• Giving Up On Patents. ongoing by Tim Bray (2010-02-23). "Not so many years ago, even as I was filled with fear and loathing of the hideous misconduct of the US Patent & Trademark Office, I retained some respect for the notion of patents. I even wrote what I think is an unusually easy-to-read introduction to Patent Theory. But no more. The whole thing is too broken to be fixed. Maybe it worked once, but it doesn't any more. The patent system needs to be torn down and thrown out. . . . And here are a few words for the huge community of legal professionals who make their living pursuing patent law: You're actively damaging society. Look in the mirror and find something better to do." (Linked Tuesday 2010-02-23.)
• Happy Birthday, BBS! Scott Merrill, TechCrunch (2010-02-17). WWIV, Wildcat, Celerity — these hallowed names represent the best of a golden era of communication, back when "getting online" meant tying up the family phone line, remembering arcane Hayes AT codes to maximize performance out of the 9600 baud modem your dad borrowed from work, and TradeWars was the… (Linked Tuesday 2010-02-23.)
• For Your Own Good. cherylcline, der Blaustrumpf (2010-02-23). Well, this is horrifying.  From Slate.com, the story of how federal officials not only outlawed alcohol, but poisoned industrial alcohols as well: Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor… (Linked Tuesday 2010-02-23.)

• Remains of the Day: Why Piracy Works Edition [For What It’s Worth] Adam Pash, Lifehacker (2010-02-18). A fed up movie-watcher explains in pictures how buying is more hostile to consumers than pirating, a school spies on students at home through webcams, and Bill Gates gives a great presentation.(Click the image above for a closer look.) Why Piracy Works See image above. [via Kevin Marks] When are… (Linked Saturday 2010-02-20.)
• Hulu May Come to iPad as Paid Subscription Service. Daring Fireball (2010-02-21). Intellectual Protectionism Vs. The Progress of the Arts and Sciences. (Cont’d.) “This sort of nonsense gets to the bottom of what's wrong with these entertainment executives' outlook on the world. They want to define everything by arbitrary device types — this is a ‘TV’, that is a ‘computer’, this other thing is a ‘mobile device’ — and then sell/distribute the same content to different device types separately and with no spillage. But it's all bullshit in the digital world.” (Linked Sunday 2010-02-21.)
• Mount Vernon Mush. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-02-17). A bunch of right-wing heavyweights (and middleweights, and lightweights) have put together the Mount Vernon Statement, purportedly a manifesto for "constitutional conservatism." Glenn Reynolds writes that it's "heavy on small-government stuff, and light on social-issue meddling," and he suggests that "this supports the notion of a libertarian shift on the… (Linked Monday 2010-02-22.)
• Review: Neil Gershenfeld’s FAB. John Baichtal, MAKE Magazine (2010-02-19). When Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, offered a class titled “How to Make (almost) Anything,” he was surprised to find himself inundated by students. In particular, Gershenfeld was taken aback by the fact that these students weren’t taking the class for some sort of abstract… (Linked Monday 2010-02-22.)

Sunday. Shamelessness. You know the drill.

This is a late Sunday post because it’s been a busy weekend; L. and I rented a car to be able to do some of our spring errands (garden, groceries, minor electronic equipment, that sort of thing) and so have been running around getting stuff done while we still have the mobility to do so. Food Not Bombs was a big blast this weekend, with some new folks at the organizational meeting, a lot of fresh energy, and a big turn-out at the Sunday picnic. I took advantage of the car to scope out a couple county parks as possible locations for a second weekly picnic. And meanwhile I’ve been playing around with social networking outlets. In particular, for an alternate means of following posts as they come out, and as an easy means of getting in touch about the project if you want to, I have created new Twitter profiles for:

• @anarchoblogs
• @feministblogs

And I’ve also created Facebook Pages for four of my major projects (Anarchoblogs, Feminist Blogs, FeedWordPress, and the blog you see before you):

There’s some other things I’ve been busy with — on these projects and others — but that probably merits a post of its own. In the meantime, here’s to sociality. And to errands completed.

And yourself? What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

Here’s Frank Rich, beating the same dead horse in the New York Times (2010-02-13) that he’s been beating for the past administration and a half:

Instead of praising bailed-out bankers, the president might have more profitably instructed his press secretary to drop the lame Palin jokes and dismantle the disinformation campaign her speech delivered to a national audience. Palin, unlike Obama, put herself on the side of the angels, railing against Wall Street's bonuses and bailout, even though she and John McCain had supported TARP during the campaign.

–Frank Rich, New York Times (2010-02-13): Palin’s Cunning Sleight of Hand

Indeed she did; but then, so did Senator Barack Obama; oops. In fact, he voted for the damned thing. Which would tend to make any attempts by the Obamarchy to condemn Sarah Palin for supporting it rather, well, awkward.

