Just in case they forgot, the words to the Pledge of Allegiance was run on the tele-prompter.

After a bit of a late start yesterday, I spent most of the afternoon with other members of the intrepid Peoples Press Collective, looking for activists and protesters who were particularly interesting.

Hot Air's Jason Mattera did some great under-cover work dressed as an anti-Guantanamo protester, in an orange jump suit, and got into some typically hilarious and revealing conversations. (I'll link to some videos when they're up on the web.)

We had gone out to "Tent State University", which looked something like the way a low-budget street fair would look just before it was about to end. That is, some bored looking liberals (Veterans for Peace, Amnesty International, random stoned 20-something white kids) waiting around for something to happen.

Some people were setting up a stage for someone to give a talk...I overheard something about the subject of "the racial income divide", but nobody was around to care.

Amnesty International had set up a model Gitmo cell, which Mattera proceeded to occupy as if he belonged there.

After returning to Civic Center Park, I interviewed some protesters and activists but there wasn't a lot to choose from during a very quiet day.

One man, a 69-year old poet/activist named Rick Burnley, was selling t-shirts that said Gulag Amerikkka which, despite the three K's obviously plagiarized from Jeremiah Wright, did have a message that I had some sympathy with. Namely, that America imprisons too many people, particularly for minor drug crimes. Despite our disagreement on some political issues, Burnley was a very pleasant guy.

I can just picture him sleeping in his car in Brooklyn, as he described, without two nickels to rub together, trying to make enough playing music and reading his anti-establishment poetry (which wasn't too bad if you're into that sort of thing.)

I spoke with some 50-ish year old women imported from San Francisco working at the Amnesty International tent. They were certainly committed radicals, self described "radical socialists leaning toward communism."

Like many of the protesters I've spoken to or overheard, they're not much more interested in Obama than in McCain, thinking that Obama isn't enough change. One woman said her favorite choice right now is Cynthia McKinney, running on the Green Party ticket. When I suggested that she was a racist, they said that was just the media's biased portrayal. (I beg to differ.)

One of the San Fran ladies said "What's wrong with socialized medicine? Congress has it and it works great for them. Now I want mine!" She wasn't kidding, and within her own deluded mind I suppose I can see her point. When I asked whether she was worried about the cost, she gave the usual answer: Just stop all wars and stop maintaining a military and we could then afford health care. When I suggested to her that Medicare was already going to bankrupt the country and was much more expensive than the War in Iraq, she didn't even comprehend what I was saying, and not because she's stupid. Her mind is simply closed to anything based on fact.

One woman said that capitalism has a fatal flaw and that it tends to "eat itself alive from the inside." I asked "hasn't Communism done exactly that every time it's been tried?"

Her answer, the answer of leftists from Dewey to Marx to Mao throughout history, was that "Russia and China were dictatorships, not truly communism" and that "it needs to be done with more of a scientific approach". Is it not amazing that they don't see the connection between forcing people to adhere to somebody's "scientific approach" and the dictatorship that such force must inevitably become?

[The] Moldovan region of Trans-Dniester, which is mainly populated by Russians and Ukrainians, differed from that of the Caucasus. . . .

Unlike the Georgian regions, neither Trans-Dniester nor the rest of Moldova, whose population is mostly Romanian-speaking, borders Russia.

Trans-Dniester, a long strip of territory on Moldova's eastern border with Ukraine, broke away from Moldova in 1990 and a war between Moldovan forces and separatists in 1992 left 1,500 people dead.

It is not recognized internationally, but is supported by Russia, which has 1,500 troops stationed there to guard weapons storage facilities left by the Soviet military. . . .

[Russia's ambassador] said, "Moldova should draw its own positive conclusions after the conflict in South Ossetia."

"It is simply impossible ... to have Moldova behave in a similar way to Georgia," he said in Russian.

"I believe that (in Moldova) the leaders will use their wisdom ... to not allow such a bloody and catastrophic trend of events" here, he said.

But he added he was glad "there is no intention to escalate the situation in the security zone (a demilitarized area along the Dniester River) and I believe that there shouldn't be any."

