On Globalized Capitalism
From commentary by American Lori Berenson being held as political prisoner in Peru.
"The details of what happened to me are irrelevant in the broader picture of the thousands of Peruvians who have been killed, disappeared, tortured and detained during the internal conflict. Since history has always been re-written by those who have the upper-hand, the issue of subversion became the scapegoat for all of Perú's problems.
In all parts of the world, symbolic culprits are used to obscure the root causes of social discontent, to distract attention and distort realities when any group of people questions the existing order.
The world order, especially in this era of globalized capitalism is designed to benefit a powerful few at the expense of the majority of our world's peoples. This system is unjust, immoral, terrifying, and just plain insane. We must change it.
Greedy Grateful Dead Widow Burns Down Online Show-Library
Archive.org has been forced to take down over 1000 soundboard recordings of the Grateful Dead by Jerry's wife and a few (perhaps one) remaining member of the band.
"For years, Archive.org has served as the repository for the Grateful Deads copious electronic recordings. Now, the site will be limited to streaming "audience-recorded" shows.
"The reaction from the very large global Deadhead
community has been very interesting, sociologically. People are confused, angry, depressed, grateful for the time they had, and more."
Boing Boing: Greedy Grateful Dead widow burns down online show-library
Understanding Local Max
Check out this article, it's a little self-helpy but I liked it. It's about something he calls "Local Max" and getting beyond it, but you're not gonna know what that is till you read it. So read it. It's brief.
Iraqis out of patience
from an April 2004 poll:
bq. "Only a third of the Iraqi people now believe that the American-led occupation of their country is doing more good than harm, and a solid majority support an immediate military pullout even though they fear that could put them in greater danger"
"more recently":http://telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/10/23/wirq23.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/10/23/ixportaltop.html
* only 1% of Iraqis believe coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security;
* 82% "strongly opposed" to the presence of coalition troops;
New crisis for Blair’s War
Britain's Tony Blair, now seems to be facing the full-scale parliamentary inquiry into the Iraq war -- its justification, conduct and aftermath -- that Bush has been able to avoid.
Let Us Blow Up Bill O’Reilly
I loved Mark Morford's response to Bill O'Reilly's suggestion that Al Qaeda blow up San Francisco for, as Mark puts it, "[daring] to ban aggressive military recruiting in our high schools so disadvantaged 18-year-olds won't be unwittingly sucked into the brutish military vortex so they can be shipped off to Iraq to die for appalling and indefensible reasons."
Mark suggests we "merely look at him like Shiva looks at a sea slug -- i.e., a moment of compassion for his regrettable incarnation -- and then laugh and shake our heads and move the hell on." I most certainly could not have put it better myself.
Vizu is like flickr for polls
I ran across this new site called "Vizu":http://vizu.com/ that's all about creating polls. It's very Web 2.0 with a bunch of Ajax submitting, RSS feeds of lots of useful information, and an easy copy/paste iframe to post the poll to your blog. If you sign up it makes anonymous use of your demographic information to provide further analysis of poll results. Seems pretty interesting and if it ever gets as popular as "flickr":http://flickr.com/ or "del.icio.us":http://del.icio.us/ then it could become really useful.
Here's a few of the "polls I've made":http://vizu.com/polls-by-member.jsp?member=derek73.
Shopping Is Patriotic, Leaders Say
I just came across this picture from my trip to British Columbia in November 2001. Notice the headline under the picture.
Takes ya back, doesn't it.
Sony Music CD’s Secretly Install DRM Spyware
Sony BMG has configured some of its music CDs to install antipiracy software using techniques typically employed by hackers and virus writers to hide the program from users and to prevent them from ever uninstalling it.