|
======================================
Subject:
======================================
Subject:
======================================
Subject:
======================================
Subject:
======================================
Subject:
======================================
Subject:
======================================
Subject:
======================================
Subject:
======================================
Subject:
======================================
Subject:
======================================
Subject:
======================================
Subject:
======================================
Subject:
======================================
Subject:
======================================
Subject:
======================================
Subject: getting around Goo(k)gle censorship
When Google announced last week that it would censor its new search service in China, the company became, to many, the latest component in that country's sophisticated system of information control.
With strategies ranging from automated keyword filtering and Web site blocking to Internet traffic surveillance, the Chinese government is unmatched in its ability to censor and monitor its citizens online.
Of course, no system is perfect.
The OpenNet Initiative (www.opennet.net), an international human rights project linking researchers from the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School and Cambridge University, tracks Internet censorship and the techniques used to evade it. To surf the Web in China and elsewhere without censorship and in marginal safety, said John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor and a member of the initiative, the primary tool is an old standby: the proxy server.
Here.
======================================
Subject: worst loss ever for GM
G.M. Posts Worst Loss Since 1992
By MICHELINE MAYNARD
DETROIT, Jan. 26 — By the middle of this decade, Rick Wagoner promised a few years ago, General Motors would again be king of the American road.
The company would have dozens of new products aimed at beating foreign automakers, Mr. Wagoner, G.M.'s chief executive, said in 2002. With those new cars and trucks, G.M. would rebuild market share and its profits would help it stay ahead of the high cost of providing health care.
Instead of fulfilling Mr. Wagoner's promise, G.M. went into reverse on Thursday. The company reported an $8.6 billion loss for 2005, the year it began its latest revamping, meant to reverse a string of losses and fend off relentless competition. G.M. reported a profit of $2.8 billion in 2004.
The loss rounded out one of the worst weeks in Detroit's recent memory. On Monday, Ford Motor unveiled its turnaround plan, called the Way Forward, which calls for closing 14 plants and eliminating 30,000 jobs in the next six years. [...] G.M.'s market share fell to the lowest level since 1925. [...]
Foreign auto companies held just over 43 percent of the American market in 2005, their highest share ever.
Here.
======================================
Subject: reporter as waiter
serving the freaks
Here.
======================================
Subject: Clive James online
Interfacing With Clive James
The Australian expat and critical gadfly has created a sprawling online salon, including guest poets and video 'Chats in the Library.' Brendan Bernhard interviews the interviewer .
Some writers have blogs. The Australian critic, poet, novelist, television personality, and all-around man of letters, Clive James, is more ambitious than that. And though still unsure of how precisely to characterize his Web site, CliveJames.com, he thinks of it as a cross between a space station, college campus, and online pyramid that will preserve much of his prose, poetry, conversation, humor and, eventually, television programs for as long as forever is. Gloriously erudite and various, it is becoming more erudite and various if not by the minute, then by the season.
Technically, CliveJames.com is a multimedia Web site, divided into four sections: text, audio, gallery, and video. According to Mr. James, it is the first such Web site to be created by any writer in the world. Besides the ever-increasing corpus of writings by Mr. James himself, it includes contributions from many of his fellow writers and friends. As of now a partial list would include Martin Amis, Peter Porter, Cate Blanchett, P.J. O'Rourke, Piers Paul Read, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Miller, and Ahdaf Soueif. All can be heard (and seen) on the site, chatting away as if in talk-show paradise. If you want to enter conversational heaven, it is now officially just a click away.
Here.
======================================
Subject: saving the dirty niggers: Christian evil continues, unabated
Article Tools Sponsored By
By DANIEL BERGNER
Published: January 29, 2006
The mission church is scarcely more than a shed with open sides. Rusty beams support a roof of corrugated metal, and a wooden lectern, unadorned, serves as the pulpit. No cross rises from the roof or hangs behind the lectern on the blue-painted cement wall; there is no cross anywhere. The house of worship is almost nothing. But it is too much for the missionary Rick Maples. "I want this to be the last church," he said. "This should be the last church built in this section of the valley."
Mehgan Maples, 12, at first adapted well to the life of the missionary but has lately struggled with yet another new language, witnessing a female circumcision and making friends.
With needles nearly bone white, scrub borders the patch of cleared ground - of coarse sand - that surrounds the church. Cactuses, shoulder-high, grow beside spindly bushes throughout the valley, and the vines and stunted trees are studded with thorns. It is a place, this desiccated land in northern Kenya, where living requires severe tenacity. But it is also a valley of abundance. The country's famous game parks are far to the south, yet here miniature antelope leap over the scrub and monkeys idle at the edge of the Mapleses' backyard. A pair of leopards pranced across the yard one evening last year. At the top of the sporadic acacia trees, whose upper branches form a broad, flat, wispy canopy that looks too delicate to support anything heavier than birds, families of baboons move about, feeding on tiny buds. They seem to float on the flimsy treetops.
