Today, we travelled up the Icefields Parkway from Lake Louise. We didn't make it all the way to the Columbia Icefields but we saw lots of incredibly beautiful mountains and glaciers. I took this picture near Glacier Lake.

The next photo, I believe, has a view of the Crowfoot Glacier.

I've been reading How Old is that Mountain? by Chris Yorath. In answering the question in the book's title, Yorath uses a metaphor that will stay with me longer than most of the geological terms. He said it's like a new house built with hundred-year old timber. The rock was formed first long before the forces that "deformed" the rock and created the mountain. The sedimentary rock in the Banff National Park was formed about 610 million years ago but the mountains were created 90 to 60 million years. In addition, glaciation and erosion continue to change the mountains as well as carve the valleys between them.

I was disappointed not to get further north. (Ok, I'll admit that I didn't top off the gas tank before leaving Lake Louise and there were no services along the way, so I had to turn back fearing we might not have enough gas for the round trip.) I wanted to get to the Columbia Icefields and ideally all the way to Jasper. The sight I wanted to see was Mount Athabasca, which is described as the hydrographic apex of North America. That is, water from this mountain drains in three possible directions -- west to the Pacific, east to the Atlantic and north to Hudson. Yorath writes that it is the "one point on which a mountaineer can pollute all three oceans with a single act."

I will have to come back again. There's lots more to explore. I want to see the Canadian Rockies in other seasons but this glimpse of early winter is really wonderful.

Billing data for a cellphone account belonging to Barack Obama was "improperly breached" by Verizon employees, according to the president-elect's transition team. Obama's spokesperson says the phone was old and no longer in use. There is no indication that email records were accessed or voicemails or call contents monitored. Snip:

Spokesman Robert Gibbs said the team was notified Wednesday by Verizon Wireless that it appears an employee improperly went through billing records for the phone, which Gibbs said Obama no longer uses.

In an internal company e-mail obtained by CNN, Verizon Wireless President and CEO Lowell McAdam disclosed Wednesday that "the personal wireless account of President-elect Barack Obama had been accessed by employees not authorized to do so" in recent months.

McAdam wrote in the e-mail that the phone in question has been inactive for "several months" and was a simple voice flip-phone, meaning none of Obama's e-mail could have been accessed. The CEO also wrote the company has alerted "the appropriate federal law enforcement authorities."

Gibbs said that while the Secret Service has been notified, he is not aware of any criminal investigation. He said he believes it was billing records that were accessed.

Obama's cell phone records breached (CNN)

Earlier on Boing Boing, Cory blogged that President-elect Barack Obama has appointed Net Neutrality advocates and "virtual worlds nuts" Kevin Werbach and Susan Crawford to co-chair his FCC transition team. Okay, so we might know the guy as Kevin Werbach out here in meatspace, but to his Terror Nova Guild buddies, he's better known as Supernovan Jenkins (the first name presumably a reference to Werbach's Supernova tech conference series), and he's a Level 70 Tauren Shaman. Livejournaler Waltermonkey opines on the deeper meaning of Werbach's WoW identity:

What does this tell us about him, as a person, as a gamer, as a government official? I will attempt to translate all the dorkese.

1. - CULTURAL RELATIVISM

Every player in WoW belongs to one of two warring factions, Alliance or Horde. Werbach is Horde. Children often choose to be Alliance because they perceive them as "the good guys", but students of history (both ours and Azeroth's) recognize that Alliance culture is based on medieval European culture and Horde culture is based on the indigenous cultures that were supplanted by the West.

Werbach is a Tauren (a minotaur), which basically makes him a Native Kalimdorian. The Tauren revere nature, living in wigwams near giant totem poles. As a Shaman (see below), he could also have chosen a troll (blue-skinned Jamaican-like monster) or an orc (green-skinned Klingon-like monster), so there must be something about the cow-man that appeals to his liberal guilt.

