Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

I wish I had been a little quicker to go on Internet record against apparent sexism in some coverage of Hilary Clinton, quite apart from my being thrilled she is not candidate for president anymore, and I hope this is both respectably early in John McCain's bid for the presidency, that it won't continue to be an issue, and that .

Using http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/home/

Dear Senator,

As a constituent, writer, web developer, and a copyright holder, I oppose this bill which will threaten both creator writes and the vital economic ecosystem of open source.

Oppose S2913 the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008.

[File this under 'why care' and 'what we need to do']

Michael Pollan on the Cornification of Food (AR, Boulder Colorado)

One farmer can feed 129 of us with corn.

Rather than 12, before the munitions factory converted from bombs to fertilizer in 1947.

We're putting away 200 extra calories, to take up 30 to 40 percent of

the way we're feeding the world with corn makes it harder for the world

we can sell it so cheaply because our government subsidizes the cost of production of corn

1.5 million Mexican farmers left the land

Douglas Rushkoff at the Personal Democracy Forum: Second day invocation speech video.

Some notes. Paraphrasings, not exact quotations, so I'm just putting the whole thing in brackets.

[
Personal democracy is an oxymoron.

I'm on the here comes everybody side of this discussion. But it's the everybody that matters.

It's not the network.

It's the people.

The network is just a tool for people to be people again.

The problem with branding, the problem for top-down communication, all these Renaissance era ideas

Thoughts from David Cohn's Representative Journalism: Funding Beats or Stories (cross-posted from a comment left there, with a couple typos corrected).

Key point, that people don't have to believe in "journalism" to contribute to its practice through spot.us.

This will bring many more people to get involved, which will make the funding of individual stories more independent of pressure from concentrated interests than beat-covering institutions.

It is the general thought that Amazing Things is doing well and - although we are doing pretty well, we're only making it because of your support. Some of you are members - and that helps a lot - even at the lowest level. But it is our membership - especially at the higher levels and our auction that keeps us alive.

— Michael Moran, Amazing Things Arts Center

http://agaricdesign.com/amazing-auction-enhancements
http://agaric.chipin.com/amazing-auction

Spotted on a discussion thread that turned to questions of government spying (FISA), in a comment by the inimitable Bill Conroy:

(For the record, I assume this communication is now being monitored since it likely crossed international lines over the Internet -- wish the monitors would weigh in, as long as it doesn't show up on my phone bill ... make it more interesting.)

Saul Alinsky on the radical:

In the end he has one conviction—a belief that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions. The alternative to this would be rule by the elite—either a dictatorship or some form of political aristocracy.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/4/11/195520/045/275/493981

I have nothing against the people of the nuclear industry. In fact, I think they've done a very good job not killing many of us, certainly fewer then even natural gas drilling, and despite not building a power plant in well over 30 years, still provides 20 percent of U.S. electricity.

It's one Jewish lunar year since my father died, and I got broken up with again (and we both better accept this, at least for a while, this time).

And I am all right.