A female Samurai who dresses only in black and admires Hillary Clinton is running for president in Russia next month.

A Samurai Fighter, Clad in Jeans, Takes On Putin

] Could the recognition of our imperfect understanding
] serve to establish the open society as a desirable form
] of social organization? I believe it could, although
] there are formidable difficulties in the way. We must
] promote a belief in our own fallibility to the status
] that we normally confer on a belief in ultimate truth.

Decius's comments:

Wow, this might be the most important thing I've read since MemeStreams started. [ I agree 100% with Decius here. I was planning to respond directly to his comments and this article, however its going to have to come connected to something else. I just don't have the time right now. Way too much to go into and/or comment on. - nick ]

First off, despite the title, this is not an anti-capitalist screed. George Soros is an investment banker and the 38th richest man in the country. In fact, this article isn't really about capitalism. This article is about everything. The title is so poor that I almost changed it.

What Soros is saying about Capitalism is that there are people who accept the concept of free trade in a ideological way, in an absolutist way, and that is a problem. The problem with religious states, which requires the separation of church and state, is that when laws are the product of man, they are open to debate, but when laws are the product of God, to question is heresy. If you have a society in which the law cannot be questioned, you have a totalitarian society. It is only a matter of time.

The thing that Soros is saying here is that any absolutist ideology can be abused in this manner. It doesn't matter if your ideology is based on the Bible, or the writings of Marx, or the writings of Adam Smith. If you have a nation of people who believe that their principals are beyond question, ultimately you have a totalitarianism. It is only a matter of time before the inconsistencies your absolutism forces you to ignore cause fissures which break your society down.

Reading this essay caused me to think back across many of the discussions that I've had on this site over the past two years. My instinct that Fukuyama's belief in an ultimate solution was flawed. Being able to see great tragedies of history reflected in the idea of pre-emptive military action and being unable to demonstrate that its not "ok" if you're doing it for Democracy. In our worries about the state of the IT industry. In my various discussions about politics with people from various perspectives.

I've had a really hard time deciding where I fit in the political spectrum. I know what the tests tell me, but somehow I'm never comfortable with the answers. When I talk to conservatives they think I'm a liberal. When I talk to liberals they thing I'm a conservative (or at the least that I've been duped by them). One thing I've come away from years and years of these conversations with is the idea that people usually i... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The Capitalist Threat - George Soros

] Thanks to the GOP takeover of Washington, and the harsh
] realities of the Big Sort, economically lagging parts of
] the country now wield ultimate political power, while the
] creative centers--source of most of America's economic
] growth--have virtually none.

Decius's comments:

This is a very good article that gets off to a slow start. It resonates with a lot of the things we've been discussing here. The author is arguing that the migration of creative people from the midwest into the country's urban centers during the .com boom created the political situation which led to the Bush win in 2000. (The Democrats' political base is now concentrated into smaller geographic areas, cutting their electoral edge on the GOP.) Now the creative class is politically disenfranchised.

You can see this directly in the election. Bush is offering tax cuts to people who are handling multi-million dollar inheritances and who make most of their money from capital gains. Dean and the other Democrats are offering to help families who make less then $50,000 a year. They talk about manufacturing jobs and steel workers. This country's economic future is not going to be built by steel workers. It is also not going to be built by the bored and dull sons of sons of sons who have more money then you can count and no real ambition as a result.

This country's economic future has always been built by people who are both capable of building it and motivated to do so. This author is arguing that we might not see it at all. He is seeing brain drain out of the US to Canada, Europe, and Australia. We wouldn't feel that right now if we had it, as the US isn't using the people they have. What's cutting a little muscle when you aren't running at top speed? The authors suggest a serious risk that the next runner to the front of the pack is likely to be a country that creates opportunities for the creative class, and right now thats not us.

