Darkness at Noon

You know, the thing with blogging, is it’s all about just remembering to blog – clearly I’ve remembered that today.

So just a quick one (via the CC Blog). An bunch of Australian Film makers have produced a film, Insecurity. Which I’m yet to watch but I’m sure is fantastic.

But the great think about it is that it’s CC licensed and free for you to download (can you see the blank look in Hollywood’s eyes can’t you, “for free?”).

I really enjoy stories like Eric Lee’s as they mirror my really positive experience with Linux. Like me, Eric is a Unionist and runs the fantastic website, Labour Start – a site that should be in the bookmarks or RSS feeds of every unionist.

Anyway, have a read of his experience with Ubuntu after one year of using it (I’m not sure how long I’ve been using Ubuntu but I started with LTS 6.06):

As I discovered entirely by accident, today marks the end of my first year using Linux.

When I began, I wrote a number of updates for my blog with titles like ‘Linux: the first nine days’ or ‘Day Eleven: The experiment continues’. I think I was amazed that it could go on like that, day after day.

There were probably two reasons for my own surprise at how well it has gone.

First, I’d had a bad experience using Linux in 2002. And second, I hardly knew anyone who used Linux on their desktops. (I still don’t know of a single trade union anywhere that has moved over to open source — unfortunately.)

After one year using Linux, I can say with confidence that I’m never going back to Windows.

Chris Bowers, over at Open Left is running an interesting anti-McCain campaign. He’s trying to get people to link to 9 articles on McCain in order to boost them in Google’s rankings.

The aim is as follows:

Searching for John McCain is a massive, online activism campaign designed to make at least ten million non-partisan, poll-tested, on-message voter contacts that reveal the damning truth about John McCain entirely through mainstream news reports and McCain’s own words.

Doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me. Some have accused it of being a little unethical but as Bowers himself says:

Obviously, it is manipulating, but search engines are not public forums and unless you act to use them for your own benefit, your opponent’s information is going to get out there

So here’s my bit:

1. John McCain Votes to Filibuster Minimum Wage Hike
   AOL News is highly ranked on John McCain, and the minimum wage increase was incredibly popular.
2. McCain housing policy shaped by lobbyist
   This article emphasizes how corporate special interests have formed McCain’s economic policy. If it becomes the top ranked MSNBC article, it will appear in the top ten searches for McCain nationwide.
3. Bush, McCain plug Social Security
   Seniors are going to be the key swing vote in this election, and they hate Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security. This is the best polling message against McCain of all, which isn’t surprising since our victory on Social Security is how began to turn the tide against Republicans and conservatives three years ago. The headline alone ties McCain to Bush, and this article already ranks very high on searches for McCain Social Security.
4. McCain blasts Obama’s and Clinton’s attacks on NAFTA
   This is a great article because it not only ties McCain to NAFTA, which is quite unpopular, but it also draws a contrast between McCain and Democrats on the issue. The LA Times is also in the top twenty searches for John McCain.
5. McCain in NH: Would Be “Fine” To Keep Troops in Iraq for “A Hundred Years”
   McCain’s “100 years” statement ha damaged him already, and this article has already been significantly optimized on Google. While Mother Jones is not an ideal news source, it is the top article for this quote, and appears in the top thirty searches for John McCain already.
6. McCain: Bush right to veto kids health insurance expansion
   This is my personal favorite. The headline just makes McCain look like an asshole, and ties him to Bush. Who is opposed to health insurance for kids? CNN also is in the top ten searches for McCain and John McCain A lot of people will see this one.
7. Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition
   While I am not thrilled about using Salon, since it isn’t as well known, and since there is an advertising wall that hides the story, the title is damaging enough. McCain’s opposition to the GI Bill really hurts him, and tying him to Bush is just as bad. This title does both in a clear, straightforward manner.
8. McCain says overturn the law that legalized abortion
   Pretty straightforward, and extremely important. More than half of all women voters think that McCain is pro-choice. This will quickly change their minds.
9. McCain Defends Bush’s Iraq Strategy
   The classic McCain SEO, that still appears in top thirty searches for McCain and John McCain. It is also proof positive that this campaign will work, because it appears as the second CBS news article, but still on the front page in Google searches just below the CBS election center information on John McCain. That is all we need to do to get it on the front page of searches about McCain–optimize it against other CBS articles. Also, even though this SEO campaign was abandoned fifteen months ago, it still ranks in the top forty in McCain searches. If a fifteen month old campaign is still that effective, imagine what we can do with enough participation in this campaign.

