At the mall's grand opening Wednesday were students who skipped school and workers who took the morning off. "They have stores I've never been in before. We're excited like little kids."

People love their malls. I am fascinated with certain aspects of malls.

Birth of a Mall

20. Senior commanders and staffs need the most education and training for nontraditional roles. The troops need awareness and understanding.

Anthony Zinni's 20 Principles of Peacemaking and Humanitarian Intervention

There are plenty of modern management techniques which the movement could employ to reinvigorate itself. Has, it, for instance, tried benchmarking itself against comparable movements? If street protest is too arduous for the membership, should it not think of outsourcing its more strenuous activities to the immigrants who already do most of Britain's tougher jobs? Taking that argument further, if domestic apathy is the problem, perhaps the answer is offshoring. A Mayday protest organised in, say, Libya or North Korea would really make a splash.

The finest in British wit, now available worldwide.

And it goes hand in hand with my recent suggestion that the Democrats hire a Bangalore call center to conduct a get-out-the-vote campaign.

This general idea here is the reason why I got off the "anarchy team" shortly after high school. Its a great defense mechanism for those points in time when you are unable to make decisions for yourself. Beyond that, its a decision to be uninvolved in the process. Anarchy doesn't scale.

There is something to say for a decision to work "outside the system" when possible. This is normally considered "independent" rather then "anarchist". Often its what's necessarly, as new ideas can be more easily seen from the fringe, even if that's not where they come from. Try explaining this to a 19 year old sometime. See, I'm old now. And I have not even hit 30 yet! I blame the Internet for turning me into a bitter man early.

From anarchy to apathy

Google's new headquarters is what graduate school would be like if all the students were rich.

I like (and use) Google as much as the next guy, but I remain truly disturbed by the lack of real competition. It is not a good thing to have most of the world researching from (and even ranking themselves against) _one_ collection of facts.

In Searching We Trust

If Rumsfeld gets his way, administration hawks may soon start using special forces to attack or undermine other regimes on Washington's hit list -- without the sort of crucial public debate that preceded the war in Iraq.

This essay, by Jennifer Kibbe of the Brookings Institution, was published in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs.

The Rise of the Shadow Warriors

The capacity to create a comprehensive digital record of work and life experiences ... will immensely influence institutional and individual behaviors, expectations, and experiences.

In the race to leave no child behind, do we risk leaving everyone behind?

... a MemeStream on every desktop ...

Reflections on the Life of the Mind in an Era of Abundance

In one form or another, governments have been fighting these five wars for centuries. And losing them. Indeed, thanks to the changes spurred by globalization over the last decade, their losing streak has become even more pronounced. To be sure, nation-states have benefited from the information revolution, stronger political and economic linkages, and the shrinking importance of geographic distance. Unfortunately, criminal networks have benefited even more.

The Five Wars of Globalization

] "An amendment to the Constitution is never to be
] undertaken lightly," Mr. Bush said. "The amendment
] process has addressed many serious matters of national
] concern, and the preservation of marriage rises to this
] level of national importance."

I've been at a loss for what to say about this gay marriage issue. I don't feel its an issue that effects me. Is that selfish? I'm starting to think so. It definitely is if we are now talking about making amendments to The Constitution.

San Francisco, before and after allowing same-sex marriages, seems the same to me. There have been no riots. There has been no break down of order. No screaming in the streets. No masses of heathens roaming the streets raping small children. No breakdown of family values. No burning churches. Nothing that the fundamentalist right would have you believe is right around the corner following such a drastic change in policy.

I can tell you what I have seen. I live about 5 blocks away from City Hall, so I've had a pretty good view. I've seen nothing. Just a rise in activity in and out of the building, and slightly more news vans present then usual. Have I seen happy gay couples? Sure, I see those every single day. I'm also about 8 or 10 blocks away from the Castro. I've seen a few "we all deserve the right to marry" banners on cars, but parking has not been any harder to find. In general, its business as usual in San Francisco. If I wasn't paying attention to the news, I might not even know anything was going on or think strangely of it. No one around me seems to.

The rest of the country however, seems up in arms. Its almost hard for me to believe that there is serious talk about making an amendment to the Constitution over this. I'm not sure where to even begin trying to analyze or comment on such a bone headed maneuver.

I'm one of those people who was raised in an environment where "faggot" was general purpose playground insult. As years wore on, I was exposed to real gay people, had friends come out of the closet, etc. I came to detest the type of discrimination that gays endure. I have my own form of "white guilt" over the issue. In that respect, I am America. In the same way that America hated blacks, or women, or any other group that we have oppressed in our history. America changes its mind given evidence of wrong doing. America rises to right wrongs. America is about equality.

I think my views are pretty common. I'm "average" in many respects. I'm moderate in my politics. In general, whatever situation I'm in, I try to find "the opposition" and play it, if only for the thought exercise. That leads people to believe I'm a "radical", but any given group has a very different opinion about what I'm so "radical" about. Here though, I have a really strong opinion. I believe in freedom. I believe in liberty. I believe that people should be able to live the way they want to l... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Bush Backs Ban in Constitution on Gay Marriage

Population; Resource Management; Technology; Knowledge; Economic Integration; Conflict; Governance.

Seven Revolutions

] The content available online is much less important than
] the manner in which it is delivered, indeed, the way the
] Web is structured. Its influence is structural rather
] than informational, and its structure is agnostic. For
] that reason, parental controls of the sort that AOL can
] offer gives no comfort to conservatives. It's not that
] Johnny will Google "hardcore" or "T&A" rather than
] "family values;" rather, it's that Johnny will come to
] think, consciously or not, of everything he reads as
] linked, associative and contingent. He will be
] disinclined to accept the authority of any text, whether
] religious, political or artistic, since he has learned
] that there is no such thing as the last word, or indeed
] even a series of words that do not link, in some way, to
] some other text or game. For those who grow up reading
] online, reading will come to seem a game, one that
] endlessly plays out in unlimited directions. The web, in
] providing link after associative link, commentary upon
] every picture and paragraph, allows, indeed requires,
] users to engage in a postmodernist inquiry.

The media is the message.

CTHEORY.NET : Why the Web Will Win the Culture Wars for the Left by Peter Lurie