Dowbrigade

KEIZER, Ore. –
Nine-year-old Keizer resident Morgan Kepford’s unusual skill may have
earned her a spot on the "Late Show with David Letterman."

For the past two weeks, Morgan has practiced shoving a balloon up her nose, holding
it in place with her toes and blowing, something she hopes to perform on Letterman’s "Stupid
Human Tricks" segment of his show.

"She’s always doing very strange things," said Morgan’s stepmother,
Dawn Kepford. "She’s very, very intelligent and she has a creative outlet
for it."
from AP

Adam Curry is in Bagdad, after numerous delays and exhaustive preparation.
Must be weird, exhilerating, moving and confusing all at once.
First
set of pics are up; looks dusty. Read the details on Adam’s blog.

The first skirmishes are being fought over President Bush’s incomplete
military records and Senator Kerry’s Vietnam-era association with that
Bete Noir of American Politics, Hanoi Jane Fonda.  While it speaks
volumes about the charisma and character of our current President that
no one remembers whether he was there or not for long periods of his
war-time service, the attention being paid to purported photos of Kerry
and Fonda seems to be pure celebrity scandalizing.

While only one authentic picture from the era has turned up so far (the
one with a blurry Kerry in the background) enterprising photoshoppers
have already come up with a number of fake realities in which John and
Jane were together, front and center.

Well, frankly, so what? Who cares if they protested the war together
or even spent a drug-drenched weekend at the Hefner Mansion with Che
Guevara and Charles Manson.  Hell, they were both attractive young
singles, and it was the 60’s.

Obviously, these photos are the work of rank amateurs. Carl Rove and
company do much cleaner work than this, and anyway, we doubt a close
examination of 20-something personal histories is somewhere the Bush
campaign wants to go.  The President has admitted that when he was
young and irresponsible, he was, well, young and irresponsible. We’ve
all been there.

However, our original point is that reality and our perception of it
is more plastic and mutable with each passing electoral cycle. What we
are seeing unfold on our quadrennial screens is the convergence of government,
big business and show business. The three pillars of the American Empire
are putting on The Greatest Show on Earth, and we all have front row
seats.

Just sit back, folks, and watch the show. Don’t feel bad if you don’t
have a horse in the race, as the winner gets deballed and the losers
end up as dog food. The American public is so hooked on entertainment
that nothing less than a wardrobe malfunction can capture their attention,
a fact that has surely not escaped the strategists for the Kerry and
Bush.

So stay tuned, Sports Fans. The Dowbrigade is willing to bet real money
that the news streams Rove and Company are cooking up as we blog will
make these weak attacks look like amateur night at the karaoke bar. And
John Kerry, as an authentic warrior and unrepentant Yalie, is a good
bet to give as good as he gets.

By the time this one is over, the Dowbrigade predicts, we will be posting photos of George Bush cavorting naked with the Olsen twins, and John Kerry cavorting naked with the Bush twins.

The election itself may be as managed as a World Wrestling Federation
Super Slam, but we are sure the half-time show will be worth watching…..

Meanwhile, in an Orwellian twist, George Bush and Tony Blair have been
nominated for the Nobel
Peace Prize.  Only a Peace Prize awarded
in the name of the inventor of dynamite could be given to the instigators
of the most one-sided war since the Invasion of Granada.

Fake photo story from Newsday

This story hits too close to home.  Ron Mayfield
became an ESL teacher late in life, although he always wanted to be an
educator.  Taking
early retirement after 20
years working on the railroad, he went back to school to get a
teaching degree from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas in 1992, the
same year his son, Robert, graduated from college. This was followed
by stints teaching English in Japan and Saudi Arabia.

Finally, tired of traveling, he returned home and got a job teaching
English to non-native speakers at Woodrow Wilson Junior High School.
By all accounts he was a stable and sober man. Then, late last year hew
was accused of "assaulting" a student in a wheelchair. He said he was
merely trying to get the attention of the misbehaving and disruptive
student.

Despite his word, testimony of other students, Mayfield’s spotless record,
an apology from the students parents and a police investigation
which completely cleared the teacher, his life was turned upside down.  His
picture was shown in the newspaper and on TV, neighbors began to whisper
about him, and he got more and more depressed.

So one late October morning he drove down the Blue Ridge Parkway to
a scenic 2-lane bridge 200 feet above
the
rushing
Roanoke
River where
he often
went
fishing for catfish with his son, and had gone as a child with his father,
a
photo of which he had installed as a screen
saver
on his
computer.  He
left his car carefully parked in a scenic overview parking area, slipped
a
neatly folded not into the bible on the front seat, and walked
to the middle of the span.  He took out his cell phone and called
his wife for a muted goodbye she didn’t understand.  Then
he carefully placed the phone on the sidewalk and jumped.

