“I’ve co-founded and am contributing to a web site and group blog, Of, By, and For, exploring politics-not-as-usual… The common conviction is that there is an urgent need to change a political system is not working. We need a new architecture of citizenship and real democratic reform. Thomas Jefferson meets the Internet, again.”

“MindGuard is a program for Amiga and Linux computers that protects your mind by actively jamming and/or scrambling psychotronic mind-control signals and removing harmful engrammic pollutants from your brain. It also has the ability to scan for and decipher into English specific signals so you can see exactly Who wants to control you and what They are trying to make you think.”

“Psychologists have long known that stress affects our ability to fight infection, but a major new ”meta-analysis” — a study of studies — has elucidated intriguing patterns of how stress affects human immunity, strengthening it in the short term but wearing it down over time.” (ScienceBlog)

“Which is the more expedient solution, the one that will produce greater happiness — becoming thin; or deciding, through rarefied cultural perspective, that being thin doesn’t matter? A dozen recent ruminations about human body weight — memoirs, science, self-help — trip grievously on this dilemma, stumbling between the options, getting lost even while pretending to reach certainty and, furthermore, victory. Whether viewed as an affliction of the body or the mind, fat is apparently an intractable problem.” — Virginia Heffernan (New York Times Book Review)

“Her approach is to select a topic that is in its essence ineffable, then gather information about it from the worlds of science and evolutionary theory, literature, myth, popular culture and personal experience, and lavish her findings with elaborately worked, poetic prose. Her intention is to say the unsayable. Here, for instance, is Ackerman defining memory in her newest book, ‘An Alchemy of Mind,’ which considers the human brain and consciousness from her customarily impressionistic mix of perspectives: ‘An event is such a little piece of time and space, leaving only a mind glow behind like the tail of a shooting star. For lack of a better word, we call that scintillation memory.'” (NY Newsday )

“A new gadget that helps people shape their dreams provides new frontiers for the media…

Despite the appeal of something like “Dream Workshop,” we don’t need to gain control over our dreams; we need to discover what our dreams truly are. This is the last thing the network programmers want to encourage. They strive to maximize confusion between marketed means and ends. The advertisers they covet are working overtime to confuse our deeper desires with what’s on the market, claiming to fulfill them.” (AlterNet)

“Without financial aid I wouldn’t have been able to attend this fancy place. Now, two decades later, I received financial aid to attend its reunion. All I had to do was ask, and then tell how much I could afford. When I thanked the woman at alumni affairs who made the arrangements, she told me to thank my classmates. It was their doing. There was a big push to get as many people as possible to come back.

How come? Why are reunions important? What purpose do they serve?“

“Creating a sense of nostalgia for a place where people spent a little bit of time a long time ago seems a good way to get them to open their hearts and wallets.” (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

How Contemporary American Poets Are Denaturing the Poem: “If this has the same effect on you as it does on me, then you have no thoughts about it. In fact, it is not because such poems are “difficult”, that I turn away from them. Most readers of poetry are attracted to the difficulty of the deeply human, the mystery of its oblique and contrary expressions. Rather, it is because such poems have spurned me, have no use for me, or any reader, would rather go frolic with themselves in a dark place, crossing themselves out, line by line, word by word, then in a yawn of post-language satisfaction, roll over and go to sleep, leaving me to stare at an old wallpaper stain.

Fortunately, a wallpaper stain provides more potential as an aesthetic challenge than staring at a disappearing poem.” (Web Del Sol)

“During the 2000 election, many activists saw little difference between Democrats and Republicans. This year, however, giving Dubya the boot has become the overriding concern, and the slogan ‘The Evil of Two Lessers’ has been replaced by ‘Anybody But Bush.’ That leaves progressives with a question: whether to demonstrate at the Democratic National Convention in Boston July 26-29 or to give the Dems a pass and concentrate on the Republican National Convention in New York August 30-September 1.

While protesters for the latter have united behind the banner of ‘RNC Not Welcome,’ a coalition of progressives in Boston became bogged down this winter in soul-searching discussions about their message. ‘Although the Democrats turn our stomachs in a lot of ways, we also didn’t want to derail the ‘Dump Bush’ agenda,’ says Cynthia Peters, an organizer with United for Justice With Peace. The coalition eventually decided on a middle road between protesting and not protesting by organizing ‘People’s Parties’ in four Boston neighborhoods to coincide with the DNC’s opening parties for delegates on Sunday, July 25.” (AlterNet)

• He can help Kerry make this campaign about what kind of America we want to live in.
• Edwards’ core theme of the two Americas – “one for the powerful insiders, and another for everyone else” – helps sharpen the differences between the two tickets, and underlines that, far from being a uniter, George Bush has been the ultimate divider.
• Without wearing it on his sleeve, Edwards’ comfort with matters of faith, morality, and religion will allow Kerry and the Democrats to make an unabashed appeal to the millions of Americans whose spiritual beliefs are central to their lives.
• Edwards can help Kerry ride the wave of idealism that was unleashed after Sept. 11. Rare among populist politicians, Edwards radiates optimism and inspires hope… This spirit is the perfect antidote to the pessimism the GOP is desperately trying to tag Kerry with.
• Edwards has made a very successful career out of eating folks like Dick Cheney for lunch in courtrooms all across America.