Read the whole thing: victory or death! yes we can! (Waltermonkey; thanks Drew Coombs of Project Lore! Recompense of phat lewt, reagents, and pizza await thee.)

Great article from the Wall Street Journal's Paul Ingrassia that summarizes how and why the US auto industry fell to pieces. My favorite part was this telling excerpt:

In Detroit, amid worker alienation and the "blue-collar blues," Chevies, Fords and Plymouths rattled, rusted and rolled over -- and those were the good ones. The Ford Pinto's gas tank was prone to explode into flames when the car was hit from the rear, making the Pinto the poster product for corporate callousness. In 1978, after three Indiana girls burned to death when their Pinto got rear-ended, Ford became the first company to be indicted for reckless homicide. The company later was acquitted, but public opinion judged the Pinto guilty.

For all the Pinto's infamy, perhaps no car better captured America's decade-long haplessness than the pug-ugly AMC Gremlin, which debuted in 1970 and died -- mercifully -- in 1980. The Gremlin's shape, fittingly, was first sketched out by an American Motors designer on the back of a Northwest Airlines air-sickness bag. On Aug. 20, 1979, 18-year-old Brad Alty, fresh out of high school in Mechanicsburg, Ohio, was driving his Gremlin to work when the car broke down. He was two-and-a-half hours late to his first day on the job at a new motorcycle factory that Honda Motor was opening in central Ohio.

For the next few weeks, Mr. Alty and his 63 co-workers did little but sweep floors and paint them with yellow lines. Then they started building three to five motorcycles a day. And at the end of each day they would disassemble each bike, piece by piece, to evaluate the workmanship.

How Detroit drove into a ditch

Some joker used a clip of Der Untergang to portray Hitler as a real estate sucker.

In this special episode of Boing Boing tv (Direct MP4 link for download), Xeni interviews Tibetan sovereignty activists Lhadon Tethong and Tenzin "Tendor" Dorjee from Students for a Free Tibet, over a Skype video chat.

They're in Dharamsala, India, the home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government In Exile, and they're attending an historic week-long meeting taking place this week to determine the future of the Tibetan independence movement.

Snip from a New York Times story by Edward Wong about the "Special Meeting":

The conclave is the first of its kind since 1991. The Dalai Lama has called for hundreds of Tibetans to gather in the Himalayan town of Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, to help decide on a new strategy for Tibet.

In a statement released Monday, the government in exile sought to play down speculation that a significant shift in its approach to the issue of Tibetan independence might be near.

“A change in policy need not come from this meeting,” the statement said, according to Reuters. “If a change in basic policy is considered necessary, there is a way that is democratic and which has the mandate of the Tibetan people.”

Lhadon and Tendor are updating the SFT blog here, and they suggest that people interested in following the story check Phayul.com, and the High Peaks Pure Earth blog, with commentary from Tibetans inside Tibet and China. Here is a statement on the "Special Meeting" from the Dalai Lama, who is not personally attending. The Tibetan Government in Exile is producing video reports from the Special Meeting here. Tibetan poet Woeser has published her thoughts on the meeting here. (Special thanks to Laird Brown, and Phuntsok Dorjee)

Oh, what won't intrepid NYT reporter John Schwartz do for space journalism! Snip:

There are many elements of [NASA's current Space Shuttle Endeavor] mission, which is devoted to further construction of the station and improvements that will allow the station to double its crew size from three to six next year. But the gizmo that is getting the most attention is the “water recovery system,” which will recycle the station’s water supply. That’s right: urine, sweat in the air, waste water and other forms of moisture will be fed into the system, distilled and sent back to the tap.

The system, created at a cost of about $250 million, will recycle about 93 percent of the water used aboard the station. The cost of lifting supplies up to orbit is so high, though, that NASA estimates the system could pay for itself in as little as two years. Similar systems would be essential to maintaining long-term bases on faraway outposts on the Moon and Mars.

