Across Weirdish Wild Space

From JK Rowling of Harry Potter fame, speaking at this year’s Harvard commencement speech about working at Amnesty International :

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

It’s an excellent address in total to be honest, dwelling on the value of failure and imagination and well worth the time to read or watch.

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

God, I love The Onion. I”m very glad that even their ability to poke fun at those in power hasn’t been dampened by Barack’s election win. Seriously, the one good indication that democracy and freedom are still alive and well in any country are people poking fun at politicos with impunity.

And in other political parody awesomeness…

• Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress
• Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job

Well, much like the rest of the jubilant free world, it’s hard not to look at Obama’s landslide election in the United States and hope that, well… finally they’ve come to their senses. It’s been a hard eight years, and I don’t think anyone would argue that things have gotten amazingly worse than they were under the tender ministrations of the Bush years.

Also, the historic precedent of the 44th president can’t be denied and hopefully will reverse some long-standing horribleness about racism and the politics of exclusion in the States.

Anyhow, the poor guy has a hell of a job ahead of him and a whack of messes and crises to deal with. Let’s hope he can live up to the potential and promises of his campaign and the speech he made in front of the Tiergarten in Germany.

As I write this, Indiana, North Carolina and Missouri are still processing votes with it looking like Obama will take two more of those states, but currently,

• Electoral College votes : Obama 251 – McCain 171
• Senate : Dems 56 – Reps 40 (4 remain)

Let’s hope the next four can do something about the last eight.

Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Obama could run. Obama ran so our children could fly.
- interwiewee on NPR Radio

One of the things I actually do always admire about the US around election time, is the incredible number of people and creativity willing to work on getting people out to vote. Considering the Canadian election that sadly has Harper and the Conservatives back in a minority, had historically low turnout, I do think when I get back that I need to work on something like this.

And you have to respect moveon.org. Consistently, these guys are just amazing with their ability to leverage web actions to get fundraising and mobilize support.

This viral replaces a simple first and last name of someone you send it to in the actual text shown in various places in the flash video making it seem like McCain won by one vote because of their not voting.

Absolutely brilliant. Can’t believe this would be too hard to do either.

OK, admittedly, as much as I really loathed the “Wassup” commercials when they were on television (and think Bud is a terrible beer), this parody is absolutely fantastic :

If you are unfamiliar with them, the original is here too :

(via BoingBoing.)

OK, as more than casual readers know, I’m a huge fan of Warren Buffet. Not only do I try and invest like him, but I think he’s very sharp beyond being just an astute and wiley investor. Great, but very long interview with him here on the Warren Buffett CNBC Interview:

”... you only find out who’s
been swimming naked when the tide goes out. Well, we found out that Wall Street has been kind of a nudist beach.”

(via clusterstock.)

Meant to post this a while back from an email that went round at work.

Love the idea. Simply… Offer to bring in a whack of business for one day to one business if they’ll pay for environmental improvements to their business with the proceeds.

Seems like the first run went well (and you have to love the Lil Wayne video spoof). Have to see whether it’s sustainable, but it is an interesting idea in crowdsourcing.

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

(thanks to Anu K. for the link)

I think Don’t Vote is one of the most seriously focused and well-designed get-out-the-vote microsites I’ve seen in ages.

Check out some of the posters to download and print and downloadable banners for embedding into webpages.

And I really especially like their little “Spread the Word” mouse rollover which definitely gives about every option I’ve ever seen for disseminating something on the web in a nice little compact rollover popup. Going to steal the idea for my own sites I think…

Love it. Not easy to tell who is responsible but the DNS record whois mentions Pollinate media in Oregon.

Now, if someone came up with something like this for the Canadian elections… =<

via scaryideas.

The Human Rights Action Center in NYC just put up a fantastic animation illustrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the observation of which being one of the cornerstones of what Amnesty works towards, for the 60th anniversary of the document on the 10th of December this year.

Utterly fantastic job in tone, animation, simplicity and even the music.

The action centre has also given over their home page to it in a full browser high fidelity version which looks amazing. Probably won’t be up forever, but looks great if you go there now.

via Cool Hunting

I always remember when I was a kid naively thinking Christmas should be this day, but September 21st, the day before the autumnal equinox would work for me as well. Any day we could get people to commit to there being a day of peace, even ceasefires, as long as it was a global gesture would be amazing.

