Masters and Servants

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Margo Kingston today closed her Webdiary at Fairfax and hang her shingle up at a new site Personal opening statement to Webdiarists
In June 2005 Reportage Medialog noted that Margo Kingston’s webdiary can really be considered as an example of citizen journalism. ‘Webdiary is in fact a pioneer of this kind of journalism and Margo has an incredible commitment to working directly with her readers - many not at all of her own political persuasion - to engender real participatory discussion.’ Citizen Journalism Alert
Stay as you were, Maintain Your Identity

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Media Studies. Discuss
Every year the A-level examiners do the press a great favour. They provide a guaranteed story in the slowest news week of the year: the "decline in standards".

A-level results are out with record passes, prompting much sneering about "soft" options such as Media Studies. An expert of the genre, Professor John Ellis, of Royal Holloway, University of London, deconstructs the media's coverage of Media Studies.

• Lies, damn lies and statistics [Creative folks coming together to talk about being creative Writers conferences ; When an avant garde attains success it is institutionalized, routinized, and trivialized Literary Theory and Media Study ]
• · The other Joe’s first acquaintance with imaginary numbers in real life came in high school when he learned all about I. The continuing debate between Yahoo and Google about who indexes more of the web misses the point: both miss most of it. The stuff search engines find is the tip of the iceberg. Most of what's out there is known and available only to those who know where to go in the first place The size of the web — and other imaginary numbers ; It was a friend who alerted me to this post by Chris Sheil rather than a search engine - My stalker: the case of Tim Blair ; How does one work in a team and ‘help the other fellow’ when so in blogosphere much is fueled by envy, jealousy, and greed? Hello, Muddah ; What I Really Want To Do Is Blog
• · · A.L. Kennedy blogs her road trip They Have Authors Guest Blogging? Why, I Oughta... ; Google, The Internet Powerhouse, has an immodest stock price and an equally immodest goal: to organize all the world's information The book on Google ; The humanities are ruined, the universities full of crooks. Art is neglected, coddled, and buried under chatter Camille Paglia
• · · · Electronic games and the internet are not dumbing down a generation of users Today's virtual jugglers will be tomorrow's high achievers ; A new book looks at the clueless ways big entertainment companies try to control content or subvert emerging technologies, and how people work around those efforts Picking the Media's Digital Lock
• · · · · When democracies abridge the rights of individuals in order to crack down on terrorism, recent experience shows how quickly things can go wrong One lesson terrorism has taught ; A conversation with J.D. Lasica at the Well's Inkwell
• · · · · · It’s easy to tell when someone is working, but how can you tell when they’re making progress? Simple work, like mowing a lawn or washing a car has transparent progress: as each small unit of work is completed it’s visible to everyone. But with complex work, building software, running a business, writing a novel, it is harder to identify true progress. Work vs. Progress; Only in Amerika - Map in Progress;Playing Flickr!

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The Media Center is offering 15 fellowships to enable independent, non-profit or academic participants from any country to attend We Media: Behold the Power of Us - A report on The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere

The Blog, The Press, The Media: What Are the Bloggers of Oz thinking?
Christopher Sheil of Back Pages is back and blogging as strongly as ever. His comeback via a highway might have been influenced by a old but fresh voice of Tim Dunlop who parked his surboard at Adelaide. Invade Road to Surfdom Aussie bloggers are even asking What is the state of blogging in Africa? Czech out Antony

The presence of readers writing back within the blogging medium has added a further declension to Gonzo, and the results can be sensational...
If you fancy yourself with a keyboard, the challenge is irresistible. No publisher needed to be sold on my ideas. No editor stood in the way of my copy. There were no limits to my distribution. I could write to the world, before breakfast every day...

