Below are some quotes I found today that I liked. If you like any of them too, just click on the corresponding "Tweet this #QUOTE" link, and you will be able to tweet it. Enjoy!
Yes it's true. The @MonkeyButler Bots are no longer an endangered species, they are officially extinct! They've all been SUSPENDED, thanks to all of you who have blocked them. While we've been triumphant in our efforts, I am also aware that this campaign has disappointed the tens of thousands* hundreds of followers who sought the services of @FollowerMonitor *Twitter's recent follower purges of spam accounts have reduced the followers of @FollowerMonitor by tens of thousands of followers to only 1,291 as of 23 JULY 2009 at 10:55 AM PDT.
As such, I thought it appropriate to post an update and a postscript. First of all, I will begin with two comments posted by @FollowerMonitor himself. Following are his two comments:
@FollowerMonitor said on July 23, 2009 at 02:59 PM...
@Noetical, I apologise for the your @mentions getting filled but I only serve the people. What started as something I did for just my friends and me became an overnight sensation as I picked up 10,000 followers in three weeks when I was only ever expecting a dozen of friends to enjoy my unique talents.
I do encourage people not to get angry or upset when people unfollow them as one of the strengths of twitter is asynchronous connections.
In addition, while I understand why people get upset, I encourage people to have the courage of their convictions when they unfollow someone. There is no shame is unfollowing.
Again I apologise for adding noise to your @mentions.
Kind Regards,
@followermonitor
P.S. I have one point of contention and that is being called the Overlord of our little menagerie in the bunker. My pigeons and monkeys are indispensable but they are here of their own free will.
@followermonitor said on July 23, 2009 at 04:10 PM...
I would like to declare my monkey butlers an endangered species (there were only 19 of them). As unsporting as it was and as sad a day as it is, I can only extend my hand and say well played madam, well played.
Rather than continue the comment thread, I've decided to post my response here:
Dear @FollowerMonitor:
First of all, let me thank you for being so wonderfully civil in your response to my efforts to exterminate your poor little bots. In response to your civility, I have changed your title from "OVERLORD" and removed the direct link to block your account.
I have to admit that I think your concept is an excellent one. My initial response was to consider following you myself, so that I might get your alerts as well. But then, as you know, I began to feel plagued by the clutter of your tweets in my @mentions. I want to assure you that I have no actual animosity toward you. Just as you used your talents to provide your friends and others with a service, I too used mine to help others, who were annoyed by your service.
The unquestionable popularity of your service is even more evidence that your idea was and is an excellent one. On the other hand, the fact that enough tweeters chose to use this tool as a means to get your @MonkeyButler Bots suspended, proves that your implementation needs rethinking.
As I mentioned to you in a tweet, I believe the best solution is for you to DM your alerts to your followers. That would eliminate the problem of others being notified that they've unfollowed someone...which presumably they already know. I know that makes it difficult for you to use your bots to spread the load. On the other hand, I have confidence that you are creative enough to figure out a clever workaround for that. I look forward to the next iteration of your service. As soon as it is one that both serves your subscribers and doesn't annoy everyone else, I will be happy to Tweet about its virtues at the top of my lungs (or wings, as the case may be.)
In the meantime, I am still getting complaint comments about your account continuing to clutter the @mentions of other tweeters. While I've removed the direct "block-link" to your account for the time being, I suggest you regroup and figure out a better implementation before your account is suspended too. @FollowerMonitor is the perfect name for the service I hope you will create, which alerts without annoying. Whether you take my suggestion of using DMs, or find an even more clever way of acheiveing your goal, I wish you luck.
