Wampum

[Eric, channeling for Dwight and MB, updates and writes] I will open the floor for nominations for the 2009 Koufax Awards towards the end of January. Because lefty blogtopia (hi skippy) has grown so much in the last couple of years, and it has been several years since we held the Koufax Awards, I thought it might be useful to post answers to some Frequently Asked Questions before the nominations open.

1) What are the Koufax Awards?

The Koufax Awards are held annually to honor the best of left-leaning bloggers. A "Sandy" will be awarded based on reader votes in each of a number of categories. It is like the Oscars for lefty bloggers, except that we do not allow overly long, overly sentimental speeches by the winners. For those, you have to visit the sites of the winners. This is the fifth year of the awards. That makes us venerable when measured in blog years. You can locate previous winners by clicking on the links located on the left hand (of course) side bar.

2) Why are they called the "Koufax Awards?"

Way back in 2002, when Dwight was first considering starting the awards, he was struggling to think up a name. Since Sandy Koufax was the best left-handed pitcher of his lifetime, and one of his childhood heroes (and mine, after all, he played for the Dodgers) and since the awards are for lefties, the name just seemed like a natural.

3) What do the winners win?

A $250,000.00 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Founda... No, that is not right. The winners receive only the recognition and gratitude of their peers and readers. We also provide a spiffy icon (designed by Kevin Hayden who, by the way, ran, and we hope runs in the future, the excellent Perranoski Prizes over at American Street. Ron Perranoski was Sandy Koufax's relief pitcher in the 1960's and, as you might expect from that fact, the Prizes are complementary to the Koufax Awards. We encourage you to participate in them, as well) to post on the winner's site. Some people have told us that the exposure their blog received during the Koufax Awards substantially increased their traffic but your experience may vary. No promises.

4) What is the purpose of the Awards?

There are three purposes of the Koufax Awards. First, as Dwight wrote in 2004:

At its core, the Koufax Awards are meant to be an opportunity to say nice things about your favorite bloggers and to provide a bit of recognition for the folks who provide us with information, insight, and entertainment usually for little or no renumeration. The awards are supposed to be fun for us and fun for you.

The most important purpose of the awards is to help build a sense of community between and among lefty bloggers and readers of lefty blogs. The awards provide an opportunity to say something nice about bloggers you like and to have something nice said about you. Please try not to take the idea of winning and losing too seriously. The primary rules of the contest are be nice and have fun.

While we will note the procedures of the awards in some detail below, the rules of "be nice and have fun" have seen us through three years of the awards. Things that are nice and are fun are encouraged while actions that violate those rules not allowed. Thus, it is completely appropriate to leave a comment extolling the virtue of your favorite blog. A comment trashing a blog you dislike is not nice and it is not fun for us or for the recipient of the abuse. Take that as fair warning. Comments that cut against the purposes of the awards will be dealt with ruthlessly. If you have to say something that is not nice, use private email, not a public comment.

5) What are the categories this year?

The categories evolve with our experience running the awards. We have not finalized the list for this year and this is your opportunity to help us decide.

For a good idea of the categories, click on the 2004 finalists on the left sidebar. This year's list will be similar:

Best Blog – Non-Sponsored Division, Best Blog – Pro Division, Best Writing, Best Post, Best Series, Best Group Blog, Most Humorous Blog, Most Humorous Post, Best Expert Blog, Best Single Issue Blog, Best New Blog, Most Deserving of Wider Recognition, Best Commenter, Best Community Blog & Best Locality Blog.

6) What are the procedures for the awards?

The Koufax Awards have three stages. Sometime towards the end of January, we will post a list of the categories and open the floor for nominations. Nominations are made by leaving a comment or by sending us an email. No specific form is necessary, but we do ask that you include the name of the blog (or post), the category for which it is nominated and a url to the blog (or post). You are welcome, even encouraged, to self-nominate, particularly for the categories for individual posts or series. After all, you know your work better than anyone else. You may nominate as many blogs as you wish in as many categories as you wish and you may make your nominations at one time or on multiple visits. If someone sends us a complete list of thousands of lefty blogs, I may decide to ignore it but that hasn't happened yet. Every blog mentioned in any nominating comment or email will receive a link when we post the full list of nominees.