Russia's President Medvedev met with Moldova's President Vladimir Voronin on Monday in the Black Sea port of Sochi to discuss Trans-Dniester.

After the meeting, Voronin said the issue would only be solved through negotiations. He said a solution to the conflict will be drafted based on current law that gives Trans-Dniester gives broad autonomy but within Moldova's borders.

I’ve got a new beta version of Twitter Tools ready for testing. Twitter Tools is a WordPress plugin that creates an integration between your blog and your Twitter account.

This release has a couple of bug fixes (from version 1.5b1) and a couple of new features:

• fixed a logical bug that made the “exclude replies” option work backwards (oops!)
• removed a try/catch for PHP 4 compatibility (oops!)
• added support for hashtags (linked to search.twitter.com)
• abstracted all API endpoints and URLs so that it can theoretically support any service that implements the Twitter API

Hopefully this will be ready for a full release shortly, with only minor changes (if any). I guess we’ll find out soon.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.

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Labor Day weekend is approaching. For most of us that means taking a long weekend to slack off and enjoy the last gasp of summer. At least that’s what I plan to do.

But our friends over at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation in Washington State are a little more ambitious. Every year around Labor Day, EFF puts out a “State of Labor” report to highlight trends and developments in the world of unions. This year’s theme is “The Expansion of Public-Sector Collective Bargaining”.

We know a little bit about the recent growth of union power in government here in Colorado. That’s why EFF asked our own Ben DeGrow to get busy and write a couple articles to fill in observers across the nation on just what has happened in our own backyard. Ben’s two articles are “Colorado Supreme Court Exempts Union Activity from Disclosure” and “Employee Partnerships and Right-to-Work in Colorado”. On the second topic, Ben also has written a Denver Post op-ed and a two-page summary backgrounder that links to a full issue paper.

Via our DNC 08 correspondent Michael Darling, here's an intriguing Ted Talk by journalist / publisher / big thinker Kevin Kelly at last year's eg conference:

Kelly asserts that less than 5000 days into the history of the world wide web, we should have learned that we need to get better at believing in the impossible. Many of the items we take for granted on the Internet today were technologically and (perhaps more importantly) economically inconceivable just a couple of decades ago.

His model going forward is that we should understand that there is only one machine; and he points out that it's the most reliable machine ever built. Zero downtime. Uninterrupted for more than 5000 days. All of our laptops, PDAs, mobile phones, etc. are all just windows into this one machine.

Kelly notes that the size and complexity of this One Machine is roughly equal to a single human brain, with the big difference being that this particular brain is doubling in size and capacity every two years. At that rate, the One Machine will have the processing power of 6 billion human brains in 30 years, and will supersede the processing power of all humanity by the year 2040.

That ought to get us to the singularity if nothing else does.

Kelly suggests that the next 5000 days will be all about giving the machine a body. As we have noted in our many discussions of rapid replication, we're heading towards a scenario in which the most valuable component of any manufactured item is the information that describes it. Kelly argues that physical objects become even more valuable as information objects when they are connected into the One Machine. So a shoe becomes a chip with heels; a car becomes a chip with wheels.

nd watching as every bit gets sucked into the one machine. Right now there's a lot of data that isn't part of this machine, but that will change.

Kelly also talks about the restructuring of the web. We started with an Internet that linked computers. Then we went to a web that links pages. The third stage will be the linking of data itself. In such a setup, this page would be automatically linked to other pages that talk about Kevin Kelly or the next 5000 days of the web. Google and RSS and various kinds of tagging already provide a hint as to how something like this semantic web will work -- and it will, in fact, probably grow out of these things.

The whole idea reminds me a lot of the notion of hypertext as it was discussed and written about when I was in grad school 20 years ago or so. For me, one of the big disappointments of the world wide web was that you actually had to build the links from one page to another. The great vision was for an underlying infrastructure that would automatically make the links, and which would surprise us by making connections that were not as obvious as the top-level ones. I wasn't wrong to want that, just wrong to expect it 20-30 years before it was slated to show up.

