Month: January 2009

By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , ,

If you’re under 35 and you watch the video of Steve Jobs introducing the first Macintosh, in January 1984, you might wonder: what’s with all the cheering, it doesn’t do much. But it was revolutionary for its time.

Before that, you talked to computers by typing arcane commands. Text was displayed all in one font, and if you were lucky, the font had descenders (the stalks on the g, p, and q actually went below the bottom of the other letters)–so you could even read it. If you weren’t lucky, it was a squiggly mess. My first laptop was like that (a Radio Shack Model 100, which I bought in 1986). Graphics? You want graphics? They were sooo primitive, and not easy for the casual user to generate. To do that detailed MacPaint picture of a Japanese woman that Jobs shows on an early IBM PC or an Apple II would have been pretty much impossible.

The Mac, from day 1, allowed multiple fonts, bold and italic (and other less useful effects) with a simple click, included a graphics program that anyone could use, and even had sound.

I had one of those early Macs: my first computer, which I bought in April, 1984. It had 124K (not meg, and certainly not gig) of RAM, 64K of ROM, and a single 400K floppy drive. The startup disk included the operating system, a word processor, paint program, and a bit of room for data files. There was no hard drive, and backing up those data files was a major PITA involving multiple disk swaps. Oh yes, and a 9-inch monochrome monitor; color Macs didn’t come along for quite a while. I bought a second floppy drive for $400, and about a year later, a 20 MB hard drive for $700. Now you can get several gigabytes on a thumb drive and pay $40.

And before personal computers, computing was reserved for the specially trained, who talked to their machines by laboriously keypunching a line of code at a time, starting over if they made an error. Processors were in a central location, and you used a terminal to talk to them–a terminal with almost no computing power of its own.

So first, PCs swung the culture away from those centralized computers, to having power on your own desk. But then the Internet reversed the trend. Once again, a lot of our processing is done someplace else. Which means everyone’s personal comptuers have access to enormous resources: the world’s knowledge available in seconds.

And the Internet as a commerce platform means we can shop, pay bills, raise and contribute funds for causes, manage databases far away from the comfort of our own home, or from any far-flung corner of the world

And among the many other things the Internet changed is our definition of community. We’ve completely separated community from geography.

For social change and environmental justice activists, the possibilities are enormous. Especially considering we’re probably at the Model T stage. The Internet as a commercial venture is only 13 years old; the Mac, 25 years old; personal computing, about 30 years old. The practical gas-powered automobile was created in 1886; Ford introduced the Model T (not his first car, by the way; he had at least three earlier models, starting in 1903) 22 years later. Just as no one could have predicted the enormous impact the automobile has had on society, so, no one can predict just how far the Internet will stretch.

Building on the Howard Dean campaign of 2004 (the first to make a serious attempt at harnessing the Internet), Obama’s presidential campaign was greatly helped by his use not only of e-mail and the Web, but of social networks like Facebook and Twitter. And by groups like MoveOn and True Majority, that were able to organize their members to support and fund the campaign, while focusing attention on a progressive agenda.

And of course, the countless blogs, e-zines, websites, and radio programs on the Net, from around the world, are an easy alternative to mainstream corporate-owned media that can no longer tightly control the news–at least not for those willing to be a bit adventurous with their web searches. That, too, is revolutionary.

The future promises to be quite exciting.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government Tagged with ,

Not since Clarence Thomas called Anita Hill’s harassment allegations “a legal lynching” have I heard such disgusting self-aggrandizement as came out of the mouth of Gov. Rod Blagojevich. He actually has the chutzpah to compare himself to Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi.

These three heroes of mine have only one thing in common with Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi: They all understood how to get attention in the media; they were marketers. Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi is taking his roadshow to major media when he ought to be in Springfield, Illinois, at his impeachment trial.

Those three giants of social justice went to jail for the rightness of their cause. If Blagojevich goes to jail, it will be because he got greedy, and got caught. I cannot imagine King, Gandhi, or Mandela selling a senate seat to the highest bidder.