After that full list of nominees is posted, we will ask for votes from that list to determine a group of 8-10 finalists in each category. The list of finalists will be determined by a count of the votes. We look for natural break points in the voting pattern to determine the number of finalists to include.

When voting (as opposed to nominating) starts, we ask that each person cast exactly one vote in each category. In a prior year there was some effort to game the system by multiple voting by persons or robots. That does not work. Eric is in charge of voting security and he is very smart, very diligent, is armed with good technology, and has forgotten more about how the internet works that you or I will ever know. If Eric thinks something looks fishy, we will all look at it. Efforts to game the system not only will be ineffective but if they piss us off sufficiently, they risk public humiliation for the perpetrator. Don't do it.

After we generate our list of 8-10 finalists in each category, we will ask for votes for a winner. The winners are determined by a manual count of the votes. Once again, one vote per person per category please. Because we tabulate the votes manually, and as a result of the exponential growth of the Koufax Awards, it is a huge amount of work to organize and tabulate the votes. If we allow multiple voting, we would have to go to a machine count. After Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 we do not think that is such a good idea.

After we tabulate the votes, we will announce the winners. It will take a few months to complete the process.

Please, please, please take the awards in the spirit in which they are offered. The Koufax Awards are supposed to be fun for you and for us. It takes an enormous amount of work (and money) for us to host the awards. If they are not fun, we have little reason to do so. Winning and losing is secondary to heaping praise upon your favorites and building the community. BE NICE.

7) Are the Koufax Awards the most prestigious of blogging awards?

Who cares? We do this for fun and to give back to the lefty blogging community. It is not a competition between the Koufax Awards and other awards. Spread the kudos, be nice, and everyone will be happier. We wish other awards nothing but the best. That said, let me take this opportunity to again plug recall the Perranoski Prizes hosted by Kevin Hayden at the American Street. They are were complimentary to the Koufax Awards (in that the categories do not overlap and the existence of the Prizes allows allowed us to keep the number of categories to a manageable number). In addition, Kevin does did a great job hosting the Prizes and offers offered them in the same spirit caused me Dwight to start the Koufax Awards. Please support the Perranoski Prizes.

8) What can you do to help?

Three things. First, please particpate. Second, when nominating a blog, a post or a series, please provide a url so that we can readily find it. We have a huge number of url's to hunt down and it really helps if you provide them. That is particularly true in the categories of "Best Post", "Most Humorous Post" and "Best Series." Third, when we put one up, around Valentine's Day, if you can afford it, please hit our tip jar. It costs us a lot, mostly in eyestrain, to host these awards and every little bit helps validate and compensate the hard working worker bees. Thank you in advance.

We hope to see you in three weeks, after Eric gets back from Washington and Geneva, when we open up the nominating process. Until then, please leave suggestions for categories in comments, and round up the usual suspects ... er ... um ... spread the word.

Originally posted by Dwight Meredith on December 10, 2005, updated by Eric Brunner-Williams on December 31st, 2009.

Posted by EBW at 04:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBacks (0)

He is now using a video camera with agility, and had fun playing with water today.

Posted by EBW at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

via Susie, now that it can't hurt the interests of any parties that matter, say, the interests of former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R, Cat-In-Half) and owner of significant equity in the Hospital Corporation of America, or Aetna, etc., look for sudden public outbursts by formerly reticent men in public life, that, they too support single payer.

There is an upside -- it is no longer rhetorical open season on Indian Health Service as the exemplar worst possible outcome of single-payer -- in the diseased OpEd pages of the Wall Street Journal. The ideologues of the right will go back to their standard, and best, offer to Native America -- nothing.

Posted by EBW at 02:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A "death by power point" weapon targeting the US / NATO forces in ... Wahrkollagistan. This is one of the funnier things I've seen come out war planners.

