Naomi Wolf: Fascist America, in Ten easy steps has a few terrifying and surprising notes. Ten hallmarks of fascist dictatorships, now replicated in the U.S.A. Read the article and see what you think. Here’s some terror trivia that got me the most. But read the article for the ten easy steps.

‘Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: “dogs go on with their doggy life … How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.”

‘From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.’

‘A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as “terrorism”. So the definition of “terrorist” slowly expands to include the opposition.’

‘…most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant”. He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.’

‘”We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you,” says a spokeswoman of the CCR.’

‘Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn’t real dissent. There just isn’t freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.’

Here’s the book. I haven’t read it yet, but tell me what you think:

On September 14, The New York Times article by Miguel Helft, Rental Building’s Good Karma Nurtures Success, describes how two guys who sell rugs, invested in startup companies and provided rental space to startups such as Logitech and Google.

‘Their investment fund put $400,000 into Danger, and the Amidis gave the company a discount on office space. Mr. Amidi says the decision was more a bet on Mr. Rubin’s abilities — as demonstrated during negotiations over the rug — than on the technology itself.

“Any time you do a financial transaction with someone, you get to know how they think, how they negotiate, what are their parameters,” Mr. Amidi said. “We kind of value that as a big advantage.”’

Many people notice their success in one area of life — such as selling rugs — but don’t apply that same success to other areas of life — such as investing in startups.

When I coach people and teams, my favorite approach is “strengths-based” or “Appreciative Inquiry” — what are you great at, and excited by, in any specific area of your life?  And how can you apply that strength and success to other areas of your life?

I think of my exciting strengths as my “wow themes” because they are the themes in everything that makes me go wow in life.

On Wednesday I was asked what are some things that excite me. It’s an exciting week:

• Thursday: I posted a profile/interview I did with Jesse Engle for cooperBricolage — this is a basic form of business storytelling,
• Friday: I saw OMFM (One Million Forgotten Moments) — a street performance with 100 performers. Yehuda, who directed it, had told me in 2001 about a similar performance he’d done in 2000, and I’d wanted to see it ever since.  (Update: Oh, it got reviewed in the New York Times!),
• Saturday and Sunday: hiking with friends in Harriman State Park,
• Monday: meeting with a client who’s taking initiative and making good progress,
• Tuesday: have a cooBric Comm meeting — this is the governance committee for cooperBricolage and I see my role as business storytelling to help express the values and vision of the community. Also am having dinner with an exciting gal,
• Wednesday: have a meeting related to the bylaws of a membership organization. I’m totally unsure where it’ll go, but eager to find out,
• Thursday: flying to work in Dublin on a fascinating project. Back in early October.

!!!

“The guy who invented the wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.” –Sid Caesar

My brother Eric once told me about a stage direction Shakespeare wrote: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” So when I saw the quote prominently featured on the webpage of a management consultant, I emailed Eric the link. He wrote back an email. “I have fallen in love with a poem that is kind of like that,” he wrote, and included the poem. And hey, I do really like the poem too.

When my Gmail account showed me Eric’s email, it showed a lot of Google Adword ads for cats. Why? The word “cat” is mentioned once in the whole poem. Any idiot human would know the email is not about cats. It’s about poems. The email is about certain emotions and a way of viewing the world.

Google sees the trees for the forest. But there’s a very simple way that Google and other contextual ad companies can see the bigger picture, know the forest for the trees, and match like Eric and I just did.

Here’s how computers can know the forest for the trees: Take the whole page. Search the combination of the most common words. The first link is usually the most relevant. That’s it.

I’ll show you the poem, and then how computers can quickly see the forest for the trees. Skip down if you ain’t such a poetry fan yourself.