P.S.: My point of contention with you is being called "unsporting." The "tool" I have offered here is merely a way for others to block you and your @MonkeyButler Bots easily. I could have devised an auto-block anti-spam bot that didn't rely on the preferences and actions of other tweeters. That would have been unsporting. Your bots were suspended because enough tweeps were annoyed to the point that they were willing to go through the process of blocking each one. As a test, I used my own tool to block each @MonkeyButler myself. While it made it easier, it took 15-20 minutes to go through the entire process of blocking each one. Anyone who went through that entire process must have been committed to eliminating them from their twitterverse. In addition, I'm sure there were plenty who blocked your @MonkeyButlers manually, without my help. The market has spoken: Excellent product, poor implementation. The ball is in your court. ;^D
Best regards, Noetical
UPDATE:
In order to facilitate more input regarding the @FollowerMonitor Service, I've created a TwtPoll with a few of the modifications suggested by both me and @FollowerMonitor. Please vote on the solution you believe would make you most likely to use the service yourself. For those who would never use this service, there are options for you too!
For those of you who were annoyed because your @mentions were suddenly cluttered with a bunch of tweets from the @MonkeyButler Bots, run by @FollowerMonitor, I created a series of links for you to use to block them. In less than a week, tweeps utilizing this page, as well as those who have independently blocked each one manually, have managed to eradicate the @MonkeyButler Bots from Twitter. They have all been SUSPENDED! As such, this page has served its purpose well and is largely unnecessary. I've kept most of the original page for archival reasons, but I've crossed out instructions that are now moot.
UPDATED RESULTS FROM BLOCKING:
First up is the OVERLORD* Mastermind of the Menagerie: @FollowerMonitor. For a look at our ongoing dialogue about how he might modify this service such that it doesn't annoy non-subscribers, please see my next post: "So Long, and Thanks for All the @Mentions...". Please feel free and encouraged to leave your comments and suggestions there, as he is reading them. It is an excellent way for you to provide input and express your concerns, such that a site like this will not be necessary as he moves forward with a modified implementation of the service. *Per a profoundly civilized request in my comments area, @FollowerMonitor requested that I not refer to him as the "OVERLORD." So as not to confuse people reading his comments, I've crossed out the word and replaced it with something nicer ;^D
This is a list of the first 28 MonkeyButlers. Here is a list of the Twitter Accounts that have been SUSPENDED,** with help from this site to BLOCK them:
@MonkeyButler01SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler02SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler03SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler04SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler05SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler06SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler07SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler08SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler09SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler10SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler11SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler12SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler13SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler14SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler15SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler16SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler17SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler18SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler19SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler20SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler21SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler22SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler23SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler24SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler25SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler26SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler27SUSPENDED!
@MonkeyButler28SUSPENDED!
**(SUSPENDED status updated daily)
Once you've blocked these, they will stop showing up in your @mentions. I hope some of you have found this useful.
The more "BLOCKS" an account gets, the more likely @Twitter is to SUSPEND the account. Since I first posted this, ALL of the active @MonkeyButler Bots have been SUSPENDED!
To make it even easier, I've included a RT link: CLICK HERE to go to Twitter with these words in your tweet:
"RT @Noetical: Help STOP @FollowerMonitor SPAM—Easily block ALL #MonkeyButler Bots at: http://bit.ly/SpamTool Plz RT—Thx!"
>Once there, feel free to edit if you wish, then press "UPDATE" and you're done.
Robert Strange McNamara, who served as the US Secretary of Defense under both Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, died today at the age of 93. He lived a long life, and did many things; but his legacy will be tainted forever by his role in prosecuting the Vietnam War. The lessons he learned and the perspective he gained from that experience are explored brilliantly in the documentary by Errol Morris, The Fog of War, as seen in this clip from the film:
On the occasion of his passing, I would like to share some of the things I learned, and perspective I gained, from working on a project about the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962. Had McNamara, and the administrations for which he served, been as thoughtful and careful when it came to Vietnam as they were in this crisis, their legacy would have been quite different than it is today.
President Kennedy and Secretary of Defense McNamara in an ExCom meeting.
Almost a decade ago, I was hired by New Line Cinema to produce the special features for a DVD of the film, Thirteen Days, which was about President Kennedy's response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The film was based on the book by Ernest R. May Ph.D. and Philip D. Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis. One of the most fascinating aspects of the crisis was the decision-making process, as orchestrated by Kennedy, and the superlative crisis-management skills he demonstrated. When President Kennedy was informed that the Soviets were establishing a base of nuclear weapons in Cuba, he immediately assembled a diverse team of experts, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExCom), including Secretary McNamara, to advise him as to his options in dealing with the situation. As the possibility of nuclear war loomed large, Kennedy held multiple, grueling sessions of ExCom. The book contains transcripts of many of these deliberations.