The astronauts don’t have a problem with this system. As Sandra H. Magnus, one of the astronauts who will be among the first to drink water produced by the new system aboard the station, noted in a recent interview, our earthbound water has been endlessly filtered through bodies, evaporated and rained down again. “We drink recycled water every day,” she said, “on a little bit longer time scale.”

You'll have to read the whole piece to learn how the stuff tastes.

Rick Sanchez on CNN showed this video of world leaders at the G20 Summit refusing to shake hands with President Bush. Sanchez says "It's almost sad." (Via The Fire Wire)

Forgetomori came across this neat example of pareidolia.

Have you seen Jesus today? The photo above may be a good chance. Sent by Jessica Lundgren from Sweden to paranormal.about.com, you can see the clear profile of a giant bearded man with closed eyes. It does resemble common representations of a fellow named Jesus. Even though that enormous Jesus head doesn’t quite fit into the rest of the image. What’s going on there? Jessica writes that “the child died short after the photo was taken”.

The link also has another photo that is either pareidolia or a hoax. Good example of pareidolia

Everything is Terrible found this funny infomercial from a long gone company Zillionaire.com, pushing a site called dotplanet.com ("the world's only lifestyle destination portal").

If George Bush would have ran an Internet business in the late 1990s, he would have had the same spiel and delivery style of Zillionaire.com CEO Hubert Humphrey (Not the politician):

"I firmly believe that Dot Planet is the most powerful phenomenon to ever hit the Internet. Our goals are just mind-boggling. We will be the fastest portal to ever hit one million users, two million, three million and all. Our vision is limitless. And I'm totally convinced that Dot Planet will be just as well known in the very near future as America Online. Microsoft, Yahoo, and it's all because of one thing: out great Zillionaire Internet army."

Here's an interesting 1999 article from Investment News about Hubert Humphrey and Zillionaire.com. Humphrey now runs a company called WLG International. From perusing the WLH site, I can't make heads or tails of what the business does: "WLG International has the Quantum Compensation Plan, which is specifically designed to help associates build and grow their 'business within a business.' One of the most powerful compensation and promotion plans in marketing, it offers a unique blend of great Personal Contracts, Infinity Overrides, Generational Overrides, Bonus Pools and Equity Sharing Pools – featuring a 100 percent gross payout to the field." Huh?

The First Zillion is Always the Hardest

Reason's David Weigel thinks Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano (rumored to be Obama's pick) wouldn't be a bad choice for Secretary of Homeland Security. My favorite part of Weigel's piece is his assessment of Rudy Giuliani:

I think history has already forgotten Battlin' Bernie Kerik, the laughably corrupt and mobbed-up cop whom Rudy Giuliani commended to George W. Bush as a great replacement for Ridge. Kerik's nomination caught fire like styrofoam in a microwave, and we as a nation got the first clue that Giuliani had been replaced at some point in 2001-2004 by a strange, bald cyborg that needed to recharge batteries by making inopportune phone calls to its "wife."

Dammit, Janet, I Love You

Here's the debut episode of our regular video updates from OFFWORLD, Boing Boing's new gaming blog. Editor Brandon Boyer says:

After an oxygen fire knocked our interstellar video link temporarily out of commission, we bring you our Boing Boing TV premiere via Azeroth, where my spiritual Death Knight equal gives you a little background on where we're is coming from and where I hope to steer the ship. As usual, here's the direct MP4 link, if you prefer a downloadable rather than the Flash.

Offworld bonus fact: in real life, my eyes and sword glow a much more vivid shade of blue. That is indeed, though, almost exactly how I shake a tail feather.

Here's a direct MP4 link, if you prefer to download the video. Like this episode? Tell Brandon and the Offworld gang what you think over at offworld.com: the comments thread is here.

(SPECIAL THANKS to the Project Lore guys, who showed us around the 'hood -- namely, Charles Ottaway.)

I heard the distant rumble and looked up from the trail. I quickly took this photo as fast as I could.

