An Interesting Analogy and Test Scale
I've been working with Doc Searls professionally for the last week or two in my job in PR for a tech research company.
He has been a blast to work with and has produced a pretty amazing article for us for which I am very, very grateful.

But he referenced an interesting scale of a technological acceptance based on Mohandes Gandhi's famous quote: First they ignore, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Each stage is its own GandhiCon. Ignoring would be GandhiCon 1 and so on.

Just thought it was a very cool and pretty enlightened way to look at things.

And Doc, sorry if I let the cat out of the bag a little early. But I'm still all excited about your email and the pending newsletter post. Pretty awesome stuff!

Questions about the War
Has anyone else noticed how many more "friendly fire" incidents there have been in this first week of the war? It seems like our forces are as dangerous to our own people as they are to the enemy. Jets being shot down, helicopters going down and many other incidents. I wonder how hard it would be to be told that your son was killed in a friendly fire incident by a fellow American or other coalition soldier instead of being killed by an Iraqi? I wonder if there's some kind of compensation, a governmental apology of sorts.

By the way, I just did a Google News "friendly fire" search and got a return of 2970 articles. Now all of those aren't new but there's definitely a large proportion of those that are related to this current war with Iraq.

That and it has become apparent that Saddam is no longer playing by any rules whatsoever. He's torturing POW's, using chemical weapons on the battlefield, using his own people as human shields and basically proving everything that ShubCo's said about his is more or less true. He is a monster, he is a sickening and despicable human being who has lost all touch with reality in an attempt to retain whatever measure of power and control he can. I hope he's not dead, I hope he's cowering in some hole somewhere praying for Allah to save him (or whatever higher authority he draws his righteous fury from). I want to see this monster put on trial and convicted for war crimes and human rights violations of the highest order.

My heart goes out to the POWs and their families. It will make things much more difficult to witness, thanks to instant war coverage, the damage being inflicted on our people by Saddam's forces. But it will not deter our resolve to pull the plug on his power mad orgy of death. If anything it will give us ever greater resolve to remove him so that he can no longer pose a threat to anyone.

And one more thing, I was reading an article about the war budget submitted to Congress. Apparently there's no real accounting for the vast majority of the $70 some odd billion dollars they're asking for. Umm, not sure but I think I'd like to have a better idea of what's going to be done with $70 BILLION dollars. It would be really easy, if there were unscrupulous types in our government, to stash away a half billion and no one would ever notice. But we all know our US government is comprised of fair minded, honest working folks, right?

Yeah, right. Want to buy a bridge? It goes from San Francisco to Marin and is really cheap, just for you today.