eric.openflows

I'm fond of saying that with the rate that false information and rumor spreads via email, blogs, twitter and facebook if the internet existed during the time of the Salem witch hunt, not one colonist would have been left alive within a week.

This week a lot of smart folks found themselves a bit embarrassed when the quote they posted to their blogs, twitter and facebook and attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr. turned out to be (other than one small part) not actually said by him.

Verify things before you re-post them! More and more people seem to be re-tweeting content to be looked at as an authority without ever having actually looked at the content first. Everything becomes trivial and trivia.

And before you start your research on wikipedia , check out this recent revision to the biography of Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the world wide web http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tim_Berners-Lee&oldid=427744427 which claims he was "born in London, England, on 8 June 1955, the son of Peter Griffin and Rosa Parks."

Enough ranting, see you tomorrow.

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today's photo is of a banana that sat on the railing of the stairway in my office all day waiting for someone to give it a good home.

The art collective known as We are Dorothy has produced a set of plastic toy soldiers that brilliantly expose the reality of war -- the aftermath and toll it takes on those that come home alive.

http://www.wearedorothy.com/art/casualties-of-war/

Detail from one of the images from their project is reprinted to the right (without permission). Click through and check out the rest. Do it now!

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today's photo:

25 Abandoned Yugoslavia Monuments that look like they're from the Future
http://www.cracktwo.com/2011/04/25-abandoned-soviet-monuments-that-look....
some of these are really cool.

Former Military Interrogator Matthew Alexander: Despite GOP Claims, "Immoral" Torture "Slowed Down" Effort to Find Osama bin Laden
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/5/4/former_military_interrogator_matthe...
not in any way cool.

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I spent the evening at the ABC No Rio benefit party so I really don't have anything to say other than please support abc no rio. It's a great project that deserves your support.

Today, I have little to say other than "can we please, as a nation, regain our sanity? please!"

Obama vs. Osama Smackdown:
What Just Happened?
http://mediastudy.com/articles/av5-5-11.html
Then came all the jubilation – which is actually quite frightening in its own right. Granted that that Bin Laden, one of the world’s most outspoken and aggressive social conservatives, was certainly a Class A Scumbag. And granted that his vision of a global theocratic misogynist dictatorship would be hell for most of us. And granted also that his tactical strategies of using terror to impose minority tyranny over a majority is why we have revolutions against leaders like him. It still is beneath us as humans to outwardly celebrate his killing. So pardon me for raining on anyone’s parade by using terms such as “bloodlust” to describe mobs celebrating assassinations or “targeted killings.” It’s just that I’m a wee bit uncomfortable with the whole barbarism ethos. We could tastefully be happy that Bin Laden’s gone and congratulate those who risked their lives to try to bring him to justice. But no.

We got spontaneous fireworks in Los Angeles. Time magazine’s Michael Grunwald began his May 2 nd editorial, writing “This is an exciting day–I can’t remember ever feeling jubilant about someone’s death before . . .” Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum, wrote that “it was both shocking and giddily uplifting last night to see the cheering throng that flocked to the North Front [of the White House], every bit as ebullient as the British crowds that pressed against the fence at Buckingham Palace on Friday for the much-ballyhooed royal wedding.” What does all of this hoopla say about us?

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"USA! USA!" is the wrong response
Bin Laden's death is a great relief, but by cheering it we're mimicking our worst enemies
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/05/02/osama_and_chants_...
There is ample reason to feel relief that Osama bin Laden is no longer a threat to the world, and I say that not just because I was among the many congressional staffers told to flee the U.S. Capitol on 9/11. I say that because he was clearly an evil person who celebrated violence against all whom he deemed "enemies" -- and the world needs less of such zealotry, not more.

For decades, we have held in contempt those who actively celebrate death. When we’ve seen video footage of foreigners cheering terrorist attacks against America, we have ignored their insistence that they are celebrating merely because we have occupied their nations and killed their people. Instead, we have been rightly disgusted -- not only because they are lauding the death of our innocents, but because, more fundamentally, they are celebrating death itself. That latter part had been anathema to a nation built on the presumption that life is an "unalienable right."

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Chris Hedges Speaks on Osama bin Laden’s Death
http://www.truth-out.org/chris-hedges-speaks-osama-bin-laden%E2%80%99s-d...
I spent a year of my life covering al-Qaida for The New York Times. It was the work in which I, and other investigative reporters, won the Pulitzer Prize. And I spent seven years of my life in the Middle East. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I’m an Arabic speaker. And when someone came over and told Jean and me the news, my stomach sank. I’m not in any way naïve about what al-Qaida is. It’s an organization that terrifies me. I know it intimately.

But I’m also intimately familiar with the collective humiliation that we have imposed on the Muslim world. The expansion of military occupation that took place throughout, in particular the Arab world, following 9/11 – and that this presence of American imperial bases, dotted, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Doha – is one that has done more to engender hatred and acts of terror than anything ever orchestrated by Osama bin Laden.

When I was in New York, as some of you were, on 9/11, I was in Times Square when the second plane hit. I walked into The New York Times, I stuffed notebooks in my pocket and walked down the West Side Highway and was at Ground Zero four hours later. I was there when Building 7 collapsed. And I watched as a nation drank deep from that very dark elixir of American nationalism … the flip side of nationalism is always racism, it’s about self-exaltation and the denigration of the other.

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