Rick, his wife, Carrie, and their two daughters, Meghan and Stephanie, moved to this mission outpost in September 2004. Once, their home was in Danville, Calif., an affluent suburb about 30 miles outside San Francisco. Their house "cost a pile," Rick told me, remembering what he termed "my other life," and Carrie recalled the sunken Jacuzzi and the high ceilings and the curved staircase that they draped with garlands at Christmastime. Rick, who is 43 and whose thick, gray crew cut and slightly round cheeks give him an air of constant buoyancy, was a salesman for a company that marketed combustion engines. Carrie, three years younger, with an angular face and a quieter voice that suggest a different, more private kind of resilience, was a nurse who spent most of her career working with pediatric cancer patients. "We were really happy with our life," he said. "We saw about 25 years ahead, and we were happy with what we saw."
We were talking at the dining table in their mission house, down the path from the church. Both house and church were built by the American missionaries whom the Mapleses have replaced. Shabby but serviceable, the small cinder-block house has running water from a tank that is mounted - along with the church bell - on a metal tower in the front yard. The refrigerator operates on kerosene. In California, the house might belong in a slum; here it is luxurious. It sits just outside Kurungu, a town in name only, near the edge of the desert, much closer to the Ethiopian border than to Kenya's capital, Nairobi, which is a 12-to-14-hour drive away, mostly on dirt roads. Kurungu's three or four shops, dim stalls of dusty shelves, rarely sell more than lard and tea leaves, sugar and salt.
The local tribe, the Samburu, are seminomadic herders of cattle and camels and goats. Scattered throughout the valley and surrounding mountains, they live in manyattas, settlements of huts, about four feet tall at the high points of their sloping roofs, covered in thatch and animal skins. A good portion of the Samburu diet - perhaps most of it - consists of milk and cow's blood, blood drained by cinching a rope tourniquet around the base of the cow's neck, then shooting an arrow into the side of the neck (without killing the animal) and letting the dark liquid spurt into a wooden tankard.
Much of Africa, and certainly much of Kenya, one of the continent's most Westernized countries, hold a mix of the modern and the timeless. But around Kurungu, the modern seems to have barely penetrated. Their wooden bells clacking softly in the still air, the herds graze, tended by the Samburu, whose bodies are draped in wraps of brilliant cloth, whose necks and foreheads are resplendent in beads and burnished metal, whose hair is dyed with red ocher.
Here.
======================================
Subject: comedy these days
"He was the most evil dictator the world had ever seen," a narrator declared in the melodramatic tone of a movie trailer voice-over. A picture of Andrew Dice Clay flashed on the screen. "He was the most offensive comedian the world had ever seen," the narrator said.
Image of Hitler: "He performed crimes against humanity that until then the world had deemed unfathomable." Image of Mr. Clay: "He told dirty nursery rhymes that shocked a nation."
"Hitler; Dice," the narrator continued as the two images morphed. "The two most important people of the 20th century are about to combine as one. This summer Andrew Dice Clay is — Adolph Dice Hitler Clay!"
At that point Brett Gelman, a 29-year-old comedian from Brooklyn, bounded onto the stage wearing a studded black leather vest and pompadour, as favored by Mr. Clay, and a Hitler moustache. He regaled his audience with a monologue that combined the thoughts of Hitler with the tough-guy, streets-of-Brooklyn accent of Mr. Clay.
Here.
======================================
Subject: 9/11 in history
Whether or not we can regard Sept. 11 as history, I would like to raise two historical questions about the terrorist attacks of that horrific day. My goal is not to offer definitive answers but rather to invite a serious debate about whether Sept. 11 deserves the historical significance it has achieved.
My first question: where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic.
Here is my version of the top tier: the War for Independence, where defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility.
Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to believe so.
My second question is this: What does history tell us about our earlier responses to traumatic events?
Here.
======================================
Subject: using the Internet to find help and like minds
60 Million Americans Seek Help Online: Survey
A new report shows a growing trend toward seeking information about major life decisions online.
By K.C. Jones
TechWeb News
Jan 26, 2006 07:24 PM
About 60 million Americans say the Internet played an important or crucial role in making a major decision in two years before being polled.
And, whether they're seeking investments, home improvements, medical issues or guidance on voting, Internet users are more likely to turn to help from their social networks than their counterparts who don't use the Internet.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project Survey, released this week, sheds light on correlations between Internet use, relationships and how much people turn to others to solve significant problems in their lives. It also shows a growing trend toward seeking information about major life decisions online.
"A fairly consistent pattern is that Internet users have greater access to help about a variety of things," the report states.
Far from predictions that the proliferation of technology would cut people off from each other, the report shows communications technologies make it easier for people to maintain and cultivate social networks. Those are contacts that can be called upon for help. It also concludes that, weighing all other factors, email contact is associated with greater levels of getting help while other forms of communication are not.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2014215,00.html
======================================
Subject: Google censors critics of Chinese communists and critics of jews, too
How Google Censors Itself For China & Paid Exclusion As Being Evil
Declan McCullagh posts an update to his great earlier story looking at how Google is censoring results at China. I talked with him a bit about this today and actually found myself even more upset over what Google's doing. That's because rather than just censoring what China is telling them to block, Google's actively coming up with its own list.
