Freezing rain is falling here in Portland. I can't wait to get out of here and head south in a couple weeks.

It's funny, the range of behavior in people here when it's cold. Some crazy wierdos wear shorts and t-shirts no matter what time of year. Others don't know how to deal with it. Drivers are all idiots here in this weather, they're so unused to these road conditions. I saw out my living room window this morning a woman getting her car ready to drive. She got out some can of some spray-on stuff and squirted it all over her windows. Like ice is some magically difficult substance that you need some weird chemical to get off your car? what ever happened to just a scraper and a little elbow grease?

Anyway, I'm from Iowa so I remember worse, but that doesn't change the fact that I hate this. I can have better, and I will. I was in Porto Alegre this time last year, drinking Brazilian beers on a floating bar on the shore of the Rio Guiua.

Oh well, at least I don't have to go far today. All I need to do is go a few blocks to Free Geek later today and build some computers to send to Bolivia.

but anyway, Fuck Winter.

It looks like Bolivia's 2nd Water War has already come to a satisfactory conclusion, in favor of the people of El Alto. President Carlos Mesa has agreed to cancel the contract with Aguas del Illimani, a French company. I've just discovered a blog by Jim Shultz, head of the Democracy Center in Cochabamba and the main reason the North found out about the first Water War in 2000. The latest entry of his blog has great details about the El Alto situation. He says that unlike the Cochabamba water war "To the government

It looks like a big hacker conference is happening
in Santa Cruz, Bolivia in early March. Seems like this would be a good way to find geeks who would want to help with the Computers for Bolivia Project. Hmm. We are very close to being able to ship the machines, but the big unknown is still: who will be there to set them up and train people at their destination?

A silly java applet lets you manipulate refrigerator magnets with dozens of other internet users at once. Warning: can be very frustrating.
UPDATE:
It's really quite an interesting lesson in complexity and emergent behavior.
To have a more controlled experiment, I installed one on my server.

I wrote a few days ago about Immanuel Wallerstein and his writings on the rise and fall of Liberalism. Here's a great passage from his essay called "The Collapse of Liberalism":

We may emerge from the transition from historical capitalism to something else, say circa 2050, with a new system (or multiple systems) that is (are) highly inegalitarian and hierarchical, or we may emerge with a system that is largely democratic and egalitarian: It depends on whether or not those who prefer the latter outcome are capable of putting together a meaningful strategy of political change.

It's interesting that he wrote this about 13 years ago, long before the current surge in what he could call "antisystemic" activistism that exploded with the Seattle WTO protests in '99, and even before the Zapatista uprising in '94. A lot of his advice is still good, and at the same time resonates with what has already BEEN happening. He talks about how there must be "a definitive break with the strategy of achieving social transformation via the aquisition of state power." I believe a large part of the current progressive movement has accepted that idea. He also talks about the central agent of change will be groups, lots and lots of different but equal groups, who recognize each others' rights and work together but are not a unified mass, do not attempt to form one centralized huge group. "Democratic centralism is the exact opposite of what is needed."

Such a coherent, nonunified family of forces can only be plausible if each constituent group is itself a complex, internally democratic structure. And this in turn is possible only if, at the collective level, we recognize that there are no strategic priorities in the struggle. One set of rights for one group is no more important than another set for another group. The debate about priorities is debilitating and deviating and leads back to the garden path of unified groups ultimately merged into a single unified movement. The battle for transformation can only be fought on all fronts at once.

(italics are mine)

It's impossible to read that and not think of current events and debates in the progressive activist world.

The second Bolivian war over water, this time in El Alto, appears to be heating up. My spanish isn't good enough to really understand this article well enough, but people I know there are extremely busy over this.

Dynebolic is a boot-from-CD, running-out-of-the-box Linux distribution. Looks somewhat like Knoppix, but it's specifically aimed at multimedia producers, media activists, and artists. Loaded with sound and video editing tools, encoders, and the like. Wow. I'd like to try this out. Runs on the Xbox, too! Seems too good to be true. I've been wanting to see a really good bulletproof linux video editing program that is easy to install and works with firewire. That just works. If linux gets there I will stop needing to buy macs and I'd be really happy.

