I have to try

Maybe this is the most pointless task I could pursue, but there is always that little weakly glittering thing at the bottom of Pandora's box.
http://windofourlittlewings.blogspot.com/

Benazir Bhutto-From BBC

Benazir Bhutto killed in attack Pakistani former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated in a suicide attack.
Ms Bhutto had just addressed an election rally in Rawalpindi when she was shot in the neck by a gunman who then set off a bomb.
At least 16 other people died in the attack and several more were injured.
President Pervez Musharraf condemned the killing and urged people to remain calm so that the "nefarious designs of terrorists can be defeated."
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attack.
Ms Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), had twice been the country's prime minister and had been campaigning ahead of elections due in January.

It was the second suicide attack against her in recent months and came amid a wave of bombings targeting security and government officials.
Nawaz Sharif, also a former prime minister and a political rival, said her death was a tragedy for "the entire nation".
"It is not a sad day, it is [the] darkest, gloomiest day in the history of this country," he said, speaking at the hospital where she was taken.
The United Nations Security Council is to meet for emergency consultations shortly to discuss the situation in Pakistan after the killing.
Scene of grief
The attack occurred close to an entrance gate of the park in Rawalpindi where Ms Bhutto had been speaking.
Read more here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7161590.stm

Trillium

Public sectors fail, private sectors fail. Some cheery economists believe that non-profit organizations will step in to fill in the holes. Others say the market will do it by itself. Either technologies that could fill those holes will advance and become cheaper/more efficient, so investing will naturally be funneled towards them, or humans will once in a while deviate from the generic economic formula of making decisions based on self-interest alone. An example of investing for both self interest and for reasons that computers and economic models don't usually predict: http://trilliuminvest.com/ I met a lady who worked for this company a few years ago. It was the first hopeful thing I had come across in a long time. Otherwise, how else could anything (other than some beautiful supervirus) rein in the Foucauldian decentralized power mess of the world. (There is absolutely no single person, thing, or event to point fingers at, or to uproot.)

What you can learn from someone who’s trying to hide from the world on the floor of a bus.

My friend Warrick says that a person’s personality is pretty well set by the time they turn 25. If that’s the case, I’ve got about 3 months to wring some bitterness out of myself and cram a little more compassion in. I have a heart that’s filled with so much impatience and criticism. But I heard something on NPR (half of what moves me on a daily basis comes from NPR these days) yesterday that made me think twice about sneering when people say “being kind is truly the most important thing we can do on this earth”.

I heard photographer Michael Nye speak about his “Fine Line” project. He got to know people around his city who are considered to have mental illness. He photographed and interviewed them. You can see his project at this site: http://www.michaelnye.org/fineline/photoaudio.html
The words that made me think more about kindness came from the lady in the photograph on the bottom row that is second from the left.

The other interesting thing I heard on the same radio show was about the documentary “The Bridge”. The maker of the film had heard that the Golden Gate Bridge is the number one suicide spot in the world. People worldwide travel there to die. So he and his crew filmed the bridge every day for one year. Apparently they stirred up a lot of controversy, but also a lot of awareness with the film.
http://www.thebridge-themovie.com/new/index.html

Robotic Camel Jockeys of Qatar

Qatar is a tiny little Persian Gulf country on a peninsula sticking off of the eastern side of Saudi Arabia. My friend Ivanhoe told me about this last night. (It's an old news story, but I hadn't heard about it.)

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0715_050715_robot_jockey.html

July 15, 2005—Technology met tradition this week, when a camel race in Doha, Qatar for the first time featured robots at the reins. On July 13, workers fixed robotic jockeys on the backs of seven camels and raced the machine-mounted animals around a track. Operators controlled the jockeys remotely, signaling them to pull their reins and prod the camels with whips.
This feat of technology was also a development in human rights. Racing-camel owners in many Persian Gulf countries traditionally use children as jockeys, sometimes as young as four years old. Faced with pressure from human rights groups, Qatar outlawed the practice last December and looked to technology to keep the races running.
Officials approached the Swiss robotics firm K-Team, which came up with a compact solution. The new robot jockeys weigh 57 pounds (26 kilograms) and cost about U.S. $5,500 each.
The market for these robotic riders may soon be growing. In April the United Arab Emirates announced that it too would use robots in camel races. And in May, Oman declared a ban on child jockeys, effective this fall.
Sheik Abdullah bin Saud, the Qatari official in charge of the robot project, told the Associated Press in April that the goal of the program was to "improve the speed, the weight, the aerodynamics, to reach the ultimate goal of completely phasing out children used as jockeys."

Richard Grossman on Alternative Radio

I just listened to a talk by Richard Grossman on Alternative Radio(http://www.alternativeradio.org/) called "Rolling Back Corporate Power."

He compared the struggle abolotionists in the 1800's faced in fighting against the status quo of what was and wasn't constitutional with the struggle modern American communities face in fighting for the constitutional rights of humans over corporations. As it stands now, because of the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company ruling the Supreme Court made in 1886, corporations have the rights of citizens under the U.S. Constitution. If you've seen the documentary "Trading Democracy" (http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/tradingdemocracy.html), that kind of corporate status, given by our constitution and by NAFTA, might make you feel as nervous as I do about the whole mess.

Here are some websites related to Richard Grossman:
http://www.poclad.org/
http://www.zmag.org/intgrossman.htm
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/TCoB.html
http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1993/08/mm0893_06.html

Can small stirrings of butterfly wings steal the breath of CEOs thousands of miles away?

Even if you leave no forwarding address when you move, all the credit card mail offers find you.

I had a credit card by the time I turned 18 years old. By the time I was 23 years old, I was choking on my breath when I tried to sleep at night, not knowing how I was going to pay my credit card bills. There was this moment where I actually froze in my steps in the middle of walking, because I suddenly realized that the total of my credit card debts combined was now equal to 2/3 of my yearly income. I made some life changes immediately, and now, one year later, I have paid my credit cards off entirely and will never have another one again.When those mail offers come, I now do something with them. I tear up the offer and wrap a strip of paper around it, on which I write "Please pass this message on to your supervisor: Please stop charging your customers outrageous fees and interest rates in order to fund these mailings, which offer only to ruin people's lives at the cost of our forests. WE ARE TIRED OF IT." Then I put the torn up offer into the "No Postage Necessary if Mailed in the United States" envelope that they sent with the offer, and I mail it to them.

It's a dumb experiment. I want to see if the offers stop coming.

Corporations have the rights of citizens. I don't think real people can compete anymore.

Dream

Sleeping outside at night with a group of people, I awoke to find my throat partway slit and festering, as if by the hands of aliens. Yet what had really happened was a massive guerilla movement across the USA, and a stray bullet had grazed my neck while I was sleeping.

In the daylight, we could see the guerillas moving north in buses along Aurora Avenue. Some guerillas were civilians, some were uniformed military men who had gotten fed up with the military. The two types were in seperate buses, but all held weapons, pointed out the window toward us... not with the intent to shoot, but rather, to announce that they were taking control of the place.

I felt the delicious thrill of adventure and a smug pleasure at knowing this GREAT government was being overthrown in 48 states, simaltaneously.