b0ing b0ing pointed me to this page, describing it as suggesting you email all your stolen .mp3’s back to the RIAA:

Stealing is never OK. But, it was just too easy. So we told ourselves we were just “sharing” the music, because everyone knows that sharing is a good thing.

But then we learned what we were really doing. We heard our favorite recording artists telling us that our “sharing” is really shoplifting and piracy. We were stealing from the musicians and singers we love!

That was when we looked at each other and said: “No more! It’s time to make it right by giving back what we stole!” And that’s just what we did! We sent back all the MP3’s we’d illegally downloaded. Everyone one of them!

Won’t you join us in sending them back?

Send them back! Right back to the Recording Industry of America Association, the industry association that helps our favorite artists keep on making the music we love.

But you don’t have to be content with merely emailing them the .mp3 files. As the site suggests, you can snail mail or fax them a printout of a hex dump of your files instead. The site was created by Parents and Their Kids against Stealing™, a group “dedicated to helping kids feel better about themselves through File Sharing Abstinence.” And, don’t forget, they remind you that

“Unauthorized use of this page, its contents or the concept of sending back MP3s is forbidden without express written permission from Parents and Their Kids against Stealing™”

Now here’s a version of ‘smart-mobbing’, the fad which FmH readers will know I have considered frivolous, that I can get behind. The Chasing Bush campaign, angry about the stage-managing of Bush’s London visit, are encouraging people to send location reports about the Bush entourage, make protests more visible, and spoil the PR effect the Bushies are trying to create with a “security bubble” around the President. —BBC [via b0ing b0ing] Camera phone images from protesters are being posted at the Chasing Bush website. There are unsubstantiated reports, however, that Bush security people have prevailed on Scotland Yard to have cellular antennas in the vicinity of the President’s perambulations shut down on the pretext that they could be used to trigger remote-control bombs.

Here is a sort of umbrella site linking to various “Bush not welcome” efforts. (“The author of this website does not advocate violence and is not responsible for the actions of individual protesters.”)

Related:

US President George Bush will tonight (Tues 18 Nov) be branded ‘one of the world’s arch environmental villains’ by Friends of the Earth’s Executive Director, Tony Juniper, when he addresses hundreds of environmentalists at the Burning Planet rally in Grosvenor Square, London.

And:

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit yesterday accusing the Secret Service of violating the constitutional rights of protesters at events featuring President Bush and other senior administration officials.

The suit contends that protesters have been forced into designated “free-speech zones” far from TV cameras and the national media, sometimes behind fences or other barriers.

Sign holders sympathetic to the administration and other members of the public are allowed much closer. —SeattlePI

$28 Million to get draft ready by June 15, 2005!!: “Read this official budget carefully and you will see that Bush is gearing up the draft–there is no longer any doubt about it. Selective Service must report to Bush on March 31, 2005, that the system is ready for activation within 75 days. So on June 15, 2005, expect the announcement that the first draft lottery since Vietnam will be held for 20 year-olds.” —Democratic Underground

Tolkien’s reputation founders in a sea of commercialism: “Before 2000, few if any marketing executives were likely to have discussed Rings in Harry Potter terms: as a ‘literary property’ with a ‘market share’ and a ‘saturation point.’ For nearly five decades, Tolkien was untouched by that morass of Rowling-sized sales hysteria of Happy Meals and bubble bath.

Everything has changed since the release of the first two films in director Peter Jackson’s chart-busting Rings film trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001 and The Two Towers in 2002. As Tolkien’s fame and fortune have swollen to unprecedented levels, ranks of movie-driven enthusiasts have multiplied like Saruman’s orcs, trampling any vestiges of that deep-rooted if naive grass-roots movement that once prevented Tolkien’s corporate-driven mass exploitation.” —Boston Globe [via walker]

The National Security Archive at George Washington University audits Freedom of Information Act requests; here it lists the ten oldest unfulfilled FOIA requests. Scroll down to page 5 of the .pdf file. They also use an interesting methodology to rank federal agencies by how promptly they fulfill FOIA requests and to measure their backlog, if you read further.

‘The Greatest Threat to Life on the Planet’ —Independent.UK

Great viewing conditions expected on North American east coast: “The 2003 Leonid meteor shower is set to peak on Wednesday morning, Nov. 19th. Sky watchers on the Atlantic side of North America are favored; they could see as many as 80 meteors per hour between 1:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. local time. Pacific observers (e.g., in Alaska, Hawaii, Japan) will count nearly half that number–still a nice shower–just before local sunrise.”

Ted Rall shows us Iraq from the other side:

“Dear Recruit:

Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.

You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein’s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.” [more] —[thanks, steve]