It's a relatively small avalanche but I'd never seen one before. They are the stuff of legend, especially in the minds of those who don't live in snow country. I can't place a particular TV drama from the sixties but I know that where I first heard the shout "Avalanche!".

We were out about two hours on a trail leading from Lake Louise towards the Victoria glacier. It was very cold but sunny. We had been told to expect avalanches with the sun warming up the ledges. The trail leads to the Plain of Six Glaciers. The avalanche we saw was snow falling off the top of the Lefroy Glacier.

Everywhere you see evidence of avalanches past such as this one.

It's usual practice for a magazine to run an excerpt of a book written by one of its editors. However, BusinessWeek went one step further and converted an excerpt from senior editor Steve Hamm's new book into a comic or manga. His book, The Race for Perfect: Inside the Quest to Design the Ultimate Portable Computer, is “a popular history of portable computing and also a narrative of a single, contemporary product (Lenovo’s X300) as it travels from conception to the marketplace.” Here's the first panel of this version, which tells the story of Alan Kay, one of the creative visionaries and inventors of the computer revolution.

Steve wrote in his Globespotting blog that one of his purposes in writing the book "was to get young people interested in being engineers, designers, inventors, and entrepreneurs." Make magazine shares that goal.

I use Alan Kay's famous quote in my talks: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." I take the liberty of substituting "make" for "invent." I would love to have Alan Kay come to Maker Faire.

View the rest of Alan Kay series on the BusinessWeek website

Free To Be... You and Me was one of my favorite movie/record/books when I was growing up. Marlo Thomas's 1972 project brought together an all-star cast to perform songs, poems and sketches that challenged gender stereotypes and delivered a fundamentally humane, loving message about being who you are and not being constrained by society's expectations.

When I was a teenager, a couple of my friends, Shona and Ted, got ahold of a print of the film and showed it at my school. It was an instant smash hit. The memories came roaring back for all of us, the wonderful songs, the humor, the nostalgia. Those songs became anthemic in my social circle, and not just as some ironic throwback -- there's some kick-ass music on that soundtrack.

So in the early 1990s, I decided to put up a Free to Be... fan-site, and I went ahead and registered freetobeyouandme.com. Then life intervened. 15 years went by and I kept on paying for the domain. I'm not sure why -- I guess I thought I might get around to putting up that fan-site, and I didn't want the site getting into the hands of some pornographer or similar.

Last spring, I got an email from a law-firm in New York that represents the Free to Be Foundation..., a charitable trust that oversees the Free to Be project and produces educational material about gender equality. The note said that the Foundation was interested in getting the domain for use in connection with the book, and would I be interested in discussing the matter.

The note did not contain any threats, veiled or otherwise. It didn't call me a domain-squatter or mention WIPO's UDRP. It was polite, friendly -- just the sort of thing I'd expect from the people who gave us Free To Be...You and Me. So I called up the lawyer, Cris Criswell, and asked him to tell me more.

It turned out that the Foundation was about to publish a 35th anniversary edition of the book, with new art and a bound-in CD, and they wanted to use the domain to promote it. He explained that the Foundation was a charitable 501(c)3, with a board of directors that included Marlo Thomas, Gloria Steinem, and other people I admired and trusted.

"OK," I said, "it's yours."

"Just like that?"

"Sure. You didn't threaten me and you're doing good work. Of course you can have it."

"Of course I didn't threaten you. I figure fans have rights too."

See what I mean?

I asked for one thing: would they send me a copy of the 35th Anniversary edition, signed and inscribed to my newborn daughter, who was already listening to the soundtrack with me? Of course they would.

I'm holding it in my hands now. It's amazing. The new art is fabulous. And I've got the CD on now, and the music is just as great as I remembered. There's Rosie Greer singing, "It's All Right to Cry," Michael Jackson singing "I Don't Have to Change at All" (!), Alan Alda singing "William Wants a Doll," Harry Belafonte singing, "Parents are People,' the Smothers Brothers singing "Helping." There's Carol Channing reciting the cleaning poem, and Mel Brooks doing the convulsively funny "Boy Meets Girl" sketch. It is just brilliant.