Posted by EBW at 07:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A year ago Tsahal was acting on a movement order from the troika of Ehud Olmert (Prime Minister), Tzipi Livni (Foreign Minster) and Ehud Barak (Defense Minister).

They had their war. Now they're unable to set foot in the EU.

Weird, that Zionists can't see themselves as "in West Asia", but insist that Israel is in Europe, a place its members of government and Tsahal's flag officers can't visit without risk of arrest -- for war crimes.

Posted by EBW at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A friend of MB's, now a 2L at Bolt, sent me a copy of a work in progress. It is a framework unstated paper, that is, a trademark policy and practice paper uninformed by other policy considerations. Because of the policy development work I'm doing, in part so that municipal TLD proposals don't get blocked ab initio by trademark, and other interests, some of which may have no interest at all, under any policy framework, intellectual property, competition, self-interest, in any TLD proposals, municipal or otherwise, ever being added by ICANN to the IANA root, I wrote the sketch of an IANA function framed paper considering only the address consumption resulting from domain name speculation. This appears below.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is responsible for the global coordination of the DNS Root, IP addressing, and other Internet protocol resources. These responsibilities, and the IANA contract, are unchanged by the change from the ICANN MoU regime to the AoC regime, which took place on Sept. 30th, 2009.

The IANA function consists of three sub-functions:

1. it manages the DNS Root Zone (assignments of ccTLDs and gTLDs), as well as the .int registry, and the .arpa zone,
2. coordinates the global IP and AS number space, and allocates these to Regional Internet Registries, and
3. is the central repository for protocol name and number registries, used in many Internet protocols.

Is domain name speculation observable from the point of view of the IANA function?

This activity has generated on the order of 35 million name to address mappings, consuming between 1 and 35 million IPv4 addresses. Name based virtual hosting has replaced address based virtual hosting, however, assuming only that aggregated load limits the number of marginally profitable names assigned to a host, whether only one, or more than one IP addresses are bound to a single network interface, or the host has multiple network interfaces, and that 1 thousand names is the optimal density for commodity hosts and commodity hosting contracts, 35 million names requires no fewer than 35,000 unique addresses. The largest observed concentration known to the author is an order of magnitude smaller, so the actual use may be on the order a third of a million unique IPv4 addresses.

It is therefore not possible to avoid the conclusion that name space speculation consumes the address resource equivalent of a medium to large access network. In classful terms, the resource consumption is bounded below by half a Class B allocation (65,534), and bounded above by two Class A allocations (16,777,214). In CIDR terms, by a /17 (32,766) and a /7 (33,554,430) allocations. It is therefore "observable" from the point of view of the IANA's number space allocation function. We're down to our last 5 /8 blocks globally, a /7 is two of them.

The qustion asked, "Is domain name speculation observable from the point of view of the IANA function?" must be answered in the affirmative.

The data available suggests a best fit predictive model where the first RIR will exhaust its available pool of addresses and no further numbers are available in the IANA unallocated pool to replenish the RIR's pool will occur on 17-Oct-2012. [1]

Therefore, assuming that exhaustion of the unallocated pool of IPv4 address for any regional Internet Registry (RIR), and a cessation of address allocation results, or a recovery regime which entails efficient breech [2] is instituted, is a non-desirable policy outcome, domain name speculation, as practiced, constrained only by commodity hardware load and commodity hosting provisioning capabilities, is contrary to the basic policy implemented by the IANA's address space management function.

This harm may be reduced by reducing the address resources domain name speculators consume. This could be accomplished through a technical density requirement that domain speculators use specific /22 allocations, or through other policy means, including those which tend to reduce the return on investment to domain name speculators, and result in substantive IPv4 address recovery.