Oh, and if you want a relatively recent recap of the Thomas confirmation circus, look no further than this splendid diatribe by Frank Rich in the New York Times, October 7, 2007. It would be a violation of copyright for me to quote the whole thing, but I’ll give you a little taste–and the link:

Pity Clarence Thomas. Done in by what he calls “left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony” — as he describes anyone who challenged his elevation to the court — he still claims to have suffered as much as African-Americans once victimized by “bigots in white robes.” Since kicking off his book tour on “60 Minutes” last Sunday, he has been whining all the way to the bank

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By Posted on Posted in Politics, Transparency vs. Secrecy

President Barack Obama is off to a great start. Some of these stories you may have heard about–others were quieter.

  • Began his foreign policy by calling several Middle East leaders (Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and Jordan’s King Abdullah–but not, unfortunately, any representative of Hamas) to talk about peace–and by appointing former Senator George Mitchell, a man who had much to do with the negotiated peace in Northern Ireland, his Middle East peace envoy
  • Also took the first steps toward drawing down forces in Iraq and closing Guantanamo
  • Overturned the secretive policies of the Bush administration in favor of much greater openness, including much better responses to Freedom Of Information Act requests:

    The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears… All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.

  • Got his Blackberry back, after the National Security Administration made it supposedly unhackable
  • Discovered, along with many of his staff, that the White House computer systems are years obsolete
  • Had a substantive discussion with his economic advisors

    • Let’s keep the momentum up! There’s a whole lot of damage to undo, and even more, a whole lot ofnew progress to be made.

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    By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , ,

    President Barack Obama’s inaugural address was deeply moving to me on many levels. And one of the most promising was his statements on energy.

    First, he recognized both the environmental and national security disaster of our present policy:

    Each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

    And second, the clean solution:

    We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.

    Not since Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House and wore sweaters instead of overheating the building have we had a U.S. President with this consciousness.

    Not Reagan, who promptly took the solar system OFF the roof. Not George H.W. Bush. Not even Clinton. And even though George W. Bush’s Crawford ranch is one of the Greenest houses in the country, his presidency has been a disaster for the environment, and an eight-year lost opportunity to address climate change while it’s still possible.

    Hooray!

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    By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life, travel

    Just back from a week aboard a cruise ship, with almost no Internet access (Yeah, I could have bought access at 75 cents a minute, but I saw no reason to grab my email at highway robbery prices. I did manage to use an Internet cafe on shore, twice, just to check if my Virtual Assistant forwarded anything urgent. But it wouldn’t be a vacation if I were still dealing with 300 incoming messages a day.

    Anyway, some totally random thoughts from the trip:

    Transportation Safety Administration has spiffy new bright blue uniforms (my last flight was several months ago). They look gorgeous–but aren’t we supposed to be in a budget crisis? There was nothing wrong with the old white ones.

    Cruise ships completely distort not only the local economy but also visitors’ perceptions. The feel we got for Guatemala in our three-week trip last summer was almost completely different from the artificial world of a cruise port that waits only for boats to dock. It’s even different from the land-based tourist towns and attractions that deal with a continuous (but much smaller) flow of tourists but also have a vibrant non-tourist life, integrated into the fabric of the nation.

    The cooperative movement and indigenous self-help organizations have even penetrated the restricted corridors of cruise terminals–Good!

    If you turn off email and Internet, it’s not that hard to completely ignore the outside world.

    Our flight to the boat was canceled, so we arranged with the boat to meet it at the next stop, arranged with the airlines to reroute us to the closest point, arranged for a one-way car rental, and drove four very scenic hours to meet the boat. This astounded many of our fellow passengers–but we’re used to making our own travel arrangements and it didn’t faze us at all. It didn’t even seem like one of our more difficult travel adventures, compared with some of what we’ve done over the last 30 years together, but cruises for the most part don’t attract intrepid travelers. Of course, it helped that we followed the Principled Profit philosophy and were so nice as we explained our situation that people went out of their way to bend the rules for us. And it also helped that we had access to a cell phone and a laptop.

