DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 last night. I think I learned more about my town than about the Bush administration.

The local theater often sells out shows on Tuesday nights, because they drop their prices for selected films to $3.50. “Tightwad Tuesday” is a local tradition; I know people who go to the theater at 7pm on Tuesdays without knowing or caring what’s showing — they pick a movie from the “cheap” list once they arrive.

Fahrenheit 9/11 tickets were not on sale, but the auditorium filled up faster than for any other movie I’ve seen there. Not only did it fill up, not only did it fill up early… my row was asked to move one seat to the right to consolidate open seats at the other end. This wasn’t about entertainment; this was a community education effort.

After 9pm, the theater lobby is a ghost town, usually. After Fahrenheit 9/11, it was full. Sixty people were standing around in small groups, talking about what they’d seen, exchanging horrific Bush anecdotes that didn’t appear in the film.

So, the movie didn’t shock me, but the scene did. I knew this to be a pretty liberal town because it’s populated almost entirely by aging hippies. (BTW, that’s not a slam; I aspire to be an aging hippie.) But getting a bunch of liberals, especially the aging-hippie variety, behind a single cause takes a compelling story. Like a war, I guess.

From Macintouch comes news of the EFF’s sample legal complaint against Apple, Toshiba, CNET for supporting copyright infringement.

Thus there can be no doubt that Apple materially relies on illegal infringement by its customers to support the commercial viability of its iPod and to maintain its high price in the marketplace.

The complaint is not real. It simply demonstrates the threat. Could the big music companies really make iPods and small disk drives and hardware reviews illegal? Under the INDUCE Act, it could happen.

At all times relevant to this complaint, Defendant Toshiba knew or should have known that Apple’s iPod would be used to induce infringement.

There’s a nice take-action site here: Save the iPod, Stop the INDUCE Act.

(It’s a new trend — enacting legislation to prevent technical progress. See the recent GMail privacy laws story for more.)

Voice of America: US Poll: 54% of Americans Say Iraq War a Mistake (mirror)

A poll shows a big swing in U.S. public opinion against the war in Iraq this month, with a majority of Americans now saying they believe the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq.

PollingReport.com shows results to poll questions about the Iraq war.

I’ve been wondering for weeks, as the news has been generally terrible and the scandals numerous, whether public opinion would really turn around — would we ever get to the point where it’s not just the people at both coasts who know Iraq wasn’t responsible for 9/11, for example. Maybe this is it?

Bim forwarded a great story about the legal battle stemming from the so-called Energy Crisis of 2000-2001: Small-time officials take lead in Enron fight (mirror)

Enron has been accused of manipulating or “gaming” the energy market, by withholding supply in order to increase demand and raise prices. The fallout was enormous: western states signed energy contracts providing ridiculously inflated prices; rolling blackouts killed power across California with little warning; Gray Davis was replaced as governor by an action-movie actor whose name escapes me.

Today’s story, in brief, is that a small utility company in Washington acquired and transcribed hundreds of hours of audio tape featuring Enron employees bragging about manipulating the market. It’s precisely the sort of evidence that Enron officials must have prayed would never come to light.

The transcriptions were explosive. Enron traders joked about lying in their negotiations with Snohomish and others. They joked about stealing money from “Grandma Millie” in California, and they joked that President Bush would not stop them by imposing price caps because of his close relationship with Enron chief executive Ken Lay.
”This is more than a smoking gun,” says Russ Campbell, another Nevada Power lawyer. “It’s an audiotape of the gun being fired, the bullet hitting the victim, and the murderer standing over the victim laughing.”

I went to the plaNetwork conference in the Presidio today. It was pretty interesting, as you’d expect if you could get a couple hundred left-leaning technology geeks in a room to talk about how to remake politics, culture, and social responsibility through creative Internet applications.

If I could sum it up into one word, the one word would be: blogging. No, wait, it’s RSS. No, wait, it’s targeted email. Well, maybe it’s not possible to boil 20 hours of conference into one word. Or even a single blog entry.

The organizers contracted with GreenHome to “green” the conference. This meant using compostable cups and forks, and providing many recycling bins throughout the conference center. These few small changes made it easy to do the right thing after lunch — although there was still some confusion about whether paper plates (bleached, ech) should go into the compost or the paper recycling. Anyway, I appreciated the effort. It would be lame to spend the morning discussing how to make the future ecologically sane and socially just if at lunchtime we’d generate 200 lbs of landfill garbage to be trucked to Alameda.