"I voted for Ralph Nader, and I'd do it again. I agree with just about everything I have heard the Union of Concerned Scientists say. I like to read Adbusters (as well as some other content that is a little less biased towards my beliefs). I think everyone should read The War Prayer."

"As long as content exists somewhere in XML, it's re-use is only a parse away. In this way, separation of style from content in the backend is far more powerful than any separation with HTML/CSS." the key here is that this must be done in the backend (on the server), which both wastes the processing power of the client machine and makes it more difficult (or impossible) for the user to control how content is displayed. CSS solves both of these problems. if i don't like your CSS, i can view your content with my own CSS, and it's my browser, not your centralized server doing the work. this system scales much better than a server-parsed XML system does.

"His year in office has brought a steady deterioration in Israel's security situation, the very opposite of what he promised voters. Improved security was his key pledge: indeed, it was perhaps the only persuasive argument for supporting him and, in doing so, many Israelis seem to have closed their eyes, crossed their fingers and hoped for the best. Their collective gamble has not paid off. Mr Sharon has not delivered. For this reason alone, he should go."

mark pilgrim says: "I think that most content producers vastly overestimate the value of their content. By the same token, most readers ("content consumers" sounds so... impersonal) vastly underestimate the cost of making good content on a timely basis and aggregating it in one place." i disagree. i think most content producers and most readers could come to an agreement about how much content is worth if payment systems were more flexible. if i and my readers both agree that my content is worth 10 cents for a month of access, how could i possibly charge them that? i can't and that's the real problem. more specifically, the problem is that it costs more for payment system providers to accept payment for the content than the content is worth - it costs almost (if not more than) 10 cents for me to charge my readers 10 cents.

unsuprisingly, cycle of violence continues in nepal: "Maoist guerrillas fighting to overthrow Nepal's constitutional monarchy killed 32 policemen in a strike after a state of emergency was extended three months."

war is not peace. "Urge the Nobel Institute to reject the nomination of Tony Blair and George W. Bush. Reckless and ever-expanding pursuit of war is not peace, and awarding the Peace Prize for massive world-wide military campaigns would be a slap in the face of peace and justice activists world wide."

bad news: "Colombian warplanes bombed Marxist guerrilla camps and air strips in a rebel enclave on Thursday after the collapse of three years of peace talks, prompting fears of a rebel backlash...The United States has provided more than $1 billion in mostly military aid for Colombia's anti-drug fight, helping increase the long-shambolic armed forces' preparedness here." the war on drugs and the war on terror have now combined into a hybrid war on abstract and easily replacable targets.

did i mention i've been sleeping less?

i got my first googlewhack.

so i made up a messy browser-based text editor with javascript and CSS. it's not particularly useful, but considering how little i know of javascript or CSS, i think it's enough for a proof-of-concept. check it out if you're interested.

"CSS is even more for the writer than the reader." my advice to CSS advocates: create a CSS( and javascript?)-based wrting system superior to <TEXTAREA> tags, and dave winer will change his views of CSS.

jonathon delacour speaks japanese: "I learned a long time ago that the only mistake is to let on that you don't understand what's going on. Bluff and you'll eventually be able to make an appropriate remark." that's one of the big things i learned when i was in japan. but i don't think it's only japanese. i think in many situations one can figure out what's happening faster (and with less distraction from whatever is happening) by pretending she already knows than by asking.

"Security forces shot and killed four Maoist rebels in the town of Kalikot west of the capital, the Defense Ministry said Wednesday. Eight more died elsewhere in overnight gun battles, authorities said." a few days ago i linked to a story about these maoists killing people, and implied that this is a bad thing. just to be even-handed, killing maoists - also bad.

Take it Easy
The object of the game is to score points by creating lines of a single color.

nader: "This war would never have happened had I been president, because for 30 years we have had an aviation safety group, and we have been urging the airlines to toughen cockpit doors and improve the strength of the locks, and they have been resisting for 30 years."

bush says: "I worry about a regime that is closed and not transparent. I'm deeply concerned about the people of North Korea. " is he talking about the "evil" people of North Korea? apparently he isn't concerned that the american regime is "closed and not transparent."

"President Bush has decided to transform the administration's temporary wartime communications effort into a permanent office of global diplomacy to spread a positive image of the United States around the world and combat anti-Americanism, senior administration officials said today." (emphasis added) isn't that what the state department is for? the state department works for, among other things "U.S. representation abroad [and] countering international crime." however, the state department also works for "promoting peace and stability." i'm guesing the "wartime communications effort" won't be as interested in this.

"Just last week President Bush announced, 'my 2003 budget calls for more than $48 billion in new defense spending.' More money for the Pentagon, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports, while its own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends. 'According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions,' Rumsfeld admitted. $2.3 trillion — that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America." bush's solution to our inept military is to throw more money at it.

"Many politicians, both Democrat and Republican, who accepted donations from Enron have pledged to donate that money to a charity for laid-off Enron employees. We believe that's the right thing to do. However, several prominent Texas Republicans have refused to do the right thing. Send them an email and tell them to do the right thing and return the money to those who need it!"

"Pearson, who works for BT Group's BTexact Technologies, has just published a "timeline" of 500 predictions for the next 30 years. It is both an exciting and disturbing vision of the future." one of the "predictions" is "rise of an American dictator." earliest potential occurence: 2000.

"Although the details of the local militia clashes remained murky, the bombing raids seemed to have placed the United States for the first time in a position of using American air power in defense of the government of Hamid Karzai, the pro- American leader of the new administration in Kabul. After fighting broke out between rival warlords in northern and eastern Afghanistan in recent weeks, Mr. Karzai said he would request American airstrikes if they were needed to end clashes between armed factions that control much of Afghanistan outside Kabul." what i'm wondering is this: just how do we plan to transition from bombing political opponents to democratic elections? or is karzai just another puppet dictator?

dave winer has been talking about CSS lately. i agree with him on this: it's not ready. i need to print this page. it's in CSS. the latest versions of both IE and netscape for the mac think it's only one page long. luckily, i had the ability to just switch to a windows machine, but it's a bad user experience. maybe this is the fault of the designer and not CSS, but it's rather difficult to use html and not get wysiwyg printing. with CSS, it's hard to get wysiwyg printing.

the good kind of intervention: "A Turkish publisher accused of disseminating separatist propaganda was acquitted yesterday after one of his authors -the celebrated American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky - appeared in an Istanbul court and asked to be tried alongside him"

drug decriminalization in the UK? maybe. "The committee backs a further step to a model similar to that in Holland, where dope is as openly consumed in cafes as coffee."

communists still haven't given up in nepal: "More than 2,400 people have died in the fighting."