• Rich side of the blogosphere Following the proud highway [A good clue for your future Barista ; Shauny]
• · [Rich side of the news Blame It on the New York Times; News Corp in talks to buy search engine ; Lunch with Jana Wendt Dame Elisabeth Murdoch
• · · ABS building a 'Google for stats' ; Academia's quest for the ultimate search tool
• · · · What was the Washington Post thinking? asks AJR editor ; Tradition of a people should count for more than traditional coverage Nicknames & Mascots: Complicity in Bigotry
• · · · · The New Ernie Pyles: Sgtlizzie and 67cshdocs At least 200 active-duty soldiers have blogs ; Iraqi bloggers
• · · · · · Just when academics were beginning to get to grips with blogging, along came podcasting ; Blog Search Engine Threatens Ban of Blogger Blogs

CODA: The Blogday Buzz is spreading. Bloggers from around the world wrote about it and placed buttons in their blogs.

Nir Ofir is the initiator of BlogDay 2005. Nir envisions that in one long moment In August 31st 2005, bloggers from all over the world will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs (at the same time) - preferably blogs different from their own in culture, point of view and attitude. On this day, all blog surfers will find themselves leaping and discovering new, unknown blogs, celebrating the discovery of new people and new bloggers.

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Spin, spin, spin. It's everywhere, all the time, and unfortunately no-one has yet invented a machine to detect it. You just have to be constantly alert (and sometimes alarmed), as evidenced by Crikey stories

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Journalism's fear and loathing of blogs
Mainstream journalism is running scared. Who You Calling A Journalist?

It's watching its audience numbers decline and its public trust numbers drop. Newspapers, magazines, and network television news have been shaken by major scandals. The media have seen the future and it is blogging.
Or at least that's the story this year. "Mainstream journalism," however you want to define it, has been under siege so long it's hard to keep track of all the people, things, and outlets that were or are still going to destroy it.

• Can't beat that [Is journalism a profession, or more a craft or trade? The occupational status of journalists in this democratic society ; Web is finally becoming as fun and flexible as your favorite software. The next Web revolution ; Scientists say they have been able to monitor people's thoughts via scans of their brains 'Thoughts read' via brain scans ]
• · Phillip Knightley It spent money like water on investigative journalism ... The editor, Harold Evans, was unhappy if a libel writ had not arrived by Tuesday, because he felt that the paper had not been doing its job - defending people without power from those who wielded it unfairly, exposing corruption, making a difference to the lives of ordinary citizens Restoring citizen's respect for journalism: we are not without power ; You always know what's on the cards with an internet search ; The great part about the Internet of all the existing mediums from before is that it's the first one that is truly global, and its impact is massive ... The likes of Google and Yahoo draw to us more information in seconds than our ancestors had access to during their lifetimes - but with too few surprises. Were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of Google AdSense
• · · For better or worse, the Internet is playing a larger role in editorial decisions about books Crossing weblines ; When Weblog Watch did an initial round-up of British bloggers' reactions to the London bomb attacks, we noted how Tim Worstall's words had generally been heeded in the immediate aftermath: Back to the fray
• · · · In August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first website. Fourteen years on, he tells BBC Newsnight's Mark Lawson how blogging is closer to his original idea about a read/write web Berners-Lee on the read/write web ; Slate's Jack Shafer on why he doesn't trust readers: Their credibility has fallen to an all-time low. Dear Slate reader ; Few scientists have caught on to the Internet's power of posting, commenting, and debating – where are the rest? The Power of the Blog
• · · · · Google profits from organising information on the web. If it does so, then it can't prevent those who use the web from doing the same Google must search within itself; Should we all be using this GoogleAnon bookmarklet to set our Google GUID to all zeros, in order to anonymize our searches? Is that a paranoid thing to do? Anonymizing Google's Cookie
• · · · · · Jenna Freedman of RR exclaims: ‘Hooray for Chicago Radical Reference volunteer Laura Crossett! Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) ; And The Overall Awards Go To The ramblings of Laura Crossett, The Medium is Not the Message

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Ethicist once aptly stated: Attraction is a feeling. Love is a choice...

