How I Made a 1,474-Megapixel Photo During President Obama’s Inaugural Address | David Bergman -- ALL ACCESS -- sports, concert, and music photographer
http://www.davidbergman.net/blog/2009/01/22/how-i-made-a-1474-megapixel-photo-during-president-obamas-inaugural-address/

Huge pano of Obama's inauguration

"My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes." I think the photography aspect is more interesting than the Obama aspect. The level of zoomable detail is amazing!

"The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos."

"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari" And the geeks shall inherit the Earth.

En arrivant à la Maison Blanche, l'équipe Obama, qui a mené la campagne la plus "2.0" de l'Histoire a découvert l'horreur d'une institution qui est resté à l'âge de pierre...

This is absolutely the reason the internet was invented.

Yes, only in Japan does Barack Obama fight Darth Vadar with a light saber

joanne

obama vs. darth vader

Must get interview

Jon Favreau

ジョン・ファブローとオバマの間でどのようなやりとりがあったか。

Guardian profile of Jon Favreau, head speechwriter for President Barack Obama.

eine art meta-"making of" mitsamt vorstellung eines engen mitarbeiter von barack obama

READ THE ARTICLE READ THE ARTICLE

Hi Res picture from above

Worldwide shots capture reaction to the inauguration of Barack Obama

amazing. can't believe i was there.

capas de obama

Great site keeping tabs on Obama's campaign promises.

via waxy

"PolitiFact has compiled about 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign and is tracking their progress on our Obameter. We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken."

Yes, the Whitehouse now has a blog.

Yes, the White House has a blog. It started up the day of the inauguration.

The official blog from the White House.

"Select a scene:" の一番下。Photosynthの技術があの瞬間を切り取って、その雰囲気を集めてる。

就任式をphotosynthで

Photosynth

After a historic campaign season and Election Day, Barack Obama begins his term in the White House with a record-breaking inauguration.

great use of photosynth to show multidimensionality of Obama's election. one browses from one household to the other.... great stuff!!!

Amazing panorama of the U.S. president giving his inauguration speech (try viewing full-screen on a 30" monitor!)

site du washington post sur l'administration obama (participatif)

Awesome site provided by the Washington Post that provides in-depth information on many of Washington's inside elite.

WhoRunsGov.com offers a unique look at the world of Washington through its key players and personalities.

Washington Post experiment

amazing viz

"At noon EST, Barack H. Obama became the 44th president of the United States of America. Watch as the (Twitter) world watched. Below are the tweets worldwide that included inauguration with a "positive attitude." " - Flowing Data

minister

Follow UK political scene with your twitter feed

the place where real life and politics tweet. :.

Forget the corridors of power... You can take an active role in UK politics right here, right now. How? Follow and Tweet MPs and Parliamentary Candidates, and use the power of Twitter to track UK politics, make your voice heard and conversations more open. You can take a back seat... or you can tweet.

england

DOJ story on Google's failed attempt to do advertising with Yahoo.. and lawyer-ly intrique and microsoft scare tactics

An article on everyone's favorite search engine by the awesome folks over at Wired.com.

Google may not be evil, but it sure does have enemies.

Absolutely Brilliant. Transparency in Government will take back our country.

Herramientas que pone el estado Americano para contactar con la administración Publica

** Posted using Viigo: Mobile RSS, Sports, Current Events and more **

วิธีดู งานสาบานตนของ Obama

Hall of shame...if they have any.

The worst economic turmoil since the Great Depression is not a natural phenomenon but a man-made disaster in which we all played a part. In the second part of a week-long series looking behind the slump, Guardian City editor Julia Finch picks out the individuals who have led us into the current crisis

... and six more who saw it coming

Final Presidential photos of Bush. HAGKYD

Errol Morris spricht mit Agenturjournalisten über Bush-Fotos

The traveling pool of press photographers that follows presidents includes representatives from three wire services — AP (The Associated Press), AFP (Agence France-Presse) and Thomson Reuters. During the last week of the Bush administration, I asked the head photo editors of these news services — Vincent Amalvy (AFP), Santiago Lyon (AP) and Jim Bourg (Reuters) — to pick the photographs of the president that they believe captured the character of the man and of his administration. There are overlapping pictures — of the president with a bullhorn at Ground Zero, of the president looking out the window of Air Force One over New Orleans, of the president receiving the news on the morning of 9/11. It is interesting that these pictures are different. They may be of the same scene, but they have different content. They speak in a different way. (The photos are reproduced here with their original captions, unedited.)

Errol Morris writes, "The traveling pool of press photographers that follows presidents includes representatives from three wire services -- AP (The Associated Press), AFP (Agence France-Presse) and Thomson Reuters. During the last week of the Bush administration, I asked the head photo editors of these news services -- Vincent Amalvy (AFP), Santiago Lyon (AP) and Jim Bourg (Reuters) -- to pick the photographs of the president that they believe captured the character of the man and of his administration. There are overlapping pictures -- of the president with a bullhorn at Ground Zero, of the president looking out the window of Air Force One over New Orleans, of the president receiving the news on the morning of 9/11. It is interesting that these pictures are different. They may be of the same scene, but they have different content. They speak in a different way."

Photographs of George W. Bush and what their meaning to Errol Morris and other photojournalists.

photos of George Bush

Iconic pictures of Bush from various photographers framed differently

Text of President Barack Obama's inaugural address on Tuesday, as delivered.

de Bush a Obama xd

The resemblance between Bush and Obama is uncanny... The middle picture, which is coincidentally the average between the two, happens to be the best-looking IMO.

George W. Bush -> Barack H. Obama

Funny Sheeit

Sarah Palin Charges: If you want to know why the rest of the world is scared of Americans, consider the fact that after two terms of disastrous rule by a small-minded ignoramus, 46% of us apparently thought the problem was that he wasn’t quite stupid enough. Palin’s unending emissions of baffling, evasive incoherence should have disqualified her for any position that involved a desk, let alone placing her one erratic heartbeat from the presidency. The press strained mightily to feign respect for her, praising a debate performance that involved no debate, calling her a “great speaker” when her only speech was primarily a litany of insults to city-dwellers, echoing bogus sexism charges when a male Palin would have been boiled alive for the Couric interview alone, and lionizing her as she used her baby as a Pro-life stage prop before crowds who cooed when they should have been hurling polonium-tipped javelins. In the end, Palin had the beneficial effect of splitting her party betwe...

wow! is this the first wave of barack obama criticism? note: i don't know who 3/5ths of the people on this list are, but for everyone else, this tells it like it is. some very choice words.

web 2.0 and collaborative communication

Techcrunch

open-source democracy.

Obama nutzt die Onlinedienste von Google, Facebook etc auch als Präsident. Spannende Entwicklung, neben der bejahenden Tech-Sicht fehlt noch die kritischere Hinterfragung.

An absolutely amazing high definition panoramic image of the inauguration. Try zooming in. Wow.

Sir David Attenborough has revealed that he receives hate mail from viewers for failing to credit God in his documentaries. In an interview with this week's Radio Times about his latest documentary, on Charles Darwin and natural selection, the broadcaster said: "They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance."

Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give "credit" to God, Attenborough added: "They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator."

Attenborough is as great as his haters are tiny and useless.

because you LOVE him :P

"Sir David Attenborough has revealed that he receives hate mail from viewers for failing to credit God in his documentaries."

"...asked why he did not give "credit" to God, Attenborough added: "They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.""

Sir David Attenborough has revealed that he receives hate mail from viewers for failing to credit God in his documentaries. In an interview with this week's Radio Times about his latest documentary, on Charles Darwin and natural selection, the broadcaster said: "They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance." Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give "credit" to God, Attenborough added: "They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator."

Politico44 is a new and innovative way to cover the Obama presidency, minute-by-minute. Powered by the largest White House staff around, it will be the go-to place for news and analysis about the president, the staff, the first lady, the vice president, and the new administration.

Very cool site that gives you details about what Obama is doing and who he meets every day.

ChairmanBruce:

2009 Will Be a Year of Panic

Intellectual property made sense and used to work rather well when conditions of production favored it. Now they don't. If it's simple to copy just one single movie, some gray area of fair use can be tolerated. If it becomes easy to copy a million movies with one single button-push, this vast economic superstructure is reduced to rags. Our belief in this kind of "property" becomes absurd.

good article

The key players are now all in place in Washington and in state governments across America to officially label carbon dioxide as a pollutant and enact laws that tax we citizens for our carbon footprints. Only two details stand in the way, the faltering economic times and a dramatic turn toward a colder climate. The last two bitter winters have led to a rise in public awareness that there is no runaway global warming. The public is now becoming skeptical of the claim that our carbon footprints from the use of fossil fuels is going to lead to climatic calamities.

President-elect Obama has made a clear commitment to changing the way government relates to the People. His campaign was a demonstration of the value in such change, and a glimpse of its potential. His transition team has now taken a crucial step in making the work of the transition legally shareable, demonstrating that the values Obama spoke of are values that will guide his administration. To further support this commitment to change, and to help make it tangible, we offer three “open transition principles” to guide the transition in its use of the Internet to produce the very best in open government.

President-elect Obama has made a very clear commitment to changing the way government works with its citizens. To this end, we offer these three principles to guide the transition in its objective to build upon the very best of the Internet to produce the very best for government.

Thoughts on how to make the transition between presidential administrations as open and transparent as possible.

President-elect Obama has made a very clear commitment to changing the way government works with its citizens.

http://open-government.us/

Constitution-free zone

Using data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, the ACLU has determined that nearly 2/3 of the entire US population (197.4 million people) live within 100 miles of the US land and coastal borders. The government is assuming extraordinary powers to stop and search individuals within this zone.

I live within 100 miles of the coastal border and "the government is assuming extraordinary powers to stop and search individuals within this zone." I don't have constitutional rights. ...Wait, what?

America's

"I wrote these principles after reflecting on the content of contemporary newspapers and broadcast media and why that content disquieted me. I saw that I was not disturbed so much by what was written or said as I was by what is not. The tacit assumptions underlying most popular content reflect a worldview that is orthogonal to reality in many ways. By reflecting this skewed weltanschauung, the media reinforces and propagates it. I call this worldview the American Cargo Cult, after the real New Guinea cargo cults that arose after the second world war. There are four main points, each of which has several elaborating assumptions. I really do think that most Americans believe these things at a deep level, and that these misbeliefs constantly underlie bad arguments in public debate."

Minimalist satire on ordinary attitudes

http://unreasonablefaith.com/2009/01/21/how-to-stump-anti-abortionists-with-one-question/

"Did you know you can stump anti-abortionists with one simple question? Just ask them this: If abortion was illegal, what should be done with the women who have illegal abortions?" | IT MAKES NO SENSE, PEOPLE. THINK!

What do you think?

This was really interesting to see how people messed up ballots. One has to wonder if somebody with OCD caused a few of these.

Representatives from the campaigns of Sen. Norm Coleman and Al Franken have been challenging ballots across the state. It's your turn to play election judge. Tell us how you would rule in the case of these challenged ballots.

Minnesota contest with Al Franken comes down to challenged ballots.

TOO.FUNNY.

natural portraits a true individual destined for greatness....really nice to see these...

Obama : The College Years - nice hat

via rodcorp

On the problems of torture and benefits of simple detective investigation: "We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work [...] 'I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate.' [...] I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo"

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

"I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq.The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. "

How could anyone deny the opinions of someone one the ground ... especially someone on the ground who was successful.

Until we renounce the sorts of abuses that have stained our national honor, al-Qaeda will be winning.

Interrogator reveals practical reasons why torture was not just wrong in principle, but counterproductive in practice.

Don't constrain your self by making too much part of your identity (reminds me of much of Tom Robbins's writing)

Paul Graham

4 mr.hoffer students ONLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this is obama's speech in words & in video!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! d:-P

The text of Obama's inaugural speech

Everyone knows how well Barack Obama's presidential campaign made use of new media to raise money and market the candidate. We also know how big a role social ...

A global perspective on Americans’ religiosity offers a few surprises

Great charts.

"A global perspective on Americans’ religiosity offers a few surprises"

thought you might be interested in this

The centerpiece of President Obama's domestic agenda is an $819 billion economic stimulus plan. The Senate will consider the measure this week, with an eye toward the amount of tax cuts and spending. Republicans and Democrats spar over what to consider a tax cut. An analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office tallies the tax-cut portion to be significantly less than the one-third Democrats claim it to be.

The Washington Post's breakdown of the stimulus package.

not the clearest visualization. could benefit from some compactness, perhaps via mouse interaction/exploration. but definitely a lot of good research and data in here.

Congressional reports made public...

The 6,780 reports, current as of this month, comprise over 127,000 pages of material on some of the most contentious issues in the nation, from the U.S. relationship with Israel to the financial collapse. Nearly 2,300 of the reports were updated in the last 12 months, while the oldest report goes back to 1990. The release represents the total output of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) electronically available to Congressional offices. The CRS is Congress's analytical agency and has a budget in excess of $100M per year.

Frightening look into the future of a social collapse in the US (and by extension other western countries) based on the experiences of the Russian collapse.

save

Hmmm. Trying not to panic.

save

obama's fc plan

obama plan website

A few weeks ago Obama's new secretary or treasury Tim Geitner unveiled the outlines of a plan to fix the financial crisis in our Country. One of the problems with these massive plans from the government is that citizens want to know exactly where their money is going. This is the treasury secretary's answer to that problem this site will document where all the money for the proposed plan will be documented and will be able to track.

Obama run site to track stimuls package spending

What do you do if you don't have the money to pay a debt? If you are like most of us, you borrow. The US Government is no different. In order to pay for the $700 billion bailout, it will have to borrow more money, increasing the national debt. But who will pay for this massive bailout? If you are a US taxpayer, you will. Here is a visual guide to understanding how the bailout is funded and a couple of financial experts take on how it could be funded.

What do you do if you don’t have the money to pay a debt? If you are like most of us, you borrow. The US Government is no different. In order to pay for the $700 billion bailout, it will have to borrow more money, increasing the national debt. But who will pay for this massive bailout? If you are a US taxpayer, you will.

A nice graphic showing how the Bailout is being funded

Republican Senators are questioning whether President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill contains the right mix of tax breaks and cash infusions to jump-start the economy. Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department. Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health. (Page numbers refer to H.R. 1 EH, pdf version).

A lot of this is twisted but she's wrong about the position being new - Bush created it in 2004 from HHS.Gov - In 2004, the President issued an Executive Order establishing the position of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology within the Office of the Secretary of HHS. The primary purpose of this position is to aid the Secretary of HHS in achieving the President’s Goal for most Americans to have access to an interoperable electronic medical record by 2014.

Based on Tom Daschle's desire to emulate failed European health care market models, the porkulus plan has provisions to create a government run health information system which will track individual health records and recommend treatments. Daschle said we have to expect less health care as we get older because you're old and you're going to die soon anyway. Still the liberal elites will always be able to opt out of this system just like members of Congress don't pay into Social Security. The health part of this bill is all about getting more people under government run care in order to create dependence on politicians and bureaucrats. The only way to get as many people as possible under a government system is to ration.

Who in the world thinks this woman has any credibility criticizing health care plans after 1993?

Eye-opening glimpse of dealing w healthcare costs; suggests treating HC as a growth industry vs. cost drain but gives no guidance

describing the nationalizing of healthcare in the stimulus plan

"How the economy went so bad, so fast and what Bernanke and Paulson did't see, couldn't stop and weren't able to fix."

The full text of Barack Obama's speech on his inauguration as US president.

Imagine if the White House was run democratically where everything was voted on by the public. Well, this site tries to simulate just that.

An interesting exercise in the effect of Digg and Democracy

Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

Make your own Inauguration Speech. Is it too easy?

In case you fancy writing your own inauguration speech...!

Inaugural Days Events

Obama, Biden, both Clintons, both Bushes, Cheney, Palin, Gore, Carter, Pelosi, Huckabee, McCain, Giuliani and Blagojevich (plus a few more in linked updates...)

اگر به جای عکسی مستطیل قرمز دیدید لطف مخابرات را جبران کنید

design img

A sensible commentary on the state of India.

The collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender. We had Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City and co-writer of the Bollywood film Mission Kashmir, give us his version of George Bush's famous "Why they hate us" speech. His analysis of why religious bigots, both Hindu and Muslim hate Mumbai: "Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness." His prescription: "The best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever." Didn't George Bush ask Americans to go out and shop after 9/11? Ah yes. 9/11, the day we can't seem to get away from.

There is a fierce, unforgiving fault-line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let's call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially "Islamist" terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try and place it in a political context, or even try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself. Side B believes that though nothing can ever excuse or justify terrorism, it exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm's way. Which is a crime in itself.

From this entry I get information about how much more Obama used the Social Networking cites online than McCain and how that helped him.

deep

A little late, but wonderful nonetheless.

Preparations for the inauguration ceremony tomorrow for the 44th President of the United States of America have been taking place for months now. Security, transportation, logistics, sanitation, everything you can think of to accomodate the predicted millions of attendees.

great pictures

This half-meter resolution image of the United States Capitol, Washington D.C. was collected by the GeoEye-1 satellite on Jan. 20, 2009 to commemorate the Inauguration of President Barack Obama. The image, taken through high, wispy white clouds, shows the masses of people attending the Inaugural Celebration. (click to download)

I honestly can't believe this is real. Appalling, but true.

With all the recent talk about the decline of big media (eg. Seth Godin's article at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/01/when-newspapers.html), I thought it relevant to point to this piece about the shocking state of world slavery: "For four years, I saw dozens of people enslaved, several of whom traffickers actually offered to sell to me. I did not pay for a human life anywhere. And, with one exception, I always withheld action to save any one person, in the hope that my research would later help to save many more. At times, that still feels like an excuse for cowardice. But the hard work of real emancipation can’t be the burden of a select few." What place does four years worth of investigative journalism have in an internet driven meritocracy? Philanthropic endeavours? Streamlined news journals?Reportage is going to change and it is important we don't lose the power to expose issues like this.

Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common. Before you go, let’s be clear on what you are buying. A slave is a human being forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. Agreed? Good. Most people imagine that slavery died in the 19th century. Since 1817, more than a dozen international conventions have been signed banning the slave trade. Yet, today there are more slaves than at any time in human history.

"Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common. ... The total number of Haitian children in bondage in their own country stands at 300,000."

Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common.

There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history

Obama experience, paso a paso

Here's the website of the Monarchy in Britain

My fascination with the British Monarchy continues to grow as my stay in the UK lengthens

waive

an interesting blog post on how banks set credit card limits

Today, we are bailing out the banks because of their greedy and deceptive lending practices in the mortgage industry. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. More is coming, I’m sorry to say. Layoffs are being announced nationwide in the tens of thousands. As people begin to lose their jobs, they will not be able to pay their credit card bills either. And the banks will be back for more handouts.

The Worst Is Yet To Come: Anonymous Banker Weighs In On The Coming Credit Card Debacle

Life at Wal-Mart

Wal*Mart isn't the devil? <gasp>

How about a different opinoin on those Wal-Mart jobs.

he seems surprised that the people who work at WalMart aren't ogres, and he completely ignores the fact that the writings about conditions at WM may have led to the improvements that he sees

How did I not link to this before?

he reads a book and swears. great

What Obama should really say to his opponents; mp3 clips from his book; impersonations; slang dialogue; Obama's range of intonations and personae

dang, obama cussing!!

In his bestselling autobiography, Dreams From My Father, President Obama introduces us to his high school friend, “Ray,” who, like him, is bi-racial. Who, also like him, is casting about to find his place in the world. But, who, unlike him, has a potty mouth that would make a sailor blush. Best of all? When reading the audiobook version of his bio, Obama does impressions of Ray’s manner of speech. Swear words and all. It’s fucking awesome. And it’s a way of talking we probably won’t be hearing from him now that he’s POTUS.

goodness, this could be fun for new ringtones. (I'm sure everyone in my office is sick of The Avalanches by now.)

An interactive inquiry about why America hasn't been attacked again. By Timothy NoahUpdated Friday, Feb. 27, 2009, at 8:59 AM ET

This is the first in a series of eight essays exploring why the United States suffered no follow-up terror attacks after 9/11.

8 reasons why the music industry can't blame piracy alone for its decline in revenue.

During The Pirate Bay trial, the music industry placed the blame for the decline in their revenues squarely on the shoulders of file-sharers. Their logic is clearly flawed, but it could sway the verdict if no alternative explanation is presented. So, if piracy isn’t to blame, then what is *actually* killing the music industry?

Musikkbransjens motgang skyldes ikke bare pirater

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rssstimulus RSS Hits the Big Time (Aaron Swartz's Raw

Via David: Obama segna un punto per la trasparenza. Il pacchetto stimulus richiede alle agenzie governative di produrre un feed con le elargizioni di denaro. Gov meshup, here we come.

The US Government are requiring agencies to publish funding information through RSS feeds. "For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription."

the new stimulus bill’s implementation instructions require that each government agency report the money it gives out in RSS: For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.

"the new stimulus bill’s implementation instructions require that each government agency report the money it gives out in RSS:"

As chaunceyt pointed out, the new stimulus bill’s implementation instructions require that each government agency report the money it gives out in RSS

sweet sweet RSS nozzle

"For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription." --- Now, someone needs to figure out where each of these feeds is (will be?) published, and write an aggregator so that there's a one-stop-shopping end-point.

"[T]he new stimulus bill’s implementation instructions require that each government agency report the money it gives out in RSS… The document is very clear that the items in the feed can’t simply be unstructured text, but have to be reusable data… Pretty amazing to see a government so tech-savvy."

Summaries of the best content from around the Web.

shortcut to the news of the day...

news and information

Leader Online

Striking editorial by murdered Sri Lankan journalist published posthumously.

An editorial by Lasantha Wickrematunge that was published after his assassination in which he spoke of...

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

(your name) is blacked out: Stand up against "Guilt Upon Accusation" for New Zealand http://creativefreedom.org.nz/blackout.html

What an insane law. I sure hope this doesn't go into effect.

The New Zealand Internet Blackout protests against the Guilt Upon Accusation law 'Section 92A' that calls for internet disconnection based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny. This is due to come into effect on February 28th unless immediate action is taken by the National Party.

Protest Against Guilt Upon Accusation Laws in NZ — Creative Freedom Foundation (creativefreedom.org.nz)

Think it's bad in AU with our new censorship filter party? Over in NZ, any accusation of copyright infringement could lead to disconnection. "The New Zealand Internet Blackout protests against the Guilt Upon Accusation law 'Section 92A' that calls for internet disconnection based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny."

Sowas wie der Bundestweet auf wahl.de, aber nicht vollständig

Unresolvable

Everyone deserves the same chance at permanence and happiness

Everyone deserves the same chance at permanence and happiness. On Countdown with Keith Olbermann, msnbc.com.

fun

ome very successful developments in the past 25 years, Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and

CNBC Financial Advice

first video against Santelli

The Daily Show | Comedy Central

Must read. 210309

If we wanted to rid the world of synthetic fertilizer use—and assuming dietary habits remain constant—the extra land we'd need for cover crops or forage (to feed the animals to make the manure) would more than double, possibly triple, the current area of farmland, according to Vaclav Smil, an environmental scientist at the University of Manitoba. Such an expansion, Smil notes, "would require complete elimination of all tropical rainforests, conversion of a large part of tropical and subtropical grasslands to cropland, and the return of a substantial share of the labor force to field farming—making this clearly only a theoretical notion."

by Paul Roberts (at Mother Jones) — the gist seems to be: re-evaluate your assumptions about what sustainable agriculture means (hint: it involves more than just carbon footprints and whether/not the farm is organic; see also: labor conditions, see also: man-hours of labor) and maybe be prepared to consider a few harsh realities about cost/benefit before you buy another heirloom tomato for $4

Spoiled: Organic and Local Is So 2008

Our industrial food system is rotten to the core. Heirloom arugula won't save us. Here's what will.

Sam Bee says Twitter has become such a big deal because it's awesome and our rotting corpses are grabbing for its glimmer.

The President is holding a new kind of online town hall where he will answer the questions you submitted and voted on for him. The event begins here at 11:30am ET. You can read the most popular questions submitted on the economy below.

WhiteHouse.gov is the official web site for the White House and President Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. This site is a source for information about the President, White House news and policies, White House history, and the federal government.

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform.

But these various policies—lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership—had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector’s profits—such as Brooksley Born’s now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998—were ignored or swept aside.

A withering op-ed by Simon Johnson on the policy disaster that is our financial sector. But he's still not willing to re-evaluate the underlying premise of perpetually debt fueled exponential economic growth. How, exactly, was this all supposed to work out?

The most lucid summary I've read to date on the current global financial crisis. Written in a clear manner by Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a former the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. His conclusion: Nationalize the banks immediately, break up the financial oligarchies which have brought us to this point, and recast the entire banking sector so the blackmail of "we're too big too fail" cannot be used again.

An article by Mark Danner from The New York Review of Books, April 9, 2009

We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not.

Mark Danner obtains Red Cross report on CIA Black Sites - US behavior toward detainees = "torture"

Mark Danner obtains confidential ICRC report on CIA torture.

the toread tag is becoming more aspirational all the time

"Oh, look. Here's the jerk who wrote the code that broke everything. A confession."

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work. Almost always, countries in crisis need to learn to live within their means after a period of excess—exports must be increased, and imports cut—and the goal is to do this without the most horrible of recessions. Naturally, the fund’s economists spend time figuring out the policies—budget, money supply, and the like—that make sense in this context. Yet the economic solution is seldom very hard to work out. No, the real concern of the fund’s senior staff, and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics of countries in crisis. Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises.

"In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay."

A former head of the IMF offers an insightful and alarming look at how the United States has been hijacked by a cabal of rotten financiers.

nice idea (accountability? no!)

Holding the experts to account

matt simmons "We are three, six, maybe nine months away from an [oil] price shock." - 2009-03-26 268 days open barton biggs the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index may rally between 30 percent and 50 percent from the 12-year low reached on March 9 - 2009-03-23 355 days open

Fantastic new site that lists and tracks predictions of the future made by public figures and purported experts.

By Christopher Hitchens

What the author of Das Kapital reveals about the current economic crisis by Christopher Hitchens

awesome painter - working on a serious of herself having sex with every us president amazing concept :)

Artists paints herself having sex with all the US presidents.

The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonmonthly.com%2Ffeatures%2F2009%2F0903.galbraith.html

"Why the economic crisis, and its solution, are bigger than you think."

hmm

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

The financial industry brought the economy to its knees, but how did they get away with it? With the nation wondering how to hold the bankers accountable, Bill Moyers sits down with William K. Black, the former senior regulator who cracked down on banks during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. Black offers his analysis of what went wrong and his critique of the bailout

Now Black is focused on an even greater scandal, and he spares no one — not even the President he worked hard to elect, Barack Obama. But his main targets are the Wall Street barons, heirs of an earlier generation whose scandalous rip-offs of wealth back in the 1930s earned them comparison to Al Capone and the mob, and the nickname "banksters."

The former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention now teaches Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. During the savings and loan crisis, it was Black who accused then-house speaker Jim Wright and five US Senators, including John Glenn and John McCain, of doing favors for the S&L's in exchange for contributions and other perks. The senators got off with a slap on the wrist, but so enraged was one of those bankers, Charles Keating — after whom the senate's so-called "Keating Five" were named — he sent a memo that read, in part, "get Black — kill him dead." Metaphorically, of course. Of course. Now Black is focused on an even greater scandal, and he spares no one — not even the President he worked hard to elect, Barack Obama. But his main targets are the Wall Street barons, heirs of an earlier generation whose scandalous rip-offs of wealth back in the 1930s earned them comparison to Al Capone and the mob, and the nickname "banksters."

video from jonas' recomendation

the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent. Then came the point he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated have historically been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, the report said, "this pattern has now changed, and the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified." As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America's religious culture was cracking.

The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now—and what, as a nation, we are about to become.

Well written and interesting American culture study.

If it's too good to be true...

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. Johann Hari reports

Excellent Article on Dubai: "Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history."

Excellent statement about how images of people in the past are almost unable to be tainted.

Justine Lai was born in San Francisco and raised in Sacramento, California. She currently lives and works in San Francisco. I was introduced to her Join Or Die series. I like her work.

YES

What is fragile should break early while it is still small.

N.N. Taleb's ideas about how to avoid financial black swans in the future, based principally on greater regulation (regulating to help people from themselves)

"No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards."

Dramatic footage obtained by the Guardian shows that the man who died at last week's G20 protests in London was attacked from behind and thrown to the ground by a baton–wielding police officer in riot gear. Moments after the assault on Ian Tomlinson was captured on video, he suffered a heart attack and died. The Guardian has handed a dossier of evidence to the police complaints watchdog.

Extraordinary footage filmed at G20 protests in London of baton-wielding police attacking the man who died.