There’s been a lot of talk about fuel prices at the moment with the opposition winning voter approval (it would seem) over it’s plans to reduce the fuel excise levy buy 5c a litre. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, the opposition seems to have finally realised that it is just that, an opposition, so a few members have even touted a 10c to 20c reduction… providing they can cost it of course.

There is the over arching feeling for me though, that in the context of climate change, it’s almost a relief to be paying more as we get closer the real cost of this fuel.

I heard Tim Flannery speak at the Communities in Control conference last week. Flannery made the point that a blanket reduction in the fuel excise is obscene. Because at the root of all these issues is the issue of equity. If you reduce the fuel excise you give everyone a tax cut, whether they are unemployed or millionaires. Where’s the equity in that?

But the elephant in the room is surely peak oil. It’s something I’ve kept my eye on since watching the film, A Crude Awakening.

What triggered this thought is these two BBC reports. The first one is interesting simply because of how vastly different the coverage is to the coverage we’ve been receiving in our local media. It actually talks about OPEC and it’s comments on Nigera are fascinating. Something I hadn’t about (although I must confess to be consuming a little less news at the moment for a variety of reasons).

Prices were also kept high by news that Nigerian oil fields operated by Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell remained shut after they were attacked last week.

The attack on Shell’s installation at Bonga, 120km (75 miles) out to sea, was the first time militants had struck at an offshore oil site, and the move cut a 10th of Nigerian oil production in one go.

This is something I’ll have to look into further but it sounds like a health dose of “get out of my country corporate pig dog” – a sentiment I can sympathise with.

The second report is an explanation of why prices are so high. It rightly points out that we don’t have a clue. But what is not discussed is the energy return on investment. Even if Oil hasn’t peaked, extraction of oil is getting harder and increasing the amount of energy required to extract it. This forces the price up. Everything I read seems to assume that it is just as easy to extract oil as it has been. But the days of enormous Oil wells is over. I suspect Oil has peaked.

If you’re interested in keeping up with the issue of Peak Oil I recommend the web site Life After the Oil Crash.

Update: and just like that the latest edition to my RSS feeds fills the gap I said I wanted filled earlier in this post. Over at Jeff Vail’s Rhizome we have Nigeria – Significance of the Bonga Attack.

It’s not a new argument but an important one. Read it here.

How relevant is it to declare oneself to be “for” or “against” copyright? Neither the stabilization nor the abolition of the copyright system seems within reach. All we see is a seemingly endless assembly line of new extensions to the law being proposed and enacted. The most recent is the proposed “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA), to be tabled at next month’s G8 meeting in Tokyo, including a clause known as the “Pirate Bay killer” that would force countries to criminalize services that may facilitate copyright infringement, even if not for profit. This is just one example of how copyright law is mutating into something qualitatively different than what it has been in previous centuries.

I’ve been out on the streets 4 or 5 times protesting the Iraq war.

I supported calls for a complete withdrawal of troops at all stages over the last five years and three months.

So I was relieved to read the front page of the paper today.

Finally, Australian combatant troops are being withdrawn. The fact that it is only 500 troops makes the move largely symbolic but that’s fine with me. It means that a lot of families will be reunited, and sends the clear message that this is an unjust and winnable war. I guess we just have to hold out for Obama to be elected before it’s really over.

Somehow it seems like an anti-climax.

However, what is more important here is that this is the result of Australian’s voting for change at the end of last year. I don’t think Rudd is our savior, but he was elected on the basis of people feeling a need for change. And we seem to be getting it, albeit in a largely symbolic sense so far (it troop withdrawal, apology to Stolen Generation etc).

…now let’s do a LOT more about climate change Mr Rudd.

(via Slashdot):

“The Obama campaign’s CTO is hiring LAMP-biased geeks for the Boston office to help elect the Senator in the fall. This got me to wondering, what if he instead announced a SourceForge project toward the same end? What would such a project look like? Tools that both sides could use ‘equally’ would not achieve the desired end. And philosophically, could the Open Source community support one side in a competition such as this? What other issues does this raise?”

I’ve often thought that if we had a mutli-million dollar foundation behind the Centre (rather than a handful of very attractive members) that we could hire a Linux developer to develop Linux-based tools for activists and add our little bit to the open source community.

This isn’t far off that and really quite an exciting development.

As for giving the opposition access to these tools – would that be a bad thing?