One of the features I made for the DVD was a documentary entitled, "Roots of the Cuban Missile Crisis," in which I explored the historical context of the crisis, and how it informed Kennedy's decisions. I conducted most of my interviews in the Fall of 2000, as Al Gore and George W. Bush were each campaigning to become the 41st President of the United States. None of us knew at the time how either would manage a crisis. What we now know, however, is that President Bush approaches crisis management very differently than Kennedy did.
The world stage and the human condition continue to increase infinitely in complexity, making many of our assumptions and responses to a given crisis obsolete each and every evolving moment. Certainly, it is true that our world has been forged by our past. Each war, each momentous event gives form to our thoughts, our understanding. But who we are, and what we do, is a new and unique entity that merely resembles the progenitors from whom we have inherited this earth. For this reason, we imperil ourselves, both physically and morally, if we try to define our leaders, villains and movements with historical analogies, which only serve as limited pieces of rhetoric, designed to win our respective arguments. (Case in point was the fact that from the onset of the Iraq War, EACH side likened the other to Hitler, in order to stigmatize opposing views.) In order to move forward wisely during any crisis, we must strive to understand, to the best of our abilities, the ways in which the unique circumstances of this place in time must be addressed.
Albert Einstein once said, reflecting this very sentiment at the dawn of the atomic age, "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking..." He knew that we must begin to comprehend the incomprehensible if we were ever going to survive in a world in which we were newly capable of the incomprehensible. Furthermore, he said this in the 1950s, when all the existing plans for the Vietnam situation included the use of nuclear weapons.
That said, of course, I agree that we can look to our past for a better understanding of our present. At 7PM, on Monday, October 22, 1962, President Kennedy appeared on television to inform Americans of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Some of this speech was included in Thirteen Days, as seen in this clip from one of the documentaries I made for the DVD:
In this speech, Kennedy reveals some of the internal struggle that guided his response to the crisis:
"The 1930's taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged ultimately leads to war. This nation is opposed to war. We are also true to our word. Our unswerving objective, therefore, must be to prevent the use of these missiles against this or any other country, and to secure their withdrawal or elimination from the Western Hemisphere."
Kennedy was not only a product of WWII, but furthermore; he felt personal shame from the fact that his father had been an active supporter of the early policy of appeasement toward Hitler in the 1930s. By the time he was faced with the Cuban Missile Crisis, it had become conventional wisdom that Hitler could have been stopped short and WWII avoided, had his aggression been checked years earlier. No one can know whether or not this is true, but Kennedy wisely saw that, whether or not it was true, the situation confronting him had unique aspects which called for a unique response. His belief in the absolute intolerability of a nuclear presence so near our boarders was countered by his fear of retaliation against the people of Berlin, should we act precipitously. There are many ways in which the Cuban Missile Crisis could have been resolved...but I believe that it was Kennedy's determination to fully understand the various nuances of the situation, in order to respond carefully and appropriately, that led to a resolution that did not include a nuclear holocaust.
In another part of that same speech by Kennedy, he speaks to concerns that many of us had about Iraq before the invasion:
"Neither the United States of America nor the world community of nations can tolerate deliberate deception and offensive threats on the part of any nation, large or small. We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation's security to constitute maximum peril. Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift, that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace."
While the situation was different, these words explain why in 2002, most Americans considered Saddam's perceived determination to develop nuclear weapons to constitute a direct and deadly threat. While I agree with JFK's premise that the mere possession of weapons of mass destruction by a country like Iraq can constitute a clear and present danger, at the time, I was unconvinced that Iraq did have these weapons. One of the reasons for that doubt was my knowledge of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
While working on Thirteen Days, I had seen the U2 surveillance photos of 1962. In fact, the entire world saw them when Stevenson argued our position at the UN in 1962. In 2002, I found it difficult to believe that forty years later, our technology could not manage to supply us with comparable evidence. We now know that one answer to that question was that there wasn't any evidence. If we had insisted on more proof and less rhetoric, we may have had fewer Senators willing to cast a vote to authorize the war.