[1] http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_breach

Posted by EBW at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, shortly after 9:30am EST, CORE's response to the City of New York's DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS (DOITT), RFP for "TITLE: SERVICES TO OBTAIN, OPERATE, MANAGE, ADMINISTER, MAINTAIN AND MARKET THE GEOGRAPHIC TOP LEVEL DOMAIN NAME .NYC " was delivered to the Contract Manager, 75 Park Place, 9th Floor New York, NY 10007. The bid was due by 3pm EST, and it was produced as part of a series of RFP responses we made in December, in Europe, the Americas, and Africa.

The City, (mis)informed by NeuStar, which operates .US (I wrote that bid's technical content, back in 2001), sought two proposals from each tender respondent, one for a "community-based" application, and one for a "standard" application. The terms of art are ICANN's, from the DAGv3. Naturally, NeuStar's application is the presumptive winner, and naturally, if NeuStar looses the Big Apple, its next renewal of the .US contract, incompetently competed last by GoDaddy/Afilias in 2007, will be much more competitive in 2012.

I expect the DOITT also took delivery of applications from Verisign, NeuStar, and Afilias, the other three gTLD registries, as well.

Hmm. Back in 1998 I came up with the idea of a TLD policied by, and for, Indians. I couldn't come up with the $40k to risk in a 7-of-40 gamble, and knowing Mike Roberts and Ester Dyson as I did, I didn't risk Indian money on something in which the weakest players would prove to be a group with millions in circa-2000 risk capital, the Getty Foundation, and the Airline Industry. That idea became sponsored TLDs, that is, things that had more "policy" than $6. And that in turn became, through the hands of Dirk Krischenowski, the idea of Cities as sponsors, starting with Berlin.

From an Indian with policy but no cash, through Berlin, then Barcelona, then Paris, to Manhattan. All that is missing is $24 worth of mirrors and beads.

Our advantage is technical competency, which is the least interesting part of the problem, speaking as CORE's CTO, and we've more time on target thinking through policy intending to make a City's name space something other than a domainer zoo, populated by pay-per-clicks and blogspam exploits.

Of course, the NeuStar informed City is likely to be "informed" that policy other than $6 will result in a couple of hippies forming the entire registrant base for .NYC, loosing the City $illions in lost revenues.

So from that starting point, what is the delta between "community-based" NYC and "standard" NYC?

Assuming that only those trademarks who's products aren't sold in NYC {are really going to go out of their way to avoid / are not qualified to participate in} the community-based NYC Sunrise phase, the delta is composed of ... Mongolian registered trademarks. Polar umbrella vendors. Australian trademarked time-share packages. So the delta for the rights-of-others policied mechanisms, the Sunrise and Landrush phase(es) for "community-based" NYC vs "standard" NYC is zero. So it really comes down to ... domainers. The "value" of a "standard" with just $6 as policy is all the domainers registering typos and squats and ...

Our proposal is no domainers, and yes meaning, as we did in Catalan, so that what one clicks is ... real. We think that in the long run, that (a) is more useful to the City's users, and (b) domainers, like swine in a shellfish bed, ruin the fishery. We believe that zoning increases the total use value of land, and name space mandates increase the value of name spaces.

So now, now that the applications are in the DOITT's hands, the real contest, the contest to inform the bloggers of the City of New York, and through them, the users who's first clicks are "in" the City of New York, that a moment of choice is upon them. The easy money of the domainers, followed by ... life west of the Pecos, or the money of, and the interests of, residents.

Anyone have suggestions for NYC bloggers to buy ad placements with?

Posted by EBW at 07:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I understand that a certain Jane has achieved epistolary parity with the Great Norquist. It must be one of those off-off-cycle things. Last off-off it was Ned Lamont, this off-off its Grover, the Bather of Cities. Starting with NOLA.

What a ... gift.

I look forward to Gibblets' or the Medium Lobster's write up. At least Jack Abramoff worked for his clients.

How awkward for art, to be less weird than life. I think we've reached the wrap-around-point, where "radicals" become reactionaries, or new media hogs aiming for nothing but this month's high status cites and the attendant traffic.

Those who write for, link to, or read "Firedoglake" are passing through the looking glass.