It’s a very nice idea. Peace on earth, everyone…

“The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.”
Mark Twain

In a stone-cold coolness coup of epic proportions the Guardian got Medium Lobster from the amazing Fafblog writing one of their political columns this past Thursday . I hope it’s becomes a very, very regular thing…

Favourite quote from the article. (Nearly dmade me spit out my coffee…) :

Mitt Romney

Pros: History of rapid flip-flops will neatly counterbalance McCain’s record of stunning policy reversals to achieve perfect pandering equilibrium; ability to suck opponents into the inky void of his soul should prove useful in veep debate; sweats liquid money.

Cons: Eccentric space-god religion could appear unacceptably bizarre to pious nation of devout 2000-year-old Jewish zombie worshipers.

(nb: if you’re not following the US presidential race and its dramatis personae closely, this probably won’t be that funny… Oh, and before anyone gets the wrong idea… I’m Canadian, not American… For differences, see here. =] )

The Year of the Political Blogger Has Arrived

In more serious news… The New York Times, which missed Loobster doing the Guardian gig, has a fab article on the rise of the political blogger. Excellent reading and definitely pro-am political journalism is becoming a trend to be noted for any activist organization (offer void in countries where written political dissidence is prohibited).

(via Fafblog, BoingBoing, the NYTimes and dem random Canadian beer commercials, eh ? ).

BoingBoing pointed to a great blog entry today from Errol Morris, the director of the amazing documentary The Fog of War (which you should really see if you haven’t. It did win an Oscar you know.).

Besides Powell’s now-infamous WMD photos of non-existent chemical weapons facilities that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, it also covers the photoshopped Iranian missiles photo that ran across a number of US newspapers (the NYT article even has my very favourite mock shot of the Iranian missile launch photos, the godzilla in the midst of the launch field).

From a course I took back in Canada on Anthropology and the Image (fascinating by the way and well worth the time and effort – note now that the course is called Visual Ethnography), I know that photography as a political weapon, even as a cultural weapon, especially with reference to people like the Navajo and Africans, was amazingly devastating in associating a set of negative attributes with a culture, but the amazing thing in the modern era (perhaps because of the ubiquity of photographs in general), is the commonplace manipulation of them, or their captioning to achieve desired political ends, whether those be supporting invasion, instilling fear or misdirecting attention. Got to be a good book or documentary in there somewhere.

But a great read. Hopefully, Morris is working on another fab documentary along these lines.

The interesting thing though, is that the fodder here for activists of all stripes, to increasingly draw attention to disinformation and political propaganda by mocking these things. For example, Worth1000-esque photoshopping contests coordinated with a photosstream on Flickr and just tagged with an appropriately complex tag to make sure interesting photos get surfaced.

via BoingBoing

OK, I have no idea why more people aren’t more furious about this, though I guess it’s just evidence of what everyone suspected all along.

And, ok… sure, the people who listen to Fox are the ones most likely to believe what the White House says in any case (or that the Dems do the same thing anyway), but this seems beyond that. As the commentator in this segment points out, there is a difference between saying “The White House today sent us a briefing saying… “ and “We think that… “

It’s the difference between propaganda and journalism or acting as a party mouthpiece and agreeing with a position. And while I don’t think anyone in the waning days of the Bush administration will be surprised to see that more cracks are appearing in the wall of an administration that would support torture, arbitrary detention and lying to start a war, but the degree to which the administration seems open to brekaing rule of law whenever it suited their agenda is a little bit frightening and should be a scary morality tale for all those governments (and journalists) who followed their lead on so many things so blindly.

Anyway, I hope it does create some incentive around a return to true journalism in the US. The Fox news model of opinion as journalism has provided a chilling effect on proper news reporting in the US and a “if it bleeds it leads” epidemic which I think ultimately hurts us all and makes it seem like we live in a much more violent and fearful world than is actually true. I’ve completely stopped watching US news programs since they seem so amazingly biased compared to their non-US counterparts (though still read the feeds for the NYTimes and the Washington Post).

I haven’t really been watching the American political race very closely so I can’t really comment on the relative merits of the current Democratic and Republican leaders going into the race. I’m sure anyone who knows me can figure out which way I’d be leaning. Either candidate, whatever the case, would be a massive improvement as far as I’m concerned over the current administration.

Nevertheless, this speech, regardless of the echoes of JFK’s and whatever you think of Obama personally, is a phenomenal piece of speech craft and an incredible piece of oratory. Let’s hope that it’s promises about a vow for unity and a global pact for working to solve our shared problems for a better world gets delivered on.

Bit long, and even though he brings up some unpopular issues on the American agenda in the middle, it still is a pretty amazing speech and definitely worth the time you’ll take to watch it.

Sean Travis is a geek. Pure and simple. And has decided to run for office. He has clearly identified a group he believes can help him take down the current Kansas State Legislature representative (described by others as “an anti-abortion, anti-evolution, pro-censorship, pro-surveillance, anti-gay incumbent.”), other geeks.

