Peridyd's Progress

I don't have to tell the readers of this blog that I consider our (U.S.) legal system imperfect at best. Today, however, there's some promising news in the software patent wars. Blackboard (link intentionally left out) may actually lose its patents on the courseware management system, patents they received because they have high-powered lawyers, not because they were there first.

They weren't.

Indeed, I was involved in software projects (and so was Greg TR, a loyal reader of this blog) that differentiated between instructors and students long before Blackboard was a twinkle in a venture capitalist's eye.

This one looks promising, and since the CMS has been the centerpiece of my professional career for the last decade or so, you can bet that I'll be following this.

Way to go Software Freedom Law Center!

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

I went to a wonderful conference presentation on the poetry of activism this week. During it, I was reacquainted with the poems of Joy Harjo, which I hadn't read for awhile. Harjo's poetry is deep, blissful, and full of caring, yet it is never superficial or afraid to enter the domains of personal or collective suffering or joy.

Without further commentary, then, I'll share one of the poems read during the workshop.

Anchorage
for Audre Lorde

This city is made of stone, of blood, and fish.
There are the Chugatch Mountains to the east
and whale and seal to the west.
It hasn't always been this way, because glaciers
who are ice ghosts creat oceans, carve earth
and shape this city here, by the sound.
They swim backwards in time.

Once a storm of boiling earth cracked open
the streets, threw open the town.
It's quiet now, but underneath the concrete
is the cooking earth,
                                  and above that, air
which is another ocean, where spirits we can't see
are dancing                 joking                 getting full
on roasted caribou, and the praying
goes on, extends out.

We keep on breathing, walking, but softer now,
the clouds whirling in the air above us.
What can we say that would make us understand
better than we do already?
Except to speak of her home and claim her
as our own history, and know that our dreams
don't end here, two blocks away from the ocean
where our hearts still batter away at the muddy shore.

And I think of the 6th Avenue jail, of mostly Navie
and Black men, where Henry told about being shot at
eight times outside a liquor store in L.A., but when
the car sped away he was surprised he was alive,
no bullet holes, man, and eight cartridges strewn
on the sidewalk
                            all around him.

Everyone laughed at the impossibility of it,
but also the truth. Because who would believe
the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival
those who were never meant
                                                 to survive?

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 09:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Upset with Senator Barbara Boxer's tough questioning of Condoleezza Rice the other day, Limbaugh has suddenly become a stauch anti-racist. He's setting up Boxer as the affluent lynch mobster of Rice, accusing her of "hitting below the ovaries" (Limbaugh's words) because Boxer (rightly?) pointed out that neither Rice nor anyone in the administration has any family who'll be paying a real price for their abysmal decision making in Iraq. In other words, neither Rice, nor Bush, nor Cheney will risk losing a family member in this war.

It is as if asking tough questions of a clueless and often imperious Secretary of State were the same thing as the violent policing of heterosexual white male privilege and racial sexual segregation (for everyone but white males, of course, who felt it their inheritance to "take" black women whenever they chose to).

There's a central irony here, of course. Ever quick to accuse those who've actually suffered instutitional discrimination of being whiners and inferior--at least by implication--Limbaugh's quick to run to the defense of a woman of color who's positioned in a rarefied, affluent, and powerful class, and who (coincidentally?) happens to share his political ideology.

Pardon me if I'm skeptical of Limbaugh's commitment to social justice.

Rather than a lynching, Rush, why not call it what it is: congressional oversight? I know that you haven't seen much of it since 2001, but this is what the founders had in mind: accountability.

Bush and his minions (and, yes, that includes Rice and, alas, Colin Powell) are finally, finally being held accountable. One could only wish that it were more than just speech.

Kudos to Boxer; shame on Rush.

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)