Has anyone noticed anyone else using the “Bush: Not in My Name” graphic I whipped up as a “consensus-busting” message (it resides over in the sidebar to the left)? I use it to link to the “Not In Our Names” project. It is also offered over at the shinybluegrasshopper “Attack Iraq? No” site. Feel free to grab it and use it for your own purposes. Please let me know of any sightings.

“Backpack Nation is a work in progress, taking shape day by day. The basic idea is to transform American foreign policy by deputizing and deploying individual travelers as “ambassadors” of the people of America. Each ambassador will be funded with $10,000 in personal expense money for an extended trip through some of the world’s less-wealthy countries, and $10,000 more to give to whatever individual/family/organization/village that he or she deems appropriate.” [via Rebecca’s Pocket]

Boys’ Case Is Used in Bid to Limit Trials of Minors as Adults NY Times

He writes about God, Jung and the symphony. But mostly he writes about what he knows best: life as a homeless man in urban America, a world so far beneath the social radar that many step right over it.

By day, Kevin Barbieux writes in the free-form diarist style of Web logs — known in Internet circles as “blogs” — as “The Homeless Guy.” His Web site (www.thehomelessguy.blogspot.com) has developed a worldwide following.

By night, the balding, blue-eyed 41-year-old stays in a shelter, a car or sometimes a new spot that he has heard might be safe. USA Today

Man lives after he is shot 25 times: ‘A 20-year-old New Orleans man has survived being shot 25 times last weekend by an assailant who is still on the loose, New Orleans police said…”Once that weapon emptied, he produced a second weapon and continued to fire,” police said. “When the second weapon emptied, he produced yet a third and continued to fire.” ‘ New Orleans Times-Picayune

The military minds behind “America’s Army,” the PC game designed to entice geeks into enlisting, have unveiled their newest recruiting tool: a weblog from a soldier stationed in Afghanistan. Wired

“GooPoetry lets you enter a query (any query you’d use with regular Google, with the exception of the phonebook: and stock: searches), and choose a “flavor” (hippie, Shakespeare, beatnik, Swedish Chef, or none).

GooPoetry will run a search, take the titles of the returned pages, and make you a lovely poem. (Or make you a really bizarre word salad.)…”

Here’s a GooPoem generated by entering “Gelwan” and “weblog”, although the site says that the weirder the query, the better the poetry.

Here think… edge !

Here: the Here:

Follow Follow is

Follow Follow Follow closer Follow Here

you is Here: think… Follow

than Follow Follow Follow than think…

Me Follow think… think… Follow Gelwan

you Here Here: Here Herezilla think… Here closer

Here — Here: Follow closer Here

Thomas Friedman: “Iraq is winning control of the agenda by Democratic default, not by Republican design.” NY Times op-ed

An owner’s manual for the investor’s brain: “Suddenly, stunning investment insights are coming from the frontiers of one of the least likely fields you could imagine: neuroscience. In university and hospital laboratories around the world, researchers are using the latest breakthroughs in technology to trace the exact circuitry your brain uses to make the kinds of decisions you rely on as an investor.” Money [Mine certainly isn’t wired for wealth! — FmH]

Richard Rorty: “If we cannot forestall such attacks, we may nonetheless be able to survive them. We may have the strength to keep our democratic institutions intact even after realizing that our cities may never again be invulnerable. We may be able to keep the moral gains–the increases in political freedom and in social justice–made by the West in the past two centuries even if 9/11 is repeated year after year. But we shall only do so if the voters of the democracies stop their governments from putting their countries on a permanent war footing–from creating a situation in which neither the judges nor the newspapers can restrain organizations like the FBI from doing whatever they please, and in which the military absorbs most of the nation’s resources.” The Nation [via Walker]

“The truth is that over the last decade geekdom has gained a baggage of beliefs about the world which are much narrower than that which used to unify us. It has become a culture which has amazingly strict boundaries on what you we can believe whilst still counting as a ‘real geek’. Stranger still is the lack of consistency amongst these beliefs.” The Register

notes the San Jose Mercury News. If you have any use for FmH’s RSS feed, it is here, by the way. [Does anyone know how to get it listed among the choices of channels you can subscribe to on the big aggregators like AmphetaDesk or NewsIsFree?]

Woman falls for Nigerian scam, steals $2.1m from law firm The Register

Less random than people thought:

“Any effort to map the Internet is necessarily incomplete and out of

date the moment it appears. Instead, Albert-Laslo Barabasi and his

colleagues at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, treat the net

as though it were a natural phenomenon. What scientists generally do

with a natural phenomenon that they do not understand is to build a

model of it. Dr Barabasi’s latest paper on the matter, just published

in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, presents a

general framework for improving the accuracy of Internet models.” The Economist

Thomas Friedman: “Iraq is winning control of the agenda by Democratic default, not by Republican design.” NY Times op-ed