My assumption had been Google and other companies were given a list of sites by China to block. I'm actually still waiting to hear back from Google to talk more about what exactly they are doing. But Declan writes in his original story:
China's government has an extensive Internet filtering process in place that controls which overseas Web sites its citizens can access. (A 2005 study by the Open Net Initiative called it "quite thorough.") With that filtering as a guide, foreign companies are expected to build their own lists of Web sites to delete from Chinese search listings.
Got it? China will give the search engines some advice on censoring and guidelines, but it remains up to the search engines to do the actual dirty work.
If Google was going to cave in China and create evil Google, at the very least they could have pushed back to say they'd block specific sites given to them. Instead, they seem to be blocking a combination of known sites plus other sites that might have objectionable material, all based on what they decide themselves.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060127-150726
Date set for hearing on Google data-sharing
A federal judge in San Jose has scheduled a Feb. 27 hearing to examine Google's decision to withhold online search records from the U.S. Justice Department.
The hearing, to be held in U.S. District Court, will be the first in the high-profile case. The Justice Department is seeking to force the Mountain View company to comply with a subpoena seeking 1 million Web site addresses reached from Google and one week of search queries.
In an interview this week with Bloomberg News, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the Mountain View Internet company will fight the U.S. government for as long as it takes to avoid handing over information on user searches.
``It's our obligation to use the law to the farthest possible means to protect our users' privacy,'' Brin said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. ``It's just a legal and ethical principle.''
Here.
======================================
Subject: Craigslist eating classified ad revs for Big Jew city papers
In the past few months, I and countless others in the mainstream media have awakened to the fact that something we thought was benign and even modestly beneficial, if we happened to have a room to rent or something to sell, was in fact a wild beast, loose in the orchards. Craigslist.org is changing everything. A simple and free online classified-ad service started by the gnomish Craig Newmark in San Francisco eleven years ago, Craigslist is (a) where young urban people conduct much of the traffic of their lives, including renting apartments, finding lost pets, and getting laid in the middle of the day, and is (b) thereby destroying classified revenues for big-city newspapers, which are already in crisis, and so it has become (c) the symbol of the transformation of the information industry. Rocked in a Bay Area cradle of left-wing values, Craigslist has built a huge national community by word of mouth. The site is free and without advertising (with the exception of help-wanted ads in three markets), and it gets more than 3 billion page views per month (10 million actual users a month), ranking it seventh on the Net, not so far behind Google and eBay.
At the convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors last spring, two panelists at a session on the crisis in the industry flashed a slide of Newmark and asked the editors how many of them knew who Craig Newmark was. A faint show of hands. Craigslist? A few more.
"The shocking thing is that this was someone who was not only a threat to steal their business but was in the process of doing it," says Jay Rosen, a blogger (the name of his blog is PressThink) and professor of journalism at NYU. "What industry could survive in which you don’t know the name of the person who is taking away your business? They’re mystified. They don’t know who this guy is and where he came from. And it just shows--that it's easier for Craig to learn journalism than it is for these guys to learn the Web."
In the situation comedy that Craig Newmark renders of his life, he is ruled by three looming faceless female figures: "the girlfriend," "the decorator," and "the nutritionist," the last of whom issued strict orders to "step away from the buffet table" and keep his pedometer count above 8,000 steps a day. None of the triumvirate, however, told him to bite his tongue, and in England, Newmark spoke openly about the stealth media venture he has invested in to promote citizen journalism.
The power of the Net could be used, he said, to help sort out trustworthy from untrustworthy reporters, and promote stories that were important but not getting attention from the mainstream media, in which people were losing trust anyway. The epicenter of this erosion, Newmark told me when I spoke with him just before the conference, is the White House press room, which let us down over Iraq. "We need the corps to back up Helen [Thomas, the columnist, who opposed the invasion from the start]."
Newmark's remarks were perceived as a "slam" at the mainstream media, and he was soon backtracking. We need trained journalists and editors and fact-checkers, he said. We need big newsrooms.
Here.
======================================
Subject: dumbed down nation risks losing it all
Catastrophe Looms
By Paul Craig Roberts
Two recent polls, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll and a New York Times/CBS News poll, indicate why Bush is getting away with impeachable offenses. Half of the US population is incapable of acquiring, processing and understanding information.
Much of the problem is the media itself, which serves as a disinformation agency for the Bush administration. Fox "News" and right-wing talk radio are the worst, but with propagandistic outlets setting the standard for truth and patriotism, all of the media is affected to some degree.
Despite the media's failure, about half the population has managed to discern that the US invasion of Iraq has not made them safer and that the Bush administration’s assault on civil liberties is not a necessary component of the war on terror. The problem, thus, lies with the absence of due diligence on the part of the other half of the population.
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/060127_catastrophe.htm
Go to :
Reader Mail Index
|