I've been reading this book of essays by Immanuel Wallerstein called "After Liberalism." (props to Jennifer Whitney for recommending him, though not this particular book). I've been interested for a while in the word "liberal" - what it means, why it's used as a perjorative in both right-wing and "radical" circles, and what its history is. In this book Wallerstein, an esteemed sociologist, goes into the birth of liberalism as an ideology, along with 2 other ideologies, socialism and conservatism, as a result of the French Revolution. His thesis is basically that that was the beginning of ideology itself, and those 3 were really just 3 flavors of the same thing, which developed and influenced each other but were basically after the same thing: "maintaining order" in a world where constant political change, for the first time, was normalized. Pretty fascinating stuff.

Additionally he asserts that with the fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1989 not only is communism over but liberalism is too. He writes a lot about colonialism and the "rights of peoples" as opposed to "human rights." Here is an excellent passage at the end of an essay called "The Insurmountable Contradictions of Liberalism":

What is the argument put forward in Great Britain, Germany,
France, the United States? That we (the North) cannot assume
the burdens (that is, the economic burdens) of the whole world,
Well, why not? Merely a century ago, the same North was assuming
the "White man's burden" of a "civilizing mission" among the
barbarians. Now the barbarians, the dangerous classes, are saying
Thank you very much. Forget about civilizing us; just let us have
some human rights, like, say, the right to move about freely and
take jobs where we can find them.

The self-contradiction of liberal ideology is total. If all humans
have equal rights, and all peoples have equal rights, we can't
maintain the kind of inegalitarian system that the capitalist world-
economy has always been and always will be. But if this is openly
admitted, then the capitalist world-economy will have no legiti-
mation in the eyes of the dangerous (that is, the dispossessed)
classes. And if a system has no legitimation, it will not survive.

The crisis is total; the dilemma is total. We shall live out its con-
sequences in the next half-century. However we collectively resolve
this crisis, whatever kind of new historical system we build and
whether it is better or it is worse, whether we have more or
fewer human rights and rights of peoples, one thing is sure: It will
not be a system based on liberal ideology as we have known that
ideology for two centuries now.

He's basically saying throughout the book that liberalism is this big 200 year old lie that finally pepole are starting to not believe in any more, and so some big changes are around the corner. I can see that some would disagree with the above passage on this key point: IS capitalism really an inherently inegalitarian system, as he says?

Really interesting, no?

I'd also like to mention that I recently got some new OCR software that I just used to scan that in, and I can say OCR software is pretty damn accurate and painless to use now. It's nice to see not just brand new whiz-bang uses for computers that we never thought of before but also things like OCR and video software, stuff I've been WANTING to do with computers for many years but that never really worked that well, cheaply, till recently. Hurray for the commodity computer economy! heh.

I just discovered that if there's a bright light (like the sun, for example) behind my powerbook display it shines right through the apple logo on the back and shows up on the screen. Kinda funny. Seems like a mistake, like they would have thought to put something opaque between the back of the display and the little logo LED assembly.

In other news, it's really really really cold today. A friend's dad arrived in town last night from Michigan and said it's colder here in Portland than in Detroit. Depressing. But, at least it's nice and sunny today. Of course the clear sky is WHY it's so cold, but i'd rather have sun and cold than overcast and a little less cold.

This article says that a study found that 8 million Americans have blogs. Yikes. Yet 62% of online users "have no clear idea what a blog is." Hmm.

It's interesting that blogs seem so strange and new. The concept seems so simple and obvious to me, and in fact has been in action since the beginning of the web, starting with one of the very first web sites, Justin's Links from the Underground, by Justin Hall, who I count as a friend (from Cyborganic days).

A blog is simply a public diary. The fact that some have taken this diary form and merged it with the newspaper form, or a couple other basic forms, is not that important. The important idea is that it's a regular place where someone publicly writes stuff, and the cloud of technological tools that surround the blog enable revolutionary ways of connecting and distributing the information in the public diary. That's where it gets really interesting. But the basic idea is still really simple. So it's not the blog itself that is that interesting or new, it's its location on the internet and the infrastructure of technology that supports it.