Posted by EBW at 06:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Of course, the issue isn't non-observation of Christmas, which not being observed, cannot have a fixed property, such as date, but the more profound problem that Christmas has no foundations. It can be asserted, but that is not sufficient.

Posted by EBW at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A bid for .nyc submitted, rather a lot of work. At 2:15pm, 48 hours before it was due at City Hall, the application coordinator, me, slipped and fell, incurring a lumbar muscle injury, which, for the next 12 hours resulted in near total paralysis. All of the other contributing writers are in the Central European time zone, far from lower Manhattan.

As frustrating as this was, as hard as it made the final day of integrating a complex package into final form, and final technical, financial, and policy content writing, and proof-reading the final contributions by others on the team, I could not take my mind off of the political moment, the Senate vote on a bill that could not have helped my family two years ago, and cannot help families similarly situated, and cannot help my family now, and, had the worst have occurred, would have transported me from the impact site to bankruptcy.

The unhoused poor, the housed poor, the working poor, deserve better than what the middle class is willing to accept from the upper class.

I put in to the bid that we'll take EBT cards as proof of residency, and right to a .NYC domain name and a .NYC blog. We'll lose a dollar per, but I'll be damned if the right to participate in the public fora is conditioned upon disposable income, the standard of care the well-off and the well-enough-off celebrate each other with.

Posted by EBW at 05:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After explaining the device, and the price, Jonah's speech therapist offered that it might be covered under our medical insurance. I didn't bat an eye or mention ... instead I simply continued to listen ... or, she continued, it might be covered under MediCare/Medicaid ... and I didn't bat an eye or mention ...

Then there are the other extra costs of autism. Can't find the public library's DVD(s) in time ... fines, and replacement fees, and surcharges that make credit card debit look ethical. And of course Jonah persevates on video, DVD and VHS, and DVD and CD formats are ... surface failure pre-disposed, so that's been a lot of cash (thank dog for the Salvation Army and their ready supply of VHS, and their more than tolerance of handicap) sprinkled on the IP lawyers who make sure no copy of any kidvid is sold at anything other than list price.

If what the Dems have for me is a life of being a tended aphid in the insurance company ant farms, as this Hope and Change year comes to a close, then I shall simply be an independ ant.

Posted by EBW at 08:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From his eval:
Jonah is a 3rd grade student in the Intermediate Autism Class. ... He has an IEP and is clasified with Autism. ... Jonah's teacher and therapist reported that Jonah has some verbal lanuage, although it is mainly composed of frequently repeated phrases ("Coming soon to theaters") or is echolalic in nature. He struggles to answer questions verbally and prefers the written form. However, Jonah's handwriting is difficult to read and not at the level of automaticity of production. The act of writing is stressful for him and takes away from his ability to focus on the question at hand. ... [H]is team would like to determine if a keyboarding device with speech output would aid him in his expressive communication. ...

Jonah was observed in his classroom working with his speech therapist in a quiet corner of the classroom. Jonah was wearing headphones that quieted the background noise while still allowing him to hear and respond to teachers in the room. Jonah was offered a DynaWrite device. Jonah initially used 1-2 fingers to explore the keyboard in an non-purposeful way, randomly stricking keys. He then independently composed the sentence "Coming soon to theaters".

When keyboarding full sentences, Jonah used 1-2 fingers on both hands and produced both words and sentences in an appropriate length of time. He did not need to look at the keyboard to find letters. Instead, he looked at the screen to see the words displayed as he typed them. He wrote in full sentences, used correct spelling and was able to independently identify and self-correct any errors. he used correct spacing and was familiar with 'enter' and 'backspace' keys. He did not use correct capitalization. He quickly learned the location of the 'speak' key so he could listend to the words and sentences he had written. He appeared to greatly enjoy the speech output as he would simile and laugh as his words were read aloud.

Jonah's speech therapist then used a white board to write questions for him to answer on the DynaWrite. She wrote "What is your name?", "How old are you?", and "Where is the cup?" Jonah typed his answers and correctly used the device to speak the responses. At times Jonah did use verbal communication along with the device to answer the questions.