Here is another great moment in A.P. history. In its quest to become the RIAA of the newspaper industry, the A.P.’s executives and lawyers are beginning to match their counterparts in the music industry for cluelessness. A country radio station in Tennessee, WTNQ-FM, received a cease-and-desist letter warning from an A.P. vice president of affiliate relations for posting videos from the A.P.’s official Youtube channel on its Website. See update below.

You cannot make this stuff up. Forget for a moment that WTNQ is itself an A.P. affiliate and that the A.P. shouldn’t be harassing its own members. Apparently, nobody told the A.P. executive that the august news organization even has a YouTube channel which the A.P. itself controls, and that someone at the A.P. decided that it is probably a good idea to turn on the video embedding function on so that its videos can spread virally across the Web, along with the ads in the videos.

see review in boing boing

free book: describes sustainable energy solutions

1基の7.62mm機関銃が非武装の人間にどれほどの脅威か、この記事の記者が知らないはずはないだろう

Johann Hari on the motivations behind the Somali pirates.

There's a lot more to understand about Somalia... http://tinyurl.com/cfrrpf (via @Xtal)

True? Somali "pirates" are defending illegal fishing

We had hoped this would go differently.

April 7th, 2009 Friday evening, in a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, EFF's litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans, the Obama Administration's made two deeply troubling arguments.

Preciso ler assim que tiver tempo

Eric Hobsbawm: Whatever ideological logo we adopt, the shift from free market to public action needs to be bigger than politicians grasp

"Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left."

cool visual on where tax dollars are spent

A Visual Guide to Where Your Tax Dollars Go Interesting, detailed poster. Obama's budget requests.

I'm not sure if the argument is right; many people die from heart disease, but I don't think we can say that better diet and exercise would have prevented 100% of these deaths.

Great foresight from the guy who tried to beat the poker pros

While the nation's lenders ran amok during the boom, Andy Beal hoarded his money. Now he's cleaning up - with scant help from Uncle Sam.

Andy Beal, a 56-year-old, poker-playing college dropout, is a one-man toxic-asset eater--without a shred of government assistance. Beal plays his cards patiently. For three long years, from 2004 to 2007, he virtually stopped making or buying loans. While the credit markets were roaring and lenders were raking in billions, Beal shrank his bank's assets because he thought the loans were going to blow up. He cut his staff in half and killed time playing backgammon or racing cars. He took long lunches with friends, carping to them about "stupid loans." His odd behavior puzzled regulators, credit agencies and even his own board. They wondered why he was seemingly shutting the bank down, resisting the huge profits the nation's big banks were making. One director asked him: "Are we a dinosaur?"

good content - horrible design makes me not want to read it

by Bruce Perens

@SalonMedia - "The success of drug decriminalization in Portugal - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com" http://hub.tm/?LWZYD [from http://twitter.com/carreonG/statuses/1337259173]

Evaluating the policy strictly from an empirical perspective, decriminalization has been an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offense.

Particularly in the U.S., there is still widespread support for criminalization approaches and even support for the most extreme and destructive aspects of the "War on Drugs," but, for a variety of reasons, the debate over drug policy has become far more open than ever before. Portugal's success with decriminalization is highly instructive, particularly since the impetus for it was their collective recognition in the 1990s that criminalization was failing to address -- and was almost certainly exacerbating -- their exploding, poverty-driven drug crisis. As a consensus in that country now recognizes, decriminalization is what enabled them to manage drug-related problems far more effectively than ever before, and the nightmare scenarios warned of by decriminalization opponents have, quite plainly, never materialized. The counter-productive effects of drug criminalization are at least as evident now for the U.S. as they were for pre-decriminalization Portugal. Beyond one's ideological

"Evaluating the policy strictly from an empirical perspective, decriminalization has been an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offense."

to read

How Rich Countries Die

This is a book report on The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, by Mancur Olson. There isn’t a whole lot about how nations pulled themselves out of their medieval stagnation (see A Farewell to Alms for that), so a better title for this still-in-print book from 1982 would be “How Rich Countries Die.”

ugh lots of fun shit to read when i'm being a goth etc.

What really happened to Russia's missing cosmonauts? An incredible tale of space hacking, espionage and death in the lonely reaches of space.

Midnight, 19 May 1961. A crisp frost had descended on Turin’s city centre which was deserted and deathly silent. Well, almost. Two brothers, aged 20 and 23, raced through the grid-like streets (that would later be made famous by the film The Italian Job) in a tiny Fiat 600, which screamed in protest as they bounced across one cobbled piazza after another at top speed. The Fiat was loaded with dozens of iron pipes and aluminium sheets which poked out of windows and were strapped to the roof. The car screeched to a halt outside the city’s tallest block of flats. Grabbing their assorted pipes, along with a large toolbox, the two brothers ran up the stairs to the rooftop. Moments later, the city’s silence was rudely broken once more as they set to work: a concerto of hammering, clattering, sawing and shouting. Suddenly, an angry voice rang out; the man who lived on the floor below leant out of the window and screamed: “Will you stop that racket, I’m trying to sleep!” One of the young me

What really happened to Russia's missing cosmonauts? An incredible tale of space hacking, espionage and death in the lonely reaches of space. FT233 Midnight, 19 May 1961.

From China

"News stories about North Korea have been quite frequent recently, with their test launch of a rocket over Japan, withdrawal from nuclear disarmament talks coupled with a threat to restart their nuclear program, reports that their nuclear attack capabilities may be larger than previously thought - and their recent arrest and indictment of two U.S. reporters on its border with China. Even with all this attention, photographs from North Korea are still restricted and hard to come by. One way around that has been for photographers to peer inside from across the border, a pastime that has also spurred a level of curious tourism in both neighboring South Korea and China. Collected here are a some recent photographs, looking into reclusive North Korea from the outside - and some of the reactions these observations induce"

Scroll down to number 25. All of my links today have been via http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/

Great shots.

read the actual torture memos

Torture memos 1

Top secret documents released by ACLU proving the US torutred

The New York Times' David Barstow won a richly deserved Pulitzer Prize yesterday for two articles that, despite being featured as major news stories on the front page of The Paper of Record, were completely suppressed by virtually every network and cable news show, which to this day have never informed their viewers about what Barstow uncovered. Here is how the Pulitzer Committee described Barstow's exposés: Awarded to David Barstow of The New York Times for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended. By whom were these "ties to companies" undisclosed and for whom did these deeply conflicted retired generals pose as "analysts"? ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox -- the very companies that have simply suppressed the story from their viewers. Th

CNN ran an 898-word story on the various Pulitzer winners -- describing virtually every winner -- but was simply unable to find any space even to mention David Barstow's name, let alone inform their readers that he won the Prize for uncovering core corruption at the heart of CNN's coverage of the Iraq War and other military-related matters. No other major television news outlet implicated by Barstow's story mentioned his award, at least as far as I can tell.

Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism awarded to journalist who uncovered complicity between Bush-era military and US media. His award goes unreported in same media. Shameful.

The outright refusal of any of these "news organizations" even to mention what Barstow uncovered about the Pentagon's propaganda program and the way it infected their coverage is one of the most illuminating events revealing how they operate. So transparently corrupt and journalistically disgraceful is their blackout of this story that even Howard Kurtz and Politico -- that's Howard Kurtz and Politico -- lambasted them for this concealment. Meaningful criticisms of media stars from media critic (and CNN star) Howie Kurtz is about as rare as prosecutions for politically powerful lawbreakers in America, yet this is what he said about the television media's suppression of Barstow's story: "their coverage of this important issue has been pathetic."

Awarded to David Barstow of The New York Times for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended. By whom were these "ties to companies" undisclosed and for whom did these deeply conflicted retired generals pose as "analysts"? ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox -- the very companies that have simply suppressed the story from their viewers. They kept completely silent about Barstow's story even though it sparked Congressional inquiries, vehement objections from the then-leading Democratic presidential candidates, and allegations that the Pentagon program violated legal prohibitions on domestic propaganda programs.

Project described in the Age, volunteer border watchers for USA-Mexico border

The TBSC BlueServoSM Virtual Community WatchSM is a network of cameras and sensors along the Texas-Mexico border that feeds live streaming video to www.BlueServo.net. Users will log in to the BlueServoSM website and directly monitor suspicious criminal activity along the border via this virtual fenceSM.

The Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition (TBSC) has joined BlueServoSM in a public-private partnership to deploy the Virtual Community Watch, an innovative real-time surveillance program designed to empower the public to proactively participate in fighting border crime. The TBSC BlueServoSM Virtual Community WatchSM is a network of cameras and sensors along the Texas-Mexico border that feeds live streaming video to www.BlueServo.net. Users will log in to the BlueServoSM website and directly monitor suspicious criminal activity along the border via this virtual fenceSM.

Beeindruckende Fotos aus dem Weißen Haus in Washington. Soviel Präsenz und Offenheit und Unverkrampfheit würde unserer Regierung auch mal gut zu Gesicht stehen!

The White House is on Flickr with great photos.

Joe Biden created the group "I Love ‘I Love You, Man,' Man.".

News organizations have done an admirable job of recapping the first 100 days of the Obama administration. But rarely do we stumble across a primary source like Barack Obama's own Facebook feed. Scroll down for the full story.

Barack Obama Sent Somali Pirates a Trio of Snipers

Ha ha ha ha ha!

How to stop the drug wars

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13237193 Howtostopthedrugwars Economist 2

i'm getting this because i keep searching for it on youtube and this should be faster. auto tune the news.

Stephen Fry's letter to himself: Dearest absurd childJust who was the young, arrogant and confused man to whom Stephen Fry recently felt compelled to write a long and heartfelt letter? Himself, 35 years ago

You went on to affirm that if ever you dared in later life to repudiate, deny or mock your 16-year-old self it would be a lie, a traducing, treasonable lie, a crime against adolescence. "This is who I am," you wrote. "Each day that passes I grow away from my true self. Every inch I take towards adulthood is a betrayal."

i am so charmed by old men writing wise letters to young men- rilke's, 'open letter to a young man', hofstadter writing to his young self, and now this one too

Stephen Fry: You wrote in 1973 a letter to your future self and it is high time your future self had the decency to write back

oh Stephen!

Well, damn. I use THREE operating systems, I must be a criminal mastermind. :P

"Aside from the remarkable overreach by campus and state police in trying to paint a student as suspicious in part because he can navigate a non-Windows computer environment, nothing cited in the warrant application could possibly constitute the cited criminal offenses."

"remarkable overreach by campus and state police in trying to paint a student as suspicious in part because he can navigate a non-Windows computer environment"

Reminds me of DC.

Q: What if markets never recover, the assets are not fundamentally undervalued, and even when held to maturity the government doesn’t make back its money? A: Then we have worse things to worry about than government losses on TARP-program money–for we are then in a world in which the only things that have value are bottled water, sewing needles, and ammunition.

bailout plan overview

on the morning of Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.” This mixing o

Nice overview of Donald Rumsfeld.

donald rumsfeld

Find the latest in men's fashion, men's clothing, news, gear, entertainment, travel and trends, gadget buying guides, grooming advice and style forums.

"Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has always answered his detractors by claiming that history will one day judge him kindly. But as he waits for that day, a new group of critics—his administration peers—are suddenly speaking out for the first time. What they’re saying? It isn’t pretty"

Excellent profile of Donald Rumsfeld, who, it turns out, pandered to Bush's religiosity by including old testament citations on his defense intelligence reports from Iraq. Yikes.

Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has always answered his detractors by claiming that history will one day judge him kindly. But as he waits for that day, a new group of critics—his administration peers—are suddenly speaking out for the first time. What they’re saying? It isn’t pretty

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often. With your help, Data.gov will continue to grow and change in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

WOW "The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government."

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.

The new U.S. federal open data site is live! "Data.gov will open up the workings of government by making economic, healthcare, environmental, and other government information available on a single website, allowing the public to access raw data and transform it in innovative ways."

Buy the DVD here http://banyak.co.uk/shop-usnow.php For more information, extra clips and reviews please go to usnowfilm.com

Buy the DVD here banyak.co.uk/shop-usnow.php For more information, extra clips and reviews please go to usnowfilm.com

Video

simplified the data from the CIA World Factbook

As we discussed in yesterday’s post, whether the United States and China like it or not, the economic futures of both countries are intertwined. Everyone knows that China’s got more people and that its importance as an economic superpower has escalated in recent years. What you might not understand is how the differences between our countries, in economic philosophy, in population, in geography and in how the military is built and paid for ultimately play into the entire economic relationship. For many China remains something of a mystery. In order to help compare and contrast the economic differences, we have simplified the data from the CIA World Factbook. For the exact numbers in any category, check here.

China vs United States

This report documents the GhostNet - a suspected cyber espionage network of over 1,295 infected computers in 103 countries, 30% of which are high-value targets, including ministries of foreign affairs, embassies, international organizations, news media, and NGOs. The capabilities of GhostNet are far-reaching. The report reveals that Tibetan computer systems were compromised giving attackers access to potentially sensitive information, including documents from the private office of the Dalai Lama. The report presents evidence showing that numerous computer systems were compromised in ways that circumstantially point to China as the culprit. But the report is careful not to draw conclusions about the exact motivation or the identity of the attacker(s), or how to accurately characterize this network of infections as a whole. The report argues that attribution can be obscured. The report concludes that who is in control of GhostNet is less important than the opportunity for generating st

This report documents the GhostNet - a suspected cyber espionage network of over 1,295 infected computers in 103 countries, 30% of which are high-value targets, including ministries of foreign affairs, embassies, international organizations, news media, and NGOs. The capabilities of GhostNet are far-reaching. The report reveals that Tibetan computer systems were compromised giving attackers access to potentially sensitive information, including documents from the private office of the Dalai Lama. The report presents evidence showing that numerous computer systems were compromised in ways that circumstantially point to China as the culprit. But the report is careful not to draw conclusions about the exact motivation or the identity of the attacker(s), or how to accurately characterize this network of infections as a whole. The report argues that attribution can be obscured.

Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a "new modern-day sort of communists," a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism.

Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this mostly free marketplace achieves social good at an efficiency that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. Sure, it undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.

mmunal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but wikin

In 2001, Portugal officially abolished all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, replacing punishment for therapy. Did it work? How many people reading this article have served jail time for drug use? How many know someone who has? It's an arbitrary system, and people don't seem to respond well to systems that rely on harsh but infrequently carried out punishments to regulate behavior--as anyone who has ever spent more than two hours with a toddler has probably already figured out.

In 2001, Portugal officially abolished all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, replacing punishment for therapy. Did it work?

I'd like to see verification of this from someone other than the Cato Institute, and it's important to remember that the US =/= Portugal, but still... interesting. April 2009.

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

The data show that, judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success. Within this success lie self-evident lessons that should guide drug policy debates around the world.

VoteWatch.eu is an independent monitoring website of EU politics. It provides detailed information about parliamentarians' voting records and formal political activities – from committee work to parliamentary reports – and includes easy-to-access information on the political coalitions that are formed around policy issues.

Hold øje med, om politikerne kommer til møderne samt hvordan de stemmer

‘VoteWatch.eu is an independent monitoring website of EU politics. It provides detailed information about parliamentarians' voting records and formal political activities.’

Voting in EU Parliament: all MEmbers, by coutnries, votes etc..

Excel·lent portal que recull de forma sistemàtica els vots dels europarlamentaris

Added from delicious

“Here lies Europe, overwhelmed by Muslim immigrants and emptied of native-born Europeans.” That is the obituary some pundits have been writing in recent years. But neither the immigrants nor the Europeans are playing their assigned roles.

Apparently Europe is no longer going to be drowned in a sea of Muslim babies. Because I know you were all so worried.

"At the turn of this century, the conventional wisdom among demographers was that the population of Europe was in precipitous decline, the Islamic world was in the grip of a population explosion, and Africa’s population faced devastation by HIV/AIDS. Only a handful of scholars questioned the idea that the Chinese would outnumber all other groups for decades or even centuries to come. In fact, however, the latest UN projections suggest that China’s population, now 1.3 billion, will increase slowly through 2030 but may then be reduced to half that number by the end of the ­century." Fascinating article on demography, including the prediction that in 2050, Africa will have a majority of the world's Christians, in addition to being the demographic center of Islam.

What a Texas town can teach us about health care.

"Die Debatte um Ursula von der Leyens Gesetzentwurf gegen Kinderpornografie im Netz macht eine gesellschaftliche Kluft sichtbar: Die Generation Online will nicht länger akzeptieren, dass über sie hinwegregiert wird. Ein Generationenkonflikt wird sichtbar, der das Land noch Jahre lang spalten könnte."

Kleine Analyse der digitalen Spaltung in der Politik: Kinderporno-Sperren, Zensur und die große Ahnungslosigkeit der Politik.

Demokratische Verfassungen werden nicht unter der Annahme gemacht, dass Menschen im Zweifel das Richtige tun werden, dass Politiker und Polizisten ja im Grunde gute Menschen sind und deshalb schon nichts schiefgehen wird. Sie sind konstruiert, um auch Fällen widerstehen zu können, in denen etwas nicht so läuft, wie man sich das als rechtschaffener Bürger wünscht. Deshalb dürfen Polizisten keine Verbrecher verurteilen, deshalb unterliegen Geheimdienste der Kontrolle des Parlaments und deshalb entscheiden Polizeibehörden in Demokratien nicht, was publiziert werden darf und was nicht.

Der Spiegel konstruiert uns "Digital Natives" wohlwollend ein Gemeinschaftsgefühl an.

Spiegel ONLINE-Artikel zur gefühlt Generationen-Kluft

Good examples of photojournalism. These photographs are pretty amazing.

news polarity aggregator

FairSpin lets you see all the top political news from left to right. Click on titles to read stories, decide for yourself if they are biased, then vote your mind. Every vote makes FairSpin more accurate and useful.

Manliness, heroes, & national character - a harrowing account of our own failures: http://tr.im/jII7 (Read 2 the end!) (via @jayrosen_nyu) [from http://twitter.com/CircleReader/statuses/1617944525]

New York Review of Books

2 of 2 essays by Mark Danner

NY Review of Books review referring to Feb 2007 Red Cross study on torture, referred to by Rahm Emanuel

Mark Danner NY Review of Books April 3009

Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was "both a cultural and political taboo" about admitting decline in America.

Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic "shrink to survive" proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.

"In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside. 'The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we're all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way. Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity.'"

"The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature. Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area."

top

dorm

Incredible and brutal images of the protests in Iran. Photos like these truly reaffirm the oft-heard cliché that "a picture is worth a thousand words."

The Big Picture - News Stories in Photographs from the Boston Globe

"The key force behind this is the next generation, the Millennials, who elected Obama in America and may oust Ahmadinejad in Iran. They want freedom; they are sick of lies; they enjoy life and know hope."

Is twitter the only network to survive in Iran?

The Revolution Will Be Twittered

It's increasingly clear that Ahmadinejad and the old guard mullahs were caught off-guard by this technology and how it helped galvanize the opposition movement in the last few weeks.

As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived. With some remarkable results. Those rooftop chants that were becoming deafening in Tehran? A few hours ago, this concept of resistance was spread by a twitter message. Here's the Twitter from a Moussavi supporter: ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and shout ALAHO AKBAR in protest #IranElection That a new information technology could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

Many to many conversation. Social collaboration. Crowdourcing

The purpose of this guide is to help you participate constructively in the Iranian election protests through Twitter.

Some interesting information and guidance that gives some insight into how social media is being used by both sides in the Iran election protests.

"The purpose of this guide is to help you participate constructively in the Iranian election protests through Twitter." - Power of networks.

General online magazine by and about women

Shirky on how Twitter and social tools have enabled global focus on the Iran protests in a new way.

Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran

reading @cshirky on twitter and Iran, fascinating. thanks :) http://blog.ted.com/2009/06/qa_with_clay_sh.php [from http://twitter.com/evrenk/statuses/2212437449]

Someone tweeted from Tehran today that "the American media may not care, but the American people do." That's a sea-change.

as a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think - That push model of one message for all is an incredibly crappy way of linking supply and demand.

NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events.

"NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events. As protests in Iran exploded over the weekend, we decided to rush out his talk, because it could hardly be more relevant. I caught up with Clay this afternoon to get his take on the significance of what is happening. HIs excitement was palpable."

Join us in digging through the documents of MPs' expenses to identify individual claims, or documents that you think merit further investigation. You can work through your own MP's expenses, or just hit the button below to start reviewing.

Investigate your MP's expenses Join us in digging through the documents of MPs' expenses to identify individual claims, or documents that you think merit further investigation. You can work through your own MP's expenses, or just hit the button below to start reviewing. (Update, Fri pm: we now have a virtually complete set of expenses documents so you should be able to find your MP's)

We hope that many hands can make light work of the thousands of documents released by Parliament in relation to MPs’ expenses. We, and others - perhaps you? - are using these tools to review each document, decide whether it contains interesting information, and extract the key facts.

Nice crowdsourcing

Guardian crowd sourcing investigative journalism

Join us in digging through the 700,000 documents of MPs' expenses to identify individual claims, or documents that you think merit further investigation. You can work through your own MP's expenses, or just hit the button below to start reviewing. (Update, Thurs evening: More added now and more coming all the time. Check back if you haven't found your MP yet) Already created an account? Log in here.

Brilliant! Help the Guardian find suspicious MP expenses claims that can be flagged to the authorities! Aaaah, the wonders of the internet!

Robert Kaplan reviews and posits theories of geographical determinism in international relations. Some cool theories here. "The wisdom of geographical determinism endures across the chasm of a century because it recognizes that the most profound struggles of humanity are not about ideas but about control over territory, specifically the heartland and rimlands of Eurasia. Of course, ideas matter, and they span geography. And yet there is a certain geographic logic to where certain ideas take hold. Communist Eastern Europe, Mongolia, China, and North Korea were all contiguous to the great land power of the Soviet Union. Classic fascism was a predominantly European affair. And liberalism nurtured its deepest roots in the United States and Great Britain, essentially island nations and sea powers both. Such determinism is easy to hate but hard to dismiss. "

oh, I must find and read that MacKinder article. What a hypothesis! fabulously heady stuff.

Robert Kaplan on the return of geography.

We all must learn to think like Victorians. That is what must guide and inform our newly rediscovered realism. Geographical determinists must be seated at the same honored table as liberal humanists, thereby merging the analogies of Vietnam and Munich. Embracing the dictates and limitations of geography will be especially hard for Americans, who like to think that no constraint, natural or otherwise, applies to them. But denying the facts of geography only invites disasters that, in turn, make us victims of geography. Better, instead, to look hard at the map for ingenious ways to stretch the limits it imposes, which will make any support for liberal principles in the world far more effective. Amid the revenge of geography, that is the essence of realism and the crux of wise policymaking—working near the edge of what is possible, without slipping into the precipice.

How Geography Determines Human Conflict in the World

People and ideas influence events, but geography largely determines them, now more than ever. To understand the coming struggles, it’s time to dust off the Victorian thinkers who knew the physical world best. A journalist who has covered the ends of the Earth offers a guide to the relief map—and a primer on the next phase of conflict. By Robert D. Kaplan

Show support for democracy in Iran add green overlay to your Twitter avatar with 1-click - http://helpiranelection.com/ [from http://twitter.com/EdwardRobins/statuses/2238952589]

Green overlay over twitter

Hey, Shakers, Liss has graciously allowed me to yell in her forum. Many thanks, Liss. I have no other outlet for what I'm about to say. I want to tell you first: at least one of you knows me in person. What I'm about to say is something you do not know about me. If it's not you, then one of your friends might be like me.

Post-adoption and post-abortion effects on women compared.

I have given a baby up for adoption, and I have had an abortion, and while anecdotes are not evidence, I can assert that abortions may or may not cause depression - it certainly did not in me, apart from briefly mourning the path not taken - but adoption? That is an entirely different matter. I don't doubt that there are women who were fine after adoption, and there is emphatically nothing wrong with that or with them; but I want to point out that if we're going to have a seemingly neverending discussion about the sorrow and remorse caused by abortion, then it is about goddamn time that we hear from birth mothers too.

More evidence that right-winger Christians are jerks and full of fear. If you're so faithful, how come you're scared?

The more Americans go to church, the more likely it is they support torturing suspected terrorists. http://bit.ly/YHDkV [from http://twitter.com/NickCobb/statuses/1685517486]

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

Enough said...

Und so funktioniert's: Hier werden alle Beiträge auf Twitter.com ausgewertet, die eine Raute (Hashtag), den Namen einer Partei und ein Bewertungszeichen (+ oder -) enthalten. Beispiel: Steht #CDU- am Ende eines Twitterbeitrags, wird er als negativ gewertet. So ergibt sich ein politisches Stimmungsbild in Echtzeit. FAQ

Hier werden alle Beiträge auf Twitter.com ausgewertet, die eine Raute (Hashtag), den Namen einer Partei und ein Bewertungszeichen (+ oder -) enthalten. Beispiel: Steht #CDU- am Ende eines Twitterbeitrags, wird er als negativ gewertet. So ergibt sich ein politisches Stimmungsbild in Echtzeit.

"Every digitized packet of online data is deconstructed, examined for keywords and reconstructed within milliseconds."

more on Deep packet

Deep packet inspection

How it's done.

The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale.

Les autorités iraniennes disposent de grande capacités de surveillance sur Internet (technologies Siemens + Nokia), expliquant pourquoi elles n'ont pas "coupé" le réseau...

'This forum aims to be a secure and reliable way of communication for Iranians and friends. Use it to discuss what is happening in Iran. Post in the forum either anonymously as a guest, as a registered user, or login with your facebook-account.'

The fine folks at anonymous - the people who brought you those scientology protests - offer online bulletin boards and messaging services for Iranian activists. Points for solidarity, but unclear if these will remain accessible to Iranian dissidents very long.

World wide protest planing forums and current news on the Iran crisis

Parlamento, istituzioni, politica

openpolis presenta il nuovo sito interamente dedicato al monitoraggio parlamentare: openparlamento.it. Per i cittadini, possibilità di informarsi, di controllare l'attività del parlamento e di partecipare, intervenendo direttamente sugli atti presentati e discussi alla Camera e al Senato.

Roger Ebert discusses Bill O'Reily

Glenn Beck

The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O'Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin. * Name calling -- giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence; * Glittering generalities -- the opposite of name calling; * Card stacking -- the selective use of facts and half-truths; * Bandwagon -- appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd; * Plain folks -- an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are "of the people"; * Transfer -- carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and * Testimonials --

"i am a very famous minor television personality" ..heh. "live long and prosper"

Hodgman questions Obama's nerd credentials

lol

An ex-pat Canadian debunks myths about the Canadian health care system.

, c

"Myth: Canada's health care system is a cumbersome bureaucracy. The U.S. has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world. More than 31 percent of every dollar spent on health care in the U.S. goes to paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, etc. The provincial single-payer system in Canada operates with just a 1 percent overhead. Think about it. It is not necessary to spend a huge amount of money to decide who gets care and who doesn't when everybody is covered."

Discussion of the migration of myspace users to facebook, explores the way class, race, and social lines are distributed across social networking sites

fascinating look at social networks and class structure

social networking

"...increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation 'choice' leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions."

“Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I’m amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, Does any of this really matter?”

creepy quote: "More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly. When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it ‘Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.’"

Vanity Fair

An in-depth (and, may I say, quite scary) portrait of Sarah Palin

Article on Sarah Palin that is ridiculous

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression

How Goldman Sachs Has Engineered Every Major Market Manipulation Since the Great Depression" The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

They use the same playbook over and over again: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. When it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again.

Warum Netzsperren nicht mißbrauchten Kindern helfen und dennoch für Ursula "von der Laien" herhalten müssen Dazu auch der folgende Podcast: http://chaosradio.ccc.de/cre124.html

Im folgenden Beitrag analysiert, kommentiert und erwidert Netzaktivist Lutz Donnerhacke die Aussagen des Familienministeriums zur Notwendigkeit von Zensurmaßnahmen gegen die Dokumentation von Kindesmißhandlungen. Dabei will Donnerhacke 13 Lügen ausgemacht haben, welche das Ministerium in den vergangenen Tagen und Wochen in Form von Textblock-Antworten und anderen Stellungnahmen verbreiten ließ.

Dopo l'Iran. Come usare Internet per comunicare.

Print page

Persepolis 2.0 - great web comic. Must read!

Since the Revolution in 1979, Iranians have coped with an increasingly repressive regime. Attempts for greater social and political freedoms have resulted in brutal crackdowns by the hardline government. The ensuing apathy and significant boycott of the 2005 presidential elections led to the election of the ultraconservative mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Four years later Iran has become increasingly alienated and its people more polarized than ever before. The campaign of former Prime Minister Mir Hussein Moussavi galvanized voters hoping for change, especially among the youth – two thirds of Iran’s population is younger than 32. On June 12th 85% of eligible voters cast their ballots and what happened next changed Iran forever…

Images from Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis were provided with new captions and dialogue to illustrate the day before and the first few days after the election in Iran.

