UPDATE ‘08: So apparently somewhere along the line the comments database for this site became corrupted. All comments have been lost. Odd, considering I was not updating the site. I suspect the problem is be related to the constant bombardment of spam comments and the thousands of comments I had ‘awaiting moderation’. Well, looks like the detained comments grew impatient and broke free and the moderating job has been done for me! It pays to back up kids.

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Last weekend saw the TOD’s first birthday and, celebrations aside, I figured this was a good time to reflect on the future of this project, ie. whether I will continue working on it and if so in what format.

The basic problem I am facing is that I just don’t have the time to put as much effort into this site that I’d like to. I spend a good 20 hours a week doing research/reading/etc, and it would take at least as long to post everything I’d like to post. That pretty much adds up to a full time job and unfortunately I already have one of those. Currently I only end up posting perhaps a quarter of what I attempt to line up for posting in one form or another, which is an endless source of frustration. We’re also entering a particularly busy time at work. Something’s got to give.

So, I am going to put this project, at least in its current form, on the back burner for now. What I would like to continue doing is post occasional longer essays/posts, without trying to keep up my regular posting schedule (which is currently about 10 posts over 4 days a week, if you’re curious). Then perhaps when things clear up (or more likely when I get sucked into a shit fight I just can’t stay out of) I’ll be back.

This hasn’t been an easy decision because I have really enjoyed blogging and things have been steadily picking up around here. But its getting to a point where other areas of my life are suffering… which is kind of lame really. This blogging business is addictive!

So goodbye for now, but not really. I’ll now have more time to drop by other people’s blogs and rant and fisk and jibe on in the comments and perhaps even write some occasional longer posts of quality, rather than churn out surf-by quotathons and dive into self-indulgent fiski-cuffs.

Today is the last day of voting in the Blogpower Awards, folks, so get in there and get voting. Links directly to the 20 categories below.

Voting will end on Wednesday, June 13th, at 19:00, London time.

1 Best Britblog or Column

2 Best North American Blog or Column

3 Best Blog or Column outside North America and the U.K.

4 Best Fisker

5 Best Ranter

6 Best Political Blog or Column

7 Best Blogpower Blog or Column

8 Best Layout and Style

9 Best Blog Name

10 Best Little Blogger [i.e. under 100 uniques a day]

11 Most Articulate Wordsmith

12 Most Under-rated Blog or Column

13 Most Over-rated Blog or Column

14 Most Politically Incorrect Blog or Column

15 Most Sadly Missed Blog or Column

16 Most Consistently Entertaining Blog or Column

17 Prettiest or Tastiest Blog or Column [refers to food or domestic bloggers]

18 Award for Services to Blogging

19 Best Post of All Time

20 Most Unintentionally Humorous post

I have submitted my post, “Female Genital Mutilation: An Islamic Practice” to the Watcher’s Council. Unfortunately I quite possibly missed this week’s deadline.

As you may or may not already be aware, members of the Watcher’s Council hold a vote every week on what they consider to be the most link-worthy pieces of writing around… per the Watcher’s instructions, I am submitting one of my own posts for consideration in the upcoming nominations process.
Here is the most recent winning council post, here is the most recent winning non-council post, here is the list of results for the latest vote, and here is the initial posting of all the nominees that were voted on.

The Blogpower team, of which I recently became a member, is running the first ever Blogpower Awards and nominations are closing soon (very soon – Tuesday 5th of June 21:00, London time… yes, I should have posted about this earlier).

Things are getting a little complicated, but you can read all about how the nominations work here. Basically in the various categories the blogs that get more than the required number of nominations will go through to the voting phase. So multiple nominations is what we’re looking for!

Below is the list of categories, of which there are 20. To nominate anyone (or even yourself), email the name of the category as it appears below, and include the name of the blog you’d like to nominate and its URL, to jameshigham-AT-mail.com (don’t forget that URL now!).

You can nominate as many blogs as you like in as many or few categories as you like. Here are the categories:

Nominations close Tuesday evening, June 5th, at 21:00

Please copy and paste category from here, then include name of blog as you’d like to see it appear [short] plus url [not in brackets].

