FB and the happiness arms race

Facebook encourages a sort of 'happiness' arms race, where most people seek to convey the brightest possible interpretation of their own lives to match the same projections they see in others...
The reason this hits the [Harvard Business Review] crowd particularly hard is because it adds another, ubiquitous front to the battle of positive image. It used to be, you only had to be an assertive, bright, shining star when you were around people or talking on the phone. Then you could go home, pour yourself a belt of Glenlivet, and be miserable for a while to blow off steam. Now you have to keep it up ALL of the time, on a medium that's everywhere and never stops. It hits hard, particularly when you're a hard charger whose career depends on being perceived as relentlessly successful and upbeat.
reply

-- from HN; discussion otherwise unexceptional.

Russian photography bans: just like the UK

Sane FT article about net politics in Russia.

I love that their example of inane Russian bureaucratic rigidity is something increasingly familiar in the UK. Namely, the banning of photography in all kinds of public spaces:

Chief among the inanities in his sights is something most tourists in Russia have encountered: the screaming security guard or elderly woman telling you that you cannot take pictures here, as if your photograph of that supermarket compromises Russian national security. Ternovskiy has used his blog to mobilise Russians to inform these guards and grannies that they are the ones in the wrong: by Russian law, photography is allowed almost everywhere. “Despite the fact that there is no legal basis to ban photography in all the places it’s banned, people will still tell you it’s forbidden,” Ternovskiy says, pouring himself a cup of thyme tea as we sit in a Moscow café. “It’s like a Soviet phantom limb.

Sheila, revisiting a book by method-acting guru Lee Strasberg, talks about consistency as a primary virtue of the actor

Lee Strasberg was obsessed with consistency and could it be taught. Were there ways to HELP an actor to be able to repeat himself? Certainly there are. Techniques of relaxation and concentration are the bread-and-butter of any regular acting class, and – like an athlete working out every day – like a singer doing scales – like a ballerina at the barre … these things must become rote.
...
actors need to know how to relax WHILE under stressful situations. Some people do it naturally. They come to life ONLY in clutch situations. These are the great talents. They always “show up” when it is demanded of them. They live for it. But many actors need to learn techniques. Relaxation is the key. Learn how to relax while surrounded by a jostling movie crew and you can relax anywhere.

Guttenberg as Net Activist

I've been enjoying the latest installment from Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. Defence minister and rising star, he was forced out of office this spring, when a cluster of online activists discovered that he had plagiarised his PhD thesis.

Now he's attempting a low-level comeback, advising the EU's internet commissioner on online freedom. In particular, he'll be looking at how the EU can support bloggers and online activists in authoritarian regimes.

Netzpolitik has mostly been having fun with all this ("More Guttenplag-wikis for dictatorships?).

But they also home in on the more important point -- the inanity of separating "internet freedom in authoritarian states" (Guttenberg's beat to be) from internet freedom in the EU. Telling others to be free while cracking down at home -- it does have the kind of arrogance which Guttenberg does so well, but that surely doesn't mean he should do it.

On the other hand, I do have a grudging admiration for Gutenberg's willingness to accept humiliation. He's chosen to go straight back to the world which saw through him, rather than the one overawed by his smooth rich-boy background. Perhaps also, over fading away into a world of business or conference-speaking, the usual stamping-grounds of the disgraced politician.

25000 is a crowd

What's really hilarious about last Saturday's protests is how tiny the numbers are. Perhaps 25000 people on the streets. Anywhere else, protests short of a hundred thousand will barely be noticed. But Russian democracy has been 'managed' so well, that even a few thousand demonstrators can constitute a shock to the system.

жж

I find it hard to tell how much Runet has migrated towards twitter. You'd certainly think so from the international media coverage -- but that can partly be blamed on the journalistic bad habit of only reporting tools the hacks themselves use.

Global Voices does provide a list of tweeple:

@MiriamElder, @ioffeinmoscow, @shaunwalker7, @A_Osborn, @oflynnkevin, @agent_Alka, @courtneymoscow, @PeterGOliver_RT, @mschwirtz, @markmackinnon, @tonyhalpin, @Amiefr_Reuters, @RolandOliphant, @niktwick are tweeting live in English from the big protest rally that is taking place at Bolotnaya Square in Moscow right now; @agoodtreaty is monitoring Russian-language Twitter coverage of the protests in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia.

