Unconventional Sources

Gathering from multiple sources, the Skeptical Introduction to Congress doesn’t seem to be enjoying what it’s finding so far.

A Green Party candidate who may be teetering even before his campaign has begun; John Conyers talking tough with no action on FBI Spying; Congressman Zach Space having a fundraiser held for him by a nuclear energy company — these are not the stories that a satisfied citizen would have heard. For that reason, it’s important that we do hear them.

Thanks to this Skeptic – and keep the survey going.

If you’ve ever known an Upstate New Yorker, you know how sensitive they can be about the whole Upstate/Downstate distinction. Say that they’re from New York, and they’ll say, “Yes, but I’m not from that New York.”

They have good reason for being so conscientious with their identity. Upstate New York is a very different kind of place than New York City and Long Island – culturally, geographically, and economically.

So, it makes sense that if there’s going to be coverage of the Green Party in New York State, there ought to be separate coverage for Upstate New York. That’s what Upstate Greens intends to provide, writing about issues and events that matter particularly to Green Party members and enthusiasts in Upstate New York.

Increasing numbers of Democrats are growing disillusioned with the direction that President Obama and the Democratic Congress are taking. Progressive promises are being broken, and replaced with a decidedly non-progressive agenda that looks too much like the politics of Bush for comfort.

So, now is a time when the Green Party could be picking up a lot of new members – if they can take advantage of the political dynamics of the moment. There is no powerful central Green Party organization, so it’s up to Green Party members themselves to make it work, from the grassroots up.

One place Green Party members can start is by going to the Green Party Central discussion boards, introduce yourself, and find out a little bit about what’s going on in your neck of the woods.

If you’re looking for information about what’s going on in Green Party politics these days, you might go to the official Green Party web site, and find something useful there. You’re guaranteed to find useful information, however, day after day, at Green Party Watch. Pay attention, Green Party activists, to the way the creators of the site keep up the effort, day after day. That’s the way to make a change.

As Albert Einstein said, you’ve got to keep things moving in order to stay in balance… or something to that effect

In a quick survey of online activism in North Carolina, there are some worrying signs for those who work against war. Two groups, the North Carolina Peace Hub and the High Country Citizens for Peace and Justice, have abandoned their posts on the Internet over the last couple of years. The North Carolina groups Community for Peace and Duct Tape for Peace now also appear to be defunct. North Carolina Peace Action hasn’t put out a newsletter since March 2008. I wonder, do the people who once made up these organizations not care about peace so much when it ceases to be an easy campaign issue for the Democrats?

Is this a sign that North Carolina is less peace-loving today than it was just a few years ago? Not necessarily. Where these peace activist sites have faltered, two other activist sites have risen to take their place. The Charlotte Area Green Party and the Buncombe Greens are now online, and looking to support candidates for public office who will promote the politics of peace.

It always seemed unsustainable, the idea of a progressive voice for Irvine, California. If you’ve ever been to Irvine, you know what I mean.

Irvine isn’t so much a place as a collection of almost places. Glass towers are circled by streets that lead to streets that never really get to anywhere, and before you know it, you’re out of Irvine, and into another ill-defined Southern California Communitee(TM). There are places in Irvine where it’s actually illegal to cross the street.

Yet, while it lasted, IrvineProgressive.com was a strong voice for progressive interests, coming right out of Irvine, California.

IrvineProgressive is now gone. Although you can still visit the domain, it’s just a place filler that sells real estate and cosmetic dental services. The holder of the domain name is hoping to sell it at a premium price. I’m betting that they don’t have any takers for a long, long time.

Last month, I wrote about Bikely, a web service that helps people share their preferred bicycling route through Google Maps. Today, I found out about a similar service, Map My Ride. Map My Ride uses MapQuest instead of Google Maps, which means that the interface isn’t quite as pretty, but it’s easier to find nearby businesses. It seems that there are many more routes on Map My Ride as well.

I am in love with Bikely. It’s a simple web site with a simple idea that makes life for bicyclists a lot more interesting.

Imagine Google Maps, but on a site dedicated to the sharing of good bike routes all around the world. That’s Bikely. I’m trying to plan a bicycling trip out of London right now, for example, but I really don’t know the roads. Bikely has been extremely helpful in my efforts.

The bike paths are shown on the maps, but show are the little points along the way, with directions and sites worthy of remark showing up as you progress from point a to point b.

The only trick – I can’t imagine actually navigating while on a bicycle in this way. How can a service like Bikely be integrated with on the road needs? Perhaps that’s where an iPhone would come in handy.

This week, a group of right wingers attempted to create a Google bomb, a fake grassroots network of web sites that link a certain phrase to a certain web page. This attempted Google bomb tried to link the Obama White House web site to the phrase soft tyranny. This effort is documented over at the Squidoo lens entitled soft tyranny.

It turns out that the phrase soft tyranny has been erroneously attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman who visisted the early United States and wrote a long essay describing the American way of life as he saw it. The idea of soft tyranny is that efforts by the government to provide for the general welfare can thwart the ambitions of individuals.

Right wingers see this as tyranny, but the idea of government helping people doesn’t seem really tyrannical to most people, which is why right wingers came up with the slippery phrase of soft tyranny. Soft tyranny is really, in the end, just a phrase for something that isn’t really tyranny at all.

People, living on the land, are not aware of the enormous crisis facing life in the water. Of course, water covers most of the surface of the Earth, and if you take into account that the livable medium in the water is not as flat as terrestrial environments, you’ll realize just how much more the Earth is a water planet than it is a planet of dry continents.

It makes sense, if we’re trying to live more in accord with the natural world, to understand the tremendous value of aquatic and marine life. A good place to start on that quest is Image Quest Marine – a catalog that samples the tremendous variety of life that exists in the waters of planet Earth.