Bayosphere

This is the famous Regina Mundi Catholic church in Soweto, South Africa, the black township next to Johannesburg. The church was the site of political meetings during the anti-apartheid revolution here. It’s also the place where students fled on June 16, 1978, after police opened fire with live ammunitition to break them up as they gathered to head to a peaceful rally. Two died and 11 were injured, and the racist regime was condemned worldwide.

Today South Africa is a democracy. There are many, many problems in the society and government, but you get a sense that people still believe in the fundamental goodwill that, almost miraculously, kept their revolution from turning monstrously bloody. I admire these people more than I can describe.

I’m here for several events — mostly talks and panels — including one later this week sponsored by the Freedom Forum, a journalism foundation based in Washington. Then we head to Grahamstown early next week for the Highway Africa conference, where I’m on two panels and chairing a third. After that we go to Zambia, where they’re having an election, for a discussion of technology and democracy. I’m thrilled that Jay Harris, former publisher of the Mercury news, is a co-panelist at several of these events.

Look for more reports during the week.

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This is a week mostly of vacation, but if you read the papers you can’t ignore the real world. Today’s newspapers are blaring the depressing story of a shipload of refugees no one wants.

A Norweigan ship saved more than 400 boat people from drowning. Australia won’t let them land. Indonesia won’t take them. The Norwegians are denying responsibility.

What a sad day for humanity.

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The front pages here have been consumed all week with the saga of the unwanted refugees that has captivated the world and shamed humanity.

To recap: The Norwegian ship rescued more than 400 refugees, most from Afghanistan, when the boat they were on began to sink. Then the Norwegian ship was refused entry into either Australia or Indonesia, the nearest nations. Some of the refugees are sick, though accounts differ on the severity of their illnesses.

The Australians claim to have international law on their side. They certainly don’t have anything else to offer. Their stay-away stance is understandable in the abstract. It is cruel in reality.

One of the ugliest parts of this saga is that Australian officials apparently alerted the Norwegian freighter to the peril of the sinking ship, and urged a rescue. Now the same government is refusing to deal with any of the events it helped set into motion.

Are refugees from horrific places like Afghanistan nothing but garbage to the rest of the world? The West’s anti-Soviet Cold War helped bring the Afghani dictatorship to power. Now the West washes its hands of the mess it assisted in creating.

That’s a geopolitical issue. There are moral ones, and practical ones, too. What ship will be willing to save people in the future, when nations will refuse to help once people have been saved?

The United States is no paragon, I should note, when it comes to treating immigrants or refugees fairly. Our system reeks of bias and politics. And America is grossly unfair in denying basic rights even to legal immigrants who run afoul of the outrageous immigration laws Congress passed and Bill Clinton willingly signed in the 1990s.

Taking a hard line seems to be politically effective for the Australian government. Even the opposition party applauded it, and surveys show solid backing among the public.

Australia doesn’t want to become the refuge of last resort, and that’s more than reasonable. But its actions this week are cold and cruel. It should reconsider. The world is watching.

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If dead people can vote in Chicago, East St. Louis and Miami, why can’t they express political support for Microsoft?

That seems like a reasonable question in wake of Thursday’s Los Angeles Times report that lobbyists had orchestrated a “grass-roots” letter-writing campaign — not for the first time — on behalf of our favorite monopolist, and that at least several of these letters to state officials were sent over the signatures of people who were no longer living.

Sleazy? Of course. What’s new?

Actually, Microsoft’s big mistake here was that it didn’t tell its opinion-laundering organizations to use better dead people.

The should have signed Abraham Lincoln’s name to one of the letters, for one, explaining why all the break-up-the-company stuff was so wrong. Honest Abe surely would have said, “An operating system divided against itself cannot stand.”

Or this from Napoleon, who understood the nature of power: “God is always on the side with the biggest market share.”

Or King Solomon’s certainly negative view of a corporate dismemberment: “We looked at this idea. Trust me. It won’t work.”