“The Path to the White Moon

There were little farmhouses there they
Looked like farmhouses yes without very much land
And trees, too many trees and a mistake
Built into each thing rather charmingly
But once you have seen a thing you have to move on

You have to lie in the grass
And play with your hair, scratch yourself
And then the space of this behavior, the air,
Has suddenly doubled
And you have grown to fill the extra place
Looking back at the small, fallen shelter that was

If a stream winds through all this
Alongside an abandoned knitting mill it will not
Say where it has been
The time unfolds like music trapped on the page
Unable to tell the story again
Raging

Where the winters grew white we went outside
To look at things again, putting on more clothes
This too an attempt to define
How we were being in all the surroundings
Big ones sleepy ones
Underwear and hats speak to us
As though we were cats
Dependent and independent
There were shouted instructions
Grayed in the morning

Keep track of us
It gets to be so exciting but so big too
And we have ways to define but not the terms
Yet
We know what is coming, that we are moving
Dangerously and gracefully
Toward the resolution of time
Blurred but alive with many separate meanings
Inside this conversation”

–from John Ashbery’s book A Wave.

Here’s how computers can know the forest for the trees: Take the whole email. Search the combination of most common words. The first link is usually the most relevant. That’s it.

1) Take the whole email, or the main part of the email. (I sent myself an email with only the poem, and Google still showed me only ads about cats. Here are the ads. Skip down if you ain’t such a fan of cat ads.

Sponsored Links (feedback)

Would you recommend these ads after reading the poem? Probably not.)

2) Find the most common words.

Here’s what a Google search looks like:

the to and we have you were this but too there on it in a with white where trees time thing that so ones of not many like has farmhouses define big at an all again

It’s not your typical search. But it’s the contextual search because “the” appears 15 times in the email, “to” appears 10 times… you get the idea. Because Google only handles 32 keywords at a time, I haven’t included all the words from the poem, but only the most frequent words.

3) The first link is usually the most relevant.

Via Negativa >> Blog Archive >> Festival of the Trees 1
So we have some mighty tangles here and there around Berkeley, …..
Thanks to all of you for the words and pictures. Nice to know so many care for trees as …
www.vianegativa.us/2006/07/01/festival-of-the-trees-1/ - 82k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

I click on the “Cached” link to see the webpage with the keywords highlighted.

Is it relevant? Eric is deeply, intensely interested in trees. And I actually enjoy reading a lot of this webpage. It contrasts nicely with my reading of the poem. And hey! there’s even poems on this page.

It doesn’t take any “semantic web” (a fancy term for thinking computers are idiots) for a computer to recommend poems — because the poem is implied from the combination of words that make it a poem. You don’t need to write “poem” to know it’s a poem.

The guy who wrote the page is “Dave Bonta, a 41-year old writer….” His profile in the top-right of the page says he runs a literary blogzine and has two collections of poetry online. Hmm, sounds like something I’ll recommend to Eric.

4) If I wanted the computer to choose a single block of text to highlight, I would give it an algorithm to find the most closely clustered highlighted keywords. I would feature this paragraph or sentence and show it at the top of the page. This paragraph from that page has nine different keywords close together.

our neighborhood is like a park, it’s a horticultural wonder that has sprung up on the grasslands of the berkeley hills. in other words, it’s mostly artificial. but it’s older, and very much overgrown - a feature many newcomers do not like about berkeley - but that’s just it, we don’t ‘manicure’ or ’spray’ much. (Although that is changing as a more monied group moves in. Berkeley used to be more about idealists of many ilks.) We wanted things to be ‘organic’ and to ‘let nature be nature.’ So we have some mighty tangles here and there around Berkeley, some briars that have gone bananas, but also just a lot of very relaxed-looking plants. I love the plants of Berkeley.

Eric drove through Berkeley and loved it. And I’m interested in what happens when new groups move in to a neighborhood.

The sentence featured by the algorithm is the first sentence which has three keywords close together:

But my assumption is that people who like trees are, by and large, given to contemplation rather than hurried skimming and haphazard clicking on links.

I’d assume that’s true about most people who read John Ashbery’s poetry, too. It’s a good summary of this webpage.

And the featured photo is the one closest to the text shown above.

I’ve done hundreds of this kind of “forest for the trees” search. Some folks call the results “uncanny.” Usually the algorithm is better than I am at finding relevant webpages. You could do this kind of search on MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles too.

Obviously if people like ten of the same movies, they have more in common than if they only like one of the same movies. But search engines and social networks have insisted on being idiots, searching single keywords instead of combinations, and warning me about Mainecoot cats when I’m more interested in stuff that actually relates to the whole page of what I’m reading.

Google and the other ad companies have invented a wheel.  Now let’s attach the other three.