The threat of nuclear power in the hands of a perceived enemy is compelling. Fear can influence people to act against some of their most strongly held convictions. In fact, one of the ways our government got the scientists of the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb in the first place, was to convince them (many of them Jewish) that Hitler was hot on the trail of developing the same weapon...which, of course, turned out not to be true. Nonetheless, the fear was enough drive away any reservations any may have had. In 1946, Einstein said: "If I had known that the Germans would not succeed in constructing the atom bomb, I would never have lifted a finger."
None of this is to say that I don't I think we should defend ourselves. However, the question still remains: from whom and how? I think we need to respect the complexity of the situation and respond with a clear understanding of what is actually going on... something Kennedy made every attempt to do and which Bush clearly failed to do when he decided to invade Iraq.
If there is anything I want to learn from the past, it is that we cannot react to situations because our leaders say "just cuz." They told us that all communists were evil...so we blacklisted them, feared them and persecuted them. One of the byproducts of the 1950s red scares was that any person with history or understanding of Asia was branded a "pinko" or a "commie" and was "purged" from the "intelligence" community and government. This is one of the reasons that the government so terribly misjudged so much of what happened during the years we fought in Vietnam. Most of the people who could have knowledgeably advised the President had been weeded out of his pool of advisors.
Sadly, President Bush showed no apparent desire to seek the counsel of those who understood all the nuances of the situation in the middle-east. Yes, his advisors included people who had waged war there, but sorely missing were people who had spent the time to understand what it is to wage peace there. These were my concerns from the start.
No one really knows how Bush would have handled the Cuban missile crisis or how JFK would have handled the Iraq crisis, but we do know that Kennedy's process (calling multiple meetings of top advisors with a variety of perspectives) gave him a more complex understanding of his options and pitfalls than Bush's process did. When lives are at stake, I'll take the guy (or gal) who takes the time to understand the situation fully before committing American blood and treasure.
According to various accounts, Bush was unfamiliar with the distinction between Sunni and Shia Muslims for as long as a year after his "Axis of Evil" speech. In contrast, JFK was doodling the word "Berlin" on a piece of paper during the initial meetings about the Cuban Missile Crisis, an indication he was considering the various ramifications of any action he took. I guess my point is that JFK's approach to decision-making was much more thoughtful and; I'd argue that thoughtful leadership is better.
It remains to be seen what President Obama's legacy will be in the end. However, one of the reasons I have such faith in him as a leader, is that he has demonstrated just such an ability to consider the complexities of the world as he navigates the treacherous waters of foreign policy.
Following is an excerpt of his speech against going to war with Iraq from 2002:
I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.
I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.
Let us hope that as President Obama meets incoming challenges, both foreign and domestic, he continues to listen to draw on the strength of conviction and wisdom that led him to oppose the Iraq war in 2002. We know that Robert McNamara had a compass that served him well during the Cuban Missile Crisis...didn't mean he knew which way to go in Vietnam.
, which was about President Kennedy's response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The film was based on the book by Ernest R. May Ph.D. and Philip D. Zelikow, 
. One of the most fascinating aspects of the crisis was the decision-making process, as orchestrated by Kennedy, and the superlative crisis-management skills he demonstrated. When President Kennedy was informed that the Soviets were establishing a base of nuclear weapons in Cuba, he immediately assembled a diverse team of experts, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExCom), including Secretary McNamara, to advise him as to his options in dealing with the situation. As the possibility of nuclear war loomed large, Kennedy held multiple, grueling sessions of ExCom. The book contains transcripts of many of these deliberations. 
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Simple Fix for Blocking #MonkeyButler Bots
Simple Fix for Blocking #MonkeyButler Bots
Simple Fix for Blocking #MonkeyButler Bots
Simple Fix for Blocking #MonkeyButler Bots