1 Best Britblog or Column

2 Best North American Blog or Column

3 Best Blog or Column outside North America and the U.K.

4 Best Fisker

5 Best Ranter

6 Best Political Blog or Column

7 Best Blogpower Blog or Column

8 Best Layout and Style

9 Best Blog Name

10 Best Little Blogger [i.e. under 100 uniques a day]

11 Most Articulate Wordsmith

12 Most Under-rated Blog or Column

13 Most Over-rated Blog or Column

14 Most Politically Incorrect Blog or Column

15 Most Sadly Missed Blog or Column

16 Most Consistently Entertaining Blog or Column

17 Prettiest or Tastiest Blog or Column [refers to food or domestic bloggers]

18 Award for Services to Blogging

19 Best Post of All Time

20 Most Unintentionally Humorous post

Thomas Sowell writing on “The Anger of the Left”:

That people on the political left have a certain set of opinions, just as people do in other parts of the ideological spectrum, is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is how often the opinions of those on the left are accompanied by hostility and even hatred.

Particular issues can arouse passions here and there for anyone with any political views. But, for many on the left, indignation is not a sometime thing. It is a way of life.

How often have you seen conservatives or libertarians take to the streets, shouting angry slogans? How often have conservative students on campus shouted down a visiting speaker or rioted to prevent the visitor from speaking at all?

Or beat their teacher to death with sticks, for that matter. Here’s an example from China’s Cultural Revolution of what results when that anger is taken to its pathological conclusion and made into state policy:

“What is your name?” the Great Helmsman asked a young student as she pinned a Red Guard armband on him in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. “Song Binbin,” she responded enthusiastically. The name her parents chose meant “properly raised” and “polite,” qualities that Mao Zedong found unappealing. “Be violent!” he ordered the girl. A short time later she changed her first name to Yaowu, or “Be Violent.”

It was Aug. 18, 1966 and the 72-year-old Chinese leader had called male and female students to assemble on Beijing’s Square of Heavenly Peace to launch his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Hundreds of thousands waved Mao’s little red book and cheered the old man.

Mao’s call to violence fell on willing ears among many young people. Thirteen days earlier Song, 19 at the time, was presumably present when the female students at her school, which was part of the Beijing Teachers University, killed their teacher, Bian Zhongyun. The girls brutally beat the 50-year-old woman to death using wooden sticks spiked with nails. On the day before the killing, members of the Red Guard had already maltreated the teacher, who was the party leader at the school — they suddenly viewed her as a “counter-revolutionary revisionist” who they believed had gambled away her life.

Bian went down in history as the first victim of the Cultural Revolution — the bloody mass movement Mao used to eliminate his enemies within the party. The teacher’s murder was followed by the killings of millions of Chinese people. The ten-year campaign destroyed entire families, irreplaceable cultural treasures and centuries-old traditions. In August 1966 alone, about 100 teachers were murdered by their own students in the western section of Beijing.

Thomas Sowell sums up his point:

If it is hard to find a principle behind what angers the left, it is not equally hard to find an attitude.

Their greatest anger seems to be directed at people and things that thwart or undermine the social vision of the left, the political melodrama starring the left as saviors of the poor, the environment, and other busybody tasks that they have taken on.

It seems to be the threat to their egos that they hate. And nothing is more of a threat to their desire to run other people’s lives than the free market and its defenders.

And here’s an example of what free market capitalism has been teaching the children of China’s great Asian competitor, India:

During the mid-1990s, the first Internet cafes began opening up in Bangalore, with one going into operation nextdoor to Gopinath’s house. “My brother Shreyas took me there. I was fascinated. The Internet changed my life,” he says. He spent every spare minute online.

He taught himself how to build Web sites. “He spent every rupee he had in the Internet Café,” says his mother, disapproval still evident in her voice. Gopinath admits, “I had been a good student up until then. After I discovered the Internet, I was an average student.” Before finding cyberspace, he had dreams of becoming a veterinarian.

So what did he become instead? How about this:

Suhas Gopinath started a software company at age 14 and has since become one of the most remarkable success stories of the Indian IT boom. Now he’s 21 and runs a world-class business with 400 employees.

Nice one, Suhas!

Take a look at the excellent presentation below, which has just won the World Best Presentation Contest. Some of the fascinating examples of the shifts happening around us: it is predicted that by 2049 a $1000 computer will have more computational capabilities than the entire human race (and more than one human by 2013), the New York Times contains more information in one week that the average person living in the 18th century would have encountered in a lifetime, and 1 in 8 marriages last year in the US was between people who met online. Much more in the presentation below.

Here’s the creator’s blog, where he lists some of the sources of the information presented.

(via FT Passport)

So sayeth Albert Einstein.

And apparently a growing number of scientists believe that although the illusion is a rather persistent one people can and do see past it… into the future. Sometimes, maybe.

Full story in This is London.

I believe I’ve had experiences that at least appeared to be premonition as they describe it and know others who have also. And yet I remain skeptical to a degree. The brain is an incredible instrument with an uncanny ability to cherry pick and catalog seonsory data in support of whatever happens to be its current focus of identification. Further to that our memory is notoriously unreliable. And human beings have a hard-wired desire to believe in the extraordinary.