The authors of Persopolis 2.0 were inspired by the work of Marjane Satrapi.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctabu/sets/72157620497679512/detail/

"Loose Tweets Sink Fleets"

U.S. President Barack Obama has now been in office for 167 days, and it's time for a look back. Why 167 days? Why not - it's just as arbitrary a number as the usual "100 days". In that time, President Obama has contended with stimulating the U.S. economy, reshaping U.S. policy abroad, and starting work on domestic issues such as health care reform. As he and his family arrive in Moscow today for an official visit, find here a look back at some of the first 167 days of the Obama administration. (38 photos total)

The poorer you are, the more things cost.

You have to be rich to be poor. That's what some people who have never lived below the poverty line don't understand. Put it another way: The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace. This is a fact of life that reality television and magazines don't o...

Following are excerpts from a symposium on the economic crisis presented by The New York Review of Books and PEN World Voices at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 30. The participants were former senator Bill Bradley, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros, and Robin Wells, with Jeff Madrick as moderator.

By Bill Bradley, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros, Robin Wells et al.

Excerpts from a symposium on the economic crisis presented by The New York Review of Books and PEN World Voices at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 30. The participants were former senator Bill Bradley, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros, and Robin Wells, with Jeff Madrick as moderator.

Yeah, good to the point article. It's nice to hear someone plea for the waning party's success. Whatever the faults with a two part system it's better than one and no matter the way you lean there had better be something to lean against

Noonan sends Palin off in style

an even better article on palin

in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know

Good WSJ article on Palin myths and the harm she did to the Republican party.

!!! [Palid is horrible, says Peggy Noonan] "She's not Ivy League, that's why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don't have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism." This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it's included in U.S. News & World Report's top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named "Abe," and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!

Wendell Potter explains exactly hoe the health insurance companies are fucking you.

With almost 20 years inside the health insurance industry, Wendell Potter saw for-profit insurers hijack our health care system and put profits before patients. Now, he speaks with Bill Moyers about how those companies are standing in the way of health care reform.

Wendell Potter

Wendell Potter, former executive at Cigna, talks about the power of the health care lobby and the way the industry manipulates congress to increase the fortunes of their shareholders, at great public cost.

<tweet> [t] <cnn> Watch it LIVE now: The Hearing on Sonia Sotomayor’s historical nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court http://www.cnn.com/live/ #sotomayor

<tweet> [t] <cnn> Obama discusses the economy and global warming at the G8 Summit LIVE now http://cnn.com/live

Watch @ryanblock live now on CNN http://www.cnn.com/live/ [from http://twitter.com/peterto/statuses/2541656580]

CNN.com Live is THE destination for live streaming video of breaking news and the latest information on unfolding events, with anchored coverage of top news stories throughout the day. Watch live video streams with the most current updates on national and international news, as well as the economy, politics, health, sports, weather, entertainment, business and much more. CNN.com Live takes you behind-the-scenes with celebrity interviews, brings you into the court room for exciting trials, and delivers live video feeds from major events like economic stimulus debates and decisions and the State of the Nation with John King at 12pm ET, including President Barack Obama's Address.

Co-produced by TechWeb & O'Reilly Conferences, September 09 - 10, 2009, Washington, DC

WA State Congressional delegation tracker

Legistalker combs a variety of news, social networking, and government sites to pool information about members of the U.S. Congress. Searching for a Senator or Representative will return mentions of that individual in the media, Twitter updates, YouTube videos, Capitol Words—a nifty weighted cloud of the words they've used in interviews and floor speeches—and their voting record which includes what they've introduced and votes yes or no on.

Breaks down references to U.S. representatives and senators in the news, on Twitter, and on YouTube.

An accountable government requires an informed citizenry. Every day, Congress relies more and more on the Internet to communicate with the world. Legistalker makes it easy for you to stay on top of what your elected officials say and how they vote. Legistalker was created by Forum One Communications as an entry for the Apps for America competition. The ever-growing database is updated every 20 seconds, and relies on data from Twitter, YouTube, Capitol Words, literally hundreds of different news sources, and others.

The Barack Obama Strategy

Hilarious!!!

Worth a look

Just how poorly constructed was Sarah Palin?s good-bye speech? V.F. editor Wayne Lawson whips it into publishable shape, with a lot of help from his red pencil.

Vanity Fair copyedits Palin's resignation. She's a moron. If she were a man, I would call her a fucking moron. Oh, but wait! That's a double standard. She's a fucking moron, sorry. We're about equality here.

If you watched Sarah Palin’s resignation speech, you know one thing: her high-priced speechwriters moved back to the Beltway long ago. Just how poorly constructed was the governor’s holiday-weekend address? We asked V.F.’s red-pencil-wielding executive literary editor, Wayne Lawson, together with representatives from the research and copy departments, to whip it into publishable shape. Here is the colorful result.

jhkjhljkjlkj,.ml.m,mlm.knm.jnk.j

humorous

Just how poorly constructed was Sarah Palin?s good-bye speech? V.F. editor Wayne Lawson whips it into publishable shape, with a lot of help from his red pencil.

*howling with laughter*

"If you watched Sarah Palin’s resignation speech, you know one thing: her high-priced speechwriters moved back to the Beltway long ago. Just how poorly constructed was the governor’s holiday-weekend address? We asked V.F.’s red-pencil-wielding executive literary editor, Wayne Lawson, together with representatives from the research and copy departments, to whip it into publishable shape. Here is the colorful result."

The mission of OSA is to educate decision makers in the U.S. Federal government about the advantages of using free and open source software; to encourage the Federal agencies to give equal priority to procuring free and open source software in all of their procurement decisions; and generally provide an effective voice to the U.S. Federal government on behalf of the open source software community, private industry, academia, and other non-profits.

Piece by Jimmy Carter about his decision to sever ties w/ his church, after six decades b/c of the church's treatment of and opinions about women.

Women and girls have been discriminated against for too long in a twisted interpretation of the word of God.

smouldering

According to the protagonist in Kurt Vonnegut's "Timequake": "...The world's second unsucessful attempt to commit suicide."

This is truly amazing.

terse yet comprehensive AND humourous

** Posted using Viigo: Mobile RSS, Sports, Current Events and more **

The Home of Fox Nation

この事件、成り行きをどうなるのか、たぶん解決は無理と思っていた人がほとんどだったと思う。 もちろん解決することはできない深い問題だけれど、まぁ、叫び罵りあわずに、ビールでも飲んで話そうよ、ということを提案したことで、議論がとたんにポジティブになった

１、行動が迅速 ２、直接に話をし、徹底的に説明する ３、自分の悪かった点についての反省 ４、ネガティブな事件をポジティブなことに変える ５、まぁ、飲んで話そうよ、という落とし所

"This problem is made worse by the fact that actually paying for your health care is a loss from an insurers’ point of view — they actually refer to it as “medical costs.” This means both that insurers try to deny as many claims as possible, and that they try to avoid covering people who are actually likely to need care. Both of these strategies use a lot of resources, which is why private insurance has much higher administrative costs than single-payer systems. And since there’s a widespread sense that our fellow citizens should get the care we need — not everyone agrees, but most do — this means that private insurance basically spends a lot of money on socially destructive activities."

There are a number of successful health-care systems, at least as measured by pretty good care much cheaper than here, and they are quite different from each other. There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. And people who say that the market is the answer are flying in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence.

atode

A page with evidence to the contrary tat the founding fathers were as Christian or as intent on impressing Christian values into the Constitution and the newly created American government.

One of the most common statements from the "Religious Right" is that they want this country to "return to the Christian principles on which it was founded". However, a little research into American history will show that this statement is a lie. The men responsible for building the foundation of the United States had little use for Christianity, and many were strongly opposed to it. They were men of The Enlightenment, not men of Christianity. They were Deists who did not believe the bible was true.

The men responsible for building the foundation of the United States had little use for Christianity, and many were strongly opposed to it. They were men of The Enlightenment, not men of Christianity.

Some of them may have been deists at best, but most of them abhorred religion and everything it entails.

the world in a window

coyote

"Michael Pollan, in an 8,000-word essay in the New York Times Magazine, took the expected swipes at animal agriculture. But his truly radical prescriptions had to do with raising of crops. Pollan, who seemed to be aware of the nitrogen problem in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma, left nuance behind, as well as the laws of chemistry, in his recommendations. ... n his book, Pollan quotes geographer Vaclav Smil to the effect that 40 percent of the people alive today would not be alive without the ability to artificially synthesize nitrogen. But in his directive on food policy, Pollan damns agriculture's dependence on fossil fuels, and urges the president to encourage agriculture to move away from expensive and declining supplies of natural gas toward the unlimited sunshine that supported life, and agriculture, as recently as the 1940s."

"On the desk in front of me are a dozen books, all hugely critical of present-day farming.... To the farmer on the ground, though, a farmer blessed with free choice and hard won experience, the moral choices aren’t quite so easy. Biotech crops actually cut the use of chemicals, and increase food safety. Are people who refuse to use them my moral superiors? Herbicides cut the need for tillage, which decreases soil erosion by millions of tons. The biggest environmental harm I have done as a farmer is the topsoil (and nutrients) I used to send down the Missouri River to the Gulf of Mexico before we began to practice no-till farming, made possible only by the use of herbicides. The combination of herbicides and genetically modified seed has made my farm more sustainable, not less, and actually reduces the pollution I send down the river."

August 7

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

The House hearings on rescission – the retroactive cancellation of individual health insurance policies – were over a month ago, but after its initial run through Daily Kos it seems to have waited a bit before popping up on Baseline and Slate. James Kwak at Baseline described the practice as rare, affecting only 0.5% of the population. The faint light bulb above my head began to flicker: could that be true…that’s not rare – that is amazingly common.

Rescission is not rare, if you happen to be sick.

rescission – the retroactive cancellation

The House hearings on rescission – the retroactive cancellation of individual health insurance policies – were over a month ago, but after its initial run through Daily Kos it seems to have waited a bit before popping up on Baseline and Slate.  James Kwak at Baseline described the practice as rare, affecting only 0.5% of the population.  The faint light bulb above my head began to flicker: could that be true…that’s not rare – that is amazingly common.

"The House hearings on rescission – the retroactive cancellation of individual health insurance policies – were over a month ago... James Kwak at Baseline described the practice as rare, affecting only 0.5% of the population. The faint light bulb above my head began to flicker: could that be true…that’s not rare – that is amazingly common."

But I will make this simple point in the hope some speechwriter pressed for a deadline picks it up: if a bank manager went to half of his highest net worth clients and said “sorry, you misspelled your address when you opened your account, I’m confiscating your balance,” he would be lucky to get himself assigned to minimum security

If, as I suspect, rescission is targeted toward the truly bankrupting cases – the top 1%, the folks with over $35,000 of annual claims who could never be profitable for the carrier – then the probability of having your policy torn up given a massively expensive condition is pushing 50%. One in two. You have three times better odds playing Russian Roulette.

Recent scenes from Afghanistan

Saber que crianças sofrem horrores por causa da ganância de poder e dinheiro de alguns homens, me dá um nó na garganta. http://is.gd/q7AM [from http://twitter.com/llagerlof/statuses/1440607522]

Colonialism in the Congo - Leopold II and Belgium

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse. Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush

"Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God."

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.

Si Vous le Répétez, Je Démentirai

s thinking

"Yes, I want decisions made by an elite group of people who know what they're talking about." So, Bill Maher wants an aristocratic oligarchy. A pretty funny read except for that section. Some really pathetic statistics in there. Yet, the idea that while many accomplished economists and doctors argue against national healthcare, that the only people against it are retarded, is a complete fallacy, and seems to be the only way the Dems are fighting against criticism at the moment. It just makes them look bad.

I.Q. Tests for everyone! As I have stated before, your well thought out, chosen vote, usually gets negated by a fucking moron.

For the birther/townhaller crowd: http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/ [from http://twitter.com/foolsby/statuses/3267512826]

WhiteHouse.gov is the official web site for the White House and President Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. This site is a source for information about the President, White House news and policies, White House history, and the federal government.

this is homebase, but they are using their social media channels to drive people back to homebase.

With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people's money. These deficits are simply not sustainable.

Testify brother, I think only business owners truly understand the ideas of free markets.

Here's what the CEO of Whole Foods actually said.

Guía para utilizar Twitter en las comunicaciones entre gobierno y ciudadanía

• Human: He warns that Twitter users can be hostile to the "over-use of automation" - such as RSS feeds – and to the regurgitation of press release headlines: "While corporate in message, the tone of our Twitter channel must therefore be informal spoken English, human-edited and for the most part written/paraphrased for the channel." • Frequent: a minimum of two and maximum of 10 tweets per working day, with a minimum gap of 30 minutes between tweets to avoid flooding followers' Twitter streams. (Not counting @replies or live coverage of a crisis/event.) Downing Street spends 20 minutes on its Twitter stream with two-three tweets a day plus a few replies, five-six tweets a day in total. • Timely: in keeping with the "zeitgeist" feel of Twitter, official tweets should be about issues of relevance today or events coming soon. • Credible: while tweets may occasionally be "fun", their relationship to departmental objectives must be defensible.

Fascinating breakdown of how a bureaucracy tries to fit itself within 140 characters. Some aspects are right on, others are only fascinating. At least they're looking at what government "digital engagement" might look like.

Guidelines suggest tweets should be frequent, timely and credible

Even its author (Neil Williams) admits that a 20-page strategy paper for government departments on how to use Twitter might be regarded as "a bit of over the top" for a microblogging tool with a limit of 140 characters a message. (...) He suggests that nothing too onerous is involved. Each department's "digital media team" should only need to spend less than an hour a day running their Twitter streams. A quick discussion of potential tweets at the morning press cuttings meetings should be followed by emails to minister's private offices to gather more material, and any incoming messages should be replied to. However, the idea of official government use of a tool that provides a confidential and confessional glimpse into somebody's personal life and views appears at first sight to be something of an oxymoron.

I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.

Immer wieder befassen sich Politiker mit dem Internet, ohne wirklich etwas davon zu verstehen. Heraus kommen Gesetze, bei denen Netzbürger nicht wissen, ob sie lachen oder weinen sollen. Die aktuelle Zensuraktion von Ministerin von der Leyen ist ein Beispiel.

Immer wieder befassen sich Politiker mit dem Internet, ohne wirklich etwas davon zu verstehen. Heraus kommen Gesetze, bei denen Netzbürger nicht wissen, ob sie lachen oder weinen sollen. Die aktuelle Zensuraktion von Ministerin von der Leyen ist ein Beispiel. Doch jetzt gibt es DIE LÖSUNG. Wie jeder weiß, können Politiker Computer nicht bedienen. Deswegen bekommen sie Internetseiten immer nur als Ausdruck ihrer Bediensteten zu Gesicht. Man spricht deshalb auch von den sogenannten Internet-Ausdruckern. Nun machen wir es ganz einfach. Mit einem minimalen Schnippsel CSS-Code schützen wir alle Seiten vor dem Ausdrucken. Und schwupps - kein Politiker wird jemals wieder eine Internet-Seite zu Gesicht bekommen.

So eine schöne Druckvorschau

Wie jeder weiß, können Politiker Computer nicht bedienen. Deswegen bekommen sie Internetseiten immer nur als Ausdruck ihrer Bediensteten zu Gesicht. Man spricht deshalb auch von den sogenannten Internet-Ausdruckern. Nun machen wir es ganz einfach. Mit einem minimalen Schnippsel CSS-Code schützen wir alle Seiten vor dem Ausdrucken. Und schwupps - kein Politiker wird jemals wieder eine Internet-Seite zu Gesicht bekommen.

President Obama reportedly gave an iPod, loaded with 40 show tunes, to England's Queen Elizabeth II as a gift. Did he violate the law when he did so? You know your copyright laws are broken when there is no easy answer to this question.

President Obama reportedly gave an iPod, loaded with 40 show tunes, to England's Queen Elizabeth II as a gift. Did he violate the law when he did so?

iPods, First Sale, President Obama, and the Queen of England | Electronic Frontier Foundation

RT @nitot: Obama a acheté de la musique et donné un iPod à la reine d'angleterre. C'est un pirate ! http://tinyurl.com/cob9jm [from http://twitter.com/hvaudaux/statuses/1444222097]

Obama's "hip" gift to the Queen raises some interesting questions and points to a need for more discussion on the topic of what's really copyright infringement.

President Obama reportedly gave an iPod, loaded with 40 show tunes, to England's Queen Elizabeth II as a gift. Did he violate the law when he did so? You know your copyright laws are broken when there is no easy answer to this question.

It's not the bonuses. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full.

What is the deeper relationship between Goldman and AIG? Didn't they almost merge a few years ago but did not because Goldman couldn't get its arms around the black box that is AIG? If that is true, why should Goldman get bailed out? After all, they should have known as well as anybody that a big part of AIG's business model was not to pay on insurance it had issued.

The Real AIG Scandal It's not the bonuses. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full. By Eliot Spitzer

Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?

getting me excited about data

Graphs of the impact of Obama on people/demographics in less than 1 year since inauguration.

"So a streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view – to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation – has swollen. Now it is all they can see."

"How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality?"

These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence – here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper – can pierce this conviction.

What's wrong with America? Here's one thing...

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what&#39;s in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

I wrote earlier today about Holder's decision to "review" whether criminal prosecutions are warranted in connection with the torture of Terrorism suspects -- that can be read here -- but I want to write separately about the release today of the 2004 CIA's Inspector General Report (.pdf), both because it's extraordinary in its own right and because it underscores how unjust it would be to prosecute only low-level interrogators rather than the high-level officials who implemented the torture regime. Initially, it should be emphasized that yet again, it is not the Congress or the establishment media which is uncovering these abuses and forcing disclosure of government misconduct. Rather, it is the ACLU (with which I consult) that, along with other human rights organizations, has had to fill the void left by those failed institutions, using their own funds to pursue litigation to compel disclosure. Without their efforts, we would know vastly less than we know now about the crimes

The Report highlights how depraved were the interrogation practices - and how unjust it is to immunize U.S. leaders.

The Report highlights how depraved were the interrogation practices - and how unjust it is to immunize U.S. leaders

This explains the need and a lot of the trials of feminism (and also acknowledges commanalities with other kinds of discrimination). It's about trust and how so many men fail at being trustworthy.

"This, then, is the terrible bargain we have regretfully struck: Men are allowed the easy comfort of their unexamined privilege, but my regard will always be shot through with a steely, anxious bolt of caution. A shitty bargain all around, really. But there it is." [Sometimes the worst isn't the asshole strangers. Sometimes the worst is a guy you care about casually, offhandedly acting like you're not a person. Making a rape joke, dismissing women as overemotional, telling you when you're offended and hurt that you have no sense of humor. The most damaging attacks are the ones from supposed friends. What can we do, but live in anticipation of the next betrayal?]

the everyday language of sexism and how much it hurts

"There is the perplexity at my fury that my life experience is not considered more relevant than the opinionated pronouncements of men who make a pastime of informal observation, like womanhood is an exotic locale which provides magnificent fodder for the amateur ethnographer. And there is the haughty dismissal of my assertion that being on the outside looking in doesn't make one more objective; it merely provides a different perspective."

English - A feminist about her feelings about men. [Warning: Page is huge and hard to load.]

Women sacrifice their rights to make men's lives easier. Beautifully written, and about all the little ways in which patriarchy is enforced. Use for teaching feminism 101.

Sounds like whoever drafted the bill had just finished watching Die Hard 4.

Critics question revised proposal from Sen. Jay Rockefeller to let the White House do what it deems necessary to respond to a 'cybersecurity emergency.' Read this blog post by Declan McCullagh on Politics and Law.

The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

When Rockefeller (D-W. Virginia), the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April, they claimed it was vital to protect national cybersecurity. "We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs--from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records," Rockefeller said. The Rockefeller proposal plays out against a broader concern in Washington, D.C., about the government's role in cybersecurity. In May, President Obama acknowledged that the government is "not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions and announced that a new cybersecurity coordinator position would be created inside the White House staff. Three months later, that post remains empty, one top cybersecurity aide has quit, and some wags have begun to wonder why a government that receives failing marks on cybersecurity should be trusted to instruct the private sector what to do.

Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who simply "didn't belong."

Hurricane Katrina Information

It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun.

The attack occurred in Algiers Point. The Point, as locals call it, is a neighborhood within a neighborhood, a small cluster of ornate, immaculately maintained 150-year-old houses within the larger Algiers district. A nationally recognized historic area, Algiers Point is largely white, while the rest of Algiers is predominantly black. It's a "white enclave" whose residents have "a kind of siege mentality," says Tulane University historian Lance Hill, noting that some white New Orleanians "think of themselves as an oppressed minority."

One of the most disturbing investigative reports to date. Mob mentality is indeed difficult to understanding during life threatening times. Where does one draw the line between self preservation and compassion. Makes me wonder far too often how any of us would react under the same circumstances.

World Press Photo: Winners gallery 2009

"Winners gallery 2009 - World Press Photo" http://bit.ly/1MxnNi

The winners for each category.

Mambo - the dynamic portal engine and content management system

Fotos ganadoras del año 2008.

I am proud to say, two of my friends have posted this piece on my facebook 'home' page. The msm can't deny there are many out there who pay attention and think.

Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

So, if we look at the media today, we ought to be aware not just of what we are getting, but what we are not getting; the difference between what is authentic and what is inauthentic in contemporary American life and in the world, with a warning that in this celebrity culture, the forces of the inauthentic are becoming more powerful all the time.

in remembrance of a time when journalism still had the balls to challenge gov't

Cronkite's best moment was when he did exactly that which today's journalists insist they must never do.

In other words, Cronkite's best moment was when he did exactly that which the modern journalist today insists they must not ever do -- directly contradict claims from government and military officials and suggest that such claims should not be believed. These days, our leading media outlets won't even use words that are disapproved of by the Government.

As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and still spend far less ...

In this regard, there’s a CNN story from last April that I like to tell: a road into a state park in Kauai was washed out, and the state government said it didn’t have the money to fix it. The park would be closed. Understanding the impact on the local economy, a group of businesses chipped in, organized a group of volunteers, and fixed the road themselves. I called this DIY on a civic scale. Scott Heiferman corrected me: “It’s DIO: Not ‘Do it Yourself’ but ‘Do it Ourselves.’” Imagine if the state government were to reimagine itself not as a vending machine but an organizing engine for civic action. Might DIO help us tackle other problems that bedevil us? Can we imagine a new compact between government and the public, in which government puts in place mechanisms for services that are delivered not by government, but by private citizens? In other words, can government become a platform? We have an enormous opportunity right now to make a difference. There’s a receptivity to new ideas t

The USA as the most interesting tech startup of '09, Anil Dash style.

was at 16 min in video... really interesting interview from US gov CIO/Wired

Ireland needs to reward govt APIs.

I think the most promising new startup of 2009 is one of the least likely: The executive branch of the federal government of the United States.

Each site has remarkably consistent branding elements, leading to a predictable and trustworthy sense of place when you visit the sites. There is clear attention to design, both from the cosmetic elements of these pages, and from the thoughtfulness of the information architecture on each site. (The clear, focused promotional areas on each homepage feel just like the "Sign up now!" links on the site of most Web 2.0 companies.) And increasingly, these services are being accompanied by new APIs and data sources that can be used by others to build interesting applications.

"Birthers, Health Care Hecklers and the Rise of Right-Wing Rage"

"Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans."

The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both.

Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.

a good article for class. talk about the two equal sides to every issue myth.

We'll never have affective healthcare in this country because crazy is a preexisting condition.

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and—most importantly—fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge

Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought—she’d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?

This seems very interesting.. but its only basic math, writing, and econ.. bah...

The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities.

actually a really good speech encouraging the kids to be proactive about their education. "Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future."

Text of Barack Obama's Speech to America's Schoolchildren

Click here to go to the White House website to see the remarks the President will make to schoolchildren on Tuesday, Sept. 8th.

WhiteHouse.gov is the official web site for the White House and President Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. This site is a source for information about the President, White House news and policies, White House history, and the federal government.

"While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly."

The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the “appalling” way he was treated for being gay.

finally

"We’re sorry, you deserved so much better."

did everyone read this: The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the "appalling" way he was treated for being gay. > http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page20571

A new campaign for photographers rights. Mapping, reporting and fighting back against restrictions on photography in the UK

health care

President Obama's health care speech delivered on September 9, 2009 compliments of Huffington Post.

A great speech

Full transcript and video of Obama's September 2009 healthcare speech.

s always open.

A lot of promises.

We are not here to fear the future, we are here to shape the future.

pay close attention to the breakdown of services; note the money, resources, and suffering

In the week that Britain's National Health Service was held aloft by Republicans as an "evil and Orwellian" example of everything that is wrong with free healthcare, these extraordinary scenes in Inglewood, California yesterday provided a sobering reminder of exactly why President Barack Obama is trying to reform the US system. The LA Forum, the arena that once hosted sell-out Madonna concerts, has been transformed – for eight days only – into a vast field hospital. In America, the offer of free healthcare is so rare, that news of the magical medical kingdom spread rapidly and long lines of prospective patients snaked around the venue for the chance of getting everyday treatments that many British people take for granted.

They came in their thousands, queuing through the night to secure one of the coveted wristbands offering entry into a strange parallel universe where medical care is a free and basic right and not an expensive luxury. Some of these Americans had walked miles simply to have their blood pressure checked, some had slept in their cars in the hope of getting an eye-test or a mammogram, others had brought their children for immunisations that could end up saving their life.

An extraordinary report from Guy Adams in Los Angeles at the music arena that has been turned into a makeshift medical centre

This site comes from the University of Richmond. Use it to find maps of all presidential elections from 1840-2008.

Wasn't going to post this b/c I try to avoid lame gossip/People Mag stuff, but the audio is so clear. Those little digital voice recorders are amazing.

Examples of open government in USA

USA initiatives in eGov and eP

In the Innovations Gallery, the public can browse examples of new ways in which agencies across the Executive branch are using transparency, participation, and collaboration to achieve their mission.

"The Innovations Gallery celebrates the innovators and innovations who are championing the President’s vision of more effective and open government."

The Innovations Gallery celebrates the innovators and innovations who are championing the President’s vision of more effective and open government. In the Innovations Gallery, the public can browse examples of new ways in which agencies across the Executive branch are using transparency, participation, and collaboration to achieve their mission.

EXAMPLES listed on WhiteHouse.gov

list of innovations by the White House that are open to participation

Übersicht der Gov Web Innovationen des White House

WhiteHouse.gov is the official web site for the White House and President Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. This site is a source for information about the President, White House news and policies, White House history, and the federal government.

weirdest thing ever

These paintings by Dan Lacey, also known as The Painter of Pancakes, shows his portrayal of the president of the United States in a series of unique paintings.

acid+paint+a Politico subscription + skittles

No matter what your particular political leanings are, I think we can all agree that this artist is definitely a weirdo. I also enjoy the fact that the person who posted these labeled them as "unusual paintings," as if there were normal, everyday paintings of a nude president cavorting with mythical beasts.

A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?

similar to a related article suggested by Carter Wiseman

stanley fish

Visualizing Millions of Iran Tweets - computational history of news using twitter

At its peak, a search for "Iran" on Twitter generated over 100,000 tweets per day and over 8,000 tweets per hour. The plot just below shows the growth in volume of information in the number of tweets per hour. How does an Internet junkie, news organization, or political operative monitor rapidly evolving real-time events, from the crucial details to the bigger picture? More importantly, how can a data stream be turned into real-time action, reaching the people who need it, when they need it, and in a form they can easily digest?

Article describes effort aimed at more sophistcicated analysis of twitter trends. Author is co-founder of Infoharmoni - startup building knowledge interfaces for real-time data sets.

How to algorithmically discover and deploy novel social structures is perhaps the billion, or trillion, dollar question. With Twitter, the data and API are in place. And if the history of computation is any guide, once programming a system becomes possible, progressing from a hack to an application to a platform is only a matter of time.

'...how can a data stream be turned into real-time action, reaching the people who need it, when they need it, and in a form they can easily digest? At the most abstract level, history and computation are the same thing: the evolution of systems over time. Twitter has several remarkable properties that allow us to finally leverage this correspondence in tangible ways. The simplicity of its data, the openness of its system, and its extreme time resolution make it possible for us to detect atoms of history, those moments when something is triggered and society is reconfigured ever so slightly. Simply tracking the volume of various phrases gives us a sense of what is happening on the street, literally and figuratively. But that signal is but a shadow of a far more complex and intricate reality, an interwoven web of individuals and actions. -- Disruptive events lead to information elites.'

For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers with controversial, game-changing propositions. We found a prison reformer who wants to empty jails, an economist who thinks foreign aid hurts more than it helps, and a military theorist who believes the US should launch preemptive cyberattacks, right now.

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn't matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched. The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand.

Yarynich is talking about Russia's doomsday machine. That's right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called "the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination." Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.