And wonderful. If you were to distill the messages that every kid needs to hear to grow up to be a confident, loving individual who does what's right even when society sneers, if you were to turn them into great songs, funny poems, without a hint of preachiness or condescension, it would be this book and CD. Every kid needs this book -- and the organization that publishes it is every bit as great as the book itself.

Hi!

Hi!

I'm a baby!

Well what do you think I am, a loaf of bread?

You could be, what do I know, I'm just born, I'm a baby, I don't even know if I'm under a tree or in a hospital or what, I'm just so glad to be here.

Well, I'm a baby too.

Have it your own way, I don't want to fight about it.

What, are you scared?

Yes, I am, I'm a little scared. I'll tell you why. You see, I don't know if I'm a boy or a girl yet.

What's that got to do with it?

Well, if you're a boy and I'm a girl you can beat me up! You think I want to lose a tooth my first day alive?

What's a tooth?

Search me, I'm just born, I'm a baby, I don't know nothing yet!

You think you're a girl?

I don't know, I might be. I think I am. I 've never been anything before. Let me see, let me take a little look around. Hmm... cute feet, small, dainty, yup, yup, I'm a girl, that's it, girl time.

Well, what do you think I am?

You, that's easy, you're a boy.

You sure?

Of course I'm sure. I'm alive already four, five minutes, right? I haven't been wrong yet.

Gee, I don't feel like a boy.

That's because you can't see yourself.

Why, what do I look like?

Bald. You're bald, fellah. Bald, bald, bald, you're bald as a ping-pong ball, are you bald.

So?

So, boys are bald and girls have hair.

Are you sure?

Of course I'm sure. Who's bald, your mother or your father?

My father.

I rest my case.

Hmm. You're bald too.

You're kidding!

No, I'm not.

Don't look!

Why?

Ugghhh. A bald girl. Yuck. Disgusting.

Free to Be...You and Me (The 35th Anniversary Edition), Free to Be Foundation (includes free MP3s from the CD)

The Digital Youth Project, a MacArthur-funded three year, 22 case study, $3.3 million ethnographic study of what kids are doing online, has wound up and published its results. The project was undertaken by the eminent sociologist Mimi Ito and her talented colleagues (including the incomparable danah boyd) and is the largest and most comprehensive study of young peoples' internet use ever undertaken in the US.

The conclusions are sane, compassionate, and compelling: in a nutshell, the "serious" stuff we all hope kids will do online (researching papers and so on) are only possible within a framework of "hanging out, messing around and geeking out." That is to say, all the "time-wasting" social stuff kids do online are key to their explorations and education online.

Ito and her team establish a taxonomy of social activity, dividing it first into "peer-driven" and "interest-driven" -- the former being what kids do with their real-world friends, the latter being the niche interests that drive them to locate other people who are as fascinated as they are by whatever brand of esoterica they fancy.

Within these two categories, the researchers break things down further into "hanging out" (undirected, social activities), "messing around" (tinkering with media, networks and technologies) and "geeking out" (delving deep into subjects based on global communities of interest) and for each one, they describe the successful and unsuccessful techniques deployed by parents and educators to direct kids' activities.

All this is explained in a crisp, 55-page white paper, a snappy two-pager, and a full-length book called (appropriately), "Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media." All three are available as free downloads, naturally, and the book can also be purchased as a physical object in a year when it's published.

This project is the best set of research-driven recommendations and observations about young peoples' use of technology I've seen -- it's the perfect antidote to the scare stories of "internet addiction" and pedophiles stalking MySpace, and the endless refrain about "kids today." If you care about kids and want to understand how they use technology and why, this is a must-read.