But Livejournal, even in senility, still seems a far more potent location of protest. It's where Navalny hangs out. It's where Vladislav Surkov, Kremlin insider and puppetmaster of "Managed Democracy", popped up to propose an urban liberal party.

But I can't tell if LJ really is still important, or if I'm just noticing things there because of familiarity.

Apathy is acceptance

Holly might sound as though she's talking about sex education. Maybe she is. But this is wider:

I don't think this apathy makes the lab okay. I think it makes it insidious. "Yeah yeah, sex is dirty, sluts have diseases, just copy the answers off the board and we'll get out of here before ten" is a much nastier and more dangerous thing than if we'd had an overtly ideological discussion of the subject. It makes it a given thing, a thing not needing discussion, that sex is dirty and nothing can be done about it.

A Conspiracy of Bores

Henry Farrell:

It is tempting to see the procedures of
the EU as a long-term conspiracy to bore
the public into submission. The truth is
more mundane. Europe’s leaders fell into
technocracy by accident rather than design.

Rock 'n' Roll isn't the party

This article on Lester Bangs is sharp and appealing:

No, sorry. Rock 'n' roll isn't the party. It's what you do when you're home and miserable alone because you weren't invited to the party. It's what you do to make up for not being at the party. That's why it sounds like a party. A guy wouldn't break out one of those rubber fake-vaginas in the middle of actual fucking, would he? Rock 'n' roll is social masturbation.

It's sort of appropriate for it to be less about Bangs himself than about his position and meaning, about his impact on his readers. After all, that's much of the appeal of Bangs, as far as I can tell. It's hard to know; he's by now so frozen into the hall of fame that I can't really get excited about him.

Still, I'm not sure I quite buy the idea of Rock 'n' Roll as the antiparty. Because unlike music or poetry or painting, music makes far less sense alone

Despite London Calling being one of my favourite albums, I'd never before realised what the cover was about:




[via Sheila O'Malley, whose now-waning period of Elvis obsession has been a joy to encounter]

Greek minister: axe-wielding fascist

Mark Ames on Greece:

See the guy in the photo there, dangling an ax from his left hand? That’s Greece’s new “Minister of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks” Makis Voridis captured back in the 1980s, when he led a fascist student group called “Student Alternative” at the University of Athens law school.

Withnail is not gonzo

David Edelstein on the Rum Diary:

Rollicking car chases, colorful carousing in tropical settings, psychedelics jags with outlandish special effects: It should be just what the Doctor of Gonzo ordered. But Robinson doesn’t have the gonzo touch. Even if his Withnail & I featured a spectacularly dissolute antihero, it was soaked through with cold rain and the melancholy specter of alcoholism and failure. To work, The Rum Diary would need to make the case for all the excesses that killed Thompson, and Robinson’s heart (or talent) isn’t in it.

[why Edelstein? Because Sheila O'Malley recommended him, entirely accurately, as "best when he dislikes something"

Laurie on sexy women we love to hate:

Sometimes it's Lady Gaga, but Gaga is weird and confusing and you never quite know when she's going to turn up dressed as a man, a lobster or all three volumes of Marx's Das Kapital at once, as opposed to the standard alien vinyl barbie look of which certain sections of the curtain-twitching middle classes love to disapprove.

Bacchus Shrugged

The London Beer Flood occurred on 17 October 1814 in the parish of St. Giles, London, England. At the Meux and Company Brewery[1] on Tottenham Court Road,[1][2] a huge vat containing over 135,000 imperial gallons (610,000 L) of beer ruptured, causing other vats in the same building to succumb in a domino effect. As a result, more than 323,000 imperial gallons (1,470,000 L) of beer burst out and gushed into the streets.
The brewery was located among the poor houses and tenements of the St Giles Rookery, where whole families lived in basement rooms that quickly filled with beer. Eight people drowned in the flood.

The brewery was eventually taken to court over the accident, but the disaster was ruled to be an Act of God by the judge and jury, leaving no one responsible

What kind of bonkers legalistic theology is that? God as lord of the storms I can see, stirring up hurricanes against the unholy and smiting his enemies with lightning. But breaking beer vats?!