The silence can be attributed partly to fears that the US would figure out how to disable the system. But the principal reason is more complicated and surprising. According to both Yarynich and Zheleznyakov, Perimeter was never meant as a traditional doomsday machine. The Soviets had taken game theory one step further than Kubrick, Szilard, and everyone else: They built a system to deter themselves.

health reform bill chain-email includes 26 lies, 18 misleading statements, 4 truths. this lists all of them.

"A notorious analysis of the House health care bill contains 48 claims. Twenty-six of them are false and the rest mostly misleading. Only four are true."

We examined each of the e-mail’s claims, finding 26 of them to be false and 18 to be misleading, only partly true or half true. Only four are accurate.

ironie

Satirical video related to the health insurance debate. A funny take on one of the stakeholders.

video to watch

Hollywood speaks out to help insurance companies ... Watch videos about Will Ferrell, Jon Hamm, Olivia Wilde, Thomas Lennon, Robert Ben Garant, Masi Oka, Jordana Spiro, Linda Cardellini, Donald Faison, PSA, insurance, health care, obama, bill, coverage, executives, money, democrats, republicans, congress on FunnyOrDie.com

"Yeah, but, you know... he's a victim himself."

More:[quote]Polanski was "demonized by the press" because he raped a child, and was convicted because he pled guilty. He "feared heavy sentencing" because drugging and raping a child is generally frowned upon by the legal system. …The point is not to keep 76-year-old Polanski off the streets or help his victim feel safe. The point is that drugging and raping a child, then leaving the country before you can be sentenced for it, is behavior our society should not -- and at least in theory, does not -- tolerate, no matter how famous, wealthy or well-connected you are, no matter how old you were when you finally got caught, no matter what your victim says about it now, no matter how mature she looked at 13, no matter how pushy her mother was, and no matter how many really swell movies you've made. Roman Polanski raped a child. No one, not even him, disputes that.[/quote]

Roman Polanski may be a great director, an old man, a husband, a father, a friend to many powerful people, and even the target of some questionable legal shenanigans. He may very well be no threat to society at this point. He may even be a good person on balance, whatever that means. But none of that changes the basic, undisputed fact: Roman Polanski raped a child. And rushing past that point to focus on the reasons why we should forgive him, pity him, respect him, admire him, support him, whatever, is absolutely twisted.

Kate Harding's excellent, unflinching response to this Polanski debacle. Deserves to be circulated as widely as possible.

"The point is not to keep 76-year-old Polanski off the streets or help his victim feel safe. The point is that drugging and raping a child, then leaving the country before you can be sentenced for it, is behavior our society should not -- and at least in theory, does not -- tolerate"

»But what’s almost certain is that economists will have to learn to live with messiness.«

It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession.

By Paul Krugman

Written for President Nixon, just in case the Apollo 11 astronauts were marooned on the Moon's surface

speech written for case that Aldrin and Armstrong were to stay stranded on the moon

"Columnist and presidential speechwriter Bill Safire was one of only three non-disloyal Jews President Nixon could name. Here is the speech he drafted for Nixon to read in case the Apollo 11 Astronauts became stranded on the moon!"

Gore attacks edmund again

A conversation with Gore Vidal unfolds at his pace.

to re-read

Interview from Guardian G2, Feb 2009. "People have been bamboozled with the technology for too long," he says. "The real questions are, 'What are your goals, and how can you use technology to achieve them?' "Organisations can build very quickly, if they do the messaging right. They need to be able to answer the question, 'What can someone do for me today?'

"People have been bamboozled with the technology for too long," he says. "The real questions are, 'What are your goals, and how can you use technology to achieve them?' Our biggest sales pitch is that we couple the services along with the technology. A lot of our competition just sells technology, and the types of organisation and causes that we like to work with, if I go in and sell them really powerful technology, it doesn't do them any good, because they don't have the wherewithal to make sense of it."

Newest addition to my fantasy dinner party guestlist: Thomas Gensemer. http://is.gd/jUmY [from http://twitter.com/louisedoherty/statuses/1226680797]

Thomas Gensemer Mastermind of the Democratic campaign

Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation. If you haven't heard of this politician, it's because he's a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country's carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers.

California has the highest unemployment rate in the last 70 years

"Los Angeles, 2009: California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state staff are being paid in IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike."

Los Angeles, 2009: California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state staff are being paid in IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike. So what has gone so catastrophically wrong?

California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state staff are being paid in IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike. So what has gone so&hellip;

California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state staff are being paid in IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike. So what has gone so catastrophically wrong?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past http://bit.ly/118DuN [from http://twitter.com/robinhowlett/statuses/4629005159]

Nothin' like a little self-hate to fan the flames

I didn't see that coming...

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots. A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

The demise of the dollar - Business News, Business - The Independent

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading.

Content Type: text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1, size: 300,585 bytes

뉴욕타임즈 전 칼럼니스트 앤드류 설리번, 칼럼모음 수록.

Some readers have asked me to put all the various odd lies of Sarah Palin that the Dish has compiled in one helpful place. So that's what we've done. A couple of months ago, I asked an intern to re-fact-check all of them to make sure new details hadn't emerged that might debunk some. And I also asked to get any subsequent statements by Palin that acknowledged that she had erred in any of these statements that are easily rebuttable by facts in the public record and apologized and corrected. She has not. Since this was a vast project over the last ten months, it's possible there are some nuances or errors that need fixing. Please tell us if you find one and we'll acknowledge and fix. But it has been put through the ringer a few times. After you have read these, ask yourself: what wouldn't Sarah Palin lie about if she felt she had to?

It's almost a truism in the tech world that copyright owners reflexively oppose new inventions that do (or might) disrupt existing business models. But how many techies actually know what rightsholders have said and written for the last hundred years on the subject?

Fully $350 billion a year could be saved on paperwork alone if the U.S. went to a single-payer system — more than enough to pay for the whole goddamned thing, if anyone had the balls to stand up and say so.

This article is an opinion piece writton the criticisms and downfalls of the healthcare plan. It is an important site, because the health care reform policy promotes itself, so it is important the the public is exposed to both opinions and both sides of the health care reform system. The article stresses the critical state of America's healthcare system and expresses its need for reform. However, the piece stresses that Obama-Biden health care reform policy will only hurt the health care system further.

Matt Taibbi, right on as usual (and rightly pissed off)

RollingStone

Moiz Syed: Highly recommend this read to understand contemporary organizational structures: http://bit.ly/WcmwS

wow! MacLeod hierarchy. Sociopaths, clueless, and losers. Fascinating.

sistema che ti permette di scegliere le parole e poi il politico le pronuncia. componi la frase e lui la dice.

UK Prime Ministerial candidates say (almost) anything

US government launch the OpenInternet. Gov site It includes videos, statements and discussion on all Federal Communication Commission activities on the issue, including coverage of broadband.

OpenInternet.gov is a place to join the discussion about the important issues facing the future of the Internet. Through this site you can stay connected to all FCC activities on the issue, and share your thoughts and ideas on open Internet.

OpenInternet.gov is a place to join the discussion about the important issues facing the future of the Internet.

要するに、重税社会というのは、貨幣システムの利用料がバカみたいに高くなる社会だ。

法人と違って、個人間での取引の場合、現金の受け渡し記録が残らないようにすれば消費税や所得税を課税するのはかなり困難だからだ。 もちろん、ヤフオクなどのように、支払い記録が残るようなシステムは使わない。そんなことをすると、税務署に把握されてしまうからだ。 基本的には、知り合

上に歪んだ政策あれば、下に歪んだ対策が必要になる。

A book representing the art & design from the campaign for change.

"Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class".

The SEC's halfhearted oversight didn't go unnoticed by the market. Six months after Bear was eaten by predators, virtually the same scenario repeated itself in the case of Lehman Brothers — another top-five investment bank that in September 2008 was vaporized in an obvious case of market manipulation. From there, the financial crisis was on, and the global economy went into full-blown crater mode.

ant. Under what became known as the "options market maker exception," the SEC permitted a market maker to sell shares whether or not he had them or could find them right away. In theory, this made sense, since delaying the market maker from selling to offset a big buy order could dry up liquidity and slow down trading. But it also created a loophole for naked short-sellers to kill stocks easily — and legally. Take Bear Stearns, for example. Say the stock is trading at $62, as it was on March 11th, and someone buys put options from the market maker to sell $1.7 million in Bear stock nine days later at $30. To offset that big trade, the market maker might try to keep his own portfolio balanced by selling off shares in the company, whether or not he can locate them. But here's the catch: The market maker often sells those phantom shares to the same person who bought the put options. That buyer, after all, would love to snap up a bunch of counterfeit Bear stock, since he can driv

Naked short-selling, and how it brought down Bear Stearns (well, that and their ludicrous debt-to-asset ratio).

um. hm. i don't agree with a bunch of this, but... the info flow is interesting.

left vs right stats information info

Ideas, issues, concepts, subjects - visualized!

Since the Great Depression, presidents have frequently experimented with Keynesian economics to combat recessions. Three economists chronicle the history of government policy during past recessions and explain what worked and what didn’t.

Keynesian economics

A possible web page for International Finance of Princ of finance

Infrographic on the dividing politics of the world

[US or World version]

kommentar von o'reilly "Giving modifications back to the Drupal community is the next breakthrough announcement that I'll be looking for."

Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine.

Portal que intenta hacer pública información sobre los secretos de Washington DC

RT @cshirky: RT THIS is a big deal. OpenSecrets.org releases 200 million [gov't] data records. Today. http://bit.ly/fdXS [from http://twitter.com/danielgillval/statuses/1512025784]

Measuring Link-Bait of Articles I have flagged in the past.

OpenSecrets.org opens up its data -- feel free to mashup information on campaign finacnce, lobbying, personal finances and much more

There is absolutely no way I’ll be able to make this relevant to tech. But I’m posting it anyway. Our Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, vetoed a California legislative finance bill – AB 1176. The letter is terse and to the point. And the first letter of each line in paragraphs 2-3 are even terser and more to the point.

There is absolutely no way I'll be able to make this relevant to tech. But I'm posting it anyway. Our Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, ...

See us at the Audience Conference, Nov 5-6th in New York » Schwarzenegger Gives California Legislature A Hidden Finger

RT @featureBlend: Secret copyright treaty leaks. It's bad. Very bad. http://j.mp/q0guK [from http://twitter.com/cyberdad/statuses/5427335635]

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says: * * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability. * * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel. * * That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules t

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says: * * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability. * * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

Jonathan Chait, 09/14/09, The New Republic takes AR seriously in a long art (c. 5,000 words?), ostensibly a review of Burns and Heller's books. Lousy article, but Chait gets some imp things right: says AR is different in regarding redistribution wrong, not in practical terms, but moral terms. But stresses that the moral issue is the virtuous and productive being sacrificed to the lazy and immoral. Says she has been very influential among the right.

On Ayn Rand's legacy and the American right: "Ayn Rand's novels tend to strike their readers with the power of revelation, and they are read less like fiction and more like self-help literature, like spiritual guidance. Again and again, readers would write Rand to tell her that their encounter with her work felt like having their eyes open for the first time in their lives... The likes of Gale Norton, George Gilder, Charles Murray, and many others have cited Rand as an influence. Rand acolytes such as Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson have held important positions in Republican politics. "What she did--through long discussions and lots of arguments into the night--was to make me think why capitalism is not only efficient and practical, but also moral," attested Greenspan. In 1987, The New York Times called Rand the "novelist laureate" of the Reagan administration. Reagan's nominee for commerce secretary, C. William Verity Jr., kept a passage from Atlas Shrugged on his desk."

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

"The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying. The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves."

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying. The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves. The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation's latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.

Collected here are a handful of recent images from the rough world of illegal drugs across the globe.

FOTOS DE DROGAS Y DROGADICYTOS!

Excellent article/information/photographic visualization of the Berlin Wall.

Cool side-by-side comparison of Berlin then and now.

I love these types of interactive pictures. More like this please.

Slider showing before and after photographs of Berlin.

Statistical findings from a Pew survey, showing the percentage of internet users that used online sources to get information on the 2008 election. The survey shows how many users shared information through blogs, watched political videos online, shared political content online through e-mail, and used social networking sites to get involved.

This research summary from the Pew Internet & American Life Project provides some interesting insights into who used the Internet during the 2008 presidential campaign and how they used it. In short, the researchers note a significant jump in the number of people seeking information about candidates online rather than from radio or print, not to mention the level of engagement (two-sided interaction with the information) these users demanded. The most intriguing part of the research is perhaps unwritten: The shift in methods of civic engagement highlighted by this report points to the importance of studying--and more importantly teaching--new media/literacies.

This article is an overview of internet usage patterns in relation to the 2008 US Election campaign. It statistically analyses who went online to get involved in the political process.

Tutkimustuloksia Internetin roolista USA:n vaalikampanjassa. Mistä kansalaiset hakivat tietoa jne.

A bit of http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=144

Copyright Watch, hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is designed for the purposes of sharing and comparing the copyright laws of countries around the world. As the world has become connected through the Internet the creation and global sharing of content has become very easy. At the same time the misuse of copyrighted content has become easier too. Sometimes copyright violations may be the result of conflicting copyright laws. Copyright Watch aims to provide a place where copyright laws can be compared and changes to copyright laws can be updated. Applications for Education Copyright Watch could be useful for teaching about the differences between copyright laws. Copyright Watch might also be useful as a part of a discussion about the purpose of copyright laws.

Copyright Watch collects and monitors copyright laws from all over the world.

Global Transparency in Copyright Law. "Copyright Watch was begun by an international group of copyright experts, drawn from the Access to Knowledge community. We’d like to thank Corporacion Innovarte, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL.net), the International Federation of Library Associations, Professor Michael Geist, the Third World Network, and the Bangalore Centre for Internet and Society for their support."

Fabulous website to checkout if you are unsure of what copyright laws exist in which countries?

Sehr guter Artikel, der die Interessen, Motivationen und Ziele der Copyright-Befürworter und der Verfechter von freier Kultur erklärt. Auch die Perspektive der Künstler bleibt nicht unbeachtet. Bestes Zitat aus dem Artikel: "Was ist das Raubkopieren eines Musikstücks gegen die Gründung eines Musikkonzerns?"

Heute, neun Jahre später, ist der Copyright-Krieg in vollem Gange. Zwei Fronten stehen sich gegenüber. Auf der einen Seite: Musikkonzerne, Filmstudios, Verlage und andere Unternehmen, die ihr Geld wie Mark Getty mit den Ideen anderer Menschen verdienen. Auf der anderen Seite: Millionen von Internetnutzern, die dieses Geschäftsmodell systematisch untergraben. Es ist ein asymmetrischer, unübersichtlicher Krieg. Ausgelöst hat ihn ein technologischer Entwicklungssprung, der den Unterhaltungskonzernen zunächst als Königsweg der Profitmaximierung erscheinen musste: die Digitalisierung. Sie hat es ermöglicht, Kulturerzeugnisse mit minimalem Kostenaufwand in verkaufsfähige Einheiten zu stückeln, sie unbegrenzt zu vervielfältigen und ohne herkömmliche Logistik rund um den Erdball zu verteilen. Die Unterhaltungsindustrie hat die Entwicklung dieser Technologie vorangetrieben – und sich damit ihr eigenes Grab geschaufelt.

Copyright

„Wer intellektuelles Eigentum zum Rohstoff erklärt, den es auszubeuten gilt – missbraucht der die Interessen von Künstlern nicht viel grundsätzlicher als jeder Internetpirat? Anders gefragt, frei nach Brecht: Was ist das Raubkopieren eines Musikstücks gegen die Gründung eines Musikkonzerns?“

Perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Polls can affect president's hold on party - USATODAY.com

The Gallup organization first started asking Americans how they approved of the job the president was doing in the 1940s. See how each president since then has fared in the approval poll, look at some news events that influenced public opinion and compare how approval ratings evolved for each president.

Presidential approval ratings over time

crazy

"This is mainly an experimentation with soft bodies using toxi's verlet springs. The data refers to the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by extent. The visual emphasis is on their decline." [Via: http://kottke.org/09/11/the-fall-of-empires "The fall of empires A visualization of the decline of the world's four maritime empires (British, Portuguese, French, Spanish) from 1800 to 2009."]

his is mainly an experimentation with soft bodies using toxi's verlet springs. The data refers to the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by extent. The visual emphasis is on their decline. More on that project mondeguinho.com/master/visual-experimentations/visualizing-empires

ISPs may not act for years on local complaints about slow Internet—but when a town rolls out its own solution, it's amazing how fast the incumbents can deploy fiber, cut prices, and run to the legislature.

"ISPs may not act for years on local complaints about slow Internet—but when a town rolls out its own solution, it's amazing how fast the incumbents can deploy fiber, cut prices, and run to the legislature."

Leet, leet, leet. Would have been awesome if they could prevail against TDS.

Minnesota town wants fast fiber broadband to the curb. Cable internet monopoly refuses. Town passes a referendum funding construction of a municipally owned network. Cable company sues town frivolously in order to delay construction of said network, and installs its own first. What a crock of monopolistic bull. This kind of crap is why we don't have fiber to the door.

Regional telco TDS Telecommunications last week issued a press release announcing a major milestone for the company: 50Mbps service over fiber optic cable to residents of Monticello, Minnesota. The Minneapolis suburb became one of the few non-FiOS communities in the country to experience full fiber-to-the-home deployment, and subscribers will all receive a free upgrade from 25Mbps service to the new 50Mbps tier

Easy for the average citizen to use and hard for any central authority to control, Twitter is practically ideal for a mass protest movement. But its strengths are also its weaknesses

Time article about the coverage of the 2009 Iranian election on Twitter.

for utk essay!

Easy for the average citizen to use and hard for any central authority to control, Twitter is practically ideal for a mass protest movement. But its strengths are also its weaknesses

http://xkcd.com/503/

I Agree

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker.

Fotografias dos políticos mundiais

To enable the citizen masher to do their wizardry, the administration will be opening up a veritable candy store of goodies: Semantic Web, RDF, Linked Data, SPARQL, RDFa, SIOC, ATOM, RESTful APIs, JSON, Widgets, Wikis, XForms, P2P Networks. Wow. They only forgot the lions and tigers and bears oh my… This is an unbelievable stack of technology. I didn’t think the government even knew what an RSS feed was :)

Kerlikowske Says Analogy Is Counterproductive; Shift Aligns With Administration Preference for Treatment Over Incarceration

May article about the Obama administration's approach to drugs and the criminal justice system

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration's new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting "a war on drugs," a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use. In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation's drug issues. "Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them," he said. "We're not at war with people in this country."

@wsj - "White House Czar Calls for End to 'War on Drugs' - WSJ.com" http://hub.tm/?jmjSY [from http://twitter.com/carreonG/statuses/1794610123]

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration's new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting "a war on drugs," a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use. In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation's drug issues.

This Is Yer Brain On War

"Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them," he said. "We're not at war with people in this country."

A brief description on how one senator beleives that the idea of greenhouses gases endangering our environment is a hoax, and our envirnment is really in no danger.

John Rennie (Chefredakteur), Scientific American: Evidence for human interference with Earth's climate continues to | John Rennie, der seit 15 Jahren Chefredakteur bei SciAm ist, geht darin kompakt aber umfassend auf sieben Argumente ein, die man immer wieder findet: 1. CO2 ist nur ein Spurengas, kann gar nichts am Klima ändern; bzw. der Menschenanteil ist zu klein | 2. Der "hockey stick", der den Temperaturanstieg zeigt, ist widerlegt, außerdem war es im Mittelalter wärmer | 3. Seit 10 Jahren ist die Erde nicht wärmer geworden | 4. Sonne oder kosmische Strahlung sind die Ursache der Erwärmung | 5. Klimatologen haben sich verschworen um die Wahrheit zu verstecken | 6. Klimatologen sind nur geldgeil/wollen Achtung | 7. Technologische Anwendungen wie Geoengineering wären viel effektiver als CO2-Reduzierung

a partial list of the contrarians' bad arguments and some brief rebuttals of them

"a partial list of the contrarians' bad arguments and some brief rebuttals of them."

While the middle class has been caught in an economic vise, the financial industry that was supposed to serve them has prospered at their expense. Consumer banking -- selling debt to middle class families -- has been a gold mine. Boring banking has given way to creative banking, and the industry has generated tens of billions of dollars annually in fees made possible by deceptive and dangerous terms buried in the fine print of opaque, incomprehensible, and largely unregulated contracts. And when various forms of this creative banking triggered economic crisis, the banks went to Washington for a handout. All the while, top executives kept their jobs and retained their bonuses. Even though the tax dollars that supported the bailout came largely from middle class families -- from people already working hard to make ends meet -- the beneficiaries of those tax dollars are now lobbying Congress to preserve the rules that had let those huge banks feast off the middle class.

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month.

Can you imagine an America without a strong middle class? If you can, would it still be America as we know it?

it's time to steal from the rich

Is it the beginning of the Asimov's psychohistory ? Ted Talks: http://bit.ly/1CBp #TED [from http://twitter.com/LoXD/statuses/1470242301]

Once he stated as a premise that people are rational I kindda lost interest. Everybody CAN be rational, but not everyone is rational and definitely not all of the time. Just like his example, some people sometimes revert to being like 2 years old.

TED Talks Bruce Bueno de Mesquita uses mathematical analysis to predict (very often correctly) such messy human events as war, political power shifts, Intifada ... After a crisp explanation of how he does it, he offers three predictions on the future of Iran.

Here we have yet another example -- perhaps the most glaring yet -- of the corporations that own our largest media outlets controlling and censoring the content of their news organizations based on the unrelated interests of the parent corporation.

GE's silencing of Olbermann and MSNBC's sleazy use of Richard Wolffe - the media as a corporate tool

"Most notably, the deal wasn't engineered because of a perception that it was hurting either Olbermann or O'Reilly's show, or even that it was hurting MSNBC. To the contrary, as Olbermann himself has acknowledged, his battles with O'Reilly have substantially boosted his ratings. The agreement of the corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corp."

This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives. Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance. We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need. For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

Bruce Schneier once again gets good mileage out of his earlier essay on the value of privacy. This time quoting portions in response to a remark made by Eric Schmidt with the typical "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" argument.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

Elechanical turk de la transpatencia

US Transparency crowd sourcing website

Coordinates distributed digitization of government data as well as things like finding state officials on Twitter. Great example of both microvolunteering and the ecosystem needed for creating an effective evaluatory section of the government cycle.

Transparency Corps is the Sunlight Foundation's answer to the question, "How can I help?". There are many big problems that we can solve with technology, but we can't solve them all. For many of the projects that make government transparency a reality, human eyes and analysis are required. With Transparency Corps, we break those tasks down into short, small actions that make a BIG difference.

awesome! Sunlight's http://transparencycorps.org project now asks for help crowdsourcing national directory of state officials on Twitte ... [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/3058548525]

There are many big problems that we can solve with technology, but we can't solve them all. For many of the projects that make government transparency a reality, human eyes and analysis are required. With Transparency Corps, we break those tasks down into short, small actions that make a BIG difference. Join the Corps, and let's get started!

We see what we want to see, we hear what we want to hear. "conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. "

Last week, Stephen Colbert revisited a segment he had done on Florida Representative Bill Posey, who sponsored a bill that "would require future presidential candidates to provide a copy of their original birth certificate," in order to put insane rumors of President Barack Obama's birthplace to bed. Colbert thought a similar measure should be taken to end the whisperings that Posey was a human-alligator hybrid. Posey, in response to Colbert, said, "I expected there would be some civil debate about it, but it wasn't civil...There is no reason to say that I'm the illegitimate grandson of an alligator." And one wondered, "Does Posey not realize that Colbert is not speaking in earnest? His reaction seems uniquely stupid!" Stupid, yes. But apparently it's not unique at all, according to a study from The Ohio State University, which proves, with math and stuff, that lots of conservatives seem to not understand the intrinsic, underlying joke of The Colbert Report:

The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway. By Matt Taibbi

"What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside."

The controversial Matt Taibbi December 2009 Rolling Stone article.

European Parliament speech of 26/03/09.Daniel Hannan is a Conservative MEP for the South East of England and author of The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Brita...

The YouTube hit.

this still gives me a warm fuzzy feeling...

"you can not spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt"

hannan pillors gordon brown

Worth reading from A-Z.

Once again, The Times Magazine looks back on the past year from our favored perch: ideas.

las mejores ideas de '09 ordenadas alfabéticamente por NYTimes

Excellent visualisation of UK government spending volume

Link referenced in #4change chat, 23 July 2009. Interesting blog post on 'why the Internet isn’t like electrification or shipping containers'.

Written in the run-in to the release of the Digital Britain report from a website with a mission to expand the UK's democracy.

Article about how the Government should improve its application of the Internet.

These services are reducing traditional institutions ability to charge for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business, newspaper, repressive institution or religion. Nor is this traditional ‘creative destruction’ going on in a normal capitalist economy: this isn’t about one widget manufacturer replacing another, this is about a newspaper business dying and being replaced by no one single thing, and certainly nothing recognisable as a newspaper business. This common pattern of more powerful tools for citizens making life harder for traditional institutions is, for me, a cause for celebration. However, I am not celebrating as a libertarian (which I am not) I celebrate it because it marks a historic increase in the freedom of people and groups of people, and a step-change in their ability to determine the direction of their own lives.

Discrimination based on a person's sex is as alive today as it ever was.

greenhouse gas beca

Quickly Find... Home | Front Page MyEXPRESS - My Homepage

100 reasons why global warming is not man-made (or even exists at all)

virtualni javni prostor

One of the striking aspects of the #IranElection crisis has been the heavy use of social media. Iranians have relied on it to spread information on protests and to communicate their situation to millions of concerned people worldwide. In fact, so much has been recorded via social media that it is possible to understand the progression of events through it. Thus, we have built a timeline of events utilizing information recorded via social media. This timeline uses Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia to paint a broad picture of the situation, as well as the growing conversation around it.

Bamboozling Ourselves (Part 1)

"To be sure, the Van Meegeren story raises many, many questions. Among them: what makes a work of art great? Is it the signature of (or attribution to) an acknowledged master? Is it just a name? Or is it a name implying a provenance? With a photograph we may be interested in the photographer but also in what the photograph is of. With a painting this is often turned around, we may be interested in what the painting is of, but we are primarily interested in the question: who made it? Who held a brush to canvas and painted it? Whether it is the work of an acclaimed master like Vermeer or a duplicitous forger like Van Meegeren — we want to know more."

Han van Meegeren

Long OpEd piece on a fake Vermeer and Nazi ties in Amsterdam

ABD'de gelir adaletsizliği tüm zamanların rekorunu kırdı

US statistics: -top .01% own 6% of wealth - top 10% own 50% of wealth

from the page: "Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. .. Saez calculates that in 2007 the top .01 percent of American earners took home 6 percent of total U.S. wages, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2000. As of 2007, the top decile of American earners, Saez writes, pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages, a level that's "higher than any other year since 1917 and even surpasses 1928, the peak of stock market bubble in the 'roaring" 1920s.'""

surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. ....As of 2007, the top decile of American earners, Saez writes, pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages

It is difficult to sympathize with these people, their comments laced with snobbery and petulance. But you can understand their shock: Their world has been turned on its head. After years of enjoying favorable tax rates, they are facing an administration that wants to redistribute their wealth. Their industry is being reordered—no one knows what Wall Street will look like in a few years. They are anxious, and their anxiety is making them mad.

Wall Street people are not moral idiots (most of them, anyway)—it’s not as if they’ve never pondered the fairness of their enormous salaries. “One of my relatives is a doctor, we’re both well-educated, hardworking people. And he certainly didn’t make the amount of money I made,” a former Bear Stearns senior managing director tells me. “I would be the first person to tell you his value to society, to humanity, is far greater than anything that went on in the Bear Stearns building.”

In a witch hunt, the witches have feelings, too. As populist rage has erupted around the country, stoked by canny politicians, an opposite rage has built on Wall Street and other arenas where the wealthy hold sway. Its expression is more furtive and it’s often mixed with a kind of sublimated shame, but it can be every bit as vitriolic.

IBG-YBG: I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone

As the privileged class loses its privileges, a collective moan rises from the canyons of Wall Street.

It was the culture of what some called IBG-YBG: I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone,”

China knows it is becoming an uncontested superpower; indeed its newfound muscular confidence was on striking display in Copenhagen. Its coal-based economy doubles every decade, and its power increases commensurately. Its leadership will not alter this magic formula unless they absolutely have to

cost of Marshall Plan

costo del rescate de bancos en la crisis económica del 2008

How much does the bailout cost, compared to other grand government programs? More.

oh. my. god. and where the hell is this money coming from, anyway???

Bailout costs more than Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA's lifetime budget -- *combined*!

$4.6165 trillion? That'sa spicy meataballa!

"As we've seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal policies short-circuited the market's self-correcting forces."

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Price, wage-fixing, and collusion blamed for length of 1930's Depression.

