Impactivism

What a million texting protesters can do

Chinese citizens alarmed about pollution won a rare victory on Wednesday when the city of Xiamen froze a chemical plant project after angry residents joined in opposition through a flood of mobile phone text messages.

According to the official Xinhua news agency, citizens compared it to an "atomic bomb" and sent nearly one million text messages via cell phones to pressure the government to renounce the project.

The port city of about 1.5 million people, centered on an island in eastern China's Fujian province, announced it was halting construction of a plant to make paraxylene, a petrochemical that goes into polyester and fabrics.

The Washington Post updated this story on June 28 with more details about how Xiamen residents used technology to increase the power of their activism.

Paving over Ireland's past

Irish poet Paul Muldoon writes in today's New York Times that the Irish government's effort to route the M3 motorway through the Tara-Skryne Valley is an act of cultural vandalism. The M3 links Dublin to ever-more-suburban County Meath, and north to the border with Northern Ireland.

Muldoon points out that what makes the Tara-Skryne Valley so special is not only the Battle of Tara Hill fought there on May 26, 1798, but a remarkably high concentration of ceremonial monuments including the Hill of Tara itself, which was the seat of the High Kings of Ireland.

Archaeologists calculate that the oldest of the monuments, the Mound of the Hostages, was raised in about 3000 B.C., thus making it roughly contemporaneous with the construction of Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt.

It is, in other words, a place rich in archaeological treasures. Not the kind of place, really,  you should be putting a motorway through. This is just the latest in a series of such road-building battles in Ireland.

Recently, a 3,500-year-old henge was discovered at Lismullen, right in the path of the motorway, covering an area the size of three football fields. (Click on the photo: it's the area under the blue plastic sheeting.) Construction has been, only temporarily, halted.

Muireann Ni Bhrolchain of the National University of Ireland and the Campaign to Save Tara says that on-site protesters recently were attacked by construction workers. You can add your name to the more than 26,000 people who have signed the petition to Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern to reroute the motorway.

Pugs. People Sure Do Love 'Em

Marty is always on about Pug-lovers as a social network phenomenon worthy of activists' attention. That 23,280 people in 126 cities connected over a love for pugs using Meetup.com.

I don't know exactly what the lesson is there for organizing but I feel sure there is one, and that it has something to do with giving  people something to love. How many people did you last get to organize for your cause?

Massive Recall of '07 Pugs
The Onion
May 23, 2007

WASHINGTON, DC—Citing centuries of quality-control issues that have resulted in chronic unreliability, cascading system failures, and even total unit shutdown, the American Pug Breeders Association announced a recall Monday of all pugs produced between February 2006 and the present day.

"We apologize wholeheartedly to any and all owners of the 2007 pug," APBA director Betty McAndrews said at a press conference, standing before a table where 10 defective pugs were displayed. "While pug owners are accustomed to dog malfunction, the latest animals are prone to more problems than just the usual joint failures, overheating, seizures, chronic respiratory defects, and inability to breed without assistance. The latest model pug is simply not in any way a viable dog."

Talking out of both sides of your mouth about terrorism

Although morally and legally reprehensible, this may not come as a surprise: the Bush administration has apparently deliberately botched the prosecution of a known terrorist to protect an ideological fellow traveler.

As reported by Robert Collier in today's San Francisco Chronicle, a federal judge has dismissed immigration fraud charges against Cuban-Venezuelan exile and former CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles.

Posada was the alleged mastermind behind the 1976 bombing of a Cubana Airlines jet that killed 73 people, as wells as a series of bombings of hotels, restaurants and night clubs in Havana in the 1990s.

Posada, 79, is expected to return soon to his home in Miami as a hero of the city's anti-Castro right wing, despite U.S. government documents that tie him to terrorist acts.

"The CIA taught us everything  --  everything," Posada said in a 1998 interview with the New York Times. "They taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb, trained us in acts of sabotage."

Margarita Morales Fernández, whose father died on Cubana Flight 455, told the Times yesterday that it hurt to see Posada walk free.

“It seems like the justice system in the United States has no interest in us,” she said in a telephone interview from Havana. “It’s just not fair that he’s free.”

The Center for Accountability and Justice tracks the cases of other mass-murderer friends of Posada enjoying hospitality courtesy of the United States government, including Orlando Bosch, whose planning of the assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976 was perhaps the most brazen act of international terrorism carried out in the United States until the 9/11 attacks. Bosch is also thought to have helped plan the bombing of Cubana 455.

Is that the proper way to treat a man?

Today marks the 34th anniversary of New York's draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws, which provided the model for America's longest running war: the war on drugs. Under the Rockefeller Drug Laws and the failed drug war, the United States addresses drug use and abuse as a criminal issue, not a public health issue.

As the Drug Policy Alliance points out, the results include: Harsh mandatory minimum sentences. Extreme racial disparities. Mass incarceration. Lack of affordable drug treatment. Loss of civil liberties. Destruction of families. Waste of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Music by Jim Jones from the forthcoming documentary, "Lockdown USA."