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To quote Staind: 'It's Been Awhile' since I have been given an opportunity to love a movie. Last night I watched a masterpiece. In About Schmidt we come across Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) who has arrived at several of life's crossroads all at the same time. Everything in his world was both under control and about to go madly wrong and fall apart. About Schmidt is nothing more or less than the opportunity to spend some time with the kind of man that we often meet in real life’s crossroads, in real pubs, in real chaos clubs, but rarely view on screens. If you're not deeply touched by this movie, check your pulse as this story gave me emotional whiplash. Jack uses his specific acting talent not just to entertain us but to open our mind for the possibly deep emptiness of people who call somewhere in their life and recognize that they aren't as rich as they are supposed to be. This strangely simple/complex character, Schmidt, tries to convince the audience that a full life should be the goal instead of just living without being aware of their own role. This can give a very positive motivation for every age.

During this darkly painful odyssey, Warren details his adventures and shares his observations with an unexpected new friend and confessor -- Ndugu Umbo, a six-year-old Tanzanian orphan whom he sponsors for $22 a month through an organization that advertises on TV. From these long letters filled with a lifetime of things unsaid, Warren begins -- perhaps for the first time -- to glimpse himself and the life he has lived. Inside the metaphorical forrest of ‘About Schmidt’ words seem magical and tragic. One moment we are in almost blinding sunlight, the next pitched under a dark blanket where the temperature is ten degrees cooler.

The script has very edgy material...
When I was a kid I used to think that maybe I was special, that somehow destiny had tapped me to be a great man - not like Churchill or Walt Disney or somebody like that. But somebody, you know, at least semi-important.

We see his melancholy through his exaggerated drunken state:
I can't get over you guys. No drinking, no carousing, no carrying on at all. I thought you college kids - let me tell you something, and I want you to listen very hard. That test tomorrow is meaningless. The senselessness of it all is going to hit you someday like a ton of bricks.

Live life to the point of tears.
-Albert Camus

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Men like to barbecue. Men will cook if danger is involved
-Rita Rudner

In the snow-draped mountains near Jalalabad in November 2001, as the Taliban collapsed and al Qaeda lost its Afghan sanctuary, Osama bin Laden biographer Hamid Mir watched "every second al Qaeda member carrying a laptop computer along with a Kalashnikov" as they prepared to scatter into hiding and exile Terrorists Turn to the Web as Base of Operations

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Blog readers are sexy
Gawker sales people tell advertisers that the blog audience is young, rich and influential.

It's a reasonable assumption. Blog readers are early adopters, and one would assume that they would have a profile much like the early internet audience. We hoped that contention was true, because it's at the core of the pitch: that blogs can help marketers reach people, above all, young guys, who are abandoning network television, and never really got into the newspaper reading habit.

• Passionate communities [ Nearly A Third Of Online Americans Have Visited Blogs ; The New York Times and Fred at Union have funded Indeed to the tune of $5 million Indeed: New kid on the blog ]
• · As an edited collection of scholarly articles by experts and practitioners in their fields, Uses of Blogs offers a broad range of perspectives on current and emerging uses of blogs Uses of Blogs ; Mainstreamers have lost their way ; Our Blog is Growing Up – And So Has Our Index Yahoo Claims Larger Search Engine Index Than Google
• · · ID theft ring hits 50 banks ; Corporations Reluctant to Reveal Incidents of Cyberextortion The Rise of the Digital Thugs
• · · · Darren Rowse has compiled a great series titled 31 Days to Better Blogs Declaring War on Blogger Apathy - Complete Article ; Yahoo Bets On Citizen Journalism ; The Top 10 Things You Should Know Before You Blog
• · · · · Blog on for wit and wisdom, but don't expect the gospel truth ; Doc Waterman stands by daughter accused of plotting wife's murder Father torn by grief, loyalty
• · · · · · Word of mouth is where it’s at, so is that blogs are better? The first excerpt from John Battelle's new book, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, is available on his blog Battelle ; Facts and Figures About Your Community