GR: SmutOnRails: Shared by robinhowlett Martin Flower's POV on smut-gate (yes, I know, I hate the unoriginali.. http://tinyurl.com/cframh [from http://twitter.com/robinhowlett/statuses/1663151187]

I have a different vision - one that sticks it to the suits so hard it will make their eyes water. How about a community where women are valued for their ability to program and not by the thickness of their skin? How about a community that edgily pushes new boundaries without reinforcing long running evils? Perhaps even a community where women reach equal numbers? Such a community would hand the suits the defeat in the long battle women have been fighting for centuries. I'd love to be part of that.

A couple of weeks ago there was a Ruby conference in San Francisco called GoGaRuCo (Golden Gate Ruby Conference). This conference has grabbed attention due to a talk at which the presenter illustrated a discussion of CouchDB by using sexually suggestive pictures of women. Unsurprisingly the result has been a fair bit of heated, and occasionally offensive, debate.

"Clearly he preferred oral sex... to oral hygeine."

Those Who Trespass audiobook Author: Bill O'Reilly Publisher: Random House Audio Date: 2001 (book was published in 1998) Discovered at: Goodwill

Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

about Avatar, District 9, & Dune

A story that revisits the same old tropes of colonization. Whites still get to be leaders of the natives - just in a kinder, gentler way

Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers...

Sure, Avatar goes a little bit beyond the basic colonizing story. We are told in no uncertain terms that it's wrong to colonize the lands of native people. Our hero chooses to join the Na'vi rather than abide the racist culture of his own people. But it is nevertheless a story that revisits the same old tropes of colonization. Whites still get to be leaders of the natives - just in a kinder, gentler way than they would have in an old Flash Gordon flick or in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels.

"When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it's only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group."

Like Dances with Wolves, Last Samurai, and even Dune, tis a story about white guilt.

io9?

"Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers... Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?"

One of the best, most compelling, incisive, pithy graphics I have ever seen.

Great picture chart 10 years of history

Dear US government and TSA. This is reality, not TV. Please act accordingly not stupidly.

A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we're doing the terrorists' job for them.

“By not overreacting, by not responding to movie-plot threats, and by not becoming defensive, we demonstrate the resilience of our society, in our laws, our culture, our freedoms. There is a difference between indomitability and arrogant "bring 'em on" rhetoric. There's a difference between accepting the inherent risk that comes with a free and open society, and hyping the threats.”

Professor Schneier does it again. He puts into words what I've been thinking, much better than I could have done so.

Last week's attempted terror attack on an airplane heading from Amsterdam to Detroit has given rise to a bunch of familiar questions. How did the explosives get past security screening? What steps could be taken to avert similar attacks? Why wasn't there an air marshal on the flight? And, predictably, government officials have rushed to institute new safety measures to close holes in the system exposed by the incident. Reviewing what happened is important, but a lot of the discussion is off-base, a reflection of the fundamentally wrong conception most people have of terrorism and how to combat it.

too pretty!

Thank you Maira Kalman http://tinyurl.com/ceabnu [from http://twitter.com/mintonmorris/statuses/1164471814]

"The angels are singing on this glorious day."

pretty pretty.

Video de la investidura de Barack Obama

Jurament i discurs del dia de la investidura de Barack Obama.

History Being Made..!

Obama's Inauguration Speech

Obama's 2009 inaugural address

instead of sweetened beverages, the average American drank water, Finkelstein calculates, he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less.

Good article on the rising rate of obesity in the US and around the world.

"The human body is “mismatched” to the human situation. “We evolved on the savannahs of Africa,” Power and Schulkin write. “We now live in Candyland.” "

A food scientist for Frito-Lay relates how the company is seeking to create “a lot of fun in your mouth” with products like Nacho Cheese Doritos, which meld “three different cheese notes” with lots of salt and oil. Another product-development expert talks about how she is trying to “unlock the code of craveability,” and a third about the effort to “cram as much hedonics as you can in one dish.” Kessler invents his own term—“conditioned hypereating”—to describe how people respond to these laboratory-designed concoctions. Foods like Cinnabons and Starbucks’ Strawberries & Crème Frappuccinos are, he maintains, like drugs:

"Early humans compensated for the energy used in their heads by cutting back on the energy used in their guts; as man’s cranium grew, his digestive tract shrank. This forced him to obtain more energy-dense foods than his fellow-primates were subsisting on, which put a premium on adding further brain power. The result of this self-reinforcing process was a strong taste for foods that are high in calories and easy to digest; just as it is natural for gorillas to love leaves, it is natural for people to love funnel cakes. In America today, obtaining calories is very nearly effortless; as Power and Schulkin observe, with a few dollars it’s possible to go to the grocery store and purchase enough sugar or vegetable oil to fulfill the average person’s energy requirements for a week. The result is what’s known as the 'mismatch paradigm.' The human body is 'mismatched' to the human situation. 'We evolved on the savannahs of Africa,' Power and Schulkin write. 'We now live in Candyland.'"

One of the most comprehensive data sets available about Americans—how tall they are, when they last visited a dentist, what sort of cereal they eat for breakfast, whether they have to pee during the night, and, if so, how often—comes from a series of studies conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Participants are chosen at random, interviewed at length, and subjected to a battery of tests in special trailers that the C.D.C. hauls around the country. The studies, known as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, began during the Eisenhower Administration and have been carried out periodically ever since.

this article is my initial article; laying out

A better description might be “cost carriers very, very, very little to transmit.” A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. The decision could not have come from a dearth of business: the 2.5 trillion sent messages this year, the estimate of the Gartner Group, is up 32 percent from 2007. Gartner expects 3.3 trillion messages to be sent in 2009.

"text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network. That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted."

The public assumes that wireless carriers’ costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain.

TEXT messaging is a wonderful business to be in: about 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year. The public assumes that the wireless carriers’ costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain.

Conservative protesters should remember that the recession, which led to so many of the policies they oppose, is almost entirely the result of Bush’s policies. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession began in December 2007—long before Obama was even nominated. And the previous recession ended in November 2001, so the current recession cannot be blamed on cyclical forces that Bush inherited.

HOORAY!

In cold fact, a financial crisis is one of the kindest and mildest sorts of crisis a civilization can have. Compared to typical Italian catastrophes like wars, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, endemic political collapse — a financial crisis is a problem for schoolchildren.

Bruce Sterling text on design, futurism and stuff.

funny, brilliant man

We create and distribute original Science is Culture content that communicates science's fast-changing place in our culture to an international audience. Our mission is to help nurture a science-savvy global citizenry by increasing public interest in science and public understanding of science.

"Eight years late, the 20th century has finally departed us this year. It will never return." bruce sterling's optimistic piece on what we're collectively in for next.

RT @applicants: The Obama Economy http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123604419092515347.html [from http://twitter.com/Captoe/statuses/1276487461]

WSJ edit page fires a shot across Obama's bow.

As the Dow keeps dropping, the President is running out of people to blame.

financial crisis

Great article -- recommended by Jeremy Shapiro. One part of the argument: the fallacy of the belief in diversification and complexity.

Very interesting article about the causes of the current crisis.

By Jerry Z. Muller Thursday, January 29, 2009 Major recessions are characterized by something novel. Opacity and pseudo-objectivity created the crisis today.

"Both major parties have become a rats' nest of hypocrisy and incompetence. That, combined with our stratospheric, near-criminal indebtedness to China (which could destroy the dollar overnight), should raise signal flags. Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?"

Liberal writer Camille Paglia = intellectually honest.

A hard look at the problems with the current healthcare proposals, from the moderate liberal perspective.

Aug. 12, 2009 | Buyer's remorse? Not me. At the North American summit in Guadalajara this week, President Obama resumed the role he is best at -- representing the U.S. with dignity and authority abroad. This is why I, for one, voted for Obama and continue to support him. The damage done to U.S. prestige by the feckless, buffoonish George W. Bush will take years to repair. Obama has barely begun the crucial mission that he was elected to do.

Read Entire Package Here

Provides a high level breakdown of how much money is allocated to each agency

Stimulus Spending Breakouts

see very bottom for foreclosure information

Comparing presidential approval ratings over the decades.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fpublic%2Fresources%2Fdocuments%2Finfo-presapp0605-31.html%3Fr

WhiteHouse.gov is the official web site for the White House and President Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. This site is a source for information about the President, White House news and policies, White House history, and the federal government.

year

The White House Blog, January 21, 2009

America: In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations. Thank you. God bless you. And

Incisive

"15 year old Calvin and Hobbes strip with almost clairvoyance on how we got into our current financial crisis.‏"

Calvin needs a bailout

http://tr.im/glf8 - via gregmankiw.blogspot.com Explains it so well! [from http://twitter.com/hardmanjustin/statuses/1217823016]

Really great analysis.

America has been strong because, despite its flawed system, people built toward the future in the 1840s, and the 1930s, and the 1950s. During just the time when Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park, when Theodore Roosevelt set aside land for the National Parks, when Dwight Eisenhower created the Pentagon research agency that ultimately gave rise to the Internet, the American system seemed broken too. They worked within its flaws and limits, which made all the difference. That is the bravest and best choice for us now.

Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great: our university system, our receptiveness to immigration, our culture of innovation. In most significant ways, the U.S. remains the envy of the world. But here’s the alarming problem: our governing system is old and broken and dysfunctional. Fixing it—without resorting to a constitutional convention or a coup—is the key to securing the nation’s future.

Very good but doesn't *really* propose that strong of sol'ns. I think we need to try to infuse competition into the government. I also think that we need to cut military spending, my god how did he not mention this!

thoughtful - build on this to make the argument that our best way to change the system is by changing the people within it. If people in government were operating more altruistically, it wouldn't matter what system they operated within, good things would happen.

It appears China can't play nice with the other kids.

Very big news you should read this!

wow, good

Congrats to Google for raging against censorship, but WTF? A blog post accusing a foreign government of attacking them? Maybe they're getting a little too big? Ya think?

Whoa. China attacks Google (to steal business information and human rights activist email). Google withdraws from China.

ink is really cool, though, is that the photo also shows the agent’s worksheet:

German

Dedicated to building America's future, supporting fresh ideas and candidates who share our vision for reform and innovation.

Shit is NOT easy.

Ich lebe online. Alle Texte, die ich seit 1983 geschrieben habe, sind auf dem Computer geschrieben worden. Sie liegen auf einem halben Dutzend Rechnern im Netz verstreut. Seit 1986 achte ich darauf, portable Formate zu verwenden, um auch bei einer Migration auf neue Systeme keine Daten zu verlieren. Seit 20 Jahren lese ich laufend meine Mail, ich bin jeden Tag in fünf verschiedenen IM-Systemen zu erreichen.

Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp

Überlegungen von Kristian Köhntopp zum "Leben online" und Politikern

It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete

Don't put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce -- and most of those who have been laid off -- employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now. Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years.

Beautiful and eloquent letter from Michael Moore, on the day of GM's "hand over" to its new shareholders: the US government and its taxpayers.

"Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades -- and we don't even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven't used it, is criminal. Let's hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now."

Michael Moore's suggestions as to what to do with GM seem good to me.

Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine)

1. “Asymmetrical Warfare”-- When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo Naval Base “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” Obama has failed to fulfill his promise.

On June 9th, 2006, [Aamer] was beaten for two and a half hours straight. Seven naval military police participated in his beating. Mr. Aamer stated he had refused to provide a retina scan and fingerprints. He reported to me that he was strapped to a chair, fully restrained at the head, arms and legs. The MPs inflicted so much pain, Mr. Aamer said he thought he was going to die. The MPs pressed on pressure points all over his body: his temples, just under his jawline, in the hollow beneath his ears. They choked him. They bent his nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it would break. They pinched his thighs and feet constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out.

A financial crisis is the worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism.

an insane article, on this day there were videos of tent camps in Sacramento, CA filled with people who had lost jobs. The editorial is by Michael Boskin

音楽が事実上無料になったことで、コピーできない部分に価値が置かれるようになったことだ。例えばパフォーマンスに関して言えば、ここ数年においておそらく今までにないほどイギリスではライブパフォーマンスが盛んになっていて、バンドはパフォーマンスを真剣に受け止めている。彼らはパフォーマンスのプロモーションをするためにレコードを作るんだ。私たちの時代は、レコードのプロモーションをするためにパフォーマンスをしたものだった。再びパフォーマンスが活性化して注目すべきものになり、全てのレベルにおいて重要になった。

Teen pregnancy. October/November 2008.

Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?

Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

Hofmann penned a never-before-disclosed letter in 2007 to Jobs at the behest of his friend Rick Doblin, who runs an organization dedicated to studying the medical and psychiatric benefits of psychedelic drugs.

Jobs, Hoffman, LSD

RT @shimritben @dannysullivan via @boingboing, a super filtered site for reliable iran tweets & other info http://bit.ly/PoeiP #IranElection [from http://twitter.com/talgalili/statuses/2276663978]

Many people assume that marijuana was made illegal through some kind of process involving scientific, medical, and government hearings; that it was to protect the citizens from what was determined to be a dangerous drug. The actual story shows a much different picture. Those who voted on the legal fate of this plant never had the facts, but were dependent on information supplied by those who had a specific agenda to deceive lawmakers. You'll see below that the very first federal vote to prohibit marijuana was based entirely on a documented lie on the floor of the Senate. You'll also see that the history of marijuana's criminalization is filled with: * Racism * Fear * Protection of Corporate Profits * Yellow Journalism * Ignorant, Incompetent, and/or Corrupt Legislators * Personal Career Advancement and Greed These are the actual reasons marijuana is illegal.

important and relevant history everyone should know

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking. Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest. Thomas Frank Thomas Frank thinks that voters have become blinded to their real interests Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different: "You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining.

If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them. / They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.

Political scientist Dr David Runciman looks at why is there often such deep opposition to reforms that appear to be of obvious benefit to voters. On BBC News.

WOW. As a library worker, I find this to be appalling...

"The New Book Banning" - can childrens books pre-1985 give lead poisoning? ( http://bit.ly/6wcqH ) [from http://twitter.com/aphofer/statuses/3149346529]

It’s hard to believe, but true: under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children’s products, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute. Merchants, thrift stores, and booksellers may be at risk if they sell older volumes, or even give them away, without first subjecting them to testing—at prohibitive expense. Many used-book sellers, consignment stores, Goodwill outlets, and the like have accordingly begun to refuse new donations of pre-1985 volumes, yank existing ones off their shelves, and in some cases discard them en masse.

Why Iran has such a sh1t government

concise and straight forward explanation of a decidedly complicated government

How Iran is ruled

Note:50% of the adult population is missing. So that's all what they call democracy

There can be more than one bad thing in the world

'what-aboutery'

Official misuses are bad enough, but it's the unofficial uses that worry me more. Any surveillance and control system must itself be secured. An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and by the people you don't. The problem is that such control makes us all less safe. Whether the eavesdroppers are the good guys or the bad guys, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in. And it's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state.

Bajo el título amarillista "USA habilita hackeo de China a Google" hay un buen artículo, lleno de info importante. http://bit.ly/64uzts [from http://twitter.com/dariuus/statuses/8156429222]

"In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access. Google's system isn't unique. Democratic governments around the world -- in Sweden, Canada and the UK, for example -- are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell."

Schneier on how the mandated backdoor access system allowed for the China incident

articulo de Bruce Scheneier sobre el ataque de china a google. video hillary clinton sobre la libertad de internet

RT @dangoldin: RT @mikkohypponen: Bruce Schneier writes to CNN on Google & China http://bit.ly/6uMYkx [from http://twitter.com/davidajudd/statuses/8152550494]

In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.

In Wal-Mart's Image The "values" of the largest private-sector employer in the U.S. are shaping our national economy -- and that's a very bad thing.

"The "values" of the largest private-sector employer in the U.S. are shaping our national economy -- and that's a very bad thing."

"Wal-Mart's more serious failure of market penetration remains its inability to break into America's major coastal cities or Chicago. There, the specter of its superstores -- stores that include supermarkets, whose success has already given Wal-Mart 30 percent of the U.S. retail food market -- poses a direct threat to unionized supermarket workers. In 2003, Southern California supermarkets, after decades of mutually profitable labor relations, told the United Food and Commercial Workers that they would have to reduce wages and benefits to compete with Wal-Mart, and, after breaking the union's strike, imposed a contract in which new hires were offered not the traditional health insurance package but one modeled on Wal-Mart's. At the time, the proportion of Southern California grocery workers with health insurance stood at 94 percent; by 2007, it had declined to 54 percent."

Interesting read about the use of technology in the Obama campaign. The link between my.barackobama.com and actual physical volunteering and organizing is particularly interesting.

"Everything I thought we knew about the campaign's use of technology and the Internet faded as I spent more time with the campaign. The game-changer in the Obama campaign, as I found in talking to key staff—and through volunteering in southern Ohio myself—was that technology was not an add-on: It represented a carefully considered element of almost every critical campaign function. Most remarkably, technology played a critical role in the one area least understood by the "digerati" and most online campaigners: moving online supporters toward real-world action. "

A smart post from Michael Silberman of echoditto

from New York Magazine

“Put a lot of information out there. People can handle it. It’s okay to use big words. You don’t need to dumb stuff down! You don’t need to make stuff simple and repetitive for people. If you assume that your audience is as interested in what you are talking about as you are, you’re going to connect with your audience in a much better way.” She might not be saving the world, but she is intent on making it a little smarter.

Maddow first came on MSNBC’s radar in 2005, when she auditioned as a foil for the conservative Tucker Carlson’s show. Bill Wolff, Carlson’s producer at the time, was immediately smitten. “She was unbelievably prepared,” he said. “And she just killed him.” She bobbed around as a guest commentator for three years, appearing as a regular guest on Carlson’s show, but also on Paula Zahn’s and Larry King’s. At one point, she filmed a pilot for a weekend political show with CNN. “She seemed really constrained there,” says a person involved in the program. “It was like they didn’t know what to do with her.” The pilot never went anywhere. CNN president Jon Klein says it was because having an “obviously liberal” host didn’t fit with the mission of the network: “It’s like, you wouldn’t put The Sopranos on Comedy Central.”

5/27/09

article on Rachel Maddow

“I do worry if being a pundit is a worthwhile thing to be,” she says. “Yeah, I’m the unlikely cable news host. But before that I was the unlikely Rhodes scholar. And before that I was the unlikely kid who got into Stanford. And then I was the unlikely lifeguard. You can always cast yourself as unlikely when you’re fundamentally alienated in your worldview. It’s a healthy approach for a commentator.”

The secret to the success of a wonky lesbian pundit with no TV experience? A Ph.D. from Oxford, a dry sense of humor, and the ability to be nice to Pat Buchanan.

Lexical Analysis of 2008 US Presidential and Vice-Presidiential Debates

wow - this is impressive. Lexical Analysis of Pres debates: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/debates/ [from http://twitter.com/pollyrt/statuses/963468907]

A new image of "tank man", asks us to re-examine our views about history

RT @mathewi @GreatDismal New photo of Tiananman Square "tank man" just surfaced http://bit.ly/UTk7n [via @pkedrosky] #homeschool #history [from http://twitter.com/CircleReader/statuses/2032806101]

Everyone has now seen this alternative angle on Tank Man from Tiananmen Square.

Rectangles in the chart are sized according to the amount of spending for that category. Color shows the change in spending from 2010.

President Obama's proposal for the 2011 budget.

Nice graphical representation of Obama's 2011 budget proposal, and how the budget changes from 2010.

Beautiful infographic.

A Strong Middle Class

US Government

Official blog of V.P. Joe Biden's Middle Class Task Force

This is the official web page of the White House Task Force on Middle Class Working Families.

WhiteHouse.gov is the official web site for the White House and President Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. This site is a source for information about the President, White House news and policies, White House history, and the federal government.

The zero-rupee note. I like this. How long til the Tea Party in United States latches on and starts using something similiar in political protest against...well....all things not Tea Party.

"One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success. Had the zero rupee note reached the old lady sooner, her granddaughter could have started college on schedule and avoided the consequence of delaying her education for two years. In another experience, a corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen."

In addition, officials want to keep their jobs and are fearful about setting off disciplinary proceedings, not to mention risking going to jail. More importantly, Anand believes that the success of the notes lies in the willingness of the people to use them. People are willing to stand up against the practice that has become so commonplace because they are no

This is one way to end bribery.

He came up with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his resistance....In another experience, a corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen.

Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success.

"Conservatives like Stewart because he's providing them a platform to reach an audience that usually tunes them out. And they often find that Stewart takes them more seriously than right-wing political hosts, who are often just using them to validate their broad positions, do. Stewart will poke fun, but he offers a good-faith debate on powder kegs — torture, abortion, nuclear weapons, health care — that explode on other networks. Stewart's interview of Cliff May — a crackling, lengthy debate about where to draw the line between freedom and security — produced one of the most clarifying discussions about torture on television. 'Literally, this is the best conversation I've had on this subject anywhere,' May told Stewart."

A look on why conservatives like to go on Jon's show

8/9/09 at 9:10 PM

John Bolton, William Kristol, and others explain why 'The Daily Show' is the best place to get their views heard.

"Conservatives like Stewart because he's providing them a platform to reach an audience that usually tunes them out. And they often find that Stewart takes them more seriously than right-wing political hosts, who are often just using them to validate their broad positions, do. Stewart will poke fun, but he offers a good-faith debate on powder kegs — torture, abortion, nuclear weapons, health care — that explode on other networks...Since the beginning of the Obama administration, Stewart has interviewed more conservative pundits than liberal ones. It may be because it's simply easier to tangle with an ideological adversary than to needle a compatriot...When he's interviewing a liberal politician or pundit, he comes from a weaker position. His offensive instincts are blurred — notwithstanding his on-air indictment of Jim Cramer — and occasionally he fawns."

How the Ecocn.org folks work

A description of a group of volunteers translating every article in the weekly Economist into Chinese.

"a group of dedicated fans of The Economist newsmagazine are translating each weekly issue cover-to-cover, splitting up the work among a team of volunteers, and redistributing the finished translations as complete PDFs for a Chinese audience. "

They call themselves The Eco Team, a group of about 240 passionate Economist fans led by a 39-year-old insurance broker named Shi Yi.

The list of sensitive subjects includes China-Taiwan's political relationship, Tibet, Falun Gong, the Tiananmen Square protests, the Cultural Revolution, discussions of freedom of the press or freedom of religion, and any discussion of the establishment of a new Chinese political party.

Jim Webb doing something decent.

criminal justice

interesting

Top 5 priorities - a year ago and still valid

The most scary thing about the Internet for your government is not pedophiles, terrorists or viruses, whatever you may have read in the papers. It is the danger of your administration being silently obsoleted by the lightening pace at which the Internet changes expectations.

RT @timoreilly: MySociety's top 5 Internet priorities for government is, as expected, right on. http://bit.ly/ghZl6 [from http://twitter.com/NicMcPhee/statuses/1330269653]

The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come.

SUNDAY FEB. 22, 2009 07:36 EST Fox News "war games" the coming civil war (updated below) Bill Clinton's election in 1992 gave rise to the American "militia movement": hordes of overwhelmingly white, middle-aged men from suburban and rural areas who convinced themselves they were defending the American way of life from the "liberals" and "leftists" running the country by dressing up in military costumes on weekends, wobbling around together with guns, and play-acting the role of patriot-warriors. Those theater groups -- the cultural precursor to George Bush's prancing 2003 performance dressed in a fighter pilot outfit on Mission Accomplished Day -- spawned the decade of the so-called "Angry White Male," the movement behind the 1994 takeover of the U.S. Congress by Newt Gingrich and his band of federal-government-cursing, pseudo-revolutionary, play-acting tough guys.

"Bill Clinton's election in 1992 gave rise to the American "militia movement": hordes of overwhelmingly white, middle-aged men from suburban and rural areas who convinced themselves they were defending the American way of life from the "liberals" and "leftists" running the country by dressing up in military costumes on weekends, wobbling around together with guns, and play-acting the role of patriot-warriors...What was most remarkable about this allegedly "anti-government" movement was that -- with some isolated and principled exceptions -- it completely vanished upon the election of Republican George Bush, and it stayed invisible even as Bush presided over the most extreme and invasive expansion of federal government power in memory...But now, only four weeks into the presidency of Barack Obama, they are back -- angrier and more chest-beating than ever."

What was most remarkable about this allegedly "anti-government" movement was that -- with some isolated and principled exceptions -- it completely vanished upon the election of Republican George Bush, and it stayed invisible even as Bush presided over the most extreme and invasive expansion of federal government power in memory. Even as Bush seized and used all of the powers which that movement claimed in the 1990s to find so tyrannical and unconstitutional -- limitless, unchecked surveillance activities, detention powers with no oversight, expanding federal police powers, secret prison camps, even massively exploding and debt-financed domestic spending -- they meekly submitted to all of it, even enthusiastically cheered it all on.

Fox News "war games" the coming civil war

Granska ipred-lagen

watch the watchdogs

November 14, 2008, 10:00 pm The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla Electronic devices dislike me. There is never a day when something isn’t ailing. Three out of these five implements — answering machine, fax machine, printer, phone and electric can-opener — all dropped dead on me in the past few days. Now something has gone wrong with all three television sets. They will only get Sarah Palin. I can play a kind of Alaskan roulette. Any random channel clicked on by the remote brings up that eager face, with its continuing assaults on the English Lang.

Now something has gone wrong with all three television sets. They will get only Sarah Palin. I can play a kind of Alaskan roulette. Any random channel clicked on by the remote brings up that eager face, with its continuing assaults on the English Lang.

"Con artists have a word for the inability of their victims to accept that they've been scammed. They call it the 'True Believer Syndrome'. That's sort of where we are, in a state of nagging disbelief about the real problem on Wall Street. It isn't so much that we have inadequate rules or incompetent regulators, although both of these things are certainly true. [..] Instead of liquidating and prosecuting the insolvent institutions that took us all down with them in a giant Ponzi scheme, we have showered them with money and guarantees and all sorts of other enabling gestures."

dissecting wall street as a series of cons

Still, the trick for Goldman was: how to collect the insurance money. As AIG headed into a tailspin that fateful summer of 2008, it looked like the beleaguered firm wasn't going to have the money to pay off the bogus insurance. So Goldman and other banks began demanding that AIG provide them with cash collateral. In the 15 months leading up to the collapse of AIG, Goldman received $5.9 billion in collateral. Société Générale, a bank holding lots of mortgage-backed crap originally underwritten by Goldman, received $5.5 billion. These collateral demands squeezing AIG from two sides were the "Swoop and Squat" that ultimately crashed the firm. "It put the company into a liquidity crisis," says Eric Dinallo, who was intimately involved in the AIG bailout as head of the New York State Insurance Department.

Matt Taibbi gets very angry at Wall Street again; I'm not sure how fair some of it is, but it's entertaining stuff.

JM Keynes

The Wallstreet mindset that allowed the Madoff scandal to happen, and how to fix it.

Required reading, Part I.

OUR financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense... The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest.

financial crisis

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Jeg har altid gerne villet være pirat.

The US copyright lobby has long argued against open source software - now Indonesia's in the firing line for encouraging the idea in government departments

Throw the shoe at George Bush - see how many times you can hit him!

Sent by Cousin Bill after the Iraq journalist sheo throwing incident in 12/08

Whitehouse.gov Redesign: The Change Has Come

this is the "shotgun over the mantle" of the financial debacle we are living through -- those few with a sense of history or drama KNEW it would be fired before the play ends... and here we are

Phil Gramm

news of the repeal of the steal-glass act

The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation's financial system. -- boy did it ever!

Ground zero for the financial crisis. 1999.

The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank.

The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank. As Tim Duy put it, there are no bad assets, only misunderstood assets. And if we get investors to understand that toxic waste is really, truly worth much more than anyone is willing to pay for it, all our problems will be solved.

We should just let the banks and institutions that have been poorly managed fail.

To this end the plan proposes to create funds in which private investors put in a small amount of their own money, and in return get large, non-recourse loans from the taxpayer, with which to buy bad — I mean misunderstood — assets. This is supposed to lead to fair prices because the funds will engage in competitive bidding. But it’s immediately obvious, if you think about it, that these funds will have skewed incentives. In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem.

Krugman talks about structural problems that make Geithner's plan highly unlikely to work, and msot definitely transfers all risk upon the tax payer http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/opinion/23krugman.html

Krugman analyzes The Geithner plan

In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose.

This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn’t actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalized. And I fear that when the plan fails, as it almost surely will, the administration will have shot its bolt: it won’t be able to come back to Congress for a plan that might actually work.

Sarah Palin gets a surprising new subscription.http://maps.google.com/vote to find out where to voteGo to http://www.ReturnOfTerryTate.com to see more videos...

Terry Tate: Reading Is Fundamental

Too funny.

Terry Tate demonstrates his opinion of Sarah Palin.

