It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.


 
Winding my way through georgewbush.com, the official Bush-Cheney campaign website, I've found a nastily effective, ethically-challenged tool that could do a whole lot of damage to the integrity of the political process.

THE BAD NEWS: the campaign to re-elect George W. Bush has initiated a campaign of Republican-sponsored plagiarism on a scale we've never seen before, backed by a program of unprecedented technological sophistication. On their web site, the Bush team encourages supporters to appropriate text staffers wrote, sign their names to it, and send it to dozens of local newspapers and newsletters at a time. When the little people do it, it's called misrepresentation, plagiarism and cheating. When Bush does it, does that make it OK? You know the answer.

THE GOOD NEWS: we can use Bush's own technology to stop his unethical practice before it gains too much steam. We can warn the hundreds upon hundreds of newspapers and newsletters that are being targeted. But we have to act together, and we have to act fast.

I've put together a briefing on the problem and a guide for how we all can help counter this tactic in six easy steps, over at http://irregulartimes.com/astroturf3.html. We can nip this dishonorable tactic in the bud if we each do our local bit.

Posted by James Cook at 12:15 AM. # (permalink)




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