actually called him, but the same idea holds. (Dogs deserve more respect--chimps too, really.)

With almost any other leader of the free world, I'd say this action was out of line and that Muntadhar al-Zaidi would have lost his sense of perspective, but Bush deserves a big fat waffle stomp print right upside the head. No question. Al-Zaidi obviously did what any sane and sensible person, even a journalist, would do when faced with such outrageous, surreal, and irresponsible behavior as has been demonstrated by King Georgie. Alas, most journalists don't seem to recognize anymore just how outrageous Mr. Bush has been.

This is old news now, two days after the incident. When we heard about this on the radio, both I and my noble spousal unit guffawed, but it was tale of the joke at the end of the story that really made me belly laugh, about it being required now "as a matter of national security" that all shoes be removed before going over the border (or to press conferences, I suppose, as pointed out over on Fiery Blazing Handbasket). Shades of our airport security, and about as sensible, hey what?

The video of the incident (actually several versions) has been seen better than 10 million times, making this one of the more popular YouTube flicks, and has already been made into online games. The joke has become popular with Latin American leaders, too. Middle Eastern shoemakers are claiming that it was THEIR shoe that almost whacked the US (p)resident.

Despite the delightful cultural sense of humor intrinsic to this good solid insult, al-Zaidi is in jail, and his family fears he has been badly beaten or tortured. Not good. Doesn't matter if he threw flaming torches or gunfire at the people on stage--the appropriate response, once you have the person in custody, is most certainly not to beat them up.

Max Planck and hot housewives

Those physicists had better make sure they know what they're saying before they publish:

A respected research institute wanted Chinese classical texts to adorn its journal, something beautiful and elegant, to illustrate a special report on China. Instead, it got a racy flyer extolling the lusty details of stripping housewives in a brothel.…Editors had hoped to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover of a special issue, focusing on China, of the MaxPlanckForschung journal, but instead of poetry they ran a text effectively proclaiming "Hot Housewives in action!" on the front of the third-quarter edition.

This story was on the Independent. The Max Planck Institute misprint has ruffled not a few Chinese feathers.

Wonder how that brothel is doing with all the free advertising, though?

He's a star!

Well, sort of. The SunStar ran their center-spread article on the drag show, and there are several lovely photos of the event, including one of our Valkyrie Viking in white frilliness. Much better quality shots than the grainy things I took. Their story says that the group earned over a thousand dollars; I'd heard it was better than $2000. However, that was gross, not net. Several people put in a LOT of money to make the show happen.

It's always really nifty to see people get together for a good cause, but events like this take a lot of effort, a baseline of cash, and a lot of time. It's good when it ends up being fun, too!

The same issue has a nice little story on the various Friday art openings, including a short interview with Sandy Gillespie (at the Annex).

More room for the Internet

Save the Internet reports that the FCC decided it was more important to have the public airwaves saved for the public (gasp!) than for the cable companies. See the Democracy Now! interview with Timothy Karr below. The Seattle Times has a pretty cool opinion piece about the issue by him, too.

Reporters without Borders: US press freedom ranking

Struck by insomnia, I decided to check out Common Dreams and discovered an interesting article by Craig Aaron and Josh Stearns of the Huffington Post about press freedom in the US. The article notes that the Press Freedom Index (put out every year by Reporters Without Borders) places us at #36 out of 173 countries, right on a par with Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cape Verde, South Africa, Spain, and Taiwan. Isn't that special? And, astonishingly, this is an improvement over last year, in which we ranked 44th!

Aaron and Stearns list several contributing items to the US's abysmal ranking:

• media consolidation
• the Pentagon's covert propaganda campaign using retired military officers
• the campaign by phone and cable companies "to dismantle the long-standing principle of Net Neutrality"
• Aaron claims that "nearly 100 journalists were arrested and detained in St. Paul, Minn., while trying to report on the Republican National Convention." (He doesn't say where he got this figure from, though. The highest I've seen to date other than this is 46.) However, it is clearly true that the treatment of protestors and journalists (not to mention medics!) at the RNC was appalling, unconstitutional, and beyond the pale.

