One can only hope...

The sound of adding machines chattering away in the Oval Office is the sound of empire in decline. The ship of the imperial state lacks fuel for its boiler and powder for its cannon … but its captain and crew dare not take it into port for maintenance. They’ve convinced themselves — and they may very well be right — that the barnacles infesting its hull are the only thing holding it together, and that it (and their jobs with it) will disintegrate if the fouling organisms are removed. And so they limp it along toward its next target, nursing as much mischief out of it as they can and hoping it holds together until they’re retired and it becomes someone else’s problem.

Read the whole thing over at c4ss.org.

Tweet, tweet! I'm a dangerous anarchist bird!

I’ll probably be producing a couple of these per week, with Brad Spangler backing me up both as writer and as alternate reader.

It’s a bit creepy voicing this, given the arrests of Elliot Madison and Michael Wallschlaeger, and the raid on Madison’s home, since I was doing much the same thing for a couple of evenings: listening to Pittsburgh-area police scanner traffic over the internet, and repeating interesting information to several relevant hashtags on Twitter.

I’ve installed a WordPress plugin called Transposh, and enabled it for Slovak and Spanish. Transposh segments the page text, pulls machine translations from Google translate and other sources, integrates them into the display of the page and stores them in the database. It then allows users to edit the translated segments of the text in order to improve upon the (almost always faulty) machine translation.

Crowdsourcing translation is a very cool idea, and has a definite “anarcho” appeal to it. Transposh is not a mature program yet, but its developer is active and responsive to bug reports and feature requests, so I’m hopeful that it will be ready for prime time soon.

When it is, I hope to roll it out on the Center for a Stateless Society‘s website, where recently I announced a volunteer effort to translate the Center’s publications into as many languages as possible.

Meanwhile, if you’re a Slovak or Spanish speaker, feel free to mess around with Transposh here and let me know what you find.