Get Ready For….Vietraq II

because, ya know, Mission Accomplished on part the first and all that……yeeeesh

“January 23, 2007

Today, the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) begins a week-long advertising campaign aimed at educating the American public about the growing threat posed by a nuclear Iran. The ad campaign consists of two 30-second spots that began running Tuesday on CNN, MSNBC, Headline News and the Fox News Channel in Washington, DC, Maryland and northern Virginia.

and then add this WP piece

“The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran’s influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort.”

Cardiac Paper Computer Take One

I printed out the PDFs for making a CARDIAC and crafted this of plain paper and tape..man this needs much better makings. The next version will probably be coated/laminated so you can write on it with a dry erase and then wipe when you are done with that run.

If you are wondering what this is….

“I had one of the real deal CARDIAC’s back in 7th grade(1977ish) , I was already hooked on the bit tip but this thing showed me some of the ways and means of the root issues. I found mention of it a few years back on boing^2 but lost the scent. The desire to teach my little ones that computers are not all about bloat and legaly constrained guis made me go and find the makings. What I lack now is the orginal manual that came with it, there is a meatspace source for it that I am tracking down.

This was a paper trialto see if it worked, it does. Paper thoug is teh flimzy so I am goingto make the next one out of sturdier stuff, maybe cardboard with the text laminated on…I dont know yet. Any ideas?

For more info on the CARDIAC go to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiac_-_cardboard_illustrative_aid_to_computation

What A Drag It Is Getting Old

It seems the CWN (community wireless network) group I am part of , that being the Personal Telco Project, is going through another bout of growth/contraction/selfexamination/reinvnetion that happens to groups . After 6 years of hard work and a shifting landscape this comes as no surprise. The thread linked to has some good WhereToNow ideas.

Any ideas? Toss em in.

Upshot of this, many of us will be at the Recent Changes Camp being hosted in Portland to see if we can do more than just post about things to the list(not that many are not already doing things, we just need more folks, myself included, doing more)

Groovr Launches Impressive Mobile Social Network

We said 2007 would be the year of mobile, and it already is – Groovr is another new mobile social network that launched on December 29th.

read more | digg story

Legalized Torture and The Death of The Rights of The Accused…American Style

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things: “The provisions of Bush’s new torture law mean that Americans have lost the key, constitutional right on which Anglo-American criminal law (and criminal-law procedures in true democracies in general) is founded; that’s the basic right of an individual to know why he or she is being apprehended and detained. Now, technically, as in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, anyone labeled an ‘enemy combatant’ – again, by whom; by Bush? – can be whisked away and never heard from again. That kind of authority, in the hands of corrupt or untruthful politicians, may or may not be an effective tool in some kind of ‘war on terror,’ but it certainly can be a useful tool when it comes to silencing their opponents.”