[Discussion of the Dynavox Xpress, a smaller, hand-held device, with a tough screen keyboard. Texting style device, using thumbs, omitted.]

Jonah appears to be an excellent candidate for an AAC device. His receptive language is strong, as he is appropriately mainstreamed into 4th grade academics. However, his ability to generate verbal expression is severely limited by his disability. ... Jonah is a strong visual learner and responds well to technology (Dad's aside: his is agile on a laptop, agile). He is adept at using the computer for academic and recreational purposes. He is motivated and skilled at using technology. Although he does not use a 10 finger approach to keyboarding, Jonah has adequate visual and motor skills to write using a keyboard. He writes quickly and prefers this method over pencil and paper writing. ...

It costs $6k.

Posted by EBW at 03:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Jim Capazula died from it. He wrote beautifully. Steve Gilliard died from it. He too wrote beautifully.

People we know, people who write blogs, people who comment on blogs, people who read blogs, have lost their lives, or have lost the quality of their lives, or have lost time from their lives, with all that the loss of paid time, or simply occupied time, implies, or live narrower lives, for want of medial care available as close as Canada, or just the other side of the Florida Straits.

Single Payer. Nothing less.

Posted by EBW at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

If I paid any attention at all to the worst choice we managed not to have to give a Koufax Award to, I'd know that that new media property is less constant in its advocacy than the average of the stable kept by Pajamas Media, which I also ignore.

Why people associate with her is just ... adsense and clickthrough.

Posted by EBW at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Joe Lieberman was elected Vice-President of the United States in the same election that Al Gore was elected President of the United States. Ned Lamont's ready cash and ambition, Markos Moulatis' and Duncan Black's remote, and Jane Hamsher's quixotic in-campaign and on-staffer, quests for a safe, yet meaningless, off-cycle contest to jack Daily Kos', Escheton's and the still obscure Firedoglake's status out of the blogosphere's "A list" into the the lower ranks of paid media, did not unmake the Brooks Brothers Riot, or separate the electoral votes given, since the 12th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1804, to Al Gore and Joe Lieberman.

An election was stolen. About a million people died by exported violence, the catharsis of a civil war arising from an end of consensual, peaceful, lawful succession, off-shore. The fiction of the defensive or reactive war in Iraq, and even Afghanistan, continues in the mainstream media, a mainstream which includes the Moulatis, Black, and Hamsher outlets. We are fortunate that Gore and Lieberman allowed the Rehnquist Court to make a political choice and appoint the new regime. If the contest had gone to arms, many elected, commissioned, non-commissioned, sworn, and unsworn officers under the Republic, and others lacking those qualifications, would be dead, wounded, jailed, or in exile abroad. The violence we did not visit on ourselves we visited on an army who's armored combat doctrine was still stop and fire, an army operating at the level of the United States during the Korean Conflict, an army without any air combat capability or interdiction capability whatsoever.

Across this enormous chasm, papered over by two successive failures of election law and political civility, in Ohio in 2004, and in Iowa, Nevada, and Texas in 2008, loonies in the left pursue the fight they picked for its meaninglessness in August 2006, a fight that took hundreds of thousands of dollars away from winnable races the left could not count on winning that amazing regime-ending November.

Defeating Lieberman will not end the reign of AIPAC over all American policy in the Middle East, or the weapons-and-oil nuttery that drives both global warming and American militarism.

It has been an expensive mistake, and Al Gore, the lawfully elected 43rd President of the United States, and Joe Lieberman, the lawfully elected 46th Vice President of the United States, who were unable to serve their terms in office, by force majeure, and the prior elected administration of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and the subsequent administration, the product of a general election, though not a primary process, of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, are the modern leaders of the non-progressive Democratic Party.

Lamont, Moulatis, Black and Hamsher may be feeling their oats, but they are why Joe Lieberman is not an otherwise undistinguished moderate-to-liberal, except on AIPAC questions, in a unified majority party, and why we're not discussing single-payer to Baucus nonsense, within a unified majority party with no problems greater than the number of Old Yellow Dogs to count the noses of.