Sexy gadgets

Jonathan Franzen stumbles on a parallel between 'sexy' as applied to humans and to gadgets: it's inherently one-sided:

Do I need to point out that — absent some wild, anthropomorphizing projection in which my old BlackBerry felt sad about the waning of my love for it — our relationship was entirely one-sided? Let me point it out anyway.

Let me further point out how ubiquitously the word “sexy” is used to describe late-model gadgets
...
Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.

Multiuser screen

To make a screen multiuser:

-a : multiuser on

You can also include _multiuser on_ in .screenrc to make all screens start multiuser

Then you connect to it with screen -x

Mongol tolerance

The Mongols, famously, were not much interested in religious conformity. People who managed to avoid being massacred during the Mongol invasions were at least unlikely, subsequently, to be persecuted for their religious beliefs. What interested the Mongols was that holy men of all religions should both pray for the Khan (for there was no knowing who might have the best hotline to heaven), and, at least as important, provide the regime with access to their specialist skills. The Mongols were nothing if not pragmatists.

-- David Morgan (?) in the TLS

[you hear this a lot. I do wonder how psychologically true it ever was]

Donations and university admissions

Large donations to prestigious universities, so goes the common belief, will help your offspring get places there.

The universities deny this with varying amounts of vigor.

The rumour, though, probably does them no harm at all. If the rumour were mostly baseless, they would be in the best possible position. They can whip up donations with the belief, and not be constrained to live up to their not-quite-promises.

Such is the benefit of being a powerful player in an illegal market, where most of the other participants will only play once, have poor information and jdugment often clouded by emotions.

[vaguely in rsponse to Tyler Cowen, and more indirectly to the New College of the Humanities]

This is fantastic, and fantastical. It's something like the origin myth of k-punk, in a self-consciously edgy philosophy sub-faculty over-exposed by Simon Reynolds:

Still nominally affiliated to the famously poststructuralist Philosophy Department of Warwick University, England, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit is a rogue unit. It's the academic equivalent of Kurtz: the general in Apocalypse Now who used unorthodox methods to achieve superior results compared with the tradition-bound US military. Blurring the borders between traditional scholarship, cyberpunk sci-fi and music journalism, the CRRU are striving to achieve a kind of nomadic thought that to use the Deleuze & Guattari term—“deterritorializes” itself every which way: theory melded with fiction, philosophy cross-contaminated by natural sciences (neurology, bacteriology, thermodynamics, metallurgy, chaos and complexity theory, connectionism), academic writing that aspires to the future-shock intensity of jungle and other forms of post-rave music.

stdout.be argues that shortage of metadata is specifically an internet problem:

It’s kind of humbling to see that even a quarter of a century ago, news formatted in International Press Telecommunications Council standards like IPTC 7901 , NITF or NewsML had more metadata associated with it than a lot of websites of today.

The “big blob of text” phenomenon we’re stuck with now wasn’t caused by newspapers sticking to their old, wary ways, but by the transition to a new medium, the internet.

via the mojo list

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe

There's a quote from Blade Runner which has long irritated me. It's sampled in some Juno Reactor track, and so slides into my subconsciousness every time I try to zone in/out with the trance:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhäuser Gate.

Out of context, it just seems so petty. You're describing the wonder and immensity of the universe, I thought, and this is the best you've got? All the cosmos can offer you is the pretty pictures? It's the equivalent of dropping acid, then just admiring the hallucinations as pieces of theatre.

I was planning a blogpost to that effect.

Then I looked up the video, and suddenly I'm a convert:


I probably shouldn't try to put the effect of the clip into words. Suffice it to say, all is forgiven. This isn't somebody bragging, it's the hopeless attempt to telegraph into dying breath the most intense moments of a 'lifetime'. The machine will not communicate -- it can't, any more than a human can verbalise hir innermost thoughts. But there's glory in the attempt.