    Environmental consciousness has penetrated even to the cruise industry. I went to a lecture from the ship’s environmental officer and was pleasantly amazed at the sophistication of waste treatment, etc. Still a ways to go. But they’re even considering having one nonsmoking ship as an experiment.

    Rainforests are very special places, and some of the landowners know this. In Belize, we visited a 3rd or 4th generation landholder, a young man in his mid-20s, who has organized his neighbors to provide many acres of unbroken habitat for howler monkeys, and has done quite a bit of research on them.

    Weather can always impact a trip. In addition to having our flight canceled, we had to skip our call in Mexico, because it was too windy to dock the boat. Bummer!

    It’s always better to have a reservation for car rentals. We didn’t when we docked in Tampa, and the cruise terminals had no cars. So we had to buy tickets to an airport shuttle, hunt around the airport for a car to rent, and then go off to see Tampa.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with ,

    For years, I’ve been calling for openness and transparency (in business and in government–in this blog, in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit, in the Business Ethics Pledge, and elsewhere. Yet most businesses AND most government entities shroud themselves in secrecy, bury attempts at discourse, and give the impression of pulling the wool over the public eye.

    This makes the Obama team’s high degree of transparency and active solicitation of public input (at the change.org website, through the in-person strategy sessions it organized, etc.) even more remarkable.

    Consider this widely reported quote yesterday from an Associated Press story on Obama’s proposed tax cut by Steven R. Hurst:

    At his meeting with bipartisan leaders of Congress, Obama said he would make his stimulus proposal available on the Internet, with a Google-like search function to show each proposed project or program, by congressional district, according to three people who attended.

    Wow!

    I find this especially interesting coming not from some kind of radical but from a mainline, centrist politician, many of whose policy platforms (especially in foreign affairs) are far more conservative than mine.

    Change is about both form and substance. Obama is doing really well on the form so far; let’s hope he follows through into the substance.

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    By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

    Susan Daffron from LogicalExpressions.com selected me for an Honest Scrap Award–woo hoo! She writes,

    The award has two components. You have to first list 10 honest things about yourself (and make them interesting), and second present the award to seven other bloggers.

    Honest Scrap Award logo
    Honest Scrap Award logo

    So here are 10 honest things about me:

    1. I live on a working farm at the foot of a small mountain, in a house built in 1743, and we’re only the third family to own it (we are not the farmers, though). I think we found Paradise, but we still love to travel.

    2. My first act of social change activism that I can remember was quietly destroying the cigarettes of my parents’ guests at age 3–and I did this not to be malicious but because I couldn’t stand smoke.

    3. I got into the peace movement at age 12, and the environmental movement three years later–been “stirring up trouble” ever since.

    4. When I was 19 and just out of college, I hitchhiked across the US and Canada

    5. I taught myself to read before I was four

    6. One of the reasons I’m successful as a writer is that I type fast–and that’s because I have such a horrible handwriting that in junior high, my teachers started refusing to read handwritten assignments.

    7. Since 1983, I’ve been married to the novelist D. Dina Friedman. We met at a poetry reading in Greenwich Village in 1978 and became a couple in April, 1979.

    8. Prior to this soon-to-be-30-year relationship, my longest romance was five months!

    9. I became a marketing expert because of my involvement with social change movements–since I was trained in journalism, I started volunteering to write the press releases, and it all started that way.

    10. I will happily eat unsweetened dark chocolate, as long as it’s fair-trade and organic. I think 90% cocoa solids is about ideal.