Two-pager, White paper, Book: Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out (download), Digital Youth homepage

I love the Buddha Machine, a little plastic ambient music generator that looks like a transitor radio -- put two or three in a room together and play them at the same time and you get something haunting, bent and hypnotic. Now there's a new version, with more loops, colors, and sound-tweaking options.

The Buddha Box 2 features nine new ambient sound loops. The new selection is noticeably more diverse than those of its predecessor--a welcome change. One of my biggest issues with the first incarnation of the box was its relatively limited aural palate. The selections on number 2 should fit a wider range of ambient-suitable scenarios. For further variation, the box also includes a wheel that bends the loops' pitch, to help you tailor the sound perfectly to its surroundings.

Hands On: Buddha Machine 2 (Thanks, Crosshatch!)

See also: Buddha Machine: spiritual, generative transistor radio

Writer/game designer/film-maker Jim Munroe sez,

IFComp 2008, The 14th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition and keeper of the old-school text-game torch, recently declared its winners. Bronze went to my game, Everybody Dies, silver went to Eric Eve's Nightfall, and the gold went to Jeremy Freese's Violet.

Everybody Dies puts you in the shoes of a chubby metalhead who has smoked his last smoke, with illustrations by Michael Cho; Nightfall drops you into a mysterious city where everyone's fled before the approaching Enemy; and in Violet your struggle to write your dissertation is aided by the most charming voice-in-your-head character in history.

All 35 of the comp entries, playable with interpreters, are available at ifcomp.org, but Violet and Everybody Dies can be played online

Congrats, Jim!

Everybody Dies Takes Bronze at IFComp, Everybody Dies review at Play This Thing! (Thanks, Jim!)

Bell Canada, the giant Canadian telco, is before the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission over its throttling practices, whereby it secretly corrupted the download sessions of its customers. The company also interfered with the connections initiated by its wholesale customers -- ISPs that leased lines from the giant and re-sold them to end-users. Bell said that it had to cripple everyone's connections, or the people who bought network access from its wholesale customers would get a better service than its own retail customers, which would be "unfair" to retail customers. Steve sez,

According to the CBC, after twice delaying the ruling, the CRTC will make a landmark decision on the Bell Throttling case by 9 a.m. tomorrow. The decision will determine whether Bell Canada has violated the Telecommunications Act by slowing down the Internet access it sells to wholesale customers.

Steve Anderson from SaveOurNet.ca coalition will be available for comment.

Steve said today, “This decision has huge implications for Internet service competition online innovation, consumer choice and free speech. The biggest battle over the Internet is yet to come, but this ruling will signal whether the CRTC is willing to take action to put Canada on a path that supports online innovation, and online choice. Otherwise the CRTC is abdicating its responsibility to Canadian people and putting us on a path towards a more closed Internet defined by the interests of big telecom companies.”

Every time I'm asked whether I'd consider moving back to Canada sometime, the answer is the same: "Not until the country gets some real telcom regulation." I earn my living on the Internet. I can't afford to live somewhere where the telcos get to throw away your packets if they don't fit their business model.

CRTC to Make Landmark Decision on Internet Freedom (Thanks, Steve!)

Buying an Apple computer? Get ready to throw away your monitor, over and over again. New Apple hardware is shipping with "HDCP" anti-copying technology that prevents showing some video on "non-compliant" monitors. Best part: the list of "compliant" monitors will change over time: the monitor you buy today can be "revoked" tomorrow and stop working.

Slashdot says that Apple's added "copyright protection" to its video. But copyright law isn't violated when you watch a movie on an "unapproved" monitor. This isn't about enforcing copyright law, it's about giving a small handful of movie companies a veto over hardware designs.

Yesterday, our buddy David Chartier at Ars and Sam Oliver at AppleInsider both publicized an issue that's been burning up the support boards for a while now: iTunes video rentals and purchases in HD are flagged for HDCP control, and in cooperation with the new Mini DisplayPort connector on the MacBook and MacBook Pro unibody models, those movies and TV shows are refusing to play back on non-compliant external displays.