Beyond the semantic Internet, and some time after the next 5000 days, we will see the the Internet of things, where physical objects, not just chips grafted on to them, are connected into the web. At that point, the line between the cyber world and the real world starts to break down in a totally unexpected way. We've had this model for a long time of a new, separate reality emerging in cyberspace, one that eventually becomes as robust or even more robust than the physical world of the substrate which contains it. That model may yet prove to be true, but it doesn't stop what Kelly is describing from happening -- having that cyber world reach up and embed itself in the real world.

Ultimately, we may no longer know which world contains the other.

But then at that point, we won't care. Our world will be the web at that point, and we will be the web. We will be the One Machine, just as, in a very real sense, we are now.

Back during the 1970's my Grandfather Shelby Gordon spent much of his retirement in his wood working shop. He made wooden swings, shelves, and - most impressively - grandfather clocks. Here's the one I have in my dining room:

You don't plug these clocks into the wall. They use weights. About once a week you pull the chains to raise the weights up and they slowly work their way down.

I thought about that clock when I read this article about storing wind mill energy:

...one of the most serious issues raised by the [wind power] naysayers was that the wind does not always blow when you need it.

But a New Jersey company plans to announce on Tuesday that it is working on a solution to this perennial problem with wind power: using wind turbines to produce compressed air that can be stored underground or in tanks and released later to power generators during peak hours.

Its a great idea in part because its so simple. It doesn't require expensive batteries or capacitors to store power. Just an air compressor. Its a totally mechanical solution.

With similar ease weights like in my grandfather clock could store power. These windmills are very tall. For perspective, check out the stairs/service entrance at the bottom right of this windmill:

If the wind is blowing hard when the price of electricity is low (like at night), why not have the windmill pull weights up to the top of the tower? It could be engineered to pull several weights or geared to slowly pull one very large weight up the tower. When the electricity is needed the weights would fall.

One of my economics professors once told me that the purest application of supply and demand theory he ever saw was at a hydroelectric dam control center. The controller watches an indicator that tells what the supply is - water behind the dam - and another indicator shows the price of electricity. These indicators were probably analog dials back when my professor toured that plant. I'm sure its computerized now. But they try to match power generation to that time when the price of electricity (and the need for electricity) is highest. Unless, of course, the water gets too high behind the dam. Then they'll generate regardless of the price of electricity.

Whether the answer is compressed air or weights, mechanical storage would allow windmills to function like hydroelectric dams and be better at providing power when its needed. And that would also improve the profitability of these power plants.

The more we know about Obama, the less we know about Obama.

Maybe if we had those special glasses, like Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones — or even Roddy … [visit site to read more]

Note: Photos and posting to other sites will come tomorrow. Right now I need to find my way to bed.

Taking Denver’s light rail line to a destination downtown imparts an interesting sense of journey that the short trip certainly can’t support. It’s the feeling of being on one of the airport people movers complete with ding-ding sounds and the whoosh of a train passing close to walls as I head into the city. For me, on a personal level, it lent an air of excitement to an already exciting moment.

In fact, I was almost as giddy today heading to my first taste of the DNC credentials as I was when I first heard the stirring refrain of “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus.”

What I can’t decide is whether the moment was cheapened or heightened by the well-dressed, nice looking, and ridiculously drunk forty-something getting on the train and hitting on the women heading down to pick up their own credentials. Like any good drunk, he interpreted a polite smile and an innocent query as sexual interest. The bright pink “Vote for Change” button on his lapel made the moment just a tiny bit better as he slyly winked at me and quietly mouthed, “Watch this. She’s gonna dig me.”

He approached his target at the front of the train, blearily introduced himself, and then wobbled off contentedly. His dignity may have taken a massive hit, but he’ll never notice. I found myself wondering if he had managed to debark at the right platform.

And then the cold slap of reality.

During the convention, light rail doesn’t quite make all its normal stops. Instead of dropping off across the lot from the Pepsi Center, it drops off at Invesco. Normally that might not seem like much of a walk, but with all the lots barricaded, entire streets shut down, and the Pepsi center surrounded by tall fences and cops, the walk becomes quite a bit longer. Normally that might not seem like much of an issue, but I was already running late--or, at least, later than I had intended to be. Which was already later than I wanted to be.

If you take my meaning.