False accusations against teachers are rising at an unprecedented rate.
It has gotten to the point where the Dowbrigade is so worried about inadvertent
touching that he teaches with his hands in his pockets, which makes blackboard
notation difficult and has convinced his students he is some sort of
pervert, negating the whole point of the maneuver.

"There is a culture now where students know how to get rid of a
teacher, they know how to get a teacher removed from a classroom," said
Greg Lawler, general counsel for the Colorado Education Association.

Mayfield was warned about the troubled boy, Abdul Nahibkhil, at the
start of the school year by a colleague who said the boy disrupted
her class the year before. Abdul’s parents, Abdul and Shina Nahibkhil,
had come to the United States from India about 27 months earlier.
The parents, who speak no English, were interviewed with their daughter
Jasmine, 20, serving as interpreter.

"When the investigators came, my parents told them that in India,
teachers hit students all the time and they didn’t care if Mr. Mayfield
hit
Abdul or not," the daughter said. "They said if he hit
him, he deserved it. But it didn’t matter. They didn’t care if he
hit him
or not. They wanted the matter dropped, and they said that they would
make Abdul go to school and apologize to Mr. Mayfield."

When [his wife] got his final phone call at 8:01 a.m., he did not
tell her that was where he had gone. In the minutes after he dropped
into
the river, his cellphone, abandoned on the sidewalk, rang again and
again without answer.

from the Boston Globe

Skiers
from six nations – including Britain – swapped their ski gear for g-strings
in Austria’s first nude skiing competition.

Organisers said they were delighted after 84 skiiers braved temperatures
of 28 F to compete in the first Nude Ski Race, in Hochfuegen.

Competitors were asked to perform two jumps for the judges before downing
a glass of schnapps and finishing the race with a five-point pirouette.

Organiser Ernst Erlebach said: "Most of the skiers wore g-strings,
bikinis, swimming trunks or underwear. Five women even skied with bare
breasts."

Authorities had threatened to pull the plug on the entire race unless
the skiers at least covered their private parts. Werner Kostenzer, head
of the local tourism board, said: "We need
to keep at least some decency. Nobody is allowed to ski naked."

from Ananova

Over the past 9 months millions of people in America have become aware that
they can use their computers to access the political process that governs
their lives. They opened an electronic door which now cannot be shut.

Their candidates did not prevail, and the resident in the White House
during the next four years will not be a blogger, or even understand
what blogs represent. But a growing number of voices are calling for
some sort of ongoing effort to encourage and develop the awakening consciousness
of political empowerment stirring in the land.

Dave Winer suggests a “Rational People’s Party” which doesn’t nominate
candidates:

Let’s call it the Rational People’s Party, or RPP. We’d meet every month
to talk about local and national politics, to start new weblogs and meetups,
to broadcast our ideas and invite political leaders to pitch themselves.
If they wandered off-topic we’d ask them to get back on track. If one
broke a campaign promise, this would appear on a public list, for every
local RPP chapter to access. Think of it as a nationwide caucus system,
that’s ongoing, and has a good database and lots of weblogs.

Hear, hear. However, calling it a “Party” starts out with the wrong
message and plays into the existing conventional terminology. People
will hear it and associate with “fringe party, green party, Black Panther
Party”. Plus, at least for us, there is the secondary association
of “Par-tay” and an unfortunate memory of once belonging to something
called the Party Party back in college.

So we favor “Movement”, which is what we want to see in the status quo,
in the political process, and in the information distribution business.
And of course we will not nominate candidates. But we reserve the right
to endorse, to advise, and to oppose candidates on a case by case basis.

However first comes a long and arduous look at ourselves, figuring out
if there are any principles worth fighting for universal enough
to attract the great masses of people needed to create real movement, followed
by the hard work of getting organized creating the analog and digital
infrastructure necessary to allow it to happen. Stay tuned…

SACRAMENTO (AP) – A self-proclaimed carpetbagger who brought the Web savvy
from his surfside home south of San Francisco to take on a Central Valley
congressman has put his campaign on the virtual auction block.

Jeffrey Vance, a carpenter by trade and political neophyte, is selling out –
literally – offering shares in his fledgling campaign on eBay, the online marketplace.

The Web site boasts 20 million items for sale at a time, including scores of
political memorabilia, but no campaigns that eBay is aware of, said a company
spokesman.

Vance, 42, who is seeking the Democratic nomination to take on nine-term incumbent
Rep. Wally Herger, R-Rio Oso, said he realized about two weeks into the race
that he wasn’t going anywhere without money.

But his platform is also grounded in the belief that special interests are to
blame for some of the nation’s problems.

"Congress is pretty much bought and sold," Vance said. "If you
look at the funding sources you’ll see why we don’t have a utopia."