    And my seven other bloggers (among dozens of possibilities), in no particular order:

    Patrick Byers, Responsible Marketing
    Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World
    Joan Stewart, the Publicity Hound
    Ryan Healy, RyanHealy.com
    Kare Anderson, Moving From Me to We/Say It Better
    Michel Fortin, The Success Doctor
    Mark Joyner, Atomic Mind Bombs/Simpleology

    If you’re on Facebook, you can read susan’s entry and nominations here.

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    By Posted on Posted in Peace and War Tagged with , ,

    Speaking of peace…this may be the first time anyone has cited both Howard Zinn and Mark Joyner on the same day. Mark is one of my favorite people. He’s extremely smart, a marketing legend, and that relatively rare bread, a marketer with a social conscience–even more rare for coming out of the military with his ideals intact. He’s an American but he lives in New Zealand. Here’s his well-thought-out plan for peace in Gaza. Methinks it could apply just as easily to Iraq or many other trouble spots.

    I’ve been involved with Middle East peace stuff for years and I could find nothing to disagree with. Bravo, Mark! Now we just have to get the leaders of the world to read your blog.

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    By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

    By Howard Zinn, with opening commentary by Shel Horowitz
    Democracy Now ran a long speech by the legendary Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States (a book that is absolute must reading for any serious student of history, of the power of social change, of people’s movements, and yes, of how to get to the kind of future we all want).

    I strongly advise: go to the DN website and listen, watch, or read this speech. And then go read his book. If you’ve read it already, it’s probably time to read it again. If you’ve never read it, prepare to have your eyes opened wide.

    Here are a couple of fragments of the speech. Two of which I bolded. the first is maybe the best advice Obama could receive–and the second is advice for we, the people. For us.
    -SH

    So, the other factor that stands in the way of a real bold economic and social program is the war. The war, the thing that has, you know, a $600 billion military budget. Now, how can you call for the government to take over the healthcare system? How can you call for the government to give jobs to millions of people? How can you do all that? How can you offer free education, free higher education, which is what we should have really? We should have free higher education. Or how can you—you know. No, you know, how can you double teachers’ salaries? How can you do all these things, which will do away with poverty in the United States? It all costs money.

    And so, where’s that money going to come from? Well, it can come from two sources. One is the tax structure…the top one percent of—the richest one percent of the country has gained several trillions of dollars in the last twenty, thirty years as a result of the tax system, which has favored them. And, you know, you have a tax system where 200 of the richest corporations pay no taxes. You know that? You can’t do that. You don’t have their accountants. You don’t have their legal teams, and so on and so forth. You don’t have their loopholes.

    The war, $600 billion, we need that. We need that money…that money is needed to take care of little kids in pre-school, and there’s no money for pre-school. No, we need a radical change in the tax structure, which will immediately free huge amounts of money to do the things that need to be done, and then we have to get the money from the military budget. Well, how do you get money from the military budget? Don’t we need $600 billion for a military budget? Don’t we have to fight two wars? No. We don’t have to fight any wars. You know.

    And this is where Obama and the Democratic Party have been hesitant, you know, to talk about. But we’re not hesitant to talk about it. The citizens should not be hesitant to talk about it. If the citizens are hesitant to talk about it, they would just reinforce the Democratic leadership and Obama in their hesitations. No, we have to speak what we believe is the truth. I think the truth is we should not be at war. We should not be at war at all. I mean, these wars are absurd. They’re horrible also. They’re horrible, and they’re absurd. You know, from a human, human point of view, they’re horrible. You know, the deaths and the mangled limbs and the blindness and the three million people in Iraq losing their homes, having to leave their homes, three million people—imagine?—having to look elsewhere to live because of our occupation, because of our war for democracy, our war for liberty, our war for whatever it is we’re supposed to be fighting for…

    Obama could possibly listen, if we, all of us—and the thing to say is, we have to change our whole attitude as a nation towards war, militarism, violence. We have to declare that we are not going to engage in aggressive wars. We are going to renounce the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. “Oh, we have to go to”—you know, “We have to go to war on this little pitiful country, because this little pitiful country might someday”—do what? Attack us? I mean, Iraq might attack us? “Well, they’re developing a nuclear weapon”—one, which they may have in five or ten years. That’s what all the experts said, even the experts on the government side. You know, they may develop one nuclear weapon in five—wow! The United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons. Nobody says, “How about us?” you see. But, you know, well, you know all about that. Weapons of mass destruct, etc., etc. No reason for us to wage aggressive wars. We have to renounce war as an instrument of foreign policy….