The long walk around the parking lots lets me get a good look at the amazing profusion of concrete barricades--and to take a few trips down dead end detours. If I were a rat and that was a maze, I would have flunked the final exam.

Finally trekking down the right sidewalk, I realized that I was happy about the hordes of cops. Watching them keeping an eye on the handful of kids wandering through looking like extras from Recreate68 media events (or, at least, like members of the Anarchists’ Progressive Hair Club for Men), I actually feel secure. Not that there are enough of the kids to make them even remotely scary, nor are their squirt guns filled with urine in evidence. Whatever mayhem was promised or planned has mostly fizzled in a powerless display of some of the dumbest of America’s next generation.

I’m not complaining.

As I finally rounded the corner at the Tivoli (oh, how many drunken evenings have I spent at the Tivoli?), I saw Checkpoint Charlie, another gathering of Denver’s finest, and a couple anti-Obama protesters. Denver’s finest were posing in a group photo for some of the folks who seem to be treating the convention as a vacation opportunity. And there are a lot of them. Later, the trip down 16th Street Mall surprised me with just how energetic this little city can be when properly motivated. Apperently the proper motivation--minus the occasional world title in either football or hockey--is the influx of thousands of out-of-towners, a few million dollars, and the giddiness that only Obama can bring into our lives.

Sadly, these realizations come pretty far away from Pepsi Center. A call to my benefactor revealed two unhappy truths: I would be stuck at the checkpoint until he could manage to work his way over to me, and, no, he wouldn’t give me the hall pass for the night.

Damn. Still, the Perimeter Pass has to have some value, right? The cops I asked at Checkpoint Charlie weren’t sure. The first one wasn’t sure it would get me through the first barrier, but suggested I ask. Cop two, at the barrier, said that, yes, it would get me in but he wasn’t sure it would get me past the next checkpoint. What was striking, aside from the fact that they didn’t know where I could and couldn’t go when I finally got that Perimeter Pass, was just how jolly they were. Happy men.

None of which mattered since I had to wait for Robert. The waiting which wasn’t helped by either my poor directions or his inability to spot the big, freakin’ smokestack that said “Tivoli.”

Not that I blame him.

While I waited, one of the cops who probably noticed my artlessly disheveled hair and unshaven face, wandered over and asked what I was doing. Even while he gave me a quick questioning, his happy demeanor never wavered. “You know,” he explained, “we’re just here to make sure everyone has a chance to be heard. Everyone has the right to speak their minds whether we agree with them or not, and we’re going to do our best to make sure that they get that chance.”

“Yeah,” I answered, “but there are some folks down here right now who don’t really play that way.”

“True. Some of the anarchists and such. But it’s been pretty quiet and hopefully it will stay that way--a good night to me would be a boring night.”

He wandered off after deciding that, while ugly, I didn’t pose a threat to the world.

A few minutes later, Robert wandered over the Checkpoint Charlie’s fence. A brief moment gazing through the chain-link fence and an exchange of credentials brought a little hope back into my world. Finally working my way through CC led me down another street toward Pepsi Center and the holy grail of the political bloggers: bumming about with real media folks at a national convention. And there I came face-to-face with the unexpected.

Happily, I was told that my pass would get me through CC, Part 2, wasn’t sure if it would get me anything else, but that I had to get in line with the rest of the media folks to find out. Disneyworld has nothing on the line to get into the freakin’ perimeter of the Pepsi Center. Suddenly, hobnobbing with “real” media seemed less fun, especially given the nature of their conversation.

I’m sure not all of the members of the media are shallow, self-interested loudmouths. I’m sure aren’t all so bold in their open support of a political agenda. Im sure it was just the folks who surrounded me. But shallow, self-interested, and boldly supportive of Obama is what they were.

A woman--perhaps the loudest of the bunch--wearing a Reuters lanyard, talking to a handful of others, proudly proclaimed herself a true believer; she couldn’t understand how her mother, a die-hard feminist and Hillary supporter, could even consider withholding her vote from Obama. “ A vote for McCain doesn’t just hurt women, it hurts everyone.”