For believers in a future paradise, he is offering $20 certificates "of
Democratic freedom" that carry the following disclaimer: "No undue
rights or privileges or access or undue influence are accorded the bearer." But
Vance does promise he will be "unfettered by corporate and special interest
control."

from the
AP

Police reportedly released the woman after 24 hours, confiscated her five computers
and shut down her Web site. She was arrested Monday in her home town of Mechelen,
30 kilometres north of Brussels.

"She was preparing to publish new viruses on this site," Inspector
Olivier Bogaert of the Belgium police was quoted as telling La Libre Belgique.

The Computer Crimes Unit inspector said Gigabyte was an extremely talented student. "I
told her it was a pity that she did not put her skills to a more positive use," he
told the paper.

Her youth and gender helped gain Gigabyte notoriety in the male-dominated world
of computer hackers. In a 2002 interview carried on the Web site www.techtv.com,
Gigabyte defended her work, saying she herself never spread the viruses she created
and published on her Web site.

"When people make guns, can you blame them when somebody else kills with
them?" she was quoted asking. "I only write them. I don’t release them."

According to TechTV, Gigabyte began writing programs when she was just 6-years-old,
created her first computer worm at 14 and before turning 18 became only the second
person to write a virus in C-sharp, the language of Microsoft’s .Net platform.

from the AP

The Cambridge/Montreal axis of the ‘Sphere is all aflutter
over the budding romance between the Redhead,
Berkman Babe Extraordinaire, and the
inimical and irrepressible Accordion
Guy. In these cruel and cynical times, it is refreshing to
witness love blossoming once again, against all odds and rational expectations.
Luckily the lovebirds involved seem to have fully functioning gag reflexes
and enough self-awareness to realize when they are in danger of drifting
into the grotesquely goopy zone. Thus far their public appearances have
been
strictly
"R"
rather than "X" -rated.

Which is as it should be. The Dowbrigade is frankly uncomfortable
with ostentatious public displays of affection. These
days privacy is an exceptionally precious commodity, and it seems that
anyone aspiring
to fame or thrust by fate into the public spotlight must accept an almost
constant and microscopic examination by the forces of the Fifth Estate.

Today we are all waiting with baited breath for the results of tonight’s
"Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner" dinner, as the Redhead presents her Philippino-Canadian,
Blogging, Accordian-Playing Man-About-Toronto Beau to her doting parents.  How
many questionable categories can one Suitor represent? Not to worry –
according to the ever-optimistic Accordion Guy, "Parents love me!"

We are all rooting for Amore and this star-crossed couple. Reports from
the dinner should be available sometime tonight. Even in the Blogosphere
celebrity involves a certain loss of privacy.

Which brings us, this cold and threadbare Valentine’s Day, to another,
less sanguine love story.  As reported here yesterday, after a torrid
41-year romance, America’s Sweethearts, Barbie and Ken, are calling it
quits.

News of show business breakups is hardly news at all, despite its
persistent appearance in our newspapers and other media, but sometimes
in the aftermath enterprising reporters dig deep and discover or invent
fascinating and engrossing tales of the depraved escapades which led
to the end of the relationship.

This sad, pathetic story is playing out again, as rumors of Barbie
Running Wild, gin-soaked vacations in Australia and on certain South
Sea Islands, participation in a Doll-swapping ring in an attempt to
breath a little life into their moribund relation, and a steamy sex
video involving the voluptuous 40-something articulated model and an
entire Welsh Rugby Team swirl around the respective camps.

Although we have not yet been able to get our sweaty hands on a copy
of the video, numerous still shots have started circulating on the
Internet, documenting a sick and twisted descent into perversion and
depravity, testifying once again to the seductive allure of the fast
lane and its ability to corrupt even the most wholesome of American
icons.

After
doing some research on the Net, the Dowbrigade is frankly aghast.  Who
knew? Photographic evidence of promiscuity, homosexuality, even bestiality
were everywhere! Barbie in a compromising position with with
Billy Bong, an Australian surfer, Barbie doing the nasty with GI Joe, Barbie
corrupting the adolescent Skipper, even Ken in some awful suspicious
positions himself.

We had to think long and hard before publishing these photos, but
in the end their value as authentic news and as a moral admonition
of the sins of success.  We all hope the rumors prove untrue and
Barbie and Ken kiss and make up soon.

Photos from I Love My Toys

The Dowbrigade will not get tired of
trashing the pathetically pointless Howard Dean until our misguided friends
and colleagues who were bamboozled onto the Dean bandwagon admit they
were sold a Bill of Goods and acknowledge our superior political perspicacity. However,
we must admit it’s probably time to MoveOn.

Politics in this day and age should be about the future, and getting
ourselves back on some kind of track leading to a world we could see
our grand kids living in. Unfortunately, both of the major party camps
seem mired in the past, caught up in bizarre Vietnam flashbacks.