In this case, 'compliant' means HDMI or recent-vintage DVI, but even monitors or TVs that support HDCP may not properly negotiate with the DisplayPort connector to give iTunes and QuickTime the all-clear signal (if so, quitting and relaunching iTunes once the display is hooked up may clear the playback hold).

Equally annoying: HDCP is only supposed to apply to 'high-value' digital streams, meaning standard-def purchases and rentals on the iTunes store should be out of scope... but some reports indicate that both the HD and SD instances are flagged, blocking playback on anything but the laptop's internal display or a straight-thru HDMI connection. Argh!

MacBook Pro users getting bitten by HDCP (Thanks, Denver Jewelry Guy!)

There were a lot of sad posts today on the blog related to 30 years since Jonestown this week, so as is the tradition, and as our commenters have requested: unicorn chaser. (thanks, Takuan)

In its special website section devoted to 30 years since Jonestown, the San Francisco Chronicle has republished a copy of a 1977 report on Jim Jones and People's Temple by Marshall Kilduff and Phil Tracy. The investigative report marked a turning point for People's Temple, an arc towards the catastrophic end that would come one year later. Before this exposé was published in New West magazine (because back then, the Chronicle's editor refused to run it), Jim Jones enjoyed what amounted to broad support and protection from news organizations, powerful social figures, and politicians who saw the influential preacher as a "deliverer of votes."

Collectively, they turned a blind eye to mounting reports of coercion, corruption, and physical and sexual abuse within his church. And they bear some responsibility for the tragedy that followed.

I agree with what one sfgate.com commenter wrote about the two tenacious reporters who fought to produce this piece:

30 years on, this is a piece that should be required reading by all journalism students at any level. To quote the 1998 article on why this was published in New West rather than the Chronicle, "Kilduff said that when he later proposed a story on Jim Jones, (San Francisco Chronicle city editor) Gavin said 'we had done a profile and that was sufficient.' I went at him several times, and said I thought we should do more. He didn't see it that way.'" Jones had co-opted the powers that were in the City, including the Chronicle, and only the persistence of Kilduff began to reveal the horrible truth.

Three decades later, the whole article is a must-read. I'll paste the final two paragraphs here:

[S]omething must be said about the numerous public officials and political figures who openly courted and befriended Jim Jones. While it appears that none of the public officials from [California] Governor [Jerry] Brown on down knew about the inner world of Peoples Temple, they have left the impression that they used Jones to deliver votes at election time and never asked any questions. They never asked about the bodyguards. Never asked about the church's locked doors. Never asked why Jones's followers were so obsessively protective of him. And apparently, some never asked because they didn't want to know.

The story of Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple is not over. In fact, it has only begun to be told. If there is any solace to be gained from the tale of exploitation and human foible told by the former temple members in these pages, it is that even such a power as Jim Jones cannot always contain his followers. Those who left had nowhere to go and every reason to fear pursuit. Yet they persevered. If Jones is ever to be stripped of his power, it will not be because of vendetta or persecution, but rather because of the courage of these people who stepped forward and spoke out.

Inside Peoples Temple, Marshall Kilduff and Phil Tracy, Monday, August 1, 1977. (SFGATE.com). Here is a PDF of the original 1977 article (via Jonestown Institute). The SFGate web feature on 30 years after Jonestown includes a number of related features, both archived and new, all well worth reading.

What lesson should we learn from this today? Why does this matter now? Snip from an extensive piece in today's Washington Post by Charles A. Krause, one of the journalists who survived the November, 1978 trip to Jonestown with Congressman Ryan:

Many Jonestown survivors and their families believe that the lessons of Jonestown are to remember and guard against demagogues who use religion as a cover for fraud, deception and imposing their own sometimes dangerous social and political beliefs on their naive and unsuspecting followers.

