I'm not really into following all the 911 conspiracy stuff, because I think that ultimately we will never, ever know the truth. It will be just like the JFK assasination, with people 40, 50 years later still writing books and making movies explaining what they think "really" happened. But it's like arguing about the bible, there will be no way to ever know for sure.

However, my housemate just pointed me to
a great video called "Pentagon Strike" that does a really good job of asking some good questions about what really happened at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Also notable is the style of the video - very hip, fast-paced, attention-grabbing, great graphics and animations. Kind of like GNN's style, which has always been a big inspiration to me. This kind of documentary work is really important in getting people informed who would otherwise not sit through documentaries. Draw in the MTV couch potatoes with Marilyn Manson music and lots of footage of fire and wreckage, but then hammer them with some really shocking quotes and analysis. yes.

Winter seems to be starting early here in Portland, screwing up all sorts of hoped-for "last nice days of the year," at least in my humble opinion. Read more>>>

Beautiful sunny rainy day. Weather forecast says 10 days, at least, of rain, but today we are rewarded with strange 5-minute showers while the sun shines. Typical Portland Spring or Fall weather.

I'm sitting at Tiny's Cafe on the porch. It's one of my favorite wireless access points cuz there's a porch with tables, and it's not RIGHT on the street, though there's still busy Hawthorne Street nearby. Portland needs more outdoor places to eat and drink that are not on fucking heavy traffic streets. But I guess that's not a big priority. If people really liked being outside a lot they wouldn't live here.

Anyway it started raining so i moved inside with my laptop, and then it stopped after 5 minutes so now i'm back out. yay.

The Yes Men are touring the country, mostly visiting swing states in their special "Yes, Bush Can!" bus. They're in Oregon right now!

I'm just gonna whine about various stupid personal things right now. Don't mind me.

( I think ultimately this mood i'm in, which has been around for awhile, is due to the fact that I know I have to leave this town that i love, and I have to figure out where I'm going and how, very very soon.)

First, my ibook's display is dying, or rather some connection between it and the rest of the computer seems flaky. As I move it back and forth the display flickers on and off. It's out of warranty so i'll probably have to spend mucho plata to get it fixed. Which I don't really have.

Someone's been sawing something with a loud power saw in my neighborhood for the last 20 hours or so and it's really fucking annoying. Why does there always have to be a fucking powertool going all the time?

It's a beautiful day but I have a buttload of stuff I need to do, stuff that involves sitting in a dark cement basement staring at a computer... My life is this constant struggle between Production and Relaxation. I just want to live a stress-free, care-free, relaxed life, I want to drift like a taoist and enjoy every shred of nice weather that i posisbly can before there is no more or before I die, but I also have all these ambitions, these videos I want to make and shit it's just maddening.

I keep thinking of Derrick Jensen's "A Language Older than Words" in which he talks about how our culture values production over anything else, over people and community, especially. When I distilled his thesis down as far as it would go I came up with:

Production = Murder

But escaping that aspect of our culture is about as hard as escaping commerce. I mean, we are soaking in it. And if you have goals, even the goal of tearing down the master's house with the master's tools, well, shit, you need to produce. You're not going to dismantle the system by lying on the beach. Unless we can get everyone in the whole world to lie on the beach instead of going to work. But that involves production right there, getting that message out there.

In other news, first thing in the morning today one of my housemates put on a Shellac album, the one that starts with "Prayer to God," which is a song I dearly love, one of my favorite songs ever, for it's sheer ferocity and the lesson it conveys about religion and hate and love. But it's one of the last songs I would pick to listen to first thing on a beautiful cloudless saturday morning full of possibility. I just don't understand people sometimes. Well, most of the time. I think maybe my use of music as precise emotion-matching ambience, something to positively support your mindset at any given moment, is something most people don't think about very deeply. It's just "good music" and it doesn't matter what mood you're in or how it might change that mood.

It made me want to do something drastic like sell every one of my CDs.

ok, enough griping. thanx.

I was just pointed to the excellent Campaign Desk, analyzing campaign coverage, and this entry in particular, a summary and praise of a very good election prediction article with facts and good stats to back it up. A good conclusion reads:

Unlike so many political writers, Cook doesn't try to force-feed a prediction upon his readers. Rather, he takes them by the hand and guides them, fact by incontrovertible fact, through the probabilities at work in any election, and the known facts at work in this election -- and at the end of the trail, he leaves them to make their own way home, informed by real information, not by bluster or one-sided passion or crystal ball readings.

Mark Morford has brought us another great and timely rant, Who The Hell Is "Undecided"? / And why do so many election polls leave you angry and stupefied and drunk? He talks about how ridiculous it is that Kerry was ahead after the DNC and suddenly Bush is ahead after the RNC, and just barely hints at the manipulation going on, that of course the candidates are neck and neck because that gets people to watch TV and buy newspapers.

He also links to an interesting story about a poll that says most people in other countries, by a 5 to 1 margin, want Bush out. Of course, yeah, I believe that, but I still think that poll is as useless as all the others, and even more useless is the way it was reported. Never did they mention the list of 35 countries that were surveyed. 35 is not a lot, it would have been easy to list them. Never did they question that maybe 35 thousand is not a sufficient sampling of 6 billion. Oh well. Again, I'm not saying I disagree, I of course believe with all my heart and head that the people of the world for the most part hate Bush with a burning passion. It's just disturbing how statistics are spun.

A local artist on a local art mailing list (that I'm not on) posted something about a big warehouse in the southeast central industrial district being sold for 3 times market price. This warehouse is the location of studio space for many artists, and the writer was bemoaning the situation and proposing some sort of vague struggle against the further gentrification of the area.

So the message was forwarded to another list that I am on and the whole thing reminded me so much of what happened in the Mission District in San Francisco when I was living there. I decided to write a little rant about it: Read more>>>

Wow, here's another good article on Portland Indymedia about political violence. I only saw this because there happens to be a little controversy on our internal mailing list over whether we should feature it. There's a lot of partisanship within our IMC, and this kind of article falls right across the battlelines, so to speak.

Anyway, I haven't read it all, it's long, but I really am excited to see it, because the debate is really very important in today's movement(s).

Just found this story on the portland imc site about Columbia Sportswear and the conditions there. This is the kind of great local articles that makes Indymedia great. Wow.

I'm particularly interested in the sweatshop issue because clients I have had are in the apparel industry. I don't feel good about that at all, but consequently I try to do what I can to get the word out and do other activism around the issue.