As we
have advised before, the question Dean backers and others should
be asking is "Does it make any difference whether Kerry or Bush is President
for the next four years?" If the answer is "Yes", well then get your
ass in gear and give the candidate of your choice the same support and
energy you gave to poor Howard.  If not, then start thinking about
how to open up the process so that
the next "Internet candidate" goes a little deeper into the playoffs.

Jim
Moore has suggested keeping DeanforAmerica going even after the
election, or perhaps morphing it into something else. This would be a
terrific tactical mistake, as the essential point of any ongoing organization
should be developing a network and opening up the process, rather than promoting any one individual
or viewpoint.

It seems to the Dowbrigade that there are all of the necessary elements
in place to see an effective Movement coalesce and emerge from the dashed
dreams and bruised egos of the Dean disaster. There is a large base of
people out there who are deeply dissatisfied with the direction this
country is taking, and they are gradually finding each other, and a voice,
in
the Blogosphere. They are motivated, educated, and ready to put their
money where their keyboards are posting.

The last time a truly popular Movement arose in this
land it was in protest over
an
immoral,
unpopular
war. Although there are certainly wellsprings of opposition to the
War in Iraq, to the manipulation of the national consciousness by Major
Media, and to any number of misguided policies of the present administration,
the Dowbrigade believes it is important that any emergent movement be
based in SUPPORT FOR something rather than OPPOSITION TO a collection
of things.

By that we mean that there will always be evil initiatives to oppose,
greedy special interest that need to be stopped, and anti-Democratic
dragons to be slain, but without a positive set of principals and firm
moral orientation, our movement would be nothing more than another Special
Interest Group.

In order to effectuate any real and long-lasting change in our society,
we have to change the rules of the game.  We have to play outside
the lines, and transcend the traditional idea of a political party or
movement. We must move to a higher level, and try to concentrate on the
way we do business rather than the business we do.

The essence of Democracy is the way it resolves differences.  It’s
beauty is in how participants can compete in an open marketplace of ideas
and those who succeed in convincing enough of their fellow-citizens
prevail in that specific instance, but then everyone moves on and works
together, without giving up the right to fight the good fight and prevail
the next time.

For the Dowbrigade the only possible Movement with enough weight and
momentum to actually turn the ship of state aside from seemingly inevitable
disaster MUST include and integrate individuals as politically diverse
as Dave Winer and Glen Reynolds. We ask the indulgence of these eminent
bloggers, whom we have chosen because although they agree on almost nothing,
and certainly not presidential politics, they both embody what is fresh
and innovative and pure about the Blogosphere. Unbridled intellects,
unbeholden and unafraid to call things the way they see them.

The only way to envision a Movement that can encompass a liberal idealist
and a die-hard conservative is by transcending politics and basing it
on principals of Human Conduct and Social Organization. It’s going to
have to be a BIIIIG tent to hold all the people we’re going to need to
really change our society.

A vast and intimidating challenge. We would never presume to be capable
of something like this, but throwing caution to the wind, let us sink
a few tent poles that might begin to support a wide enough tarp.

• We must strive to make the political process, its operation and funding,
  more transparent
• We must invite and facilitate widespread participation in the political
  process

• Technology should be used to facilitate this transparency and participation
• To the maximum extent possible, the media has a responsibility to
  seek out and present a variety of viewpoints.

• Government should
  exist to serve no
  interests other than the interests of the Public; not industries,
  corporations or economic
  power centers.

• People have a right to choose from as wide a variety of news and
  opinion sources as the existing technology and infrastructure
  can deliver.

• The government should sponsor the development and installation of
  technology and infrastructure designed to give the citizens as wide
  a a variety of
  news and opinions as possible.

• Politicians should act more like servants and less like lords and
  masters.

• Public service should be a sacrifice, not a ticket to fame and fortune. It
  should be looked at a necessary inconvenience, like jury duty or
  a prison sentence.

• The entire profession of career politicians should be abolished.
  Strict term limits should be enforced to return us to a model of
  "citizen leaders",
  real people who serve a turn in government and then return to private
  life.

Obviously an incomplete list, but perhaps a starting place. The Dowbrigade
believes that in the next few years a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
will play out as the American Superstate is transformed by waves of social
and technological change.  We can either be Players, or Victims.  You
choose.

Brevity is the soul of wit. It is also the key to getting
a decent return rate on any kind of survey, questionnaire or non-coerced
cooperation. So please take 60
seconds (our crack team of tame test-takers
has run time trials to prove this is all it takes) and give us a little
input.

Although we make no claims to scientific integrity in our sample, we hope
to collect a small snapshot of out tiny corner of the Blogosphere. Friends
and Bloggers, please point your readers to the
survey – any relevance it
achieves will be in direct relation to the number of participants.

Of course, the results will be shared with all in this space.

Go to the Sixty-Second Survey