General – Page 91 – Letter Never Sent

Religion/philosophy — Comments Off
05
May 03

Scary wars of religion

Christians Hail Rightist’s Call To Oust Arabs:

During his speech last week, Elon quoted from Chapter 33 of Numbers, in which God tells Moses that the children of Israel are mean to inherit the land of Canaan. God then instructs the children of Israel: “Ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you… But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then shall those that ye let remain of them be as pricks in your eyes, and as thorns in your sides, and they shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell.”

Drawing loud cheers from the audience, Elon said, “I know, we always have to be politically correct, but it is very, very complicated to be politically correct when you have to correct so many political mistakes.”

To correct such mistakes, said Elon, an Orthodox rabbi, “Let’s turn to the Bible, which says very clearly… we have to resettle them, to relocate them, and to have a Jewish state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.”

Politics — Comments Off
05
May 03

Books >” href=”http://www.senate.gov/reference/reference_item/mccarthy.htm”>McCarthy Hearings

General — 1 Comment
05
May 03

Your body must be heard.

I told my friend, Sara, I thought she should post her final paper here since I thought some people might find it interesting. I asked her to write a little explanation of what it’s about in a nutshell. The formatting on the linked doc is a little messed up, but I will remedy that later:

This is a feminist analysis of Bjork’s music videos over the last 10 years, centering on how images of the grotesque and autoeroticism create an identity of Bjork that is constantly metamorphosing. Her videos create a (perhaps unconscious) response to the sexist images usually constant in popular music videos, and so feminists and other viewers who do not agree with the dictates of popular culture can use these videos as a site of resistance.

Read the whole thing here.

General — Comments Off
05
May 03

Okay program from The Connection

Okay program from The Connection on ‘Orwell’s Legacy‘. Good to listen to if you’re working.

General — Comments Off
04
May 03

The road to 1984

This is worth reading:

Guardian: The road to 1984: George Orwell’s final novel was seen as an anticommunist tract and many have claimed its grim vision of state control proved prophetic. But, argues Thomas Pynchon, Orwell – whose centenary is marked this year – had other targets in his sights and drew an unexpectedly optimistic conclusion

Science — 1 Comment
04
May 03

I am scared of SARS…

SARS Can Live on Common Surfaces: Key to Its Spread Lies in Quantity: The SARS virus can survive on common surfaces at room temperature for hours or even days, which could explain how people can catch the deadly lung infection without face-to-face contact with a sick person, scientists have found.

New laboratory studies, being released today, have produced the first scientific data on how long the SARS virus can live in various places and conditions, demonstrating for the first time that the microbe can linger outside an infected person’s body.

One study showed the virus survived for at least 24 hours on a plastic surface at room temperature, which suggests it might be possible to become infected from touching a tabletop, doorknob or other object. Another found the microbe remained viable for as long as four days in human waste, a crucial finding that could clarify how the virus can spread through apartment buildings, hospitals and other facilities.

General — Comments Off
04
May 03

Yeah

U.S. Hires Christian Extremists to Produce Arabic News: The U.S. government this week launched its Arabic language satellite TV news station for mostly Muslim Iraq. It is being produced in a studio – Grace Digital Media – controlled by fundamentalist Christians who are rabidly pro-Israel. That’s grace as in “by the grace of God.”

Plan Aims to Ban Criticism of Israel at Universities: The third-ranking Republican member of the Senate, “conservative” Rick Santorum (Pa.), plans to introduce so-called “ideological diversity” legislation that would cut federal funding for American colleges and universities found to be permitting professors, students and student organizations to openly criticize Israel, which he considers to be an act of “anti-Semitism.”

Santorum wants to rewrite the federal funding formula under Title IX of the Higher Education Act to include “ideological diversity” as well as sexual equality in education as a perquisite for federal funding. Ideological diversity seems to be some sort of double think. In other words, if you don’t buy the mainstream orthodoxy you need more ‘ideological diversity’.

Software Bullet Is Sought to Kill Musical Piracy: Since the law and the technology itself are new, the liabilities — criminal and civil — are not easily defined. But some tactics are clearly more problematic than others.
Among the more benign approaches being developed is one program, considered a Trojan horse rather than a virus, that simply redirects users to Web sites where they can legitimately buy the song they tried to download.