'Creative Class War' by Richard Florida

] Eight security experts held a Red Team exercise on
] January 19, using a GEMS server and six AccuVote-TS
] terminals, replicating an election scenario with no prior
] knowledge of source code. As suggested by the earlier,
] Hopkins report, the team quickly guessed the hardcoded
] passwords to administrator and voter smart cards. At a
] cost of less than $750, they were able to reset voter
] cards to allow multiple votes with the same card and
] suggested similar abuses with forged supervisor and voter
] cards. All 32,000 statewide terminal locks are identical,
] and the team picked them in less than 10 seconds,
] allowing physical access to the PCMCIA bay, which
] contains cards for the modem and the ballot definitions
] and results. These cards could be tampered with,
] destroyed, or stolen for their valuable data. Attaching a
] keyboard to the terminals allowed resetting of all
] counters in the PCMCIA bay without an administrator card
] needed.
]
] The server was missing over 15 Microsoft security
] updates, and the team was able to use the flaws used by
] the "Blaster" worm. By using insecure USB ports or more
] secure CD drives, the team was able to modify results and
] databases

LawMeme - Voting Machines Compromised in Election Simulation

What we demanded of Iraq was that they account for all of this and they prove the negative of our hypothesis."

Just listen.

Earlier this page was not working, complaining about too much bandwidth usage. Its working now. I assume this is getting downloaded a fair amount.

Digging for Weapons

] We've taken orkut.com offline as we implement some
] improvements and upgrades suggested by users. Since orkut
] is in the very early stages of development, it's likely
] to be up and down quite a bit during the coming months.
] None of the information you've entered will be deleted,
] and none of the connections you've made will be lost.
] And, if all goes well, you should see some significant
] improvements when we come back online.

I had been curious about Orkut since made aware of its existence. I was pleased with what I saw the first time saw it, when I got an uber-quick tour via someone else's account. This time around only confirmed the clue I saw present then. I believe they are basing their architecture on a way more valid model of a social network then any of the other players out there I have seen. You can tell they know it can be used for way more then the Friendster style color scheme suggests.

I knew Google had clue. I expect great things from Orkut.

] We'll send an email once everything is ready and running
] again. Thanks for your feedback and for bearing with us
] as we work our way up the learning curve.

Don't worry about it.. You folks can fart over there, and we (everyone) will wind up hearing about it. I think your doing a great job thus far. You can see how good Tom and I are doing.. Hehe..

You get your own subtle (pre-planned?) irony. Today, under construction is the joke of the Internet.. Tomorrow or the day after? Hmm.. Going to have to eyeball the index for that one.

orkut - under construction

"2004 is not an ordinary election; it is a referendum on the Bush doctrine. The future of the world hangs in the balance. That is the other point that I want to make; it is not enough to defeat President Bush. We must also develop and adopt a more constructive vision."

You can read a transcript of the speech, or you can download an MP3 of the introduction, speech, and discussion.

George Soros, Bubble Book Boy

... Until the president is willing to employ carrots as well as sticks, he will make little headway in changing Iranian or Syrian behavior. The president's lack of initiative on this point is especially disappointing.

... and now you know the rest of the story.

Why Libya Gave Up on the Bomb

] global networks

] a traveling retrospective of 25 works by mark lombardi
] organized by independent curators international, new york
] curated by robert hobbs

] yerba buena center for the arts. san francisco,
] california - 17 january - 4 april, 2004

This opens up this Saturday.. I will most certainly check this out while it is in town.

mark lombardi @ pierogi 2000

] his paper documents the use of pictorial images in social
] network analysis. It shows that such images are critical
] both in helping investigators to understand network data
] and to communicate that understanding to others.
]
] The paper reviews the long history of image use in the
] field. It begins with illustrations of the earliest
] hand-drawn images in which points were placed by using ad
] hoc rules. It examines the development of systematic
] procedures for locating points. It goes on to discuss how
] computers have been used to actually produce drawings of
] networks, both for printing and for display on computer
] screens. Finally, it illustrates some of the newest
] procedures for producing web-based pictures that allow
] viewers to interact with the network data and to explore
] their structural properties.

Found via Many-to-Many, posted by Clay Shirky.

Carnegie Mellon: Journal of Social Structure: Visualizing Social Networks