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When crises roll around, people don't panic nearly as much as we've been lead to believe, says Baruch Fischhoff A Hero in Every Aisle Seat

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Illegal Cities
Near the beginning of a review of Robert Neuwirth's Shadow Cities, Robert Nelson had this to say about the lawlessness of urban-squatter societies in Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, and Nairobi:

Anarchist political theorists have long dreamed of such a society; some of their ideas are today being put to the test. As Neuwirth reports, squatter anarchy can work surprisingly well. In the favela squatter settlements of Rio, law and order is privately maintained by local drug lords, and there is hardly any crime, comparing favorably in this regard with most Rio neighborhoods served by the city police

• Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World [Filming the Hand That's Stealing His Wallet ; The ancient Egyptians were arguably the world's first and best cheaters Crib Sheet Confidential]
• · Our second ranking of the World's Most Powerful Women illustrates how fleeting power is The 100 Most Powerful Women; It does not matter how far away you go, or to which country you visit, if you are only remaining in the inner cities of such places, life is practically identical Infernal paradise: how city design determines lifestyle
• · · I love reading online writers, but it’s hard for them to find readers, let alone earn any money. Wouldn’t it be great if I could find a way to help? The inspiration; Older people are drinking at unprecedented rates, research shows - but their bodies may be unable to take the pace Boomers now drowning their sorrows
• · · · Authors ranging from Bob Dylan to Stephen King on Thursday made the Quills short-list -- a new American literary award pitched as a populist event with a touch of Hollywood glitz New populist US literary award unveils nominees ; The Publishers' Choice - Not the People's
• · · · · The message to Australia's growing "creative class" is head west Perth: a city on the edge ; How many are mine? The World’s 100 Largest Yachts
• · · · · · Whether it is to do the dishes, clean the car or vacuum the living room, men now have an answer to their wife's war cry that they never listen: it's not me, darling, it's my brain Can't hear you, dear ... blame my brain ; Scripts from screenwriter

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Bureaucracy is a much-maligned feature of contemporary government. And yet the aftermath of September 11 has opened the door to a reassessment of the role of a skilled civil service in the survival and viability of democratic society Dismantling Democratic States 10 days that dismantled the Labor Party Bloodbath in Macquarie Street There were inklings of Bob Carr's resignation two months before the event, write a journalistic couple, Robert Wainwright and Paola Totaro, (czech out hard copy for an exclusive diary entry) Premier's silence gave game away

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Taxing Australian Federalism
The States, argues former Queensland Treasurer David Hamill, are in danger of becoming just another set of service providers to the Commonwealth as major changes continue to be wrought upon the nation's fiscal powers.

The Howard Government heralded its New Tax System (ANTS) and the Goods and Services Tax (GST) as a major reform of Australia's taxation system that would also enhance the financial capacity of Australia's States and Territories to provide community services. It was claimed that these reforms would arrest the erosion of States' and Territories' fiscal capacity that had occurred with the Commonwealth expanding its role in the social and economic affairs of the nation over the course of the twentieth century. In reality, ANTS and the GST have done exactly the opposite

• ANTS [One in 13 of the country's wealthiest individuals will soon be investigated by the Tax Office or locked in disputes with it - many for failing to disclose offshore assets or income Pay your dues, Tax Office tells wealthy; The death of the NSW property tax and end of vendor duty will speed fall in house prices Carr denies delaying vendor tax decision ; Web Porn to be Taxed, Filtered]
• · Health: Policy or Polyfilla? We need political leadership in Australia ; Information, e-government and opportunity: A public housing estate online
• · · Hurting family life and the working poor Pell and Jensen raise IR protest to critical mass; Labor needs some conviction politics Kim Beazley’s Tampa? ; John Quiggin doubts whether further privatisation of Telstra will benefit taxpayers T3 will be another disaster
• · · · Traudl Junge, the central character of the recent controversial movie Downfall, lived in Sydney with her younger sister The secret life of Hitler's secretary; Torture: The slippery slope to surrender to terror ; Bin Laden may not be capable of organising terror attacks directly, but then he does not need to Al-Qaida is now an idea, not an organisation
• · · · · Mushy middle? No way! A twelve-point creative-centrist agenda ; Ten best American political novels, 1945 - 2000 ; It's the perfume of the radical that gives him his edge Why Giorgio Agamben is so popular ; Government Regulation of Irrationality: Moral and Cognitive Hazards
• · · · · · The Real Aipac Spy Ring Story -- It Was All About Iran ; Before the War, CIA Reportedly Trained a Team of Iraqis to Aid U.S Scorpions ; Galloway says Blair and Bush Have blood on their hands