Which is hardly to say that nobody should come out and blast Sarah Palin for supporting TARP. The fact that both political parties were in absolute agreement on such an obviously horrible screwjob and  overt act of plunder as 2008’s Endangered Capitalists Act is no argument that supporting TARP was somehow O.K., or that the politicians who supported it deserve anything other than contempt and condemnation. If the Obamarchy were to come out blasting Sarah Palin for her support for TARP, their own history would be no argument against the point. But be that as it may, I certainly don’t know why Frank Rich expects Barack Obama or any other prominent Democrat to come out against their own damned program.

If you want an alternative, you need to look outside of the political parties and the interlocking Beltway consensus that they have constructed. It’s not going to come from Sarah Palin, to be sure, but if you’re expecting it to come from a Democrat, you’re going to stay disappointed. The most you’re ever going to get out of such a constrained debate is a massive game of “I know you are, but what am I?”

As for those of us who both Republicans and Democrats consider small enough to fail, the disgust and anger with Obama and the Democratic Congress hardly means that we have been seduced by the devious pseudopopulist wiles of Sarah Palin; all it means is that

I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you undertand me …

Or, to come around to it, if we are ever going to get anywhere, we — you and me and the rest of us, the vast majority who have nothing to do with the Beltway and its idiotic shouting matches — must be on each other’s sides, and learn to do for ourselves, without these grandstanding jackasses. There’s no winner to pick in that horse race. And as long as Frank Rich believes there is, he’s going to continue putting out silly apologetics for a party that has trashed everything he supposedly cares about over and over again.

• Disney's Takedown Of Roger Ebert's Tribute To Gene Siskel. Techdirt (2010-02-17). Intellectual Monopoly Vs. Grieving Friends and Human Decency (cont’d) (Linked Wednesday 2010-02-17.)
• We Won't Raid Medical Marijuana Producers . . . so Long as They Aren't Successful at It. And Don't Talk About It. The Agitator (2010-02-17). In which President Barack Obama’s DEA continues to launch assaults on medical marijuana producers. I’m sure he’ll get around to stopping that real soon now, perhaps shortly after he’s done withdrawing American troops from Iraq and closing Guantanamo. (Linked Wednesday 2010-02-17.)
• Hier Ist Kein Warum. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-17). When Primo Levi, as a newly arrived prisoner at a Nazi concentration camp, reached for an icicle to quench his desperate thirst, a guard knocked the icicle out of his hand. To Levi's question "Warum?" ("Why?"), the guard replied with what was destined to become a famous quote: "Hier ist… (Linked Thursday 2010-02-18.)
• COLIN WARD, RIP: My favorite left-anarchist writer, Colin Ward, Jesse, The Perpetual Three-Dot Column (2010-02-17). COLIN WARD, RIP: My favorite left-anarchist writer, Colin Ward, has passed away at age 85. Ward was the most practical radical I've ever read: Rather than sketching out utopian blueprints of a society without a state, he searched for empirical examples of everyday people organizing to solve their own problems…. (Linked Thursday 2010-02-18.)
• American Psychiatric Association Pulls an #Obama on #Transgender People. Anarchoblogs in English (2010-02-18). The Genital Correctness Busybody Blowhard Bully Brigade (cont’d): Meet the new diagnosis, same as the old diagnosis (Linked Thursday 2010-02-18.)
• SixthSense. ignorethecode.net (2010-02-18). Technological civilization is awesome. (Cont’d.) (Linked Thursday 2010-02-18.)
• Anarchists For Total Government. Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-18). Anarcho-liberal-socialistic-fascialidocious! (Cont’d.) This time, from Glenn Beck. (Linked Thursday 2010-02-18.)
• Shakesville: "Where are 1% of American adults?" shakespearessister.blogspot.com (2010-02-18). From Shakespeare’s Sister. Via David Gross at The Picket Line. “Five percent of the world’s population is American; twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners are American. The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any country in the history of the world.
  
  The rate is three times that of Iran, six times that of China. More than one in a hundred adults in the United States is in prison. One in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is in prison.” Meanwhile, under threat of solitary confinement, the United States government’s military conscripts its millions of prison workers as a source of slave labor for the military supply chain: “It is illegal to bring into the United States any goods produced by forced labor or by prisoners, yet American prisoners make 100% of the military helmets, ammunition belts, bulletproof vests, ID tags as well some other items used by the US military.” (Linked Thursday 2010-02-18.)
• diveintomark: @KuraFire Serving the masses is great. But serving the masses does not, a priori, require prohibiting unintended uses. Apple *chooses* to. Twitter / diveintomark (2010-02-03). diveintomark: @KuraFire Serving the masses is great. But serving the masses does not, a priori, require prohibiting unintended uses. Apple *chooses* to. (Linked Friday 2010-02-19.)