(...) It was that theme that dominated Tuesday's memorial service at the mass grave in Oakland. In an emotional and highly charged address, the Rev. Amos Brown, bishop at San Francisco's Third Baptist Church and president of the San Francisco NAACP, warned the mourners to beware of religious leaders who claim to have all the answers and insinuate themselves into politics, as Jones did so effectively in San Francisco.

"Good religion elevates folk, it teaches people to think for themselves. Good religion isn't authoritarian. Good religion isn't bigoted," he said. "Open up your eyes, America. America isn't a theocracy, it's a democracy. . . . And that is the lesson we must learn from Jonestown."

Boing Boing posts on Jim Jones, Jonestown and People's Temple:

- Jonestown, 30 years later: original audio recordings from People's Temple and Guyana.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: Life and Death of People's Temple (PBS video).
- Jonestown, 30 years later: interview with a survivor (video)
- Jonestown, 30 years later: From Silver Lake To Suicide
- Jonestown, 30 years later: "Father Cares," NPR documentary from 1981
- Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People
- Andrew Brandou on his Jonestown paintings

The imprisoned Chinese blogger and human rights activist Hu Jia today received the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, Europe’s most prestigious human rights prize. Snip from NYT article:

The award was a pointed rebuke of China’s ruling Communist Party that came as European leaders were arriving in Beijing for a weekend summit meeting. Mr. Hu, 35, was given the prize by the European Parliament despite warnings from Beijing that his selection would harm relations with the European Union.

Last year, Mr. Hu testified via video link before a hearing of the European Parliament about China’s human rights situation. Weeks later, he was jailed and later sentenced to three and a half years in prison for subversion based on his writings criticizing Communist Party rule.

Mr. Hu has been one of China’s leading figures on a range of human rights issues, while also speaking out on behalf of AIDS patients and for environmental protection. He had been considered a front-runner for the Nobel Peace Prize, but lost to the former president of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari. “Hu Jia is one of the real defenders of human rights in the People’s Republic of China,” said the president of the European Parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering. “The European Parliament is sending out a signal of clear support to all those who support human rights in China.

Chinese Activist Wins Rights Prize (NYT). Embedded video above: Prisoners in Freedom City, an autobiographical internet video documentary about his case, available in multiple parts on YouTube (links to single-file editions there). Hu Jia's case is documented and updated regularly on Twitter. His wife and supporters are very concerned about his health in prison; he has symptoms of liver disease, and information about his whereabouts, condition, and treatment in prison is unavailable. See also this related Los Angeles Times editorial: China should free dissident Hu Jia. Here is Amnesty International's statement.

A fascinating piece by Ed Wong in today's NYT on the role archaeology -- specifically, a set of mummified human remains -- plays in the conflict over independence for one of China's ethnic minorities. Snip:

“Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” says one prominent sign. But walk upstairs to the second floor, and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story. One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down, her lips pursed in death, her high cheekbones and long nose the most obvious signs that she is not what one thinks of as Chinese.

The Loulan Beauty is one of more than 200 remarkably well-preserved mummies discovered in the western deserts here over the last few decades. The ancient bodies have become protagonists in a very contemporary political dispute over who should control the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.

The Chinese authorities here face an intermittent separatist movement of nationalist Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who number nine million in Xinjiang. At the heart of the matter lie these questions: Who first settled this inhospitable part of western China? And for how long has the oil-rich region been part of the Chinese empire?

The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn’t Care to Listen To (NYT)

The demolition of Long Mill Dye House in Roanoke, Virginia brought down two smokestacks but one didn't fall as planned.

photo from WSLS.com

Watch this AP video and listen for one of the operators warn: "Be advised: one stack apparently did not fall in the right direction." There were no reports of injury to persons or property.

Long Mill demolition video

A local TV station WSLS reporter wrote:

Many of the people who came out to watch the building crumble worked in the mill for years, but for some it wasn’t such a sad sight to see their former employer come crashing down.

“I hate to see them kill all the big rats, they had rats over there about 2 foot long,” said Jim Chattin, who used to work at Long Mill.