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Workers are like lemons: When the rich have sucked out all the juice, they throw them in the garbage.
- Ricardo Flores Magon, Regeneracion, April 1911

Most new era marketers understand the power of promotion and branding as well as the benefits of low costs real-time connectivity offered by the Web Sexed up Marketing of Blogs:
A post...about posts..about posts... Recapped: Many quiet voices



The Blog, The Press, The Media: Media Blogs
Many blogs take it as their mission to monitor the so-called MSM, or Mainstream Media. Remember Rathergate?

That's where bloggers debated the legitimacy of George Bush-related military documents that were used in a Dan Rather report, ultimately proving them forgeries and causing uproar at CBS News. And since you can't beat 'em, mass media figures have decided to join 'em--and started blogging as well. Today it's tough to separate the media-watchers from the mass media itself. -- Mara Leventhal

• Rich Media [Mas Media and the Military; Computer Assisted Reporting ; Clicking with e-news ; Steve Rubel What's next after blogging and podcasting? ]
• · Buchwald helps citizen journalists write a really good column ; Covering the Supreme Court is tough for TV journalists
• · · Plain Dealer editor explains decision to run FBI probe story ; Revealed: Dirty little secret of the Washington press corps
• · · · It is one thing to be an expert blogger and blogging strategiest, it’s another thing to be an expert blog designer and programmer Chris Abraham ; If you could ask only one person for advice about starting a company or joining a startup, chances are you'd pick John Doerr John Doerr's Startup Manual ; Digital Citizens: Your creativity Go Digital: Your digital world
• · · · · Trends in Australian CEO contract terms ; via Jacobson Consulting: External Insights ; Blog Tools
• · · · · · Everyone knows the Web is a shopper's paradise, teeming with great goods and great buys Shopping Blogs ; It stands to reason that budding businesspeople would be attracted to Weblogs, those do-it-yourself publishing sites that embody the very spirit of entrepreneurism Small Business

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The establishment people tell us that if the workers wanted to share the profits, it was called communism. When management wants to share profits, it's called a bonus
- Phil Donahue

Meanwhile, NSW Treasurer Andrew Refshauge has announced his resignation as Deputy Premier and as a member of Parliament today Iemma elected NSW Premier: Wild Times of Sydney

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Going cheap: Sydney's transport secrets
It's amazing what you can get for $20 these days

How about a fully featured IBM server computer, slightly used by the State Transit Authority but with all its data intact? Data such as payroll and financial information, Sydney public transport passenger counts and a high-level code for the city's ticketing systems. That's what a Sydney computer engineer, Geoffrey Huntley, says he found on computers bought at a government auction recently - and it wasn't just one server; there were 12 of them. Some still had backup tapes in their drives. Huntley posted pictures of the computer system screens - with key information faded out to be unreadable - on his website (www.geoffreyhuntley.com) on Saturday. These included incident reports, charter bus hiring systems, school bookings, employee numbers and employee access PINs

