Category: Politics

Jack Cafferty points out a problem with the NSA spying on US citizens.

Like Michael Moore once said: »If you want to bomb a country you should at least be able to point it on a map!«. I would add you should at least be able to name some kind of reason. Just watch this video: It’s a little bit hard to see in the video: These people…

BBC reports that US secretary of offense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledges that the “war on terror” is primarily a struggle of ideas. He proposes the US propaganda machinery must be capable of fighting down the unfavourable news from offensive media with a “more effective 24-hour propaganda machine”. Hm. I was thinking free press and freedom of…

Bruce Schneier in Wired discusses the challenge that surveillance technology raise for constitutional rights: Sometime in the near future, a young man is walking around the Washington Monument for 30 minutes. Cameras capture his face, which yields an identity. That identity is queried in a series of commercial databases, producing his travel records, his magazine…

MoveOn.org is running a site where people can offer housing for the evacuees. And there are entries like this that are kind of amazing: We can provide a family of five or six a place to stay while rebuilding is complete. WE WILL PAY FOR YOU AIRPLANE TICKETS, WE CAN OFFER WORK AND WE WILL…

»Crossing the Rubicon« claims to be the second largest selling book about the attacks on September 11th after the official Kean Commission report. Michael C. Ruppert (who is running the website fromthewilderness.com) summarizes the claims he is making in this book: In my book I make several key points:1. I name Vice President Richard Cheney…

This concept proposed by Jon Lebkowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe asks what is the future of democracy in the information age: “Extreme democracy” is a political philosophy of the information era that puts people in charge of the entire political process. It suggests a deliberative process that places total confidence in the people, opening the policy-making…

Hiroshima was not only a human desaster of unspeakable extent – it is also the beginning of »politics of deception« that led to Vietnam, Iraq I and Iraq II (and probably more to come). Quote from the LA Times article: Hiroshima’s myths have gradually given rise to an American unilateralism born of atomic arrogance. The…

Few days after my returning home from New York after 9/11 (the day I originally planned to fly home) I felt strongly that the WTC attacks were just a episode and that there is a great deal of background and responsibility on the side of the current (and probably former) US governments and the fact…

The death toll desaster in asian sea begins to exceed any catastrophe the world has ever seen. It is a shame to read this headline: Secretary of State Colin Powell conferred by video hookup with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan Thursday on assistance to the victims of the Asian and African tsunamis and then added the…

At sorryeverybody.com people trying to apologize for re-electing George W. Bush. People can submit images to testify their disappointment to the world. The server seems to be pretty overloaded.

factcheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Doing “fact checking” seems the be the latest trend and a growing obligation for US voters. Quoting out of context, twisting the words, exaggretating – all these techniques seem to be in the arsenal for Democrats and Republicans as well.

Martin Brampton from Silicon.com doubts that software patents are rarely as innovative as the simplistic argument for patents would suggest. A parallel debate is being fought in science. Governments have sought increased commercial involvement with university research, but the price has often been proprietary control over new ideas. Many academic scientists are opposing this trend,…

Just for the record: Why We Know Iraq Is Lying (by Condolezza Rice, Jan. 23rd 2003)

DB Research has issued a paper that claims software patents block innovation: A growing number of R&D-intensive businesses realises that licencing out their IP (intellectual property) can constitute a substantial share or their revenues, which in turn encourages innovation efforts. Bearing this in mind, one could be tempted to consider ever stricter IP protection regimes…

What if you invent a web site creation and maintenance system that permits distributed control and centralized management of a web site? What if the physical implementation of the web site resides on a database maintained by a database administratorand the web site system permits a site administrator to construct the overall structure, design and…

When I was in New York on 9/11/2001 I was stunned by the news program FoxNews. US people know that program: I didn’t at that time. The only US program we see here is CNN Europe (which is very different from the US as I learned that time). Now it seems (some) Americans start to…

This week there is a conference in Copenhagen where scientists debate environmental challenges of the world. Copenhagen Consensus is based on the aim to improve prioritization of limited means. The world is faced with a countless number of challenges such as diseases, environmental degradation, armed conflicts and financial instability. Copenhagen Consensus takes a new and…

This article by James Lovelock keeps me thinking. 25 years ago he was one of the first to warn about the global warming and he first conceived the Gaia hypothesis while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in the mid-1960s, where he was designing life detection instruments for NASA’s Mars Viking probes.…