UPDATE: if you’ve got Firefox, you can check out this hotness. It does pretty much the same thing, but does it by summoning additional powers of ridiculousness. Wanna know how? Take a look under the hood and you’ll see what I mean.

If the embedded iframe breaks, try the original document.

ACHTUNG: high entropic content in the following link. May cause confusion. May cause viewer to start wearing purple for no particular reason.

Basically, I told Kelcy she ought to post this. And she said that if she was going to post it, I had to post it. And apparently there are no takebacks allowed, so I’m posting it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Gogol Bordello.

I’ve reached a decision (after sitting on my ass for a good two months, anyhow).

While I can’t say for sure that this won’t get covered to death in the upcoming YouTube debates, I want to send the letter I developed this spring to the democratic forerunners for ‘08. If anyone feels it is unfair to leave the Republicans out of it, let me know; I don’t not want Republicans to care about the issue, I just find it that much less likely that they will be budged by such talk. At any rate, I’ll probably be reworking the thing entirely once more before I send it out. As it exists currently, it would almost need a cover letter, one of the approximate effect of (and yes, I know it’s odd to be declaring my own self a hacker, but I want that label front and center (I think) and can provide references if needed):

Salutations, Dear Candidate. As someone who has come to eschew party distinctions but consistently votes toward the left, I congratulate you on your successful campaign thus far and wish you all the best in the coming primaries and, perhaps after that, the 2008 presidential election. It is an election in which, I’m happy to say, I will be casting my absentee ballot and will not have to face down any dubious Diebold contraptions. But I digress; I am not writing to criticize Diebold. I’m writing this letter to challenge you and your fellow candidates on this side of the aisle to do me a tremendous favor as a voter and taxpayer, and take a vocal position on a politically dicey issue to which I and all my kind ascribe great worth. I want you to take on American information policy.

To answer the obvious question, who are my kind, is tantamount to getting to the heart of the issue. I am a hacker, a computer professional, a student of engineering and design, an active blogger, and a some-time writer and musician. I graduated from an acclaimed and innovative undergraduate institution. At the age of 21, I have already accumulated experience programming in-house with a major government contractor and have been a part of one of the biggest names in software for engineers. I have collaborated with the One Laptop Per Child project in my free time, and have worked on improving the state of elder care in my engineering capstone project. And, frankly, among my fellow alumni, this list of achievements is rather on the modest side of mediocre.

We can do serious work because we love what we do. We are, in large part, free of cynicism about the potential of this small fact to move mountains. We believe in social entrepreneurship, an ideal which we approach from the varying directions of our many and varied talents. What we have most in common, apart from youth, is our lust for information and our reliance on modern information technology to help us organize and achieve our ends.

We are thus all affected to some extent by the (sometimes strange) goings on in Washington, where thanks to President Bush’s equation of innovation with intellectual property protections, and surveillance with security, constitutional freedom appears to be backsliding a bit faster than usual. I’m sure you’ll have heard some of this rhetoric before, so I’ll cut to the chase. Bush’s “legacy” to the nation, apart from a new Vietnam to be Vietnamized, is what appears to be a renewed dedication to strengthening American education. As an idea, it may be the single best thing he leaves behind; I will not attempt to assess his implementation strategy. What I will say is that the American Competitiveness Initiative has at least one gaping ideological hole: it doesn’t approach the problem of innovation as what it is rapidly becoming, an information policy problem.

If elected, I ardently hope that you will print yourself a copy of the ACI booklet and go to town on it with a red Sharpie marker. The document contains a great deal of posturing about intellectual property (IP) that is of more worth to the recording industry than it is to the American people. The people are sick of having lawyers run the show; they want a free culture, a free online press and an IP policy that will emphasize their rising star children over the dinosauric publishing companies that currently hold sway in Washington. They want a real, cohesive, sensible policy they can understand. Don’t know what to do about it? Talk to Larry Lessig. Talk to John Perry Barlow. Talk to Eric Raymond. Ask your kids, even. The issue is big, very big, and each year more voters are growing conscious of it. They’ll continue to do so because, increasingly, our very way of life is at odds with the Washingtonians’ posturing, as I will now explain.

If there’s something people want, a certain percentage of them are just going to take it. Fifteen percent of the populace will never steal. Fifteen percent will steal most anything not nailed down. The battle is for the hearts and minds of the remaining seventy percent.

–Bruce Sterling, “The Hacker Crackdown”

Mondays can be rather dismal. On this particular one, I was held up in traffic for half again the usual length of my commute, first because the 30 stopped dead somewhere in Weston, and second because, having made my way around the blockage and to Oak St in Natick, the inlet to 9 was crawling, although that part was probably normal. And in the course of all this I saw two or three squad cars, one of them here at Apple Hill, just sitting there with flashers on. Who knows why.

By comparison yesterday was totally awesome. We did some shopping in downtown Natick, where I made my one designated splurge for the summer–a used Warwick Corvette Standard 5-string, which I took home for less than 800 after trade-in. Finally, an instrument that lives up to my discriminating musical ear