The loonies of the left are not cheap. Now they are media properties. They won their war with Spain. And Ned Lamont is still just yet another millionaire with disappointed political ambitions.

Posted by EBW at 05:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

At least in Copenhagen "the left" actually assemble in the streets to petition government. It means being "processed" by "law and order" forces that may be a substitute for government, but at least they assembled to petition.

A good read for a Sunday is Jerome a Paris' Europe is doomed! Special Decline and Defeatism edition critique of a magazine that really shouldn't sell a copy on this side of the Pond, but unfortunately is visibly present in most of the major dailies, who's owners would rather go under than deviate from the Villagers-are-the-Readers dogma.

Catalans are voting today on a non-binding referendum, whether to seek independence from Madrid.

Posted by EBW at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

That was all I wrote when I learned that the party that made us an offer, that we accepted (sure, we'll do the who .nyc application, operate the registry, do all the marketing, for 5% of the net, cause our brave partners were putting up the risk money -- to be paid only, only, if we didn't make our numbers, doing all the marketing, sales, operations, and dusting under the beds -- and if we put up what they put up, why hooray! we'd get 50%!!

I thought they were bad news ab initio, and when they got into a food fight over .food, well, distance would be good.

So they made an offer, we accepted, and they ... took a couple of days to let us know they're going to apply for .nyc with some other partner.

"Excellent!"

So now the contours of CORE's bid to be the Contractor selected by the City of New York to apply for, and operate .nyc, will be our own, not the irrational zig zags of yuppies chasing the main chance with other people's cash.

I'm good with that.

Posted by EBW at 08:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently I visited the New York Public Library. I was meeting one of the several indigenous triblets claiming to own, or at least represent, Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, to see if my company, operating under a charter granted by the Canton of Geneva, in the Swiss Federation, could assist one, or several of these warring, grasping-at-foreigners-for-help tribelets, bring a credible bid to the City's Department of Informtation Technology and Telecommunications, to operate .nyc -- a top-level domain. I was facinated by the Library's Hudson exhibit.

So, before anything else, I recommend anyone who reads this, and who can, or who can cause others to do so, to spend an hour or so walking through the Library's Hudson exhibit. It is not a graded exercise, but it is as close to the real thing as one can get to for an equivalent expenditure of temporal and intellectual wampum. The English were not here first.

Before the English there was the Dutch. Before the English there was the French. Before the Dutch there was the Spanish. Before the Spanish there was the Basques. The layers of Europeans in the Americas, even Europeans in Dawn Land, is richer than a lasagna, closer to mille feuille.

We count at Verizano, who my wife's people mooned in 1524, after he worked his vessel up the Sound, because they already knew that European and their vessels were better kept offshore. We count again at 1616, when we all die, when the plague comes to Dawn Land. Before Hudson there are layers, of Spanish, of Basques. After Hudson there are layers, of French, of Swedish, and the English. Followed by the surviving loosers of the consolidation of power West of the Channel, the Scots the Irish, and surviving loosers of the end of the Wars of Religion, both West of the Channel, and East of it.

The history of the European experience in the Western North and Mid-Atlantic settlements, their interactions with the Late Woodlands Culture, the Algonquins, and later the Iroquoians, like the study of Europe itself before, and during the Contact Period, is too serious to be left to Europeans. It is also too serious to be left to Euro-Americans. The central narrative is not that the English came, and here we are, it is that many Europeans came, and of them, the English dominated the Eastern North Atlantic, and therefore the Western North Atlantic.

So there is our starting point. We moderns. We Indian moderns. The study of Europe, the study of Europeans, the study of the European Expansions, belongs to us, is as natural to us, as the study of the Pre-Columbian Americas, the study of Indians, the study of the Indigenous Contractions, which also belongs to us, and is not the monopoly of European and Euro-American academics and the Conquest Narrative they produce and reproduce and reproduce.

