› free texas holdem poker download:
free texas holdem poker download
› where to buy texas holdem poker chips:
where to buy texas holdem poker chips
› Kairosnews:
Acyrologia, Equivocation and the Global Test
› Running Scared:
Cheney on Iraq from 1991
› Joho the Blog:
GrannyD for Senate
Ethan Zuckerman has published the initial results of the alpha version of a project he's started, and it's pretty damn interesting. He's scraping NY Times articles and then checking which ones are being linked to in blogs. The raw results are depressingly unsurprising: We blog about the US, then about the US, with occasional digressions about the US.
According to the Center for Media Research:
According to The U.S. Teens Market, a new report from Packaged Facts, by 2006 12- to 19-year-olds in the United States are projected to have a buying power that will top the $182 billion gross domestic product of Russia, increasing a staggering 27.7% to $190 billion between 2001 and 2006 due to higher earnings from jobs held by teens, as well as a jump in family expenditures on teens.
From Matthew Stoller at BOPNews comes a link to this story that says Iran has decided to fight us in Iraq. If true: Ack.
Robert Fisk reports that academics, particularly at the University of Baghdad, seem to have been targeted for murder. Distressing and depressing.
Our elections will deeply affect much of the world. So, much of the world apparently wants to let us know what it thinks. Talk to US wants to help:
Talk to US is a non-partisan public benefit organization seeking to expand US-international dialogue by inviting the opinion of all those affected by our decisions. We are collecting 30-second video messages from around the world, with the most powerful to be broadcast nationally, starting with Link TV (which reaches more than 20 million homes).
Should be interesting. Of course, 30 seconds is just about long enough for communications to make deep cultural-contextual errors...
EthanZ praises the New York Post for supporting Rep. Rangel's protest of our neglect of the genocide in the Sudan: "..., it's reassuring that truly pressing crises like Darfur can bring liberals and conservatives together."
Interesting speech by Bush. According to the Boston Globe, in Turkey he said:
"Some people in Muslim cultures identify democracy with the worst of Western popular culture and want no part of it. And I assure them, when I speak about the blessings of liberty, coarse videos and crass commercialism are not what I have in mind," Bush said. "There is nothing incompatible between democratic values and high standards of decency."
That certainly is to the point. But I wonder how it sounds to a conservative, tightly-controlled religious-based country. After all, as Bruce Sterling pointed out at SXSW, to much of the world, hooking up to the Internet means they start getting porn in their inbox. Does Bush mean that the US is ok with a democratic society enforcing standards of decency? The Saudis apparently consider it indecent for a woman to drive and the Taliban considered it indecent for a girl to show up in school. Does it mean that we're ok with censorship?
Or is Bush saying that democracy doesn't necessarily lead to coarse videos and crass commericalism, in which case, I'd like to know what W thinks has led the American democracy to coarsness and crassness. Is it a problem with American society but not with our democracy? Are they separable?
I think it was a good thing for Bush to say. I'm just having trouble figuring out what it means, and what I think about it.
A guy on a mailing list sent this around saying that it came from a friend of a friend of an n degree friend. It's supposedly the clothing label from a small American company that sells its product in France.
Translation:
Wash with warm water.
Use mild soap.
Dry flat.
Do not use bleach.
Do not dry in the dryer.
Do not iron.
We are sorry that
Our President is an idiot.
We did not vote for him.
From a piece by Bruce Schneier about the story that Chalabi told the Iranians that we had broken their secret code:
If the Iranians knew that the U.S. knew, why didn't they pretend not to know and feed the U.S. false information? Or maybe they've been doing that for years, and the U.S. finally figured out that the Iranians knew. Maybe the U.S. knew that the Iranians knew, and are using the fact to discredit Chalabi.
The really weird twist to this story is that the U.S. has already been accused of doing that to Iran. In 1992, Iran arrested Hans Buehler, a Crypto AG employee, on suspicion that Crypto AG had installed back doors in the encryption machines it sold to Iran -- at the request of the NSA. He proclaimed his innocence through repeated interrogations, and was finally released nine months later in 1993 when Crypto AG paid a million dollars for his freedom -- then promptly fired him and billed him for the release money. At this point Buehler started asking inconvenient questions about the relationship between Crypto AG and the NSA.
