The Web cast of tonight's program is probably working. Here are your choices:

Paul Williams of UFO Desk is arranging for this feed. And we thank Porus dot com for this feed.

“Emmanuel Goldstein” of Off The Hook is maintaining this feed.

I will again insist that the year 2000 is the last year of the 20^th century, not the beginning of the 21^st. The United States Naval Observatory agrees with me, as do all rational individuals.

Of course we're all going to have to get used to writing the date starting with a “20” rather than the “19” we've all been writing our entire lives. That will take more getting used to than anything else, I think. And humans will still be writing that “19” in the date long after all of the computer software has been fixed. Entire forests will give their lives for the mistakes made writing dates in on paper forms over the next few years.

Some folks find a lot of humor in the Y2K bug. I find it most humorous that Y2K magazine has folded as of December 1. I can't link to it because there's no longer anything to link to. Most folks should probably look at the Microsoft Y2K page for assistance with their personal computers.

I don't think that there's going to be a big problem next week. I certainly don't think that there are going to be 85 million dead in the United States alone, as one “expert” on a WBAI program said. There will be little problems, some of them annoying, and they'll get cleared up fairly soon.

In the panic department, however, is the city of Seattle, Washington where they have actually cancelled their big New Year's celebration because of fear, not of computer based Y2K glitches, but of “terrorists.” Of course given the oppressive violations of the civil rights of the demonstrators who were peacefully protesting the Word Trade Organization meeting at the end of November, I guess their police and Mayor really aren't competent to handle a New Year's celebration.

I'm a bit surprised to find that Y2K based fear and panic are at a bare minimum, with most fears being centered on what some humans might do rather than in everything collapsing as some, mostly right-wing, dimwits have been predicting for a couple of years (all the while selling dried food to the gullible, along with instructions on how to transform your fallout shelter into a Y2K bunker). While I've given the link to Microsoft's Y2K fix page above, I thought I'd also include a little problem Microsoft apparently had with some of their software at their own site. Hint: look at some of the release dates part way down the page. They corrected it pretty fast, but not before someone at memepool got a screen capture of it.

Now if you really want to get into the spirit of the mock Y2K scare and make believe that the world you've known all your life is about to give way to the world of the Mad Max and Road Warrior movies here are some links:

• The American Red Cross has a long checklist for a kit that's bound to take the fun out of any disaster.
  
  
• If you're planning on flying an aircraft over the Y2K hump you could read the U.S. Dept. of Transportation's Civil Aviation site, and then you'll just miss the entire Y2K event because you'll have to spend so much time reading their exhaustive list of who's ready for Y2K and who's maybe not ready.
  
  
• The Department of Defense says “Don't Panic!” I didn't know they had Douglas Adams consulting for them!
  
  
• The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has a little list, but it seems to neglect to mention their plans to suspend the Constitution the first chance they get. Talk about home grown terrorists!
  
  
• The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has some information for you on the Y2K transition, they'll probably sell you some umbrellas with their logo on them. And remember, those aren't commercials they're running for those companies, they only look exactly like commercials.
  
  
• Laughably, the Utne Reader has a whole lot to say about Y2K preparedness. They're into those goofy neighborhood preparedness groups that I personally think are just a crypto-fascist method of organizing right wing militias and targeting which neighbors to exterminate the next time the lights go out.
  
  
• The BBC will help you to keep a stiff upper lip. Of course for them it may as well be 1900.
  
  

As for me, well, Pickles of the North and I have laid in enough vodka and vermouth so that if Y2K gets really bed we can just ignore it. Enjoy the holiday, and don't worry about the damned Y2K crap.

That buffoon John Rocker of the Atlanta Braves baseball team decided to say some truly stupid, racist and homophobic stuff in a Sports Illustrated interview this last week. Come Spring, I predict that this guy's going to run into some problems from teammates and other baseball players who may find his remarks a little bit much all these decades after Jackie Robinson changed things in that game. Rocker's games in New York City should be interesting as well.