Having been invited to address a gathering "held by The Collegiate Church of New York, the oldest surviving institution of the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, and the Lenape, [] who met the Dutch settlers arriving here in the wake of Henry Hudson’s discovery of Manhattan, to talk about the significance of this long-overdue reconciliation, the current state of Native American integration within the broader framework of American culture, and the need for continued discussion about the history and legacy of Native Americans", our starting point as Native Intellectuals, as Wampum's bloggers, is that we see beyond the grey water to the East, past the curve of the Georges to the Henrys, and west to the Mississippians. That is, we stand outside of the box constructed by Europeans and Euro-Americans in which they comfortably occupy the clear center. From our perspective, most Euro-Americans could also stand outside that box, and some do -- that is the basis of modern Democratic minority coalition politics in the US, in which Tribes participate.

We also stand in the present, a moment in which, in Canada, the Van der Peet trilogy, R. v. Van der Peet, R. v. N.T.C. Smokehouse Ltd. and R. v. Gladstone, defines Treaty Right as a static moment in the Ethnographic Contact. This has the amusing anomoly that Siksika (Treaty 9) are the mounted non-agricultural raiders of the plains -- on horses that are a trade good arising out of the actual culturally transforming contact two hundred years before journal keeping Europeans arrived at the western edge of the prarrie. That construction of Indian creates a kind of primate, a species, which has not developed culturally in two and three hundred years, as well as overlooking the experience of the Siksika as semi-settled agrarians, interacting in both Woodlands and Mississipian trade, as well as Range and Basin trade. Of course the point is to prevent the Plains Tribes out of the commercial cereals business, and Coastal Tribes from commercial fishing, the real purpose of CJ Lamar's curious construct.

In this present in which we stand, in this moment, in the United States, a State may use a historical document as old as the Massachusets Bay Colony Charter, as evidence to gain an island and its payroll tax base in Federal Court, and an Indian Tribe may not use a historical document half as old, of equal gravity and provenence, as evidence to recover land with facially unsettled aboriginal title, because "too much time has passed". The place of Heathens in Christian Courts, enslaved and barred absolutely by the Bull Romanus Pontifex of 1455 and again by the Bull Inter caetera of 1493, is the present condition. The reversal contained in the Bull Sublimus Dei of 1537, which ended enslavement as a practice protected by religion, allowed free Heathens access to Christian Courts of Law, has been lost since the Marshall Trilogy. Christian States may offer facts into evidence. Heathen Tribes may not offer facts into evidence. For this we thank Justices Rehnquist and Ginsberg, joined in common antipathy towards limitations on settler rights.

The customary production of an invitation such as this is an authentic, culturally appropriate, exercise of wisdom. As Indians who blog, for as long as there has been a blog ethos of writing, we propose to our readers only that they read, and not that they read standards usually consumed as authentic, culturally appropriate, exercises of wisdom, but that they read the simple, unnuanced texts that teach the English were here first, so that that fiction is read as fiction.

Back to the fantastic cliams of a couple of people armed with an incomplete 501(c)(3) application and little else, the "Connecting New York, Inc." pair of bridge partners, and a couple of people armed with speculator cash, the "Dot NYC" pair of bridge partners, it is slightly amusing that either could consider themselves capable of effectively serving, or effectively selling, the public resource of all internet identifiers ending in ".nyc", and all internet identifiers used by residential and business access network operators serving the Five Boroughs. From the deck of the "Halve Maen", whether flying a Dutch, or Swiss flag, both camps appear to be little more than a couple of Chiefs lacking Indians, unlikely to thrive in the demanding environment of ICANN regsitry and registrar competition.

They are offering us pretty glass beads and mirrors to entice us to give them what they lack -- a registry -- a system that took hundreds of thousands to build. My inclination is to sail on, the Pueblos of Los Angeles and San Franciso offer better terms, starting with reciprocity, the only real currency, whether measured in fathoms of wampum, or contracts.

Posted by EBW at 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)