Surprisingly funny, and appropriate.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha my costume just got 100% awesomer

The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, "I don't consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

Project Houdini

'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'

More info on the Houdini project from the Obama campaign

The disclosures are among many revealed in "How He Did It, 2008," the latest installment in NEWSWEEK's Special Election Project, which was first published in 1984. As in the previous editions, "How He Did It, 2008" is an inside, behind-the-scenes account of the presidential election produced by a special team of reporters working for more than a year on an embargoed basis and detached from the weekly magazine and Newsweek.com. Everything the project team learns is kept confidential until the day after the polls close.

The Obama campaign was provided with reports from the Secret Service showing a sharp and disturbing increase in threats to Obama in September and early October, at the same time that many crowds at Palin rallies became more frenzied. Michelle Obama was shaken by the vituperative crowds and the hot rhetoric from the GOP candidates. "Why would they try to make people hate us?" Michelle asked a top campaign aide.

Vettu, jeg begynner å like han her: "The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, "I don't consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

this is good scary look at things and people hating obama hilary the CAMPAIGN

We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we're being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later. Oliver North learned this, way back in 1987, when messages he thought he had deleted were saved by the White House PROFS system, and then subpoenaed in the Iran-Contra affair. Bill Gates learned this in 1998 when his conversational e-mails were provided to opposing counsel as part of the antitrust litigation discovery process. Mark Foley learned this in 2006 when his instant messages were saved and made public by the underage men he talked to. Paris Hilton learned this in 2005 when her cell phone account was hacked, and Sarah Palin learned it earlier this year when her Yahoo e-mail account was hacked. ... Ephemeral conversation is dying. Cardinal Richelieu:If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

"Conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it. Organized crime bosses worried about phone taps and room bugs, but that was the exception. Privacy was just assumed. This has changed. We chat in e-mail, over SMS and IM, and on social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal. We blog and we Twitter. These conversations -- with friends, lovers, colleagues, members of our cabinet -- are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails. We know this intellectually, but we haven't truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we're being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later."

When he becomes president, Barack Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry. Aides are concerned that his unofficial conversations would become part of the presidential record, subject to subpoena and eventually made public as part of the country's historical record.

"When he becomes president, Barack Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry. Aides are concerned that his unofficial conversations would become part of the presidential record, subject to subpoena and eventually made public as part of the country's historical record."

But as technology makes our conversations less ephemeral, we need laws to step in and safeguard ephemeral conversation.

"The younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. ... until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers -- we aren't fully an information age society." (via Oblinks)

Homer Simpson tries to vote for Obama. Homer Simpson tries to vote for Obama in the '08 election.. From: deebold08. Views: 10239317. 29551 ratings. Time: 01:21. More in. Entertainment.

Homer Simpson tries to vote for Obama. Homer Simpson tries to vote for Obama in the '08 election.. From: deebold08. Views: 10223817. 29500 ratings. Time: 01:21. More in. Entertainment.

Genre: animation

lol often http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ

funny clip

Uff, buen video para responde mi pregunta por quien votaria Homero Simpson?

Using Twitter for activism

20-page downloadable activist's intro

Guía para hacer activismo en Twitter. Documento en iglés en formato PDF.

Interesting portrait of Ben Bernanke in the New Yorker

Article from The New Yorker on Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke; brief history of current economic crisis (13 pp)

Interesting article about Chairman Bernanke and the current financial crisis

- added by harper reed's google reader

In the ten days since Iran's disputed presidential election, street demonstrations have taken place every day. Many of the photographs here were taken and transmitted at great risk in the past week, in the hopes that others would be able to see and bear witness. [...]

Fotografias de temas da actualidade

Iran pictures on The Big Picture.

Official Homepage of the FCC National Broadband Plan

Cidadania na Internet

This could be a great tool for google hearings and stuff like that.

extensive CSPAN archives going way back.

Good #infographic explaining American politics: http://infobeautiful.s3.amazonaws.com/leftright_US_1416.gif – Chris Harrison (cdharrison) http://twitter.com/cdharrison/statuses/10324141855

Liberal vs. Conservative, Left vs. Right, Progressive vs. Traditional

Excellent infographic comparing the left-wing and right-wing government

We hear a lot about “biblical marriage” these days. Some of us might not be clear on what that means. The website Religious Tolerance has provided a helpful article on the types of marriage found in the pages of the bible.

1. Polygynous Marriage 2. Levirate Marriage When a woman was widowed without a son, it became the responsibility of the brother-in-law or a close male relative to take her in and impregnate her. If the resulting child was a son, he would be considered the heir of her late husband. See Ruth, and the story of Onan (Gen. 38:6-10). 3. A man, a woman and her property — a female slave 4. A man, one or more wives, and some concubines The definition of a concubine varies from culture to culture, but they tended to be live-in mistresses. 5. A male soldier and a female prisoner of war Women could be taken as booty 6. A male rapist and his victim Deuteronomy 22:28-29 describes how an unmarried woman who had been raped must marry her attacker. 7. A male and female slave A female slave could be married to a male slave without consent, 8. Monogamous, heterosexual marriage

1) polygynous 2) levirate 3) wife's slave 4) concubines 5) soldier and kidnapped female prisoner 6) rapist-raped 7) two slaves (forced) 8) monogamous heterosexual

via shinuna (thx!)

"When Pinochet's military overthrew the Chilean government 30 years ago, they discovered a revolutionary communication system, a 'socialist internet' connecting the whole country. Its creator? An eccentric scientist from Surrey. Andy Beckett on the forgotten story of Stafford Beer"

Completely

When Pinochet's military overthrew the Chilean government 30 years ago, they discovered a revolutionary communication system, a 'socialist internet' connecting the whole country. Its creator? An eccentric scientist from Surrey. Andy Beckett on the forgotten story of Stafford Beer. (See also: http://vimeo.com/8000921 )

all the figures behind obama's social networks and their achievements

Article on Obama's strategy for raising money via online, tms, email, etc.

Fascinating article that traces election results in counties in the South all the way back to geological events millions of years ago. In short, coastlines determined soil types which determined demographics which determined voting patterns.

This is so awesome.

How an ancient Cretaceous shoreline voted for Obama.

amazing. how soil types determine voting patterns.

A list of Google services availability in Mainland China.

Regularly updated page showing which Google services are still available in mainland China.

list of google services available in mainland china

Availability of Google Services in mainland China

Let me just say this: any New Yorker that drinks bottled water is a fucking disgrace.

"Let me provide some expamples -- by no means an exhaustive list -- of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred..."

Everyone should read this, regardless of party affiliation.

many many references to GOP shenanigans

best blog entry ever

created by Kevin "KAL" Kallaugher @ UMBC with students.

Kal's site on crazy politics

AmericanDad blogs about how lunatics and hypocrites in high places have hijacked the Republican party, and he calls for true conservatives to boot them out and take their party back. Tons of links and references.

Crazy amount of links about how the repubs are crazy

您对我很少参加院里的会议一直十分不满，我理解您的不满，但我坚持不参加，因为这些会议，大量的都只是充斥着官话套话的官僚会议，少量的学术会议中确也偶有闪光的思想，但总体而言，为这些会议花时间至少对我来讲是不值得的，我不能像买彩票一样去开会以增加学术性收益。等到哪天院里的学术活动正常化了，基本去行政化了，而不是您这个处长教授一手遮天了，我可能很愿意参加各类活动，包括会议。 大致回顾这六年来自己的工作，自省从未在学校、院里、课堂、会议上有过任何反人类言行，也从未有过违反学术伦理、教师伦理、滥用学术自由之言行，实在找不出停课的正当理由。那么，薛刚凌院长，您能否拿出正当的合乎学术规范的程序来告知我为什么停我的课？为什么侵犯我上课工作的权利？为什么侵犯部分学生听我的课的权利？ 我不揣冒昧地猜想，中国政法大学可能并不需要一位以扼杀学术自由、扼杀教授自由、取缔教授自治为己任的法学院院长。 法学院教师：萧瀚 2010年3月21日

Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists.

Article was updated. One time there were military helicopters that were hovering directly over me and Kenneth's apartments in Bowling Green. I went to tell Francis Gardler what had just happened to me and he just dismissed me as paranoid and crazy. Of course, military helicopters really did hover directly over our apartments. That's about the time that I started losing respect for Gardler.

Whether you were in Kansas and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications: says Whistleblower Russell Tice

in hyperlinks

all articles from "the onion" relating to bush & bush administration.

In a Herculean feat of linkage, Teresa Nielsen Hayden offers us the Bush years through the watering eyes of Onion readers. As she says "Other histories of the Bush years will doubtless be more factual, but none will ever be truer."

Argues that you should look at the insurgency according to its structure.. more fragmented groups, or fewer but stronger groups?

Long running conflicts depend on a stability of number of factions vs. strength of factions, if you have lots of weaker factions, they're not strong enough to commit as effective attacks, if you have fewer, but stronger factions, you can start leveraging negotiation.

組織やシステムの不備や怠慢を、個人個人の優れた能力と自己犠牲で切りまわしてきた、世界にも稀に見る“個人プレイ”が得意な民族なのではあるまいか

> アメリカ人は、互いに異質でバラバラのやつらが、まとまればまとまるほど賢く強くなってゆき、日本人は、個々人は優れている均質なやつらが、集まれば集まるほどアホになり弱くなってゆく。

David Frum

I can only hope both sides can start to find more value in the middle. Both edges scare me.

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves. At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994. Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure. This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

See subsequent followup link...

Julkishallinnon mashupeja.

What is neoliberalism, and what's it done to our universities?

Short-term transactions-for-profit replace long-term planning designed to produce a more just and equitable society. Everyone is always running around doing and acquiring things, but the things done and acquired provide only momentary and empty pleasures (shopping, trophy houses, designer clothing and jewelry), which in the end amount to nothing. Neoliberalism, David Harvey explains, delivers a “world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.” (”A Brief History of Neoliberalism.”)

a good description of commodity-based thinking

As Ronald Coase put it in his classic article, “The Problem of Social Cost” (Journal of Law and Economics, 1960): “The question to be decided is: is the value of the fish lost greater or less than the value of the product which the contamination of the stream makes possible?” If the answer is more value would be lost if my factory were closed, then the principle of the maximization of wealth and efficiency directs us to a negotiated solution: you allow my factory to continue to pollute your stream and I will compensate you or underwrite the costs of your moving the stream elsewhere on your property, provided of course that the price I pay for the right to pollute is not greater than the value produced by my being permitted to continue.

Well defined article analyzing the disjointed humanism taught at institutes of higher education. NeoLiberalism.

Vizrt and SportVu

Artículo que explica las claves que hicieron posible la retransmisión holográfica durante las elecciones a la presidencia de los Estados Unidos.

tvt: CNN's hologram effect used 35 HD Cameras, 20 computers Each camera filmed at different angles to transmit correspondent Jessica Yellin from Chicago to New York. /// CNN's holographic election coverage is fancy pantsy, but how did they manage to send 3D 360 degree footage of virtual correspondent Jessica Yellin from Chicago all the way to the station's election center in NY? On the subject's side: • 35 HD cameras pointed at the subject in a ring • Different cameras shoot at different angles (like the matrix), to transmit the entire body image • The cameras are hooked up to the cameras in home base in NY, synchronizing the angles so perspective is right • Twenty "computers" are crunching this data in order to make it usable Wolf Blitzer really loves it (or loves Jessica Yellin): "It's still Jessica Yellin and you look like Jessica Yellin and we know you are Jessica Yellin. I think a lot of people are nervous out there. All right, Jessica. You were a terrific hologram."

"If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from."

Questions: of all the video and audio footage there, no footage? And also, really? They wanted to enjoy a spring day during a protest. Absolutely logical. Seems politicians never tire of the "Look there! A (racist, bigot, socialist, etc.)"

To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance

«It's time to declare the end of adolescence. As a social institution, it's been a failure. The proof is all around us: 19% of eighth graders, 36% of tenth graders, and 47% of twelfth graders say they have used illegal drugs, according to a study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan. One of every four girls has a sexually transmitted disease, suggests a recent study for the Centers for Disease Control. A methamphetamine epidemic among the young is destroying lives, families, and communities. And American students are learning at a frighteningly slower rate than Chinese and Indian students.»

"Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human history: consigning 13-year-old males to learning from 15-year-old males." Good point.

an graduate a year early get the 12th year's cost of schooling as an automatic scholarship to any college or technical school they want to a

Teabonics - a new dialect of the english language... assorted pictures from Tea Party gatherings with spelling/grammar challenges...

Can't stop clicking...

These are signs seen primarily at Tea Party Protests. They all feature "creative" spelling or grammar. This new dialect of the English language shall be known as "Teabonics."

Teabonics!!! RT @remarkk: Teabonics: a Flickr set of misspelled signs seen at Tea Party protests http://bit.ly/cQnrVx

Teabaggers hoisting poorly spelled protest signs.

This time-line gives a summary of the transfers of nuclear technology and secrets. It starts with the United States in 1945 and moves through USSR (1949), UK & Canada (1952), France (1960) and on to present date 'aspirants'. The New York Times > Science > Image

via @ghensel on twitter

Amid the many uncertainties loosed by the al-Qaida attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, one forecast seemed beyond doubt: Islamist terrorists would strike the United States again—and soon.

Clear overview of the prevailing theories about why no major attacks have occurred since 9/11/01.

So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.” If we don’t sometimes defer to the expert consensus, we’ll systematically tend to go wrong in the face of one-way-hash arguments, at least outside our own necessarily limited domains of knowledge. Indeed, in such cases, trying to evaluate the arguments on their merits will tend to lead to an erroneous conclusion more often than simply trying to gauge the credibility of the various disputants. The problem, of course, is gauging your own competence level well enough to know when to assess arguments and when to assess arguers. Thanks to the perverse phenomenon psychologists have dubbed the Dunning-Kruger effect, those who are least competent tend to have the most wildly inflated estimates of their own knowledge and competence. They don’t know enough to know that they don’t know, as it were.

Via Brad Plumer, I see Cato’s Jerry Taylor is riled at responses to an open letter ad the Institute published in which a group of scientists signed off on a statement questioning the strength of the case for catastrophic climate change. I’m broadly sympathetic with his irritation at the proportion of ad hominem attacks in debates like these, but I’m not sure I agree with his bottom line in context: An argument’s merit has nothing to do with the motives of the arguer, the credentials of the arguer, or the popularity of the argument. Full stop. No exceptions.

The one-way hash argument is an excellent illustration of why argument from authority is not always wrong.

An analysis of Obama's victory speech.

linked: A NEW AMERICA http://tinyurl.com/5wqy6t [from http://twitter.com/travispoling/statuses/991273776]

Beautiful. I really enjoyed it.

Einer der wenigen sachlichen und differenzierten Beiträge zum Thema. "Google gilt vielen derzeit als Inbegriff des Bedrohlichen. Angebracht wäre es dagegen, Google als rational handelndes Wirtschaftsunternehmen zu begreifen. Erst dann ließen sich unbegründete Ängste von tatsächlichen Gefahren unterscheiden."

In 1980, when Obama was a freshman at Occidental College in Los Angeles, he was approached by an aspiring photographer named Lisa Jack, who asked him if he would be willing to pose for some black and white photographs that she could use in her portfolio.

THIS IS REALLY REALLY GOOD.

The wrong policy? (Via Daring Fireball: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/04/20/pot-alcohol ).

'nuff said

How the New Deal actually corrected the economy and the myths used to argue that it did not.

Addresses the pervasive myth that FDR failed. That is, it's a "myth" for some definitions of "myth." As always, YMMV.

At such a moment, it is imperative to expose a dangerous popular myth regarding the efficacy of President Roosevelt’s actions: that it was not the programs of the New Deal, but only the placing of the nation on a wartime footing years later, that restored the health of the nation’s economy. This belief, though widely held, cannot stand up to even the most basic economic analysis. Yet the mainstream corporate media, which abound with anti-government ideology, seek to reinforce this myth. Just this past Sunday, The Washington Post featured on Page One of its Outlook section an article by Amity Shlaes headlined “FDR Was a Great Leader, But His Economic Plan Isn’t One to Follow.” Underscoring Shlaes’s made-up claims, the Post ran the continuation of her piece under the title: “FDR’s Plan Failed to Spark Real Growth.”

Wikileaks leaking gratuitous US military killings. When they nonchalantly shoot journalists (or any people) someone still has to tell the people. I wonder what kind of consequences will come from this (for Wikileaks rather than the officials in charge, who'll – without doubt – have just done their job as usual).

5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

One year ago nostalgia :-)

PDF at http://buffalobeast.com/133/BIG3.ad.from.BEAST133.pdf . Just brilliant.

"You wouldn't buy our shitty cars, so we're taking your money anyway."

The slide deck .. is by the talented Rahaf Harfoush - I share her passion for learning, developing, testing, and executing ideas, thinking in terms of possibility, and surrounding myself with interested people. Are these some of the essential qualities of a marketer 2.0? Plus Edelman Digital and Blue State Digital.

The Bush administration's Torture 13. They authorized it, they decided how to implement it, and they crafted the legal fig leaf to justify it. (...) Some of the 13 manipulated the federal bureaucracy and the legal process to "preauthorize" torture in the days after 9/11. Others helped implement torture, and still others helped write the memos that provided the Bush administration with a legal fig leaf after torture had already begun.

"The Bush administration's Torture 13. They authorized it, they decided how to implement it, and they crafted the legal fig leaf to justify it."

RT @HoneyBearKelly The 13 people who made torture possible. http://tinyurl.com/pxqurs Marcy Wheeler is doing such a great job. [from http://twitter.com/thejoshuablog/statuses/1860684718]

Great article

Must read: excellent post on "the media hologram" and existence

A bit naive in his discussion of free markets, but otherwise a great article.

First you will experience boredom, then comes an internal psychic violence and anger, much like the experience of zazen, or sitting meditation, as the layers of your mind conditioning peel away. Don't quit, keep at it, endure it, to the end. And when you return you will find that deeply experiencing a non-conditioned reality changes things forever. What you have experienced will animate whatever intellectual life you have developed. Or negate much of it. But in serious, intelligent people, experiencing non-manufactured reality usually gives lifelong meaning and insight to the work. You will have experienced the eternal verities of the world and mankind at ground zero. And you will find that the healthy social structures our well intentioned Western minds seek are already inherent in the psyche of mankind, but imprisoned. And the startling realization that you and I are the unknowing captors.

And what I write about is Americans, and why we think and behave the way we so. To do that here today I am forced to talk about three things -- corporations, television and human spirituality.

Psychology and what it might be good for considering the state of the world

"You can see that most of these spikes in zombie popularity do seem weirdly close to periods of historical trauma like wars or the AIDS epidemic. Is there a causal connection, or is it just coincidence? You be the judge."

SHARED USING: http://www.tagle.it

Astounding. Twitter gets a network upgrade rescheduled because a country's fate is, you know, in balance. http://bit.ly/10Z8zo [from http://twitter.com/pkedrosky/statuses/2184901019]

A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran.

jm: from twitter's mouth Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fblog.twitter.com%2F2009%2F06%2Fdown-time-rescheduled.html

RT @biz NTT America proves again why they are such an awesome partner and reschedules urgent network maintenance http://bit.ly/nwPNv [from http://twitter.com/KeithDriscoll/statuses/2188647497]

Our partners are taking a huge risk not just for Twitter but also the other services they support worldwide—we commend them for being flexible in what is essentially an inflexible situation. We chose NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services early last year specifically because of their impeccable history of reliability and global perspective. Today's decision and actions continue to prove why NTT America is such a powerful partner for Twitter. - via Gaultier

RT @znmeb: Twitter Blog: Down Time Rescheduled http://bit.ly/FozaU [from http://twitter.com/commonsense4/statuses/2185865443]

A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight's planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).

Agregador de política de Washington Posrt- Refuerza con compra de Newsweek y de Foreign Policy

Under the Bush team a prominent and profitable bank, under threat of a damaging public audit, was forced to accept less than $1b of TARP money. The gov insisted on buying a new class of preferred stock which gave it a tiny, minority position. The money flowed to the bank. Arguably, back then, the Bush administration was acting for purely economic reasons. It wanted to recapitalize the banks to halt a financial panic. Fast forward to today, and that same bank is begging to give the money back. The chairman offers to write a check, now, with interest. He's been sitting on the cash for months and has felt the dead hand of government threatening to run his business and dictate pay scales. He sees the writing on the wall and he wants out. But the Obama team says no, since unlike the smaller banks that gave their TARP money back, this bank is far more prominent. The bank has also been threatened with "adverse" consequences if its chairman persists. That's politics talking, not economics.

I must be naive. I really thought the administration would welcome the return of bank bailout money. Some $340 million in TARP cash flowed back this week from four small banks in Louisiana, New York, Indiana and California. This isn't much when we routinely talk in trillions, but clearly that money has not been wasted or otherwise sunk down Wall Street's black hole. So why no cheering as the cash comes back?

ermany is on the verge of censoring its Internet: The government – a grand coalition between the German social democrats and conservative party – seems united in its decision: On Thursday the parliament is to vote on the erection of an internet censorship architecture.

#zensursula #hadopi #loppsi version allemande http://2mm52.tk [from http://twitter.com/mazenovi/statuses/2193045872]

German politicians already seem to be lining up with their wish-list of content to be censored in future – the suggestions ranging form gambling sites, islamist web pages, first person shooters, and the music industry cheering up with the thought of finally banning pirate bay and p2p.

#armamentos

'Information is beautiful'

How do racists, anti-Semites and all-purpose hate-mongers view the possibility of America’s first black president? Not necessarily the way you think they would.

WTF o_O

"In an informal Esquire survey, three out of four white supremacists prefer Obama, while McCain is the clear favorite among black nationalists. (Sure, our methodology suffered from an extraordinarily low sample size--limited to four white supremacists and one black nationalist--but just because it wouldn’t fly with Gallup doesn’t mean there ain't a kernel of truth in there.)"

interesting article

"White people are faced with either a negro or a total nutter who happens to have a pale face. Personally I’d prefer the negro.

Then, we have a black man, who loves his own kind, belongs to a Black-Nationalist religion, is married to a black women--when usually negroes who have 'made it' immediately land a white spouse as a kind of prize--that’s the kind of negro that I can respect. Any time that a prominent person embraces their racial heritage in a positive manner, it’s good for all racially minded folks

Probably one of the most ironic things in the history of irony.

Most counterterrorism policies fail, not because of tactical problems, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates terrorists in the first place. If we're ever going to defeat terrorism, we need to understand what drives people to become terrorists in the first place.

"Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism is inherently political, and that people become terrorists for political reasons...Max Abrahms, a predoctoral fellow at Stanford, argues that this model is wrong, and discusses seven habits observed in terrorist groups that contradict the theory that terrorists are political maximizers...Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity."

Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States. The evidence supports this. [[Some of the comments are very intriguing as well. —Ed.]]

Most counterterrorism policies fail, not because of tactical problems, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates terrorists in the first place—by Bruce Schneier

Video - CNBC.com

Intense reaction by some financial analysts in Wallstreet to the current plans

Rick Santelli expresses outrage at the prospect of government rewarding bad behavior.

"CNBC's Rick Santelli and the traders on the floor of the CME Group express outrage. . ." It's good to see and hear people who are appropriately angry. Also, note the paternalistic, faux-aristocratic comments of the other anchors, though; particularly how they try to paint a dissenting, informed, concerned, and eloquent citizen as a demagogue stirring up, "mob rule."

A couple days later I found out from a detainee who was on that block that the older detainee was just scared and that when we placed him on his knees he thought he was going to be executed. He then went on to tell me that this man had seen some of his friends and family members executed on their knees. I can remember guys coming up to me after it was over that night and said "Man, that was a good job; you got you some". .......... Former President George Bush and Former Vice President Dick Cheney will never be held accountable for the decisions they made. It's the detainees and the guards like myself that will have to live every day with what they went through, saw, and did while there.

On December 4, 2008, Specialist Brandon Neely approached CSHRA with testimony he wished to contribute to the Guantánamo Testimonials Project. He believed that insufficient attention had been paid to "the hell that went on at Camp X-Ray." He would be in a position to know, as he arrived in Guantánamo while the cages of Camp X-Ray were still being welded, and escorted the second detainee to hit the prison grounds. In this interview, Specialist Neely provides testimony of the arrival of the detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, possible isolation regime of the first six children in GTMO, utter lack of preparation for guarding individuals detained

testimony of guard at GTMO

The bus doors opened, the escort teams were lined up right next to the bus to take the detainees off the bus and put them in the holding area. You could hear the Marines screaming at them "Shut the fuck up! You're property of the United States of America now."

And what about minimal force? SOPs say IRFings have to use the minimal amount of force necessary. And guards' reports that have been released say they were conducted in this way as well. On the other hand, you say that the Number 1 Man of the IRF team had to "hit the detainee as hard as he could with the shield". That does not seem consistent with minimal force… All I can say to this question is I am sure a lot really has changed in the way the day-to-day activities take place. Especially with regards to IRFing. But at Camp X-Ray, especially before ICRC (or International Committee of the Red Cross%2

test 1

Presidential Elections - [Exit Poll Data][

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

The Ted Conferences have always provided interesting and though provoking content. This is a great view on the impact of video with social networking... listen up... Barack Obama did... and won an election without a lot of substance, but with a lot of social networking connections and digital media.

Evolution of media: 1. The printing press and moveable type 2. Wireless and telephone 3. Recorded image and sound (photographs then audio) 4. Harnessing of electromagnetic spectrum to send sound and images through the air (Radio and television) Up until then we had an asymmetry of media - the media that's great at creating groups is no good at creating conversations and the media that's great at creating conversations is no good at creating groups. Then came… 5. The internet! Key qualities… • Media as site of coordination • Consumers to producers • Global, social, ubiquitous and cheap • Convene people, not control them

"convene, don't control" audience

Security concerns and record-keeping laws mean that Barack Obama is unlikely to become the first e-mailing president.

Obama may need to give up his BlackBerry to become president.

"For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign."

Given how important it is for him to get unfiltered information from as many sources as possible, he will miss the freedom of email

ps: todos los bookmarks agregados el 13 de marzo en la mañana son del grupo de Camila Boudez

CNN Hologram

During the American election Jessica Yellin was recorded as a hologram and beamed into the studio

Hologram :)

A reporter enters a newsroom, virtually ...

shitty cars

Probably the defining moment in Sen Obama's campaign ... meeting Jed Bartlet!

"The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it."

Saw this all over the place during the campaign, loved it then, and finally found it online ^_^

Graphic comparisons of the US to other countries in the areas of life expectancy, education, etc.

while the top income-tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, the numbers are a bit misleading. “People coming from the U.S. to the Netherlands focus on that difference, and on that 52 percent,” said Constanze Woelfle, an American accountant based in the Netherlands whose clients are mostly American expats. “But consider that the Dutch rate includes social security, which in the U.S. is an additional 6.2 percent. Then in the U.S. you have state and local taxes, and much higher real estate taxes. If you were to add all those up, you would get close to the 52 percent.”

29 Apr 09 /

Free Loading Free Lance writer extols the collective virtues of the Dutch.

For 18 months now I’ve been playing the part of the American in Holland, alternately settling into or bristling against the European way of life. Many of the features of that life are enriching. History echoes from every edifice as you move through your day. The bicycle is not a means of recreation but a genuine form of transportation. A nearby movie house sells not popcorn but demitasses of espresso and glasses of Dutch gin from behind a wood-paneled bar, which somehow makes you feel sane and adult and enfolded in civilization. Then there are the features of European life that grate on an American sensibility, like the three-inch leeway that drivers deign to grant you on the highway, or the cling film you get from the supermarket, which clings only to itself. But such annoyances pale in comparison to one other. For the first few months I was haunted by a number: 52. It reverberated in my head; I felt myself a prisoner trying to escape its bars. For it represents the rate at which

online marketing sty. by B.Obama

'It's kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari,' an Obama aide says

If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past.

"If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past."

"Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts." I guess at least they didn't remove all the Ws from the keyboards.

If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past. Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts. What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking. "It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.

Nice to see the White House is just like any other bloody office I've worked in then!

A story done on behavior economics and it's acceptance in the Obama administration.

RT @GuyKawasaki: Great piece on behavorial economics and social psychology. Must read! http://adjix.com/6ufc [from http://twitter.com/r1tz/statuses/2088997262]

Human beings don't always behave rationally. Now, policymakers are using research about human decision-making to design policies to protect humans from their own poor judgment &mdash; including everything from unwanted pregnancies to failing to save for retirement.

Economic models and how unpredictable human beings mess with them.

The Economist

これは確かに一理ある。

海外のマスコミの日本のニュースをチェックするのが質が高くて，ニュートラルなニュースが読めるかも．これからはそうしようかなぁ．

麻生首相は明らかに、４つある日本の民放TVネットワークの犠牲になっている。これらの民放は政治の話題を、何か別な形態の番組と区別せずに扱っているように見える。つまりテーマが面白おかしくなければならないような種類の番組と、そうではない番組ということである。

on this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord, on this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics

Obama speech. Use for Hopes and Dreams as well as writing to argue and persuade

Barack Obama has been sworn in as the 44th US president. Here is his inauguration speech in full.