So maybe Chalabi's information is from 1992, and the Iranians changed their encryption machines a decade ago.
Or maybe the NSA never broke the Iranian intelligence code, and this is all one huge bluff.
In this shadowy world of cat-and-mouse, it's hard to be sure of anything.
Xiao Quiang at Many2Many writes about a new Chinese website where citizens can report illegal or "unhealthy" uses of the Internet. He also points to an article on how censorship works in China, by Princeton professor Perry Link. Link compares the Chinese methods with those of the Soviets:
The Chinese Communist Party rejected these more mechanical methods in favor of an essentially psychological control system that relies primarily on self-censorship. Questions of risk — how far to go, how explicit to be, with whom to ally and so on — are moved inside the cerebrums of every individual writer and editor... By “fear” I do not mean a clear and present sense of panic. I mean a dull, well-entrenched leeriness that people who deal with the Chinese censorship system usually get used to, and eventually accept as part of their natural landscape...
...the “vagueness” of the charges is hardly new. Such vagueness is purposeful and has been a fundamental tool in Chinese Communist censorship for decades. It has the following four advantages...
From Mark Dionne:
Geraldine Sealey on Salon.com estimates the war will cost $500 billion. If my memory serves me, there are about 20 million people [26M - ed.] in Iraq. That works out to $25,000 per person, $100,000 per family of four. I suspect that that amount would easily buy a new house for each family in the country.
You can watch the numbers at The Cost of War.
Blackfive runs an email from a Marine colonel in Iraq that talks about the surprisingly positive effects of Bush's apology for the prisoner abuse. Excerpt:
"Why does Arab media fail at self criticism and why can't Arab human rights NGOs pressure Arab governments the way their counterparts do in America?", asked the host of satellite news channel al-Arabiy's (one of the harshest critics of the United States) "Spotlight" news program. The follow up commentary was even more astounding, given the source...
[Thanks to Salon's RightHook for the link.]
Some comments via email from Ethan Zuckerman, ex of GeekCorps and now a Berkman fellow with a blog with the tagline "My blog is in Cambridge, but my heart's in Accra":
A few things that have caught my eye...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1211351,00.html - Former CACI contractor Torin Nelson, who served at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, says that CACI was so desperate for staffers, they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. One of his fellow interogators had last worked as a truck driver. Most folks with actual intelligence experience were in management, leaving the actual questioning to folks with significantly less real experience.
http://www.caci.com/ - One of the weird things about CACI is that it looks, at first pass, like a software business. They're listed in a number of places as VARs. (Guess I never thought about buying interogators with my SAP system.) They're not small - $692m in revenue in 2002... Despite all the bad press, they're still recruiting interogators on their website: http://cacirecruiting.caci.com/jobpostings.nsf/$$Search
http://www.clearancejobs.com - "Got a clearance? Get a job!" Lists a number of interogator jobs - interesting to think of financial motivations here - these jobs, in Iraq or Afghanistan, have pay rates attached to them of $80-$150k plus leave packages.
Jeff pulls together a bunch of Iraqi bloggery about the reaction to the prison tortures.
Mohammed Ali Abtahi, the vice president of Iran, in his weblog:
Closing the websites, a measurement for limitations
I was listening to one of Arabic TV channels while I heard that Saudi Arabia is at the top place for closing the websites and it has already closed 40,000 officially.
[...Major snippage...] the Internet and Internet sites are as factors to measure the freedom in each country. The limitation walls will be broken down by communications. Whoever in individual or any regime that thinks about resistant, the wall will fall down over his own head and not over his peoples!!
