The Prop 8 Issue - Being Black and Gay Are Not The Same

This video will be misunderstood by some just for its title. I ask you to listen to what I say. I'm am against California Proposition 8. I've made videos to show the World how stupid and hateful the people who back the initiative can be. But what does bother me is the discovery that of all groups, African Americans voted more for it than against it. Why? I think one reason is that the message those who were against Prop 8 put out was off-putting to many who are Black. While I agree that gay marriage is a civil rights issue, one can't then make the cognitive leap and say that Blacks and Gays share the same path and past. The reason is simple: if I walk down the street you already have made up your mind how you're going to adress me because of my skin color. That's not true if the person's Gay -- you can't tell by looking. The bottom line is civil rights for all -- but the message that's sent by "No on 8" seems to say that if a person's straight White and male, they're normal. No one Black wants to hear that.

Barack Obama Is President Of The United States

Ok. Finally here are my thoughts on the election of Senator Barack Obama as President of The United States. For me it's the culmination of two years of work online as part of something called "Obama Rapid Response", where we work to counter negative information about Barack Obama. I dont know of a campaign that's had such a widespread grassroots online effort of this kind before. It worked.

Barack Obama as President of the United States has effectively changed racism as we know it in America. It's made it far more the thing of people who's brain just is'nt' wired correctly. And we have seen people -- White -- elect a person who happened to be Black because he proved he was the best person for the job.

Barack Obama: President of The United States.

Arianna Huffington - The Web Killed Karl Rove Politics

 At the Web 2.0 Summit, where web tech people get together to discuss the ever changing nature of the advance and use of the Internet and Internet technology , Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington summed up why President-Elect Barack Obama prevailed over Senator John McCain:

"The McCain campaign didn't have a clue," said Huffington in a reference to technical rather than intellectual deficiencies. "The Internet has killed Karl Rove politics."

I'm sorry I missed Web 2.0, but I'll catch the Expo.  But the matter of just how the Internet killed Karl Rove politics bears exploration.  In brief, the Internet allowed the free and rapid transfer of information between people, thus allowing a single episode of rumors and negative information that would have altered the course of a campaign in the past to be 1) quickly countered and 2) replaced by new news in the cycle.  That leads to a related point: the news cycle is now in less than a day, it's more like a six hour process.  Thus, news that's really a day old has been repeated again and again online often before it hits the newspapers the next day.  


That didn't happen in 2004, and so Karl Rove's "divide and conquer" strategy worked.  Not today.  

Court Orders IBM Executive to Stop Working for Apple

A U.S. District Court in New York has ordered former IBM executive Mark Papermaster to immediately stop working for Apple. Papermaster was recently wooed away from IBM after being offered what he described as “a once in a lifetime opportunity”.

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Y! Live Stopping It's Broadcast December 3rd 2008

I just saw this post  explaining that Y! Live, Yahoo's experiment in online broadcast distribution, will be going off the air December 3rd:

Our mission here on the Brickhouse team is to quickly develop product ideas that can add value to Yahoo! as a whole. To do this effectively we constantly evaluate our early-stage products and sometimes have to make the hard decision to move on, in order to continue exploring new territory and developing new products.

So it is with great sadness that I share the news that Yahoo! Live, a Brickhouse project in social broadcasting will be going off the air on 3 December 2008. We’d like to thank everyone who has participated. Without all of you, Y!Live would not have built the strong community that it has. It has been really interesting (and entertaining) to see all of the ways broadcasters have used Live, developing it into a place for all sorts of social interactions.

Court Orders IBM Executive to Stop Working for Apple

A U.S. District Court in New York has ordered former IBM executive Mark Papermaster to immediately stop working for Apple. Papermaster was recently wooed away from IBM after being offered what he described as “a once in a lifetime opportunity”.

read more | digg story

The Ultimate Jell-O Shot - A Scientific Study

The purpose of this experiment was to determine the highest possible concentration of alcohol attainable in a Jell-O shot, while still maintaining the structural integrity (i.e., the gelling properties) of the gelatin. The result: a Jell-o shot that's like shooting straight vodka.

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4 Black Marines Executed Their Interracial Sergeant & Wife

Court records indicate four Marines acknowledged they had roles in the robbery, sexual assault and murder of a Camp Pendleton-based Iraq veteran and his wife last month in Riverside County. The four were charged Tuesday with the execution-style slayings of Marine Sgt. Jan Pawek Pietrzak and Quiana Faye Jenkins-Pietrzak. Most media avoiding facts.

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GOP Lawyer Dispatched To Retrieve Some Of Palin's Clothes

Sarah Palin left the national stage Wednesday, but the controversy over her role on the ticket flared as aides to John McCain disclosed new details about her expensive wardrobe purchases and revealed that a Republican Party lawyer would be dispatched to Alaska to inventory and retrieve the clothes still in her possession.

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Putin may return to presidency in 2009

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev could resign from his post in 2009 to pave the way for Vladimir Putin to return to the Kremlin, Vedomosti newspaper reported on Thursday, citing an unidentified source close to the Kremlin.

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1 Million Jobs Lost In 2008: America's Shrinking Payrol

Carol Steinbrecher is a 55-year-old mother of three who, like many Americans, has spent most of her life working hard to provide the best for her family. But today she is part of another group of Americans, one that is growing larger every day: the unemployed.

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Pentagon hands Shell 25-year monopoly on S. Iraq's gas

Royal Dutch Shell oil company and the Iraqi Oil Ministry have struck a secret, as-of-yet non-binding agreement that gives a monopoly over southern Iraq's natural gas to the energy giant. It marks the first time in over 35 years a Western oil company has played a major role in the country's most lucrative industry.

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