JFK: “Ask not what Microsoft can do for you. Ask what you can do for Microsoft.”

Microsoft’s failure to use really great dead people in its defense just goes to show the company’s lack of innovative thinking. If I, a fellow journalist and my brother, Wiley, could come up with those examples off the top of our tiny-brained heads, imagine what the combined mental firepower of Microsoft’s well-funded political supporters should have done.

No doubt you, too, can think of some dead people to rally in support of Microsoft and its continued push for domination of not just computing but all communications and commerce.

Send me your ideas. I’ll post my favorite ones here.

UPDATE: Well, some great submissions are coming in. Here are my favorites so far:

“We have not yet begun to test our legal budget.” — John Paul Jones

“Give me Microsoft, or give me death!” — Patrick Henry

“An OS is able if Microsoft releases it.” — Buddha

“The only thing we have to fear is competition itself.”
and

“The only thing we have to fear is open source software itself.” — Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“I have a dream that when we let the freedom to innovate ring from every PC, all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing ‘Windows at last! Windows at last! Thank Gates Almighty, Windows at last!’” — Martin Luther King Jr.

“Let them eat Service Packs.” — Marie Antoinette

“There are only two truly infinite things, the universe and Microsoft. And I am unsure about the universe.” — Albert Einstein

“Two roads diverged in the woods,

and I took the one Microsoft traveled by,

and that has made all the difference.” — Robert Frost

Many thanks to all the contributors!

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I’ll be traveling most of the weekend. Look for the next update on Monday.

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Dave Farber took a picture of me standing in front of the opera house. Concidentally, he and GG are here on vacation. We’re going to have dinner tonight.

Dave and I are being interviewed later today by an Australian technology journalist. Then I’m planning to go and climb the harbor bridge if the weather cooperates. I don’t like heights, which is the point of the exercise, I think…

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Los Angeles Times: Lobbyists Tied to Microsoft Wrote Citizens’ Letters. Letters purportedly written by at least two dead people landed on the desk of Utah Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff earlier this year, imploring him to go easy on Microsoft Corp. for its conduct as a monopoly.

Once again, the Microsoft munchkins are at work. And once again, as you’ll see if you read this story, Microsoft sees nothing wrong with its sleaze.

A couple of months ago, I was bombarded with letters after writing a critical column about Microsoft. I started noticing similar language in the letters, and figured they’d been ginned up by one of the company’s lobbying outfits.

Sure enough, it turned out that a Microsoft-funded group calling itself Americans for Technology Leadership was behind the “grassroots outpouring” — one of the same worthy organizations cited by the Los Angeles Times in this story. No one from the group returned my phone calls or email when I called to ask about the campaign.

Here’s what Microsoft is accomplishing with this crap. It’s further infuriating the state government officials who are responsible for consumer protection. With every day that passes, they get more certain that Microsoft is a company that has no concept of ethical behavior, that Microsoft will do anything to maintain its monopoly and ability to abuse the free market.

Now that’s an effective lobbying campaign.

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John Balzar (Los Angeles Times): Bill Gates’ Way or No Way. Long ago, the hammer and chisel yielded to charcoal, which led to the quill pen, the pencil, the ballpoint, the typewriter–the purposes of which, to record and share information, have now been sucked into the force field of Microsoft.

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If I weren’t just a couple of days away from departing on an around-the-world reporting and speaking trip, I’d be in Colorado this week at the Jabbercon conference. It’s where some of the vital infrastructure of tomorrow’s Internet is taking shape.

I’ve been studying up on the technology and have come to the conclusion that this is crucial stuff. I wish I could be at the conference so I could get an even better grasp of it.

Luckily, some of the best bloggers are there, and you can read their accounts. Check out the coverage from Dave Winer and Craig Burton in particular.

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Jesse Helms won term after term in the U.S. Senate by resorting to race-baiting advertising and otherwise using race as a wedge. The media coverage of his announced retirement is sickening, because it generally glosses over his ugly record.

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