I'm aloft somewhere between Rome and Cincinnati, jetting back towards my crazed, stupefied, dangerous country after three days in Berlin. I dread coming home. You know things have taken a paradoxical turn when Germany feels safe, sane, and free by comparison with the United States of America. But that's how it looks to me.

That's how it looks to the Germans too. The idea that we might actually re-elect George Bush is unfathomable - indeed, inexcusable - to them. As one of them put it to me, "We can forgive you for electing him once.

Finally following up to a blog entry by John Beatty regarding a conversation he and I had back in June at Planetwork.

Jaco Aizenman just wrote me via the Anonymity group of orkut asking for

any comments you may have on Virtual Rights and Virtual Identity.

Details on:
http://www.nephridium.org/virtualrights/

Virtual Rights:

1. To have a Virtual Identity
2. Not to have a Virtual Identity

I have fought software patents for years, and am equally appalled at the creeping (creepy?) unlimited enforcement of copyright. Staford law professor Lawrence Lessig recently had this to say:

Tuesday sharpened the definition of the ongoing legal struggle to satisfy both proprietary and open source advocates through equitable intellectual property regulations.

At the Identity Commons we're building a persistent global and/or local identity infrastructure using the OASIS standard for Extensible Resource Identifiers (XRI).