A more malicious program, dubbed “freeze,” locks up a computer system for a certain duration — minutes or possibly even hours — risking the loss of data that was unsaved if the computer is restarted. It also displays a warning about downloading pirated music. Another program under development, called “silence,” scans a computer’s hard drive for pirated music files and attempts to delete them. One of the executives briefed on the silence program said that it did not work properly and was being reworked because it was deleting legitimate music files, too.

Other approaches that are being tested include launching an attack on personal Internet connections, often called “interdiction,” to prevent a person from using a network while attempting to download pirated music or offer it to others. It’s an arm’s race. Luckily there’s more of us than them.

Israel Plans Palestinian Statehood In Jordan: OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, May 3 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Jordan can be the new homeland of Palestinians in return for allowing it to have lucrative reconstruction contracts in Iraq, revealed an Israeli plan Saturday, May 3.

Israeli Tourism Minister Benny Elon left last night for the United States, where he will present the U.S. officials with the plan based on naturalizing the Palestinians in Jordan and that a Palestinian state in the spirit of President George Bush’s vision will only feed terrorism and that Jordan is Palestine, Israeli daily Haaretz said.

Military and defense — Comments Off
26
Apr 03

The New Cold War

The New Cold War: India and China are picking up where the US and Soviet Union left off:

China has openly declared its desire to colonize the moon. The world’s most populous nation is unlikely to build lunar settlements, but that’s not the point. China’s motive lies not in constructing a lunar Hong Kong, but rather in luring India into a loud public competition. Later this year, if all goes as planned, China will become the third country to send a citizen into space. An orbiting taikonaut will be even more impressive if American shuttles are stuck in their hangars while the misnamed International Space Station limps along with a skeleton crew.

As Russia once did, China has a strong technical advantage. It already owns a chunk of the commercial space-launch business. But India has a decent shot at victory as well. It doesn’t have China’s manufacturing know-how, but it’s rapidly becoming the world’s software back office.

Who will become top dog in South Asia? That’s an open question, and there aren’t many good ways to answer short of a useless massacre. A space race offers a good solution. It’s a symbolic tournament that tests competing political and economic systems to their limit.

A decade after the end of the Cold War, good old-fashioned space programs still matter. Not for exploration’s sake, but to settle new cold wars. If you doubt it, imagine this scenario: It’s 2029, and a lunar mission lands at Tranquillity Base. A crew of heroic young Indians – or Chinese – quietly folds and puts away America’s 60-year-old flag. If the world saw that on television, wouldn’t the gesture be worth tens of billions of rupees or yuan? Of course it would.

General — Comments Off
26
Apr 03

Stalinist show trial

From Slate: No More Whistlin’ Dixie via robotwisdom:

That wasn’t good enough for Sawyer. She spent an hour trying to bend the Chicks with a combination of false sympathy and crass sensationalism. Time and again, she cut back to a typeset insert of Maines’ original remark, as if Maines had called for the pillage of Crawford. “Ashamed?” Sawyer said, incredulously. “Ashamed?” In the tradition of a Stalinist show trial, the women were forced to affirm their patriotism and their support for the troops. At every point they—who are, after all, entertainers with no particular training in political science—were thoughtful, modest, and firm. At every point Sawyer tried to force them into a crude, Manichaen choices. “Do you feel awful about using that word about the president of the United States?” she asked at the start of the interview—in a prime example of the sort of leading question no self-respecting first year AP stringer would ask. “Well,” replied Maines, carefully, ” ‘awful’ is a really strong word.” Later, when Maines was trying to apologize and clarify, Sawyer said, “I hear something not quite, what, wholehearted. …”

Well, I heard something not quite—what—honorable in Sawyer’s presentation of the affair: an attempt to take a trivial matter that had blown up into an absurd controversy, and blow it up even more under the guise of simply covering the story. Essentially, she asked the women to choose between abasing themselves on national television or stirring up more hatred against themselves. It was a depressing moment in an ugly time.

the old stuff