Tag Archives ⇒ blogs

Michael Moore explains how deal with Lies and Lying Liars

September 26, 2003
· Martin Kelley

Film­mak­er Michael Moore’s satir­ic doc­u­men­tary on gun own­er­ship in the Unit­ed States is out on video and DVD now. “Bowl­ing for Columbine” is pure Moore: he goes around the coun­try talk­ing with gun own­ers and gun vic­tims but also ties it all in with a cul­ture of mil­i­tarism and violence.
Not unpre­dictably, the pro-gun lob­bies have cam­paigned against the movie and have tried to dis­cred­it it. In the last month or so, plen­ty of blogs and even some of the cable news net­works have been full of expos­es of the film­mak­er’s sup­posed deceits. “Now Moore response to his critics”:http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/wackoattacko/
If you haven’t seen “Bowl­ing for Columbine” go right out to your video store and do. Moore is one of the best satirists in the coun­try today. He com­bines humor with hor­ror and pro­duces work that is always com­pelling to watch.

Going all the way with MovableType

August 5, 2003
· Martin Kelley

I’m start­ing the process of putting my whole site onto Mov­able­Type, even the old sta­t­ic pages.

Inspired by Doing Your Whole Site with MT on Brad Choate’s site, I start­ed exper­i­ment­ing today with putting the whole Non​vi​o​lence​.org site into Move­able­Type. At first I thought it was just a tri­al exper­i­ment but I’m hooked. I espe­cial­ly love how much clean­er the entry for the links page now looks and I might actu­al­ly be inspired to keep it up to date more now. (I’ve also inte­grat­ed Choate’s “MT-Textile” which makes a big dif­fer­ence in keep­ing entries clean of HMTL garbage, and the semi-related “Smar­ty­Pants” which makes the site more typo­graph­i­cal­ly ele­gant with easy M‑dashes and curly quotes)

So here’s what I’m doing: there are three Mov­able Type blogs inter­act­ing with one anoth­er (not includ­ing this per­son­al blog):

  • One is the more-or-less stan­dard one that is pow­er­ing the main home­page blog of Non​vi​o​lence​.org.
  • The sec­ond I call “NV:Static” which holds my sta­t­ic pages, much as Brad out­lines. I put my desired URL path into the Title field (i.e., “info/index”) and then put the page’s real title into the Key­words field (i.e., “About Non​vi​o​lence​.org”) and have that give the date for the title field and the first head­line of the page. It might seem back­wards to use Title for URL and then use Key­words for Title, but this means that when I’m in MT look­ing to edit a par­tic­u­lar file, it will be the URL paths that are listed.
  • The third blog is my “NV:Design Ele­ments.” This con­tains the block of graph­ics on the top and left of every page. I know I’ll have to redesign this all soon and I can do it from wher­ev­er. This blog out­puts to HTML. All the oth­er pages on the site are PHP and its a sim­ple include to pull the top and left bars into each PHP page.

Oh yes, I’m also think­ing of incor­po­rat­ing guest blogs in the near future and all of these ele­ments should make that much easier.

Here’s anoth­er site to check out, about how some­one inte­grat­ed Mov­able­Type into their church web­site using some inter­est­ing techniques.

Betting on Terror

July 29, 2003
· Martin Kelley

The news sites are all report­ing a Pen­ta­gon plan to bet on future ter­ror­ist activ­i­ty (BBC). It’s report­ed as a stock market-style sys­tem in which sucess­ful pre­dic­tions by investors would win them money.
Some­one at the Pen­ta­gon has read a lit­tle too many books about the infi­nite wis­dom of the free mar­ket. There are those who have a reli­gious faith in the pow­er of unfet­tered cap­i­tal­ism, who posit it as a kind of all-knowing, self-correcting God. With the input of enough self-interested actors, the truth can be dis­cerned. I’d argue that stock mar­kets are more like blogs (the highly-linked New York Times ver­sion of the arti­cle), with every­one rush­ing to make the same links (Asso­ci­at­ed Press).
The truth of the mat­ter is that recent intel­li­gence laps­es have been the result of polit­i­cal med­dling in the col­lec­tion and ana­lyt­i­cal process­es. When the boss wants a cer­tain result (proof of weapons in Iraq, proof of Al Qae­da links), then the group-think pres­sure to con­form will warp the sift­ing process. A stock market-style sys­tem for pre­dict­ing ter­ror would be about as accu­rate as a poll of CNN and Fox News watch­ers – it will tell you what every­one thinks but it prob­a­bly won’t tell you the truth.

William Gibson: the future will find you out

June 28, 2003
· Martin Kelley

An inter­est­ing arti­cle on George Orwell and the future we’ve become. What would Orwell have thought about the big broth­er of nation­al secu­ri­ty and the never-ending war on ter­ror. And what would he have thought of the inter­net and blogs? Here’s a snippet:

“In the age of the leak and the blog, of evi­dence extrac­tion and link dis­cov­ery, truths will either out or be out­ed, lat­er if not soon­er. This is some­thing I would bring to the atten­tion of every diplo­mat, politi­cian and cor­po­rate leader: the future, even­tu­al­ly, will find you out.