• Centralise in order to make it easier for terrorists to obtain information at one place. Bring On the ID Card. Hackers can already sneak into the transport surveillance images Alan Jones [Like Sydney train stations, Boston is filled with noise pollution and Alarming Warnings; Arguments about welfare and poverty bring out strong emotions ]
• · Medical Indemnity National Data Collection: public sector 2003 to 2004 ; Nicholas Pengelley Finding Australian Law
• · · There’s no business like small business; Driving Success: How You Innovate Determines What You Innovate ; All leadership comes down to this: changing people's behavior. Why is that so damn hard? Science offers some surprising new answers -- and ways to do better Change or Die ; The SEIU, the largest union in the AFL-CIO (the US equivalent of the ACTU) drive divisional changes United We Stand?
• · · · Capacities to believe in both equality and slavery, are the stuff of history. What an occupation journalism, I mean, not since the SS was dissolved in 1945 has there been such an opening for insensate cruelty Carr's green legacy should be taken with a grain of salt ; Christopher Sheil: Carr’s achievement was to fashion a political model that proved successful for Labor in all the states and territories. Basically, the model involved Labor conceding ground to the conservatives on financial and crime policies, while retaining the presumption of a positive role for government in providing public services and protecting the environment to improve living standards The ambiguities of Bob Carr ; The politically elegant Bob Carr defined the strategy of politics as administration for the state Labor Governments Politics as administration
• · · · · Culture minister, dissident, playwright dies at age 62 Dostál loses battle with cancer ; Joyfully joining the world with all its risks
• · · · · · John Quiggin A Happy Day ; Xmas Island camps ; On the other hand, It's official: We're top of the world Down Under

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It is not enough for a handful of experts to attempt the solution of a problem, to solve it and then to apply it. The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment.
- Albert Einstein

Major media companies are investing in blogs. Is this a new boom or just a bubble? Cashing in on Weblogs

To get the feel of Web logs and blogging, visit some of these sites Blogs 101: NY Times
Forbes also goes through a selection process: We don't matter Blog Power

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Working the Digital River to your advantage
One of my goals as a press observer is to explain how journalists do what they do

If you tell people about how you gather information and put together a story, you'll gain their confidence a lot faster than by keeping the process a mystery or by writing in stentorian tones to give the impression that you've just engraved gospel onto a stone tablet. In this vein, a friend recently suggested that I try—"try" is the key word—to suggest ways for people to navigate through today's information overload and become reasonably well-informed without making it a full-time job the way news addicts like myself do. So here goes...

• Sydney H. Schanberg Rx for Info Overload [Adult dosage: Take one or two or three three papers and a website daily - add grains of salt and stir the Digital Decade That Changed the World We Are All the Web]
• · Up to 70 journalists, artists and photographers employed by Fairfax Business Media went on strike indefinitely yesterday over job restructuring flowing from the closure of two magazines Fairfax plan spurs strike ; Jay Rosen has a thought provoking post at his Press Think site entitled: PressThink, Live from the BlogHer Conference ; Interactive Storytelling, Rethinking Journalism Check out the five finalists in the 2005 Batten Awards ; The Herald believes city officials are telling other news orgs what the tabloid is up to Boston Herald won't get City Hall comment on exclusives
• · · The writer, Dilpazier Aslam - Rathergate treatment: When The Guardian, one of England's most respected newspapers, printed an opinion piece in the aftermath of the London terrorist bombings this month, nothing seemed out of the ordinary Scott Burgess: N.O. expat scoops London's Guardian; Press Tour getting bogged down in blogs Newspapers have become "strangely enamored" of blogs
• · · · How the bias-spotting industry has turned news into mush ; Miami Herald executives defend decision to fire DeFede
• · · · · It's also led to the worst split in memory between two media giants -- Time Inc. and the New York Times -- in an area where news orgs usually present a united front grounded in the First Amendment, reports the Wall Street Journal Plame case presents biggest test of secret sources in years ; The media give the public what the public wants; Novak: I don't think I've ever talked to Rove on the record
• · · · · · Dean Baquet, the next Los Angeles Times editor, tells Tom Scocca: "The truth is, the great secret is, over the five years that John [Carroll] and I have run the paper, we have cut a lot, and I think the paper is better -- not because of the cutting …. Baquet wants to choke budget guys who say cutting is good ; Is McClellan serving the president well in press briefings?