The full text of Barack Obama's speech on his inauguration as US president.

The truth about Obama....

visualisiert Text in Baumdiagramm

obama word tree

interactive map to explore the speech

Obama Dec 27

content type: text/html;charset=UTF-8

The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Congresspersons, after what happened in Iraq, why did you give a green light here, then get surprised that Paulson is acting like a douche?

``We need oversight,'' Paulson told lawmakers. ``We need protection. We need transparency. I want it. We all want it.''

The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral

"The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral."

Transcript scrolls with video.

which allowed users to watch the 2008 Presidential debates and speeches on demand;

Interactive video and transcript of Senators John McCain and Barack Obama debating in Oxford, Miss., on Sept. 26.

总统竞选辩论

watch

In an elaborate hoax, pranksters distributed thousands of free copies of a spoof edition of The New York Times on Wednesday morning at busy subway stations around the city, including Grand Central Terminal, Washington and Union Squares, the 14th and 23rd Street stations along Eighth Avenue, and Pacific Street in Brooklyn, among others.

Liberal Pranksters Hand Out Times Spoof

and another one

spoof paper with accompanying spoof site of the Times' real site. Good demo for the concept of online hoaxes and how they are made to look like the real site

The Yes Men strike again!

Yes.

1-cnn marijuana

Over the past two years, drug violence in Mexico has become a fixture of the daily news. Some of this violence pits drug cartels against one another; some involves confrontations between law enforcement and traffickers. Recent estimates suggest thousands have lost their lives in this "war on drugs." The U.S. and Mexican responses to this violence have been predictable: more troops and police, greater border controls and expanded enforcement of every kind. Escalation is the wrong response, however; drug prohibition is the cause of the violence. Prohibition creates violence because it drives the drug market underground. This means buyers and sellers cannot resolve their disputes with lawsuits, arbitration or advertising, so they resort to violence instead.

Prohibition of drugs corrupts politicians and law enforcement by putting police, prosecutors, judges and politicians in the position to threaten the profits of an illicit trade. This is why bribery, threats and kidnapping are common for prohibited industries but rare otherwise. Mexico's recent history illustrates this dramatically. Prohibition erodes protections against unreasonable search and seizure because neither party to a drug transaction has an incentive to report the activity to the police. Thus, enforcement requires intrusive tactics such as warrantless searches or undercover buys. The victimless nature of this so-called crime also encourages police to engage in racial profiling.

Eric

http://www.dccc.org/content/sorry via @addthis [from http://twitter.com/eaton3000/statuses/1579283995]

by Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

Palin Prank Call: Canadian Comedy Duo Convinces Palin She's Talking To Sarkozy (AUDIO)

I hope this is real!

OMG

<<higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.>>

"Except in a few private wealthy universities, the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past."

2009

Patent and copyright law are stifling innovation and threatening the global economy according to two economists at Washington University in St. Louis in a new book, Against Intellectual Monopoly. Professors Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine call for abolishing the current patent and copyright system in order to unleash innovations necessary to reverse the current recession and rescue the economy. The professors discuss their stand against intellectual property protections in a video and news release linked here.

According to two economists at Washington University in St. Louis in a new book, Against Intellectual Monopoly. But that's the opposite of what they were designed for...

""We are witnessing the end of Rovian politics," Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google told me. And YouTube, which Google bought in 2006 for $1.65 billion, is one of the causes of its demise."

Great article on how the Internet has changed the elections, and probably the face of politics. Age has finally become an issue for John McCain. But the problem isn't the candidate's 72 years; it's the antediluvian approach of his campaign. McCain is running a textbook Rovian race: fear-based, smear-based, anything goes. But it isn't working. The glitch in the well-oiled machine? The Internet.

Arianna Huffington: "Back in the Dark Ages of 2004, when YouTube (and HuffPost, for that matter) didn't exist, a campaign could tell a brazen lie, and the media might call them on it. But if they kept repeating the lie again and again and again, the media would eventually let it go (see the Swiftboating of John Kerry). Traditional media like moving on to the next shiny thing. But bloggers love revisiting a story. So when Palin kept repeating her bridge to nowhere lie, bloggers kept calling her on it. Andrew Sullivan, for one, has made a cottage industry of calling Palin on her lies. And eventually, the truth filtered up and cost McCain credibility with his true base: journalists. "

" So when Palin kept repeating her bridge to nowhere lie, bloggers kept calling her on it. Andrew Sullivan, for one, has made a cottage industry of calling Palin on her lies. And eventually, the truth filtered up and cost McCain credibility with his true base: journalists. The Internet may make it easier to disseminate character smears, but it also makes it much less likely that these smears will stick."

via NPR's Planet Money @planetmoney on Twitter. Great commentary from a great kid.

Em inglês

Here's the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states.

Why states need to cut taxes: http://tr.im/lEOG #tcot [from http://twitter.com/Underdown/statuses/1836031711]

It's already happened in Maryland.

I'll up the ante. What if they were Muslim? @laughingwoman Tim Wise: What if Tea Partiers were black? http://bit.ly/cZzE8K

Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

RT @CarriBugbee: Ephphatha Poetry: "Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black" - Tim Wise ""Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black" - Tim Wise" htt ...

"Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. . . . // And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis." (avoid the comments)

Excellent article on white privilege

"In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color. How many whites viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that white president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same people of color?" Via Debbie.

And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Arts & Culture | Banksy in secret exhibition stunt http://ow.ly/1E0z0

Banksy in secret exhibition stunt

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

Friedman, Thomas L.. The Inflection Is Near?." New York Times 07 March 2009.

We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks.

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows. “You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate ...’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

m the things I’ve made for them,” Chen said. “And I also hear that, when they no longer want an item, they simply

The Inflection Is Near? By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Sometimes the satirical newspaper The Onion is so right on, I can’t resist quoting from it.

Freidman,

Rob Thomas's slightly conflated argument for marriage equality

When I heard that my novel The Golden Compass (the name in the USA of Northern Lights) appeared in the top five of the American Library Association's list of 2007's most challenged books, my immediate and ignoble response was glee.

Censorship is a terrible thing. So thank goodness it never works, says Philip Pullman.

In fact, when it comes to banning books, religion is the worst reason of the lot. Religion, uncontaminated by power, can be the source of a great deal of private solace, artistic inspiration, and moral wisdom. But when it gets its hands on the levers of political or social authority, it goes rotten very quickly indeed. The rank stench of oppression wafts from every authoritarian church, chapel, temple, mosque, or synagogue – from every place of worship where the priests have the power to meddle in the social and intellectual lives of their flocks, from every presidential palace or prime ministerial office where civil leaders have to pander to religious ones. My basic objection to religion is not that it isn't true; I like plenty of things that aren't true. It's that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

Censorship is a terrible thing. So thank goodness it never works, says Philip Pullman

Religion, uncontaminated by power, can be the source of a great deal of private solace, artistic inspiration, and moral wisdom. But when it gets its hands on the levers of political or social authority, it goes rotten very quickly indeed. The rank stench of oppression wafts from every authoritarian church, chapel, temple, mosque, or synagogue – from every place of worship where the priests have the power to meddle in the social and intellectual lives of their flocks, from every presidential palace or prime ministerial office where civil leaders have to pander to religious ones. My basic objection to religion is not that it isn't true; I like plenty of things that aren't true. It's that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

"My basic objection to religion is not that it isn't true; I like plenty of things that aren't true. It's that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good."

Censorship is a terrible thing. So thank goodness it never works, says Philip Pullman

Via Ed Mitchell

strangely similar to the ongiong crisis in membership organisations...?

I'm going through that periodic "who can I bring myself to vote for?" dilemma and this just makes it worse. Just one good party would be enough. (via Lee)

Charlie Brooker gets serious.

50 discursos históricos disponibles online http://bit.ly/9rfeOi – Juan Diego Polo (wwwhatsnew) http://twitter.com/wwwhatsnew/statuses/13120160646

Wow this is potentially huge! Thoughts? RT @timoreilly:Bulk Data Downloads:A Breakthrough in Government Transparency http://bit.ly/EizO3 [from http://twitter.com/jhelmus/statuses/1283585077]

On getting greater access to government documents and data, with an amendment now in the House

Ein Wörterbuch über Begriffe aus Sicherheitsdebatten und was damit eigentlich gemeint ist.

Wie lassen sich Einschränkungen der Freiheit als Gewinn verkaufen? Indem man sie sprachlich vernebelt. Ein Katalog des Neusprech der Inneren Sicherheit

Untersucht mit welchen Worten die immer neuen Einschränkungen persönlicher Freiheiten gerechtfertigt werden, die in den vergangenen Jahren im Zuge des "Kampfs gegen den Terror" und der Stärkung des abwehrbereiten Staates verabschiedet wurden.

herrlich und gefährlich, wie euphemismen eingesetzt werden, um polizeistaat-handlungen zu beschreiben. beispiel: "finaler rettungsschuss" statt schießbefehl/tötungsgenehmigung

banktron [waupwaupwaupwaup] <-transformer noise

This comic pretty much sums up the bank bail-out of 2008.

"He had been hunted, kidnapped, and told he was filming his own execution. But CNN correspondent Michael Ware had no plans to leave Iraq. Now, it won’t leave him."

Hell and a bucket of gasoline.

He had been hunted, kidnapped, and told he was filming his own execution. But CNN correspondent Michael Ware had no plans to leave Iraq. Now, it won’t leave him.

We're not all "Jesus Freaks" who run around screaming about how everyone should "Judge not lest ye be judged," whine "Blessed are the meek" all the time, or drone on and on about how we're all equal in the eyes of God! Some of us are just trying to be good, honest folks who believe the unbaptized will roam the Earth for ages without the comfort of God's love when Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior returns on Judgment Day to whisk the righteous off to heaven.

Ha.

Everybody has this image of "crazy Christians" based on what they hear in the media, but it's just not true. Most Christians are normal, decent folks. We don't all blindly follow a bunch of outdated biblical tenets or go all fanatical about every bit of dogma. What I'm trying to say is, don't let the actions of a vocal few color your perceptions about what the majority of us are like.

The Onion

exactly

No, really. It's true. The Onion wouldn't lie about these matters.

"The president seems to be someplace else lately," said one high-level official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Yesterday we were all being briefed on the encroachment of Iranian drone planes into Iraq, when he just looked up from the table and blurted out, 'What am I supposed to watch on Fridays at 10 p.m. now? Numb3rs?'" "I haven't seen him this upset since Admiral Adama realized that Earth was actually an uninhabitable wasteland," the official continued . . .

Obama watched the finale just as he had every previous episode, alone in the White House screening room with the volume turned all the way up.

"I haven't seen him this upset since Admiral Adama realized that Earth was actually an uninhabitable wasteland," the official continued.

WASHINGTON—What am I supposed to watch on Fridays at 10 p.m. now? Numb3rs? blurted out a distraught Obama, in the middle of a briefing on Iranian drone planes.

cool way to do man on the street type feature

Interactive Vox Pop. Fantastic.

multimedia example -- interactive audio and photo -- ordinary citizens expressing their hopes for President Obama.

The Times asked more than 200 people to share their hopes for the Obama administration. Readers are invited to vote on favorites. avec intégration témoignages audio des interrogées qd ds mot.

What are your hopes for the Obama administration? The New York Times asked more than 200 people in 14 states (half red, half blue) to identify their greatest hopes for what Barack Obama might accomplish during his time as president. We grouped their responses into the 29 “hopes” below. Their answers do not represent any kind of scientific sample — they come from people who shared their thoughts outside supermarkets, at parks, in restaurants. We grouped their responses into the 29 “hopes” below. Click on each speech bubble to hear their voices, and then choose the hopes you agree with by clicking on “I Hope So, Too.” Use the tabs to see which hopes are the most popular. If your hope is not represented below, tell everyone about it by including it in the comment section.

As a white-collar criminologist and former financial regulator much of my research studies what causes financial markets to become profoundly dysfunctional. The FBI has been warning of an "epidemic" of mortgage fraud since September 2004. It also reports that lenders initiated 80% of these frauds.1 When the person that controls a seemingly legitimate business or government agency uses it as a "weapon" to defraud we categorize it as a "control fraud" ("The Organization as 'Weapon' in White Collar Crime." Wheeler & Rothman 1982; The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. Black 2005). Financial control frauds' "weapon of choice" is accounting. Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime -- combined. Control fraud epidemics can arise when financial deregulation and desupervision and perverse compensation systems create a "criminogenic environment" (Big Money Crime. Calavita, Pontell & Tillman 1997.)

After conducting a college band and watching Palin deliver a commencement address to a small group of home-schooled students in June 1997, Wasilla resident Philip Munger said, he asked the young mayor about her religious beliefs.

Hahahahahahahaaaaaaa.... *phew*... Hahahahahahaha!

Huffington Post on the neanderthal Palin

Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition.

Heather Havrilesky, fantastic article and reader responses. God, I love Heather.

Nov. 7, 2008 | Dear boomers: We're sorry for rolling our eyes at you all these years. We apologize for scoffing at your earnestness, your lack of self-deprecation, your tendency to take yourselves a little too seriously.

"Your earnest, self-important prattle has gotten on Gen X nerves for decades. But now we finally get it... When we watched Barack Obama's victory speech on Tuesday night, we looked into the eyes of a real leader, and decades of cynicism about politics and grass-roots movements and community melted away in a single moment. We heard the voice of a man who can inspire with his words, who's unashamed of his own intelligence, who's willing to treat the citizens of this country like smart, capable people, worthy of respect. For the first time in some of our lifetimes, we believed."

When Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave a gloved Black Power salute on the Olympic podium in October 1968 it sent a shockwave through sport. But what happened to the other man on the platform?

In case you ever wondered who the white guy on the podium was.

"Given that governments are inherently reactive, rather than proactive (I need give no examples), how can this be compatible with the rapidly evolving world of social software?"

Dr. Mark Drapeau about government 2.0.

"Ironically, however, many government agencies block such sites for use at work. For example, I cannot access MySpace or YouTube from the computer in my office at the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) blocks most social networking sites besides LinkedIn. At least one part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) blocks Google Chat. Not only do these policies make little sense (there are legitimate research uses for all of these sites, while email, iTunes, and non-blocked websites are ‘abused’ daily), the policies are inconsistent. Despite this, there are overt sprinklings of Web 2.0 influence all over the federal government. For example, in mid-2007, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sponsored a public blog about pandemic influenza, which I contributed to due to my work on global health security. This was a great early example of a government agency engaging with an interested, and in many cases, expert audience. "

Mark Drapeau blog on social government

A diagram comparing the cost of the current economic crisis with large and costly events in US history

It is exceedingly difficult to convey exactly how much we are spending on all these bailouts. Whenever I start talking trillions (versus mere billions), I get puzzled looks from people. Humans have a hard time conceptualizing any number that large. I wanted a graphic way to clearly show how astonishingly ginormous the amounts involved were. So I once again went to Jess Bachman at Wallstats. I gave him my list of expenditures (inflation adjusted of course!) and he went to work. This early Bailout Nation graphic shows the the total costs to the taxpayer of all the monies spent, lent, consumed, borrowed, printed, guaranteed, assumed or otherwise committed. It is nothing short of astonishing.

18 jun 09 / early Bailout Nation graphic shows the the total costs to the taxpayer of all the monies spent, lent, consumed, borrowed, printed, guaranteed, assumed or otherwise committed. It is nothing short of astonishing. It includes the total outlay for all the bailouts to date. In just about one short year (March 2008 - March 2009), the bailouts managed to spend far in excess of nearly every major one time expenditure of the USA, including WW1&2 (omitted from graphic), the moon shot, the New Deal, total NASA budgets (omitted from graphic), Iraq, Viet Nam and Korean wars — COMBINED.

Produced in just under 76 hours by the JESS3 team, this site was built with the Twitter community in mind during the 2008 Elections. Launching on Election Day 2008, I worked with the NMS team to get some amazing coverage for it... not to mention tweets, too :)

interesting data visualisation

Twitter + Information Visualisation + Advertising

The Cybersecurity Act gives the president the ability to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any "critical" information network "in the interest of national security." does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency-- left to the president. grants the Secretary of Commerce "access to all relevant data concerning [critical] networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access." This means... can monitor or access any data on private or public networks without regard to privacy laws. The bill could undermine the Electronic Communications Privacy Act enacted in the mid '80s, requires law enforcement seek a warrant before tapping in to data transmissions between computers. might violate the Constitutional protection against searches without cause. Once information is accessed, it can be used for whatever purpose, no matter the original reason for accessing something

from the page: "The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (PDF) gives the president the ability to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any "critical" information network "in the interest of national security." The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president... It also grants the Secretary of Commerce "access to all relevant data concerning [critical] networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access." ... When one person can access all information on a network, "it makes it more vulnerable to intruders," Granick says... "Once information is accessed, it can be used for whatever purpose, no matter the original reason for accessing something... Who's interested in this [bill]? Law enforcement and people in the security industry who want to ensure more government dollars go to them...""

Will Obama Shut the Internet Down. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/04/should-obama-control-internet [from http://twitter.com/HenryDubb/statuses/1451549136]

Extremist material of any kind always looks gaudy and cheap, like a bad pizza menu. Not because they can't afford decent computers - these days you can knock up a professional CD cover on a pay-as-you-go mobile - but because anyone who's good at graphic design is likely to be a thoughtful, inquisitive sort by nature. And thoughtful, inquisitive sorts tend to think fascism is a bit shit, to be honest. If the BNP really were the greatest British party, they'd have the greatest British designer working for them - Jonathan Ive, perhaps, the man who designed the iPod. But they don't. They've got someone who tries to stab your eyes out with primary colours.

Charlie Brooker: For the BNP to claim to be more British than the other British parties is as nonsensical as your dad suddenly claiming to have invented the beard

"Don't vote for those nasty slick parties. Vote for a shoddy one! Never mind the extremism, feel the ineptitude"

The BNP represents Britain's workers? They don't even represent basic British craftsmanship

Charlie Brooker skewers the BNP

For the BNP to claim to be more British than the other British parties is as nonsensical as your dad suddenly claiming to have invented the beard.

Extremist material of any kind always looks gaudy and cheap, like a bad pizza menu. Not because they can't afford decent computers - these days you can knock up a professional CD cover on a pay-as-you-go mobile - but because anyone who's good at graphic design is likely to be a thoughtful, inquisitive sort by nature. And thoughtful, inquisitive sorts tend to think fascism is a bit shit, to be honest.

RT @eliza: Charlie Brooker on the BNP http://bit.ly/4fKf2O Bunch of wankers. [from http://twitter.com/standardman/statuses/1835238421]

Lovely piece

This is an excellent takedown of family-values homophobia.

RT @stephenfry: The best letter I've read for a long time. http://www.andrewtobias.com/newcolumns/000504.html Not ashamed to say it made ...

A great empathetic responce to the religious morality police attacks on homosexuals

Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken enough from you good people. I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny. My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay. He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called "fag" incessantly, starting when he was 6.

visualizing words

"They work, what, 27 hours in a good week" , "19 holidays a month" Huuuuu, 41 hours a week and 11 holidays a year: http://www.touteleurope.fr/fr/actions/social/emploi-protection-sociale/presentation/comparatif-le-temps-de-travail-dans-l-ue.html

Viewpoint: As Washington rushes to nationalize troubled parts of the economy, the inescapable reality is that we're all French now

Viewpoint: As Washington rushes to nationalize troubled parts of the economy, the inescapable reality is that we\'re all French now

Article discusses how socialist the US has become, despite conservative's contempt for the concept.

Only now with the advent of Potato Day has tyranny come to our shores.

Very funny, or really scary? (Via Daring Fireball: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/04/09/baracknophobia ).

As the US presidential campaign enters its final weeks, both the Republican and Democratic candidates are hitting the swing states. But misconceptions and rumours abound and many voters have thei... As the US presidential campaign enters its final weeks, both the Republican and Democratic candidates are hitting the swing states. But misconceptions and rumours abound and many voters have their facts about the candidates all wrong. Some believe that Democrat Barack Obama is a Muslim, for instance. Casey Kauffman talked to some Republican supporters after a rally by Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, in Ohio.

I know I shouldn't discount Republicans as being bad or dumb or crazy. I know that. But these are the ones that specifically concern me as being ridiculous. I am trying, but they make it hard!

Al Jazeera's 2 minute view of Ohio's battleground state.

Al Jazeera news video

"...the black will take over", "when you got a nigger running for president...", "...he's related to a known terrorist", "just the whole muslim thing...9/11", "...he thinks us white people are trash".....LISTEN TO THESE PEOPLE!! THESE ARE MCCAIN SUPPORTERS....But I honestly can say that McCain allowed Sarah Palin to feed these people, then he had to start cleaning up her mess. Their campaign is resorting to fear-mongering to win this election.

Palin E-Mail Hacker Says It Was Easy

Email hacking is taken too far.

Palins e-mail was hacked into not with expert knowledge of computer systems, but rather a well thought out trick to recover her account password. This just goes to show information is power. People can find personal information on many other people in the world. If this information gets into the wrong hands, there are ways to it may be used against you.

"hacker" said it was easy. Haha.

barack, obama, joe, klein, time, interview, democrat, democratic, politics, president, race, white, house, race, campaign, 2008

Joe Klein's perspective on Barack Obama

not an interview but the journalist talking about it...still pretty good. Liked the sync of the word "maturity" and his wedding ring at the end, kinda cool.

Freedom Of Information Act Search Engine

EFF's Freedom Of Information Act project has gathered thousands of pages of material. These shed light on controversial government surveillance programs, lobbying practices, and intellectual property initiatives. You can use the EFF FOIA Search Engine below to search and examine the documents' contents. If you find something you think is significant, send us an email: foia@eff.org.

EFF's document collection-obtained through requests and litigation under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)-covers some controversial government initiatives, including the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse and DCS 3000 surveillance program and the Department of Homeland Security's Automated Targeting System and ADVISE data-mining project.

EFF's Freedom Of Information Act project has gathered thousands of pages of material. These shed light on controversial government surveillance programs, lobbying practices, and intellectual property initiatives.

Fulbright and Hogan & Hartson

"John Roberts: The Supreme Court’s stealth hard-liner." (by Jeffrey Toobin)

John Roberts and conservative activism

No More Mr. Nice Guy The Supreme Court’s stealth hard-liner. by Jeffrey Toobin

So much for candor at confirmation hearings.

When John G. Roberts, Jr., emerges from behind the red curtains and takes his place in the middle of the Supreme Court bench, he usually wears a pair of reading glasses, which he peers over to see the lawyers arguing before him. It’s an old-fashioned look for the Chief Justice of the United States, who is fifty-four, but, even with the glasses, there’s no mistaking that Roberts is the youngest person on the Court. (John Paul Stevens, the senior Associate Justice, who sits to Roberts’s right, is thirty-five years older.) Roberts’s face is unlined, his shoulders are broad and athletic, and only a few wisps of gray hair mark him as changed in any way from the judge who charmed the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing, in 2005.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Freporting%2F2009%2F05%2F25%2F090525fa_fact_toobin

"In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."

Palli quote generator

He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgement that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.

Harper's Magazine

Army Private Brandon Neely

(no description)

Artigo sobre o programa de controle da Internet no governo do Sarkozy

"Le président de la République actuel a un plan". C'est la première phrase du livre de François Bayrou, Abus de Pouvoir, et l'on peut la vérifier au moins en ce qui concerne le contrôle du net. Depuis la loi DADVSI où il était président de l'UMP et ministre de l'intérieur, Nicolas Sarkozy a déployé son plan pour contrôler le net. Il a commencé à l'appliquer avant-même la loi Hadopi, et prévoit de le parachever avec la Loppsi.

Le meilleur papier sur Hadopi

RT @t_de_baillon: RT @fmeichel: French [digital] dictature is on the way http://tinyurl.com/rcy6y9 (in French) [from http://twitter.com/hvaudaux/statuses/1857869025]

Mon Feb 09, 2009 at 08:58:22 PM PDT According to Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D) (PA-11), in mid-September of 2008, the United States of America came just three hours away from the collapse of the entire economy. In a span of 2 hours, $550 billion was drawn out of money market accounts in an electronic run on the banks.

Nevermind, this is apparently false. http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2009/02/11/kanjorski-and-the-money-market-funds-the-facts

Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D PA-11)

According to Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D) (PA-11), in mid-September of 2008, the United States of America came just three hours away from the collapse of the entire economy. In a span of 2 hours, $550 billion was drawn out of money market accounts in an electronic run on the banks. Rep. Kanjorski: "It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it."

It only took a few paragraphs in a $500 billion, 591-page bill to raze one of the most important limits on federal power. Congress passed the Insurrection Act in 1807 to severely restrict the president's ability to deploy the military within the United States. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 tightened these restrictions, imposing a two-year prison sentence on anyone who used the military within the U.S. without the express permission of Congress. But there is a loophole: Posse Comitatus is waived if the president invokes the Insurrection Act.

For the first time in 100 years, and contrary to a long-standing legal prohibition, an active duty military unit is permanently assigned inside the U.S.

2008/09/24

About as funny as God's facebook page!

"I see you staring at me from across the water"

there is an expert here

Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth.

Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he added.

lets hope he gets on with it

Not only is he America's hope for relevance but now he has to save the world too. It would be funny if it were not true. If America doesn't take a leadership role in this too (along with the others who have already stepped forward I might add) then as the great Australian poems reads: "We'll All Be Rooned" said Hanrahan!

7 things to do on-line to help get involved and make a difference

Como utilizar a Internet para ajudar a transformar a America. 7 dicas que cada um de nós pode fazer na Internet para ajudar a restaurar América.

Twitter einträge zu einem bestimmten Hashtag auf einer Map darstellen

Freedom of Information

"The only reason we know anything about all those claims for light bulbs and moat cleaning is that campaigning journalist Heather Brooke has spent the last five years fighting tooth and nail for MPs to come clean about their expenses ..."

"The only reason we know anything about all those claims for light bulbs and moat cleaning is that campaigning journalist Heather Brooke has spent the last five years fighting tooth and nail for MPs to come clean about their expenses."

The only reason we know anything about all those claims for light bulbs and moat cleaning is that campaigning journalist Heather Brooke has spent the last five years fighting tooth and nail for MPs to come clean about their expenses ...

The statistics and causes of Russia's startling post-Soviet population decline...

"The upsurge of illness and mortality, furthermore, has been disproportionately concentrated among men and women of working age—meaning that Russia’s labor force has been shrinking more rapidly than the population overall."

Col·lecció de "xapes" per a la campanya presidencial de Barack Obama

That's a whole lotta Barack 'n' Roll

An exhaustive collection of Obama buttons. It's certainly believable that it's a complete collection. Lots of good/interesting design here

"der staat betritt mit gewalt eine welt, in der er nichts zu suchen hat... damit aber löst der staat kein problem. er wird selber zu einem." (lorenz maroldt)

Sehr gute Einordnung des politischen Wahnsinns in das Grundkonzept unserer Gesellschaft

Und wann verbieten sie die Schießvereine? Idiotentum? Ja!

Es ist lächerlich, als Konsequenz aus Winnenden ein nur für Erwachsene erlaubtes Spiel wie Paintball zu verbieten - aber auch bedrohlich. Der Staat betritt mit Gewalt eine Welt, in der er nichts zu suchen hat.

"Es ist lächerlich, als Konsequenz aus Winnenden ein nur für Erwachsene erlaubtes Spiel zu verbieten – aber auch bedrohlich. Der Staat betritt mit Gewalt eine Welt, in der er nichts zu suchen hat. Paintball wird auf privatem Gelände gespielt. Man mag es blöd oder abstoßend finden, aber wer nicht will, wird davon nicht belästigt. "

Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis report on how Argentina's worker-run factories have nurtured a powerful social movement, while seamstress Matilda Adorno explains how a dispute over pay became a political struggle ... There were many popular responses to the crisis, from neighbourhood assemblies and barter clubs to resurgent left-wing parties and mass movements of the unemployed, but we spent most of our year in Argentina with workers in "recovered companies". Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over businesses that have gone bankrupt and reopening them under democratic worker management. ... "We formed the co-operative with the criteria of equal wages and making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work; we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders."

Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis report on how Argentina's worker-run factories have nurtured a powerful social movement, while seamstress Matilda Adorno explains how a dispute over pay became a political struggle

In South Africa, we saw a protester's T-shirt with an even more succinct summary of this new impatience: "Stop Asking, Start Taking".

Occupy, resist, produce

"Capitalism produces and distributes not just goods and services, but identities. When the capital and its carpetbaggers had flown from Argentina, what was left was not only companies that had been emptied, but a whole hollowed-out country filled with people whose identities - as workers - had been stripped away as well. As one of the organisers in the movement wrote to us: "It is a huge amount of work to recover a company. But the real work is to recover a worker and that is the task that we have just begun.""

hilarious slideshow...