It was a sentiment that I had heard earlier by a couple of black women who were waiting back at CC. When a man from Montreal (complete with heavy accent) approached them to tell them just how important this election was to folks up north, the older woman answered, “It’s important to us, too. It’s important to everyone. Those folks voting for McCain are just being silly and they don’t know what all this means--what it means for everyone.”

There’s a part of me that wonders how Obama could possibly live up to the expectations of his biggest supporters? That’s not a critique of the man, nor is it a prediction of failure, it’s just that expectations of that size are often impossible to fulfill.

If there is a dissenting voice inside the first checkpoint, it’s probably embedded in the bloggers’ room or in one of just a handful of conservative reporters covering the event. It’s a see of liberalism. Again, that’s not a critique: this is, after all, the Democratic National Convention and filling the seats with true believers is part of the point of the show. You can’t rally the troops if the troops aren’t already predisposed to follow the leader. That doesn’t change the fact that, for a Republican, it’s eery to be surrounded by so many people who are openly hostile to my beliefs, who would call my beliefs silly.

Which is why I keep my mouth shut, keep as low a profile as I can, and hope that no one notices my innate conservativeness. Because, let’s be honest, if they suspected that I’m a thrall of Big Oil (or any of the other evil Big industries), they will probably openly scold me or something equally irritating.

But I endured the line, I endured the comments about Bush, and I endured the comments about McCain ("It was so cute when his little girl looked at him and said, ‘I really don’t like McCain.’"), and I endured the piercing voices--all to get inside The Perimeter.

Which was kind of useless, if you want to know the truth. After clearing the gates, walking through the metal detectors, I found that the outside of the Pepsi Center was fairly covered with Perimeter Pass folks like me either watching the CNN broadcast on the TVs at the CNN official bar or wandering somewhat aimlessly outside the facility and glancing longingly, wishing they were inside doing something useful.

Which is pretty much what I ended up doing until I got bored by eavesdropping on the half-baked policy ideas of reporters waiting for their rides. Hybrids, of course.

Leaving was much easier than getting in and, after managing to wind my way through more maze-like barricades and vendors selling everything from bottled water to Obama Frisbees (my current favorite gift idea for the Democrats on my Christmas list), I ended up at the light rail station by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. A black gentleman was waiting there and he helped me figure out which line I needed to be boarding. He ended up giving me the moment that made the evening all worthwhile.

Living out in Aurora near where I live, he was biking into town daily to see the event. “This is great. I’m taking a bunch of pictures for a scrapbook for my grandchildren since I didn’t get mine in the sixties.”

It wasn’t an angry statement, it wasn’t even particularly racial in nature. It was a guy saying that he was happy to see another man, with his skin color, taking part in the race for the highest elected office in the land. A lot of conservatives will make a big story about the percentage of black folks who vote for Obama and how, if we are truly in a post-racial America race shouldn’t be the deciding factor in an election. There’s a lot to be said for that sentiment. But it ignores the reality: sometimes race matters and, right now, many black folks are feeling a sense of inclusion in American politics that they’ve never quite felt before.

That’s not a bad thing; in fact, if it brings us closer to the point where a black man or woman can fun for the office without it being a big deal, then it’s a damned good thing.

Good. Now if a few concerned parents would get together and do something similar to all those brainy egghead kids, I wouldn’t have to waste my time helping the boy with his homework.

So, like, … [visit site to read more]

Well, not really must, but I think it’s a good idea.

Steve Green, in his very first video piece for Pajama’s Media, comes up with a story quite different from the one he expected. Death threats, a minor bit of violence, and a Michelle Malkin showing far more poise than I could muster under similar circumstances.

While I have some big policy differences from Malkin, I still imagine that she would be a wonderful person to debate. She’s smart, she’s quick on her mental feet, and has a great personality. Having a few martinis and hashing out differences in viewpoints on everything from gay marriage to national security would be fun with someone like her. Any discussion with Alex Jones and his cartoonish, crackpot fellow travelers looks to be damned near impossible.

It’s also instructive of what happens when you disagree with the fringe left that claims to believe in free speech: you get threatened, shouted down, harassed, and at last one guy was assaulted (albeit in a minor way). And then these devotees of intellectual debate start shouting: “Fascist! Fascist!”

It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.