The complete report (PDF) is pretty hefty, at least if you're on dialup, like me. There is an article available online giving the highlights. Several other interesting articles are available, too.

The first list was published in 2002, and the US was at 17th place at that point. In 2006, we'd sunk to 53. So I suppose this is the sign of an upward trend, which is heartening, but somehow I can't feel jubilant about 36th place.

More footage of the RNC arrests

This is a video of the arrests at the Take Back Labor Day concert, narrated by a guy from the Glass Bead Collective who interviewed a bunch of people and then buried his video camera so it wouldn't get confiscated. Good thing, huh?



The Minnesota Independent has continued to cover this story, the most recent development being a forum held by the Society of Professional Journalists. Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis Star Tribune has also written about the experiences of St. Paul residents vis-a-vis the protests and arrests.

What 9/11 has brought us

Seven years ago, approximately 3,000 people of many nationalities, ethnicities, and languages died in horrific acts of mass murder committed on the United States' eastern seaboard. The world commiserated with us, offered help and sympathy. We mourned.

Great leaders take the adversities of a nation and inspire their people to rise above them. To offer hope, and direction, and resolve, to move an injured people to do great things, requires a person who can orate, who can give us meaningful, potent words that appeal to our higher selves and make us believe that we can do more, that we are meant to be noble, selfless, brave, generous—a great leader not only leads us to breathe in those words and ideas and feelings, a great leader helps us to find the abilities we need within ourselves to actually be what is needed. Literally, in • spirare, to breathe in.

Unfortunately, we didn't have a great leader.

We had a poor orator and simplistic thinker—but one with a good speechwriter, and with a group of men and women behind him devoted to twisted ideals. And so, when he and they spoke to the nation and the world, we heard an appeal not to our higher selves, but to that which was basest: an appeal to our fear, for revenge. We heard lies. And because our leader had a good speechwriter, and because it is easier to ignite a mob than to inspire a people, far too many of us became inspired to those horrible words.

Since September 11, 2001, we have:

Roused ourselves to war based on deliberate lies. We are now involved in two wars, one very badly executed in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and are flirting with a third. Approximately 1,255,000 Iraqis have died as a result since we invaded.

Indebted ourselves to the tune of 53 trillion dollars.

Tolerated and even accepted torture as an appropriate means of questioning suspects.

Tolerated the idea that not all men are created equal, and some have fewer rights than others. Those with fewer rights can be declared outside the law, by the president, without explanation or proof of anything, and held indefinitely, secretly, and without access to lawyers or family.

Accepted domestic spying, wiretapping without a warrant, and other features of the surveillance state as normal and even necessary.

Marginalized and even criminalized dissent.

Accepted the corruption and trivialization of the major news media.

Never underestimate the power of the spoken word.

42 journalists arrested at the RNC

According to Anna Pratt of the Minnesota Independent, at least 42 journalists were bagged by the cops at the Republican National Convention:

Of the 800-plus people who were arrested or detained in conjunction with RNC protests, a good chunk of them — 42, by our count — were members of the news media. Media representatives in town to cover the events, from both big and small presses, were slapped with citations and pending charges ranging in severity, including unlawful assembly, obstructing the legal process, misdemeanor interference with a peace officer and felony to riot plus other riot pretenses.

Among them were the managing editor of Variety, two AP reporters and one AP photographer, several journalism students, and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, along with a host of other journalists. People are still trying to get their confiscated items back from the police.

I-Witness raided again

Amy Goodman describes the experiences of independent journalists in Minneapolis:

The attack on and arrest of me and the "Democracy Now!" producers was not an isolated event. A video group called I-Witness Video was raided two days earlier. Another video documentary group, the Glass Bead Collective, was detained, with its computers and video cameras confiscated. On Wednesday, I-Witness Video was again raided, forced out of its office location. When I asked St. Paul Police Chief John Harrington how reporters are to operate in this atmosphere, he suggested, "By embedding reporters in our mobile field force."

The police conducted the raid because an informer told them there was a "hostage situation" there. Sounds like the police are either somewhat stupidly using pretty unreliable informers, or they're lying through their teeth. I-Witness is now at the offices of Free Speech TV.