    A hundred different countries, we have military bases. That doesn’t look like a peace-loving country. And besides—I mean, first of all, of course, it’s very expensive. We save a lot of money. Do we really need those—what do we need those bases for? I can’t figure out what we need those bases for. And, you know, so we have to—yeah, we have to give that up, and we have to declare ourselves a peaceful nation. We will no longer be a military superpower. “Oh, that’s terrible!” There are people who think we must be a military superpower. We don’t have to be a military superpower. We don’t have to be a military power at all, you see? We can be a humanitarian superpower. We can—yeah. We’ll still be powerful. We’ll still be rich. But we can use that power and that wealth to help people all over the world. I mean, instead of sending helicopters to bomb people, send helicopters when they face a hurricane or an earthquake and they desperately need helicopters. You know, you know. So, yeah, there’s a lot of money available once you seriously fundamentally change the foreign policy of the United States…

    when you put together that don’t belong together, you see a “national security”—no—and “national interest.” No, there’s no one national interest. There’s the interest of the president of the United States, and then there’s the interest of the young person he sends to war. They’re different interests, you see? There is the interest of Exxon and Halliburton, and there’s the interest of the worker, the nurse’s aide, the teacher, the factory worker. Those are different interests. Once you recognize that you and the government have different interests, that’s a very important step forward in your thinking, because if you think you have a common interest with the government, well, then it means that if the government says you must do this and you must do that, and it’s a good idea to go to war here, well, the government is looking out for my interest. No, the government is not looking out for your interest. The government has its own interests, and they’re not the interests of the people…

    We have checks and balances that balance one another out. If somebody does something bad, it will be checked by”—wow! What a neat system! Nothing can go wrong. Well, now, those structures are not democracy. Democracy is the people. Democracy is social movements. That’s what democracy is. And what history tells us is that when injustices have been remedied, they have not been remedied by the three branches of government. They’ve been remedied by great social movements, which then push and force and pressure and threaten the three branches of government until they finally do something. Really, that’s democracy.

    And no, we mustn’t be pessimistic. We mustn’t be cynical. We mustn’t think we’re powerless. We’re not powerless. That’s where history comes in. If you look at history, you see people felt powerless and felt powerless and felt powerless, until they organized, and they got together, and they persisted, and they didn’t give up, and they built social movements. Whether it was the anti-slavery movement or the black movement of the 1960s or the antiwar movement in Vietnam or the women’s movement, they started small and apparently helpless; they became powerful enough to have an effect on the nation and on national policy. We’re not powerless. We just have to be persistent and patient…

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics

    After the Madoff scandal, the collapse of the stock market, and all the rest, we need recession-busters and we need a business culture of ethics and sustainability. Here are three simple steps that could make it happen:

    1. Sign the Business Ethics Pledge–demonstrate your understanding that ethical businesses work better, and your commitment (which your customers will love) to conduct your business ethically.
    2. Tell at least 100 others (you’ll get a resource guide offering a dozen easy ways to do this, once you sign). better yet, tell a few thousand.
    3. Take advantage of the option you have as a Pledge signer to get my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, at a very deep discount ($9.95 instead of $17.50).
    4. Read a chapter a week and put at least one idea into practice.

    By around May, you’ll have finished the book–and chances are good that your business will be thriving as you implement these life-changing strategies and demonstrate to the world–and your own financial team–that these ways actually work.

    Why not give it a try?

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