Self-deception is contagious and consensus hallucinations abound. So I’ll wait and see.

And now a word from the skeptics:

Research in this matter is subject to the element of selective recall, whereby individuals tend to remember when a dream or hunch turns out correctly and forget it if it fails. Therefore, anecdotal reports are not of much value.
In 1983, an examination was made of the evidence offered by 127 persons who responded to a U.K. newspaper feature on premonitions. A questionnaire was accompanied by a personality test. Most who answered were female, average age was forty-six years, and 80 percent of them said that they were correct 70 percent of the time. The personality test showed that these persons were significantly more neurotic than average and scored high on a “lie scale.” Some 85 percent of their predictions involved death or other tragedies. The investigator concluded that the ability to have premonitions is important since it warns females and thereby provides a “survival advantage to the species.” No comment.

Hey, maybe neurotic middle-aged women really can foretell the future better than everyone else. If I was persistently yanked into the future by visions and foreboding of impending catastrophes I’d probably be neurotic too.

I have submitted my post, “Professional revertard Yvonne Ridley misquotes, misrepresents self” to the Watcher’s Council.

As you may or may not already be aware, members of the Watcher’s Council hold a vote every week on what they consider to be the most link-worthy pieces of writing around… per the Watcher’s instructions, I am submitting one of my own posts for consideration in the upcoming nominations process.
Here is the most recent winning council post, here is the most recent winning non-council post, here is the list of results for the latest vote, and here is the initial posting of all the nominees that were voted on.

Sincere thanks to Velvet Hammer for listing Tao of Defiance as one of the 5 nominations for her contributing node to the “Thinking Blogger Award” meme (well, beme, actually).

Here are the rules for those who want to come join the party:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,

2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,

3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote. (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

I am going to make an all Aussie list. Here are 5 Blogs That Make Me Think:

1. Saint’s Dogfight in Bankstown. Possibly the most under-rated blog in Australia.
2. Sheik Yer’mami’s Winds of Jihad. Single-handedly holding the fort in Cairns, the Sheik is renowned for thought-provoking hits such as “Harry the Taliban” and “Muslim Woman”. The Sheik makes me think particularly hard about protecting my online anonimity.
3. Pommygranate. Because he is so well integrated.
4. A Western Heart makes me think terribly un-PC things. John Ray also makes me think that too many blogs is never enough -an even dozen and counting! How does he do it?!
5. My last nominee has already gained global infamy as the premier exponent of the Evil Minimalist (Min-evilist) school of blogging. Title, quote, linepunch! Like a hammer hits a cantaloupe. Repeat until the demons of stupid are out. Lefthandalist suckers beware, its the “Evil” Tim Blair!

Don’t forget to check out Velvet Hammer’s great blog, Ironic Surrealism, too.

Here’s an excellent documentary that aired on the Cutting Edge program on SBS on Tuesday night. It has already been shown on British television in December 2006 and was made by Journeyman Pictures.

(be patient, it may take a few seconds to load when you press Play)

The Journeyman website has a transcript of the program.

About the documentary:

Videos of smiling suicide bombers and insurgent attacks have become as important a weapon as explosives in Al Qaeda’s global jihad against the West. The jihadis have seized on the power of the internet and their message cannot be silenced. But who actually watches these videos and what effect are they having on young people in the Muslim world? And – for that matter – on their enemies in West?

Abu Muawiya smiles and blows a kiss to the camera. He’s about to ram his car, packed with explosives, into an Iraqi checkpoint. Hours later, a slick and sophisticated video of his death is available to download. This is the jihadi propaganda machine, designed to inspire its supporters and terrify its enemies. The video is emotional, powerful and – thanks to the internet – you can get it anywhere in the world.

“We use the programme ‘Windows Movie Maker’ to make the films”, explains one jihadi producer. The whole process is taken very seriously. Only when the video has been checked and approved by the group’s chain of command will it be taken to an innocuous internet café to be uploaded. “The CIA can search for ages. Even if they find the café where it was uploaded, they can never find the person”, explains journalist Faris bin Hizam.

Al Qaeda have always recognised the importance of propaganda. When planning September 11th, they filmed the wills of the hijackers against an easily replaceable background. This enabled them to edit in shots of the World Trade Centre in flames later. For them, 9/11 was as much about creating iconic images as killing their enemies. But it was the war in Iraq and spread of broadband internet that turned the trickle of propaganda into a torrent.
[..]