Make room for the Irish

Clearly the solution for the estimated 5-10,000 homeless people in Ireland is for them to go live with the crispies buying up apartments in New York. As one recent buyer comments, "It’s an Irishman’s dream to be able to go to Manhattan and be able to buy property there."

With an average life expectancy of only 42 years for a person sleeping rough in Ireland, sure they wouldn't be bothering you for long in your New York loft.

I'm falling in love all over again

Now, Leslie Feist may not know that she's my girlfriend. But that's never stopped our relationship blossoming these last few years.

I think it's finally time to just tell her once and for all. (I'm thinking a less direct approach than Borat's wedding sack, however; perhaps something a little more, well, windswept and interesting. But certainly no more having my geeky friends "anonymously" hand-deliver love poems I've written. I'm proud to say I stopped that since I turned 29.)

In any case, the new album "The Reminder," her third studio effort, is heartfelt, compelling, sometimes beautiful, and growing on me. Plus Feist knows how to hold an audience in the palm of her hand; which is why you'll find me and a few friends at the Fillmore on June 26. It's already sold out, I'm afraid, but the word is a second show will be added. So get on it if you're in the Bay Area.

Listen to "I feel it all" from Feist's just-released album.

"I don't know what I knew before. But now I know I want to win the war."

Why Murdoch should own the Wall Street Journal

So Seth got me thinking this morning (it happens) in his succinct post "How to write for a billionaire."

With Rubert Murdoch's competitor-scaring bid for Dow Jones so high and so lacking in the normal economics of deal-making being considered by the controlling Bancroft family, it's worth considering that Murdoch's purchase of the esteemed Journal may actually be *a good thing* for American journalism.

“I’m sometimes frustrated by the long stories,” Murdoch says about the Wall Street Journal.

Yes, quite. So we might expect that to change.

Or, as Murdoch told biographer William Shawcross in 1983: “All newspapers are run to make profits. Full stop,” he said. “I don’t run anything for respectability. The moment I do, I hope someone will come and fire me and get me out of the place — because that’s not what newspapers are meant to be about.”

As an advocate of citizen-driven journalism, it's strange that I've been an apologist for the frequently rabidly right-wing WSJ as long as I have. Certainly, the news pages of the paper produce some fine investigative reporting and, according to former staffers, some reporters commonly refer to the right-wing editorial page writers as "Nazis." So no one could accuse them of not knowing the enemy.

But it's seductive to think that a Murdoch-owned WSJ would ultimately destroy the paper.

Because there's no golden rule of journalism that says we have to suffer the whims and fancies of editorial writers that hold conspiracy-theorist fantasies about anyone to the left of, say, Paul Wolfowitz, in order to receive the wisdom and intelligent writing of great news reporters.

So I hope you get to buy the paper, Rupert, and then destroy it. And so allow the journalism that currently thrives there to rise from the ashes elsewhere. At least that way, I don't have to be reminded any longer that denouncements about such infringements on individual rights as labor unions are lurking just a few pages back, like fascists in the emperor's shadows waiting for their Machiavellian moment.

When you dump 160,000 friends, how long does it take to get them back?

Much has been made already of the incredible blunder by Barack Obama's campaign in how it wrested control of the candidate's MySpace page from Obama supporter Joe Anthony.

Anthony had agreed to turn over control of the page he started on popular social networking site. But the Obama campaign decided they wouldn't pay $39,000, which is what Anthony said he proposed for his extensive volunteer work on the site, plus some additional fees up to $10,000.

MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and by some estimates captures one-eighth of the time people spend on the internet, jumped into the dispute, and turned the site over to the Obama campaign.

Personally, I think Anthony should have negotiated payment before he did the work if he wanted to be paid (although we don't yet know the full story of Anthony's communication with the Obama campaign as this conflict developed). Ethically, I don't think you can volunteer your time, and then demand to be paid later. But at the same time, it baffles me that Obama's campaign doesn't recognize the value of Anthony's work. Offer the man a job, for goodness sake.

As of today, Obama's number of MySpace "friends" had dropped 85%, to just over 21,000.

My friend Dana suggests Hilary Clinton should offer the following response: "If Barack Obama is unwilling to pay Joe Anthony $50,000 for two years of advocacy, tech support and writing (a steal for the number of hours clocked in and the number of connections made), while at the same time seizing control of what is effectively Anthony's intellectual property, then what exactly does this say about his stance on the arts, copyright and his efforts within the creative community?"

Good quote. But I'd push back on this point: how much of anyone's MySpace page, whether controlled by Joe Anthony or the Barack Obama campaign, is their "intellectual property?" Isn't that what  exactly what I.B.M., Intel, Microsoft, Sony, Disney and Time Warner argue in the A.A.C.S. case, yet another example of what happens when you try to control a message you think you own, but in a world where the concept of ownership changed when you weren't looking.