He’s calling on them, precisely 3000 of them, via an xkcd style comic style page to donate precisely $8.34 each and help him with name recognition advertising as he has identified this as the key to winning (xkcd is a very geeky, minimalist comic famous for using stick figures for its graphics, yet being very clever, funny and a pillar of high geek culture, you can see it here : http://xkcd.org ).

He’s currently polling within 3 percentage points of his opponent. And he’s got 2,894 donors as of this morning (which is a record for donations to a Kansas rep)

In terms of a clearly identified group, goal, and change he wishes to happen (as well as a focused communication that appeals to his target influence group), it’s a great example of strategic campaigning well executed (so far).

UPDATE [19 jul 2008] : Sean blew away the 3000 mark in just over 36 hours and is now coasting close to 5000… and has added onto his comic. Very impressive.

This is article, I have to say, is extremely interesting :

Free and Flush, Russians Eager to Roam Abroad – NYTimes.com: ””

One of the thing it was impossible not to notice on my recent trip to Turkey, particularly near Antalya, where the hotel this article talks about is, was the incredible numbers of Russians and Germans on the south coast (and increasingly, Bulgarians as well).

I was trying to explain to a Russian newly-made friend there about how strange it seemed, since when I was growing up, Russia was an identifiable enemy in the Cold War and trying to illustrate it with a trip to Seattle I had taken where a Russian attack submarine was on display as more of a curiosity and amusement rather than this nuclear weapon of terror during the 80s.

Anyhow, it’s quite fascinating, how the growth of some of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are totally changing the face of tourism and influencing their own home countries. To be honest, other than the carbon footprint (I shudder at), I can’t really view it as anything other than a good thing.

Though, it does also change the destination countries they end up going to I find. The fact that trying to learn to speak Turkish did nothing but seem to amuse Turks while I was in the country (though did get me free into some places just for trying) and the fact that every Turk seemed to be working on learning German or Russian (in fact, in Kas German was hear dmuch more than even English).

Definitely interesting, though this Las-Vegas-ification/Disneyfication of countries for the benefits of package tourist guests is always worrying.

Well, couple of bumps getting it out the front door, as well as having to deal with a killer 6 am launch time to coordinate the global media strategy, but the mighty mighty AI web team managed to get the annual report out into the wild and into everyone’s browsers in the wee hours of the morning and well in time for the first of or media blitz interviews with CNN. People still face torture in 81 countries around the world, unfair trials in 54 and cannot speak freely in 77 countries.

Massive props to the early morning hours crew that did the final push to get it out as well as all the people throughout the Secretariat and DUs who made it possible. I think it’s difficult for anyone outside the organization to understand what a massive undertaking this is or how many resources are involved in bringing it to fruition.

At some point, I hope someone is going to feed me and let me go home to sleep…

[Update: 7.22 AM BST – We just moved up to the most viewed story on cnn.com and this articlejust made the home page. The Beeb also gave us a high profile mention as well.

Update 2: 2.52 PM BST – We also managed to get mentioned in the NYTimes and the Guardian Online.]

Well, at last for now. The election of Boris over Ken has an incoming ban on drinking on the Tube starting Jun 1 2008.

Boris thinks he can do something about criminality and hooliganism in London based on New York’s example of apparent success with broken window theory zero tolerance enforcement. Personally, I’m as skeptical of this as the ubiquitous and largely useless CCTV everywhere here in London, but the ban will be law 1st of June so the People are planning one last hurrah on the neverending loop that is the Circle Line on the 31st of May (though I do think banning alcohol on the metro is a good idea, as the people who seem to indulge in the liberty tend towards intimidating and berating their other passengers). Nevertheless, a party is a totally different animal, so…

Details for the facebook viral are here.

And yep, planning to be there barring the usual chaos that is my life. A bit ironic since I’ve never had a drink on the Tueb in my entire life, but hey… I do like the idea of sipping champagne on the metro.

Partypeople of London!

Come one, come all, lend us your ears – this one’s a bit special..

So Boris has been elected, and he’s banning drinking on the underground. Fair enough you might think. No more being harassed by crazies. But it also means no more last drink before the club, no more champagne frolics at new year’s and no more tanked up Aussie guys singing.

First a smoking ban, now a drinking ban, what’s next?

But we’re not giving in so easily! No no Monsieur. We’re organising one last party, one high-glamour, weird-ass shindig on the circle line to royally give the finger to Big Brother and this culture of legislation and regulations. What’s more, we’re holding it on the night before the drinking ban! Vive la revolucion!

Hard to watch but important to see.