Robot History: Robot is a word that is both a coinage by an individual person and a borrowing. It has been in English since 1923 when the Czech writer Karel apek's play R.U.R. was translated into English and presented in London and New York. R.U.R., published in 1921, is an abbreviation of Rossum's Universal Robots; robot itself comes from Czech robota, "servitude, forced labor," from rab, "slave." The Slavic root behind robota is orb-, from the Indo-European root *orbh-, referring to separation from one's group or passing out of one sphere of ownership into another. This seems to be the sense that binds together its somewhat diverse group of derivatives, which includes Greek orphanos, "orphan," Latin orbus, "orphaned," and German Erbe, "inheritance," in addition to the Slavic word for slave mentioned above. Czech robota is also similar to another German derivative of this root, namely Arbeit, "work" (its Middle High German form arabeit is even more like the Czech word). Arbeit may be descended from a word that meant "slave labor," and later generalized to just "labor."
Japanese scientists have unveiled the most human-looking robot yet - a female android named Repliee Q1Expo Jozefina Robotova: Will You marry MD?

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The whole history of progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning, they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted
- Frederick Douglass (1857)

I’d say it’s not quite as bad as poker machines but probably a bit worse than racehorses How much of a gamble is farming?

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Honest Abe
Knowing when to exit gracefully is not a quality we normally associate with politicians, so it was unusual when the NSW Premier Bob Carr decided to step down this week, 10 years after he won the top job.

But Bob Carr spent a beautiful Sydney weekend with his wife, contemplating his future, and decided that the time had come. He quoted one of his American political heroes, President Abraham Lincoln, saying he did so in the spirit of Honest Abe's second inaugural address — "with malice for none, with charity to all". It was just as well since his would-be successors for the job in the Labor Party were soon jockeying for position, with the odd elbow thrown in. NSW Police Minister Carl Scully said on Thursday he would not be pushed out of the race by the ALP's right-wing machine backing Health Minister, Morris Iemma. Friday he pulled out of the race. Mr Iemma now looks likely to win the caucus ballot on Tuesday and the premiership. Meanwhile, Mr Carr has been basking in the limelight of praise from his colleagues ... for example, the former NSW Premier, Neville Wran, who also decided to depart voluntarily after 10 years on the stage, said of Bob Carr: "People say, 'What's his greatest achievement?' I will tell you now, his greatest achievement was to keep on winning elections."

• Bob Carr: Revenge of the Nerd [ Lobbyist get up gears up for Senate ; Capital and Labor want some respect ; Get up!: first impressions? ]
• · Economics Blogs ; Ten Lessons for Nation-Building ; Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War A Rich Man's War
• · · Russia’s split personality – symbolized by its Tsarist coat of arms, a two-headed eagle – has been on open display recently The Two Faces of eX KGB Chief Vladimir Putin; Britain’s social model has developed a distinctive, hybrid character under Tony Blair – both less “American” and more “European” than critics claim Blair’s opportunity: an Anglo-Social European model
• · · · China and the world economy ; The Great Indian Poverty Debate engages the mind as much as the conscience ; Why Britain is great
• · · · · Europe's largest nation is in decline and has been for several years. The very core of its economy has begun to shrink: a process that no reforms have managed to halt. Germany's problems are rooted deeply in the postwar era The German Defect; From the outside, it seems like chaotic violence. But it's worse than that. In Iraq, Sunni Muslim suicide commandos are launching bloodbaths among the Shiites, gradually edging the country toward civil war. Instead of becoming a democratic beacon for the entire region, Iraq is on the verge of disintegrating Is the Country Heading for Civil War? ; Now, IRA stands for I Renounce Arm
• · · · · · That feeling of being under suspicion: What of "profiling" as an anti-terrorism forensic tool? ; When the Profile Fits the Crime Critics protest that profiling is prejudicial. In fact, it's based on statistics ; Political Blogs