Hilarious

joe "six pack" biden trains for the debate

I've debated Governor Palin more than two dozen times. And she's a master, not of facts, figures, or insightful policy recommendations, but at the fine art of the nonanswer, the glittering generality. Against such charms there is little Senator Biden, or anyone, can do.

"Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I'm amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, 'Does any of this really matter?' " Palin said.

I know firsthand: She's a master of the nonanswer.

For tonight: a preview if you will.

open Letter to Republicans

Yikes: "Just imagine where America would be today if the 14 to 20 million voters -- 'the rube base' who slavishly follow the likes of Limbaugh -- had not voted as a block year after year thus empowering the Republican fiasco. We would have a regulated banking industry and would have avoided our current financial crisis; some 4000 of our killed military men and women would be alive; over to 35,000 wounded Americans would be whole; we would have been leaders in the environmental movement; we would be in the middle of a green technology boom fueling a huge expansion of our economy and stopping our dependence on foreign oil, and our health-care system would be reformed."

The worsening economic situation is your fault and your fault alone. The Republicans created this mess through 8 years of backing the worst president in our history and now, because you put partisan ideology ahead of the good of our country, you have blown your last chance to redeem yourselves. You deserve the banishment to the political wilderness that awaits all traitors.

republican sees the light

woo-hoo!!

nail hit squarely on the head!

Frank Schaeffer (one of the founders of the Religious Reich) rips Republicans a new one.

Reasons to bail out GM. Basically useful as a device to pull out whenever anyone claims that the problem is easy, and that we should "just liquidate the bastards."

by Jonathan Cohn. This is not your father's Oldsmobile we're rescuing.

Tech-related aspects of Obama campaign.

Brian Solis asks if the same social media tools that Obama deployed to communicate “to” constituents could/would also be used to listen and interact with supporters as well as those who don’t currently endorse the President-elect?

This isn’t just about broadcasting content through new channels or merely soliciting feedback, participating in popular networks or actively listening. It’s the ability to identify and internalize themes to precipitate change and earn support through action—not just words. For the first time, the U.S. President can cultivate grassroots communities directly where people create, discover, and share information online. He is already thinking in this direction, as evidenced by his intention to record the weekly Presidential address on Youtube, in addition to broadcasting it over the radio. The videos will be hosted on Change.gov, with the first one already recorded. Other opportunities to engage with citizens online include:

Nice chart comparing tax plans.

Obama v McCain tax plans

Wash. Post. / NYTimes review of tax plans useful diagrams

Alvar Freude vom Arbeitskreis Zensur hat einfach mal per Mail die Provider angeschrieben, die Seiten hosten, welche sich auf europäischen Sperrlisten befinden. - Die Mehrheit der Seiten enthielt kein Kinderpornografisches, teils überhaupt kein illegales Material. (In Finnland waren dagegen Seiten gesperrt, die sich kritisch mit Netzzensur auseinandersetzten.) - Die Provider waren bisher nicht informiert das die von ihnen gehosteten Seiten sich auf Sperrlisten befanden - Wenn man die Provider darauf hinwies waren die Provider zur Kooperation bereits

Die Abschaltung von Webauftritten mit kinderpornographischen Inhalten dauert nicht länger als die Übermittlung einer Sperrliste. Dies führt die Argumentation der Befürworter des bloßen Sperrens ad absurdum - es gibt keinen sachlichen Grund, strafbare Inhalte im Netz zu belassen und sie für alle einschlägig Interessierten mit minimalem Aufwand weiterhin zugänglich zu halte

RT @torschtl: Löschen statt verstecken: Innerhalb von 12 Stunden 60 kinderpornographische Seiten gelöscht http://bit.ly/1eUci #zensursula [from http://twitter.com/ThomasKujawa/statuses/1933381725]

alvar freude vom ak zensur macht die probe aufs exempel: innerhalb von 12h werden 60 kipo-sites vom netz genommen

RT @insideX AK-Zensur, wie zuvor CareChild zeigen, dass wir KiPo Seiten einfach vom Netz nehmen können http://bit.ly/1eUci [from http://twitter.com/gbyat/statuses/1933647376]

- State Dept. says keep tweeting... ( http://bit.ly/rwobD ) [from http://twitter.com/aphofer/statuses/2196162891]

State Department to Twitter: Keep Iranian tweets coming http://bit.ly/b4WX7 [from http://twitter.com/KeithDriscoll/statuses/2200387369]

The importance of social networking

While officials would not say whether they were communicating with Iranians directly, one senior official noted that the US is learning about certain people being picked up for questioning by authorities through posts on Twitter.

Time Management for Anarchists

Time Management for anarchists - comic

パネルは更に、メディアが載せる記事・載せない記事という論点に進みます。

・イランでは情報統制が従来から非常に厳しかった。それをかいくぐってきた人たちだからこそ 　今回のように情報統制が行われてもネットで情報を出せているのではないか。 ・メディアでは「イランから起きたTwitter Revolution」的な取り上げられ方も多い中、 　実際はTwitterユーザはイラン国内には少なく、メディアリテラシーが高い人ばかりではない。 　イラン国内でデモを組織する等の情報交換は、あくまでSMSや電話、口コミといった従来型のツールが使われているらしい。 ・Twitterは情報を世界中に伝播するツールとしては極めてパワフル。 　イランからの少数の情報の元、アメリカでTwitterを使って情報がどんどん増幅されているというのが実態であるもよう。 ・ただし、Twitterにはデマや誤情報も多く、伝播してしまう場合もあるので要注意。 ・現在、既存メディアも多くの情報をTwitterから得ている。 ・イランではTwitterよりFriendfeedの方が使われていたのだが、真っ先にアクセスブロックされてしまった。 　現在proxyを経由して使えている人たちは、Friendfeedをプライベートモードで使っており、 　我々には不可視なコミュニケーションが粛々と行われているらしい。 ・Facebookはお知らせをするには最適で、Mousavi氏もFacebookを使っている。 ・現在なぜか情報統制がゆるんでいるのでこんなに情報が出されているのではないだろうかという専門家も。 　政府は現在の抗議活動の情報を記録して、落ち着いた後に逮捕していくのではないかとの懸念が囁かれている。

"（※ちなみに私は日本の報道機関がどれだけ厳しく事実確認をしているのか詳しく知りませんが、米国の報道機関はとても厳しいような気がします。私の前のボスへのインタビューが掲載されるときも編集の方から××という記者がこういう記事を掲載する予定だが、これは事実か？これは事実か？という質問を送って来ましたし、私が書いたブログ記事をネタに記事を書いた記者の方がいらっしゃったのですが、そのときも編集の方から詳しい事実確認メールが送られてきました。日本の報道だとあまりそういうことをやっていないような気がします。）"

本当に良記事です。この記事を見ていたら身震いしてきた。ReTweet や各種 twitter 関連サービスによるネットワーク外部性により，もはや完全な検閲は不可能というところか。twitter などのミニブログからジャーナリズム革命を感じる。「本当の大変化はこれから始まる」 by umedamochio "しかし、Twitterの情報の広がるスピードはあまりに速く、間違いもそのまま広がっていってしまう可能性が高い。スピードと会話をとるか、事実確認をとるか。" "Twitterはツールであり、twitter.comのサイトが全てでない点においてFacebook等のSNSと比べて検閲しにくい"

さらに続編、すごいまとめです

I love that the Wall Street Journal writes this but never complained about Bush using fear mongering. Also I don't think he has fear mongered, I think Obama has presented evidence that backs up what he is saying.

the Great Depression are not only historically inaccurate, they're also dangerous. Repeated warnings from the White House about a coming economic apocalypse aren't likely to raise consumer and investor expectations for the future. In fact, they have contributed to the continuing decline in consumer confidence

Mr. Obama's analogies to the Great Depression are not only historically inaccurate, they're also dangerous. Repeated warnings from the White House about a coming economic apocalypse aren't likely to raise consumer and investor expectations for the future. In fact, they have contributed to the continuing decline in consumer confidence that is restraining a spending pickup.

WASHINGTON — The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.

Honest Tea

The rug is still there, as are the presidential portraits Mr. Bush selected — one of Washington, one of Lincoln — and a collection of decorative green and white plates. During a meeting last week with retired military officials, before he signed an executive order shutting down the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Mr. Obama surveyed his new environs with a critical eye. “He looked around,” said one of his guests, retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, “and said, ‘I’ve got to do something about these plates. I’m not really a plates kind of guy.’ ”

A Tally of Federal Rescues http://nyti.ms/cwSSVf Mind blowing ! The New York Times > Week in Review > Image >

visualization of the recent bailout

Need some time to wrap my head around these figures

Comment 42: William: "That, and our economy runs on paper money that the world doesn't accept as currency due to no gold standard. See the financial reasons for war in Iraq and Iran being next due to both economies no longer accepting US Dollars as main trade currency, instead switching to the Euro for its more stable fluctuation in value. When the US buys, the US prints, thus inflating their own economy, essentially taking it out on US citizens, and devaluing the money the foreign sellers recieve. They get tired of taking $9.50 worth of bills at which time of agreement was worth $10; in which time we declare them an international threat and takeover their government to re-establish the dollar as currency to maintain the image in the world. One large economic nation such as China or India stopping trade in US Dollars and our economy is finished." -- Basically

heh

Lutz Donnerhacke

die zeit widerlegt die behauptungen von zensursula und co

und das stand heute in der Zeit: http://tr.im/lg1I #internetsperren #zensursula [from http://twitter.com/gbyat/statuses/1786412306]

Die Bundesregierung begründet das Gesetz für Internetsperren mit Fantasiezahlen und unsauberen Interpretationen. Eine Analyse

A new Gallup Poll, conducted May 7-10, finds 51% of Americans calling themselves "pro-life" on the issue of abortion and 42% "pro-choice." This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.-The new results, obtained from Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs survey, represent a significant shift from a year ago, when 50% were pro-choice and 44% pro-life. Prior to now, the highest percentage identifying as pro-life was 46%, in both August 2001 and May 2002.- The source of the shift in abortion views is clear in the Gallup Values and Beliefs survey. The percentage of Rep (incl inde who lean Rep) calling themselves "pro-life" rose by 10 points over the past year, from 60% to 70%, while there has been essno change in the views of Dem and Dem leaners.- Similarly, by ideology, all of the increase in pro-life sentiment is seen among self-identified conservatives and moderates;

Hey, at least they're calling her "diva", not "bitch".

Aide calls VP nominee a "diva" and says she's only looking out for herself.

More infighting is just helping the Obama campaign that much more (like they need it!), the RNC is going to need to pull another Watergate to get through this one.

"She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone," said this McCain adviser. "She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else. "Her lack of fundamental understanding of some key issues was dramatic," said another McCain source with direct knowledge of the process to prepare Palin after she was picked. The source said it was probably the "hardest" to get her "up to speed than any candidate in history."

She's off the reservation!

Sara Palin: Even McCain is sick of her.

"Her lack of fundamental understanding of some key issues was dramatic," said another McCain source with direct knowledge of the process to prepare Palin after she was picked. The source said it was probably the "hardest" to get her "up to speed than any candidate in history."

Great lyrics, typography, and visual effects on this hip-hop themed video.

Could there be a more thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women?

"But shouldn’t a woman who is prepared to be commander in chief be intimidating? Because of the intelligence, experience, talent and drive that got her there? If she isn’t, at least on some level, off-putting, if her presence inspires national commentary on breast-pumping and babysitting rather than health care reform and social security, then something is seriously wrong. If she doesn’t elicit at least some degree of awe, then something is missing."

“This election is not about issues,” Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager said this week. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” That’s a scary thought. For the takeaway is so often base, a reflection more of people’s fears and insecurities than of our hopes and dreams.

Article on Globish (to go with podcast)

Meray sent me this!

New lingua franca upsets French

This article demonstrates the new trend in specialized English classes for business. The term 'globisch' reflects the globalization of business since the terms that are used are not an exact English. It is considered a dialect, which some of us may find ourselves teaching or interpreting at some point.

Globish has only 1,500 words and users must avoid humour, metaphor, abbreviation and anything else that can cause cross-cultural confusion.They must speak slowly and in short sentences.

Bernstein manifesto

e-mails from Sanford to Maria

Sanford-Maria love letters

Letters

Exclusive: Read e-mails between Sanford, woman

cartas del Gob de Carolina a su amante argentina

Wow, he seems to be a romantic guy. I have just heard the excerpts of the emails so far. He is goes. Governor Mark sanford is indeed very romantic and I wish they tap the emails like this in India too. More steaming stories will be there for you then.

E-mails, obtained by The State newspaper in December, between Gov. Mark Sanford and Maria, a woman in Buenos Aires, Argentina. At the time, efforts to authenticate the e-mails were unsuccessful. However, Sanford’s office Wednesday did not dispute their authenticity. The State has removed the woman’s full name and other personal details, including her street address, e-mail address and children’s names.

8% wereldwijd is econoom; de meerderheid jurist

The presence of so many engineer-politicians in China goes hand in hand with a certain way of thinking.

ter, Wen Jiabao, specialised in g

Economist article on the prevalence of lawyers in U.S. and U.K. politics.

McCain had to pay people to make calls for him...

"Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents."

Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents. Nina Williams, a stay-at-home mom in Lake County, Indiana, tells us that her daughter recently called her from her job at the center, upset that she had been asked to read a script attacking Obama for being "dangerously weak on crime," "coddling criminals," and for voting against "protecting children from danger." "They walked out," Williams says of her daughter and her co-workers, adding that they weren't fired but willingly sacrificed pay rather than read the lines. "They were told [by supervisors], `If you all leave, you're not gonna get paid for the rest of the day." The script coincided with this robo-slime call running in other states, but because robocalling is illegal in Indiana it was being read by call center workers.

events of 2008, People Who Mattered etc

No surprise here.

Nice flow chart for the Bill to Law process

RT @DesignerDepot: 100 Years Of Propaganda: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: http://ow.ly/1Y0up

1) Dimitri Moor propaganda map of the USSR during the civil war, 2) circa 1490 world map used by Columbus to garner support for his expedition, 3) earliest known Chinese globe from 1623, 4) Waldseemuller world map, first naming the American continent, 5) Google Earth ("Google Earth presents a world in which the area of most concern to you can be at the centre, and which - with mapped content overlaid - can contain whatever you think is important. Almost for the first time, the ability to create an accurate map has been placed in the hands of everyone, and it has transformed the way we view the world."), 6) 1889 map of London poverty, 7) post-Revolutionary War map establishing USA-Canada border, 8) Harry Beck's London tube map, 9) the Peters equal-area projection world map, and 10) a late medieval world map that "marks the birth of English patriotism".

CHINESE GLOBE

With interesting comments.

"If this Gulf accident had happened in Nigeria, neither the government nor the company would have paid much attention," said the writer Ben Ikari, a member of the Ogoni people. "This kind of spill happens all the time in the delta."

The Deepwater Horizon disaster caused headlines around the world, yet the people who live in the Niger delta have had to live with environmental catastrophes for decades

This is also a corollary to keeping them too busy to think. Of course you can't turn off anyone's thought processes completely—but you can keep them too tired to do any original thinking. The decision center in the brain tires out just like a muscle, and when it's exhausted, people start making certain predictable types of logic mistakes. Found a system based on those mistakes, and you're golden.

Sick Systems

sick systems, sick workplaces

Rule 4: Reward intermittently. Intermittent gratification is the most addictive kind there is. If you know the lever will always produce a pellet, you'll push it only as often as you need a pellet. If you know it never produces a pellet, you'll stop pushing. But if the lever sometimes produces a pellet and sometimes doesn't, you'll keep pushing forever, even if you have more than enough pellets (because what if there's a dry run and you have no pellets at all?). It's the motivation behind gambling, collectible cards, most video games, the Internet itself, and relationships with crazy people. How do you do all this? It's incredibly easy: Keep the crises rolling. Incompetence is a great way to do this: If the office system routinely works badly or the controlling partner routinely makes major mistakes, you're guaranteed ongoing crises.

Creating sick systems to ensnare unwitting lovers and/or employees.

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

RT @kantandesu: NYタイムズにすごい記事が出た。アフガニスタンには1兆ドル規模の鉄、銅、コバルト、金、リチウムなどの鉱物資源が眠る。アフガニスタンはリチウムのサウジアラビアになれる、と書いている。理由はタリバンではなかったのだ…。恐ろし。http://ny ...

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan..Afghanistan has never had much heavy industry before, it has little or no history of environmental protection..The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal w/ mineral development. Internatl accounting firms that have expertise in mining contracts have been hired to consult w/ the Afghan Ministry of Mines, & technical data is being prepared to turn over to multinational mining companies & other potential foreign investors. The Pentagon is helping Afghan officials arrange bids on mineral rights by next fall..In 2004, American geologists, stumbled across old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. The data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences

Daughters preferred over sons, women more successful

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women&#8217;s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn&#8217;t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way&#8212; and its vast cultural consequences

"Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences"

In his final book, The Bachelors’ Ball, published in 2007, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes the changing gender dynamics of Béarn, the region in southwestern France where he grew up. The eldest sons once held the privileges of patrimonial loyalty and filial inheritance in Béarn. But over the decades, changing economic forces turned those privileges into curses. Although the land no longer produced the impressive income it once had, the men felt obligated to tend it. Meanwhile, modern women shunned farm life, lured away by jobs and adventure in the city. They occasionally returned for the traditional balls, but the men who awaited them had lost their prestige and become unmarriageable. This is the image that keeps recurring to me, one that Bourdieu describes in his book: at the bachelors’ ball, the men, self-conscious about their diminished status, stand stiffly, their hands by their sides, as the women twirl away.

As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success, women begin to have the advantage.

// What a great article.

The general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel's thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications. Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual – blue tie, button-down shirt, dress slacks – McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one of his advisers says, is the "most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine." The general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too "Gucci." He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer) to Bordeaux, Talladega Nights (his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable: Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops.

Got the guy fired 06/23/10 ; ideally should get a bunch of others fired too, but probably won't, or not the important ones anyway.

Whether Cahn and Carbone are right will take time and subsequent scholarship to learn; but their story is both plausible and sobering. Plausible, because it brings so many aspects of the culture wars into sharper focus. Sobering, because the economic and cultural forces battering traditional family norms show no signs of abating -- but the new, education-centered pathway to adulthood is often least accessible to those who need it most.

In red America, families form adults

"New norms arise for this environment, norms geared to prevent premature family formation. The new paradigm prizes responsible childbearing and child-rearing far above the traditional linkage of sex, marriage, and procreation. Instead of emphasizing abstinence until marriage, it enjoins: Don't form a family until after you have finished your education and are equipped for responsibility. In other words, *adults form families*. Family life marks the end of the transition to adulthood, not the beginning. Red America still prefers the traditional model."

RT @brainpicker: Do "family values" weaken families? Very compelling read from National Journal http://is.gd/c3p5t [from http://twitter.com/bfwriter/statuses/13765341391]

Can it be? One of the oddest paradoxes of modern cultural politics may at last be resolved. The paradox is this: Cultural conservatives revel in condemning the loose moral values and louche lifestyles of "San Francisco liberals." But if you want to find two-parent families with stable marriages and coddled kids, your best bet is to bypass Sarah Palin country and go to Nancy Pelosi territory: the liberal, bicoastal, predominantly Democratic places that cultural conservatives love to hate.

Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Web Services as Governments http://bit.ly/dcQn3M via @VenessaMiemis | Related: War http://www.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/3424896427/ [from http://twitter.com/CircleReader/statuses/16160255165]

As I thought about it, it became clear that web platforms really don't make much. Instead, they create the conditions that encourage others to invest their time and energy to create useful services. The value of Twitter is not in the software that runs on their servers; it is in the content that 180 million people contribute to their network - same with Facebook. Many would argue that Apple makes things, but even there, the full experience of the iPhone has a lot to do with the 200,000 applications that others created to run on the device. A lot of people have begun using the term ecosystem to describe these big platforms. That captures their decentralized, emergent character, but ecosystems do not have a central point of control. Apple decided to eliminate third party analytics between one release and the next. That doesn't happen in an ecosystem. The right analogy is a government.

Apple, Facebook, Craigslist, et all as governments (totalitarian, state economies, libertarians?)

Social networks act as governments with their APIs.

Secret South African papers expose of which Israel told her i would sell nuclear warheads on the apartheid plan, providing the very first established documentary evidence of your california's possession involving nuclear items.

Key Southerly Africa files uncover that Israel wanted to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the initial established documentary proof of the particular state's ownership of nuclear items.

Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state's possession of nuclear weapons.

The documents show both sides met on 31 March 1975. Polakow-Suransky writes in his book published in the US this week, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's secret alliance with apartheid South Africa. At the talks Israeli officials "formally offered to sell South Africa some of the nuclear-capable Jericho missiles in its arsenal". Among those attending the meeting was the South African military chief of staff, Lieutenant General RF Armstrong. He immediately drew up a memo in which he laid out the benefits of South Africa obtaining the Jericho missiles but only if they were fitted with nuclear weapons.

conservatives have been better than progressives at exploiting anecdote and emotion to win arguments. Progressives tend to think that giving people the facts and figures will inevitably lead them to the right conclusions. They see anecdotes as inadmissible evidence, and appeals to emotion as wrong.

A well written, middle of the line piece on denialism and why normal people become extremists. Bottom line: they don't like giving up control for things that they can't see the real benefits of. Ie. Vaccines; because people no longer get diseases they are vaccinated by, denialists are prone to suspect if vaccines actually do anything or are they actually tools by a power hungry elite to control us and increase autism levels?

What motivates people to retreat from the real world into denial? George Lakoff, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that conservatives have been better than progressives at exploiting anecdote and emotion to win arguments. Progressives tend to think that giving people the facts and figures will inevitably lead them to the right conclusions. They see anecdotes as inadmissible evidence, and appeals to emotion as wrong. The same is true of scientists. But against emotion and anecdote, dry statements of evidence have little power. To make matters worse, scientists usually react to denial with anger and disdain, which makes them seem even more arrogant. Poland has reached a similar conclusion. He has experimented a few times with using anecdote and appeals to emotion when speaking to lay audiences. "I get very positive responses - except from numerates, who see it as emotionally manipulative," he says.

The first thing to note is that denial finds its most fertile ground in areas where the science must be taken on trust. ... Similarly, global warming, evolution and the link between tobacco and cancer must be taken on trust, usually on the word of scientists, doctors and other technical experts who many non-scientists see as arrogant and alien. ... This is not necessarily malicious, or even explicitly anti-science. Indeed, the alternative explanations are usually portrayed as scientific. Nor is it willfully dishonest. It only requires people to think the way most people do: in terms of anecdote, emotion and cognitive short cuts. Denialist explanations may be couched in sciency language, but they rest on anecdotal evidence and the emotional appeal of regaining control. ... He calls his opponents "the innumerate" because they are unable to grasp concepts like probability. Instead, they reason based on anecdote and emotion. "People use mental short cuts

Good read > The Creativity Crisis http://bit.ly/an2WvJ /RT @invisiblepilot

Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?”

Important article detailing research that indicates that tests of creative performance by children, after rising steadily from the 1950s to 1990, have been dropping sharply since that point. Story attempts to discuss some of the reasons why, how educators (here and abroad) are attempting to inculcate innovative thinking and action in schoolchildren and what sorts of familial and societal conditions spark creativity.

The Spill, The Scandal and the President

The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world's most dangerous oil company get away with murder

Rolling Stone is on fire these days—The Spill, The Scandal and the President http://bit.ly/9X3rnW & The Runaway General http://bit.ly/97zeAS

Top Secret America (Washington Post)

One of the best uses of Flash to display data that I've ever seen.

Questi sono alcuni dei risultati di un'inchiesta portata avanti per due anni dal Washington Post. Dice @riotta su twitter che non ci sono scoop, però.

Great piece of journalism from Washington Post: Top Secret America, A hidden world, growing beyond control. http://is.gd/dyx7L #Terrorism

Interesting.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

tl;dr Government is too big.

To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post. What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest -- and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities.

To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

RT @redlog: RT @ananny Phenomenally good reporting from the Washington Post: "Top Secret America", http://bit.ly/9Ja5Fi

invetigaciones especiales acerca del gob de EUA

tl;dr Government is too big.

To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post. What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest -- and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities.

To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

RT @redlog: RT @ananny Phenomenally good reporting from the Washington Post: "Top Secret America", http://bit.ly/9Ja5Fi

invetigaciones especiales acerca del gob de EUA

tl;dr Government is too big.

To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post. What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest -- and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities.

To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

RT @redlog: RT @ananny Phenomenally good reporting from the Washington Post: "Top Secret America", http://bit.ly/9Ja5Fi

Interesting governmental site dealing with freedom (of the use of music potentially)

Web para eliminar leyes innecesarias

^CK HMG using an off the shelf crowd-sourcing package.

This site gives you the chance to tell us which laws and regulations you think we should get rid of.

@nick_clegg et al really cracking down on new/duplicate websites http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/ http://spendingchallenge.hm-treasury.gov.uk/

Interesting governmental site dealing with freedom (of the use of music potentially)

Web para eliminar leyes innecesarias

^CK HMG using an off the shelf crowd-sourcing package.

This site gives you the chance to tell us which laws and regulations you think we should get rid of.

@nick_clegg et al really cracking down on new/duplicate websites http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/ http://spendingchallenge.hm-treasury.gov.uk/

Wikileaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, obtained the material in circumstances he will not discuss, also says it redacted harmful material before posting the bulk of the data on its own "uncensorable" series of global servers. Wikileaks published in April this year a previously suppressed classified video of US Apache helicopters killing two Reuters cameramen on the streets of Baghdad, which gained international attention. A 22-year-old intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, was arrested in Iraq and charged with leaking the video, but not with leaking the latest material. The Pentagon's criminal investigations department continues to try to trace the leaks and recently unsuccessfully asked Assange, he says, to meet them outside the US to help them. Assange allowed the Guardian to examine the war logs at our request. No fee was involved and Wikileaks has not been involved in the preparation of the Guardian's articles.

Reading up on Wikileaks' US documents on the Afghan war on @CNN http://j.mp/da2xsH http://j.mp/axPx55 and The @Guardian http://j.mp/bjAFKy

Rachel Reid, who investigates civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said: "These files bring to light what's been a consistent trend by US and Nato forces: the concealment of civilian casualties. Despite numerous tactical directives ordering transparent investigations when civilians are killed, there have been incidents I've investigated in recent months where this is still not happening. Accountability is not just something you do when you are caught. It should be part of the way the US and Nato do business in Afghanistan every time they kill or harm civilians." The reports, many of which the Guardian is publishing in full online, present an unvarnished and often compelling account of the reality of modern war.

A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency. The war logs also detail: • How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial. • How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles. • How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada. • How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

why we need a place for whistle blowers

Disagree with the comments that this is manipulative and only out to make money. If being for profit was an issue we wouldn't be able to trust anything in most books, journals or papers.

Afghanistan: The war logs [guardian.co.uk] http://goo.gl/XHW4

A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.

The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed "blue on white" in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents. Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists out of a determination to protect themselves from suicide bombers.

"We strongly condemn the disclosure of information that makes us look like bloodthirsty fucking idiots."

A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency. Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama's "surge" strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US naval personnel captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday. The war logs detail: • How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial. • How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles. • How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

As to this whole "unspoken agreement" business: the reason Lara Logan thinks this is because she's like pretty much every other "reputable" journalist in this country, in that she suffers from a profound confusion about who she's supposed to be working for.

Matt Taibbi is absolutely right. This is what's wrong with American journalism.

"If I'm hearing Logan correctly, what Hastings is supposed to have done in that situation is interrupt these drunken assholes & say, "Excuse me, fellas, I know we're all having fun & all, but you're saying things that may not be in your best interest! As a reporter, it is my duty to inform you that you may end up looking like insubordinate douche bags in front of two million Rolling Stone readers if you don't shut your mouths this very instant!"... What the hell are we doing in Afghanistan? Is it worth all the bloodshed & hatred? Who are the people running this thing, what is their agenda, & is that agenda the same thing we voted for? By the severely unlikely virtue of a drunken accident we get a tiny glimpse of an answer to some of these vital questions, but instead of cheering this as a great break for our profession, a waytago moment, one so-called reputable journalist after another lines up to protest the leak & attack the reporter for doing his job. God, do you all suck!"

Matt Tabbi on the follow up reporting of the original article that led to Gen. McChrystal's departure.

Anyone who wants to know why network television news hasn't mattered since the seventies just needs to check out this appearance by Logan. Here's CBS's chief foreign correspondent saying out loud on TV that when the man running a war that's killing thousands of young men and women every year steps on his own dick in front of a journalist, that journalist is supposed to eat the story so as not to embarrass the flag.