This arrived over the transom. I don't know anything about it:
"The Rest of the World"
Friday, May 7th, 6:30pm . Apple Store, NYC . 103 Prince St. (at Greene)
"The Rest of the World" is the first in a series of 40-minute
documentary films focused on how U.S. foreign and domestic policy
impacts the lives of people throughout the world.The film was shot in Winnipeg, Canada and features an extensive
interview with Howard Zinn, author of "A People's History of the United
States."The objective for each film is to weave together a number of interviews
with people around the world to create a dialogue on America's global
influence - both social and political - covering everything from
Starbucks Coffee to the War in Iraq.By focusing the bulk of the series primarily on the perspective of
those who live elsewhere in the world, I will seek to address the role
of the United States objectively, and not only provide some clarity on
the actions and decisions this country is now pursuing abroad, but
provoke a healthy dialogue - a "Communication Movement," if you will -
between individuals throughout the world.Running time is 40 minutes.
The site goes live on Friay.
So, now we're beating Iraqi prisoners to death with rocks.
If I were Bush, I'd declare a day of mourning. I'd get the UN into every one of our prisons in Iraq. I'd disengage the troops for a single day everywhere feasible. I'd announce plans to end the hiring of mercenaries. I would take this very, very seriously, not just as a criminal investigation but as a call for introspection.
Bush and introspection? I'd laugh if I weren't so sad.
Loic le Meur, whom I got to meet at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conf, got to rant in front of the World Economic Forum. Here's the summary and here's the stream. (He'd opened up his blog for suggestions.) He argues for deregulation, increased R&D spending, and creating regional centers of excellence. [Thanks to Joi for the link.]
"When you go around the world a half dozen times each year it reinforces the fact that this planet is one complex place, with many perspectives, the least attractive of which is a nationalistic one. "
Nicholas Negroponte, 1995
Having spent two days in Portugal on a fact-finding mission (that sounds so much better than "wandering around as a stupefied tourist"), I am now ready to pronounce on that country's attitude towards ours.
Man, were people eager to tell me how frightened they are of W. Their attitude can be summed up in two words: Scary cowboy.
I was expecting that. I wasn't expecting, however, to hear people so consistently talk about the US in the past tense. We were so admirable, so free, so much the natural leaders of the world. Now, they say, we are becoming tyrants. And they looked sad as they say it, as if we've ruined a dream for them.
Yes, this is based on an absurdly small sample from a completely skewed sample. Their sadness was nonetheless disturbing.
Over at Joho the Blog, I've run an entry from the blog of Iran's VP, and a brief response. I've also used the form on his site to send him a msg. I wonder if I'll get a response...
See who's making a buck in Iraq. [Thanks to George Kamburoff for the link.]
The Voices without Votes lets the rest of the world have some sort of say in (or at least about) our election. It's just been revamped.
That's the title of Luke Thomas' excellent Salon piece on the growing political importance of the Net in Iran. Here's how it begins:
The landslide victory of fundamentalists in Iran's recent "free" elections disheartened Western observers. The CIA declared that the lopsided outcome signifies a new era of repression by the country's clerical regime. But the real story is that by blocking free and fair elections, clerical hard-liners have driven dissent online -- lighting up thousands of alternate channels of communication for the Iranian people.
In Iran, the Internet is becoming the most successful route around oppression. It
We can only hope that Luke's long-term optimism is right.
Darren Barefoot points us to BlogsCanada. It's a:
non-partisan group blog with people posting from all over Canada, of all political persuasions. The blog was started and is hosted by Jim Elve, a hub of all things Canadian and bloggish. Topics are examined and hotly debated, and I think that it's provided a clearing house and focus point for the online campaign...
At the moment, three candidates are vying for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. This has provided a sort of dress rehearsal for the blog, and gotten things off to a flying start. Reflecting developments in the States, there's been plenty of discussion of the online communities that the three candidates are building. In truth, none of them seem to have clued in to Dean's success in the States. For example, the most talked-about candidate, Belinda Stronach, has a weblog (http://www.belinda.ca/Belinda/english/belindablog.asp),
but it doesn't permit public commenting and hasn't been updated for 2 weeks. Not to mention that her site looks like Martha Stewart's.
Voices without Votes tries to give the world some influence over the election of the president of the only remaining superpower.
According to a report by the BBC, North Korea is testing chemical weapons on political prisoners.
1.0