As regular listeners know, I'm very concerned about the current spate of cyber-hijackings going on where big companies try to grab domain names from smaller companies and individuals. Sometimes the big companies don't even want to use the domain names, they just want to prevent anyone else from using them. Of course what happens is that the small companies or individuals may be perfectly in the right, but they can't afford the lawyers' bills and get bulldozed.

The latest case of using lawyers to hijack a domain name is that of newbie cyber retailer eToys getting an injunction shutting down the Web site of the European Artists' group etoy.com. Even the artists' ISP was blocked for some hours in order to leverage them to shut down. You'll notice that etoys.com and etoy.com are not the same. This is a case of a company trying to prevent anyone from even being near their name. What's worse is that the artists' site was up and running for years before eToys even began doing business! Although you can get to the artists' site above, they were shut down for a while, and they are now prohibited from using their lawfully obtained domain name etoy.com. The link above is simply an IP address that no one could ever remember, which is the idea behind domain names.

Predictably, this outrageous attack on artistic expression by the money grubbing newbies at eToys has sparked protests of various sorts.

• There is the ToyWar Resistance Network site, which carries the caveat, “...if you are an e-commerce business mentioned on this site and something happens to your e-commerce stock, blame your lawyers.”
  
  
• A site simply called ToyWar.com is seeking to recruit protestors against the eToy hijackers.
  
  
• The EvilToys site offers articles and an E-mail newsletter.
  
  
• An actual parody of the eToy site has been set up by the folks at violentnation.com.
  
  

This is an issue that's only going to get worse, I think. There was one good court decision earlier this year, but now we have this eToys hijacking where the artists are shut down even before they can come to court. Of course I should also remind folks that I have a personal stake in exactly this sort of battle since I own glib.com, the site you're viewing now, and this cyber-hijacking stuff worries me on a personal level as well as on a level of concern for free speech and for the legal rights of the little guy.

On the program I read a little from an article about deep time and the survival of life from the November 1999, issue of Scientific American. Unfortunately, they don't have that article on line, but I found the author's page. You can look around there and see what format of a similar article you want to download, or you can assume that you'd like the PDF format and just get it. Of course you'll need the Adobe Acrobat reader, which you can get right here.

The bottom line is that the universe is going to become completely hostile to life in any form as the expansion of space itself accelerates and eventually this will be a completely lifeless universe. So enjoy it while you can! Of course this is not a personal problem unless you plan on living for another 10³⁷ years.

Here's a piece of E-mail that I read over the air. You can see that I'm still way behind on the mail. I hope to catch up with it next month, however. On the program I read all of the holiday greetings I'd gotten from listeners, so at least the snail mail from the end of December's been read.

The URLs in the below E-mail are all functional, so you can view what he's writing about.

Okay, there's this lawsuit against Pacifica Management over their theft of the Foundation. It's being challenged in court, and so you are asked to send any letters soliciting money from you for WBAI, or any other Pacifica station, to:

The Office of SIEGEL & YEE
499 14th Street, Suite 220
Oakland, CA 94612
Telephone (510) 839-1200
FAX (510) 444-6698

For more information than I can type in furiously just before leaving to do tonight's radio program, go here and read about the lawsuit.

There are a lot of issues that we can't talk about on the air at WBAI. But there is an Internet list called “Free Pacifica!” which you can subscribe to, and these issues are discussed there. If you subscribe to it you will receive, via E-mail, all of the messages which are sent to that list. You will also be able to send messages to the list.

If you want to subscribe to the “Free Pacifica!” list just click on this link and follow the instructions, and you'll be subscribed. Could open your eyes a little bit.

The above list has occasionally produced a high volume of E-mail because of the attention that these issues have drawn. If you would prefer to subscribe to a low volume list that only provides announcements of events related to these issues then subscribe to the FreePac mailing list.

Back to the Back of the Book page

Back to my home page.

The contents of this Web page and subsequent Web pages on this site are copyright © 1999, R. Paul Martin