Removing whitespace with sed

Use sed to remove leading whitespace:

sed 's/^[ \t]*//'

The particular reason I want to do this is to turn my todo-list (a tree of tasks, marked off by when i completed them), into a sorted record of what I've done on a particular day. In other words, I want to go from this:

Code
 Thule
  OED javascript
  other tasks
  2011-04-17 16:57:33 Sort out markdown for vim 45m
  blah
 Thing I haven't done
 

To this:

2011-04-17 15:58:32 update blog with more cmds 3m
2011-04-17 15:58:59 modify timestamp to include date 20m [,,T,,D wil do for now]
2011-04-17 16:57:33 Sort out markdown for vim 45m
2011-04-17 17:39:04 [email to ejc about resources for journalists

Which can be done by removing whitespace, limiting to lines containing dates, and sorting

$ cat todo/todo.otl| sed 's/^[\t ]*//' | grep 2011 | sort

mode function in python

Oddly, there seems to be no mode function in the python standard library. It feels like something that should have an optimized C version squirreled away somewhere. 'Mode' is too ambiguous to be easily searchable, alas. Anyway, here's a version that should be reasonably fast

from collections import defaultdict
def mode(iterable):
    counts = defaultdict(int)
    for item in iterable:
        counts[item] += 1
    return max(counts, key = counts.get)

Should be reasonably fast (for pure-python), though could eat up a lot of memory on an iterable contaning large items.

back to the future with ellis

Warren Ellis is on an urbanism/retrofuturism jag:

the real world was always moving faster than science fiction: it’s just that back then the real future was broadcasting at 4.20 in the bloody morning and no-one was around to see it.

[more]

Firefox switch to tab

FF4 has a feature by which, when you try to open a second copy of a page, will flip to the existing tab rather than re-opening it.

This drives me crazy.

I usually have several dozen tabs open, across multiple screens, some not visible. When I re-open a tab I want it to appear right in front of me. Not (as happens now) to be brought to the front of a window I can't even see.

this blogpost offers some solutions, most of which don't seem to work.

What does seem to work is adding some junk to the end of the url. A hash should do it, or in extreme cases a hash followed by some random characters.

More B&T

More B&T:

BRIC - MIST - MAYHEM: "the creation of random geopolitical blocs is kind of fun. I mean, if you group Mexico with Afghanistan, Yemen, Haiti, Egypt and Moldova then you have MAYHEM; as indeed you do."

Libyan nukes:

Actually, come to think about it there seemed to be a fair amount of ritual involved in Libya giving up its nuke programme.

Step one: Libya buys a bunch of stuff from the Khan network

Step two: Libya hands it over and renounces its programme

Stepo three: Welcome to the international community! Here's a guy we jugged earlier.

I always wondered if step one was taken in anticipation of taking step two.

On Torygeddon

it's important not to get paranoid about this. Just because the management of the economy resembles something from a political science textbook about the period of destabilisation engineered to lay the groundwork for a coup doesn't mean that it's actually happening that way.

On Tunisia: "It obviously wasn’t a twitter revolution, or a wikileaks one for that matter. It was a "man burning himself alive in despair" revolution. The only thing digital about it was when he flicked his bic"

Empire numerology: "So, Britain as superpower, 1759-1945. US as superpower, 1919-2008. USSR as superpower, 1945-1989. Clearly there's a pattern here; each new power lasts approximately half the length of its predecessor. ..Unfortunately, this only gives the Chinese from 2008-2033 or thereabouts. Which sounds about right for a really serious demographic/elite incompetence crisis. India and Brazil only get 12 or 6 years, and at some point in the 2050s the world order starts to move like a singulatarian's fantasy"

Quickly creating a shell script

Suppose you want to create and run a short script. It's often faster not to bother opening up a text editor. Instead, use shell history to write a file, then chmod and execute it:


$ cat > /tmp/me.py
#!/usr/bin/env python
print('hello world')
$ chmod a+x !$
chmod a+x /tmp/me.py
$ !$
/tmp/me.py
hello world
$


Qatar arms to Libya

The New York Times reports that:

for the first time, Qatar put the question of supplying arms to the rebels on the table, but no agreement was reached.

Well, not really for the first time. Qatar has been pushing for arms shipments to the rebels for a long time:

"If they will ask for weapons, we're going to provide them," the amir, who is on a visit to the United States, told CNN in an interview. [xinhua, 15 April]

And the New York Times itself has reported on the rebels receiving foreign weapons, and speculated that Qatar is one source of them.

Kenneth Rexroth

Bruce Sterling, Kenneth Rexroth. Rexroth was columnist in the San Francisco Examiner, through the 1960s. Elegant, thoughtful, panoramic. While I don't quite share Sterling's enthusiasm ("there are no blogs this good"), there's good stuff here:

Looking back, it seems now that most of our crises have been crises of talk. We have been able to take it out by abusing each other. That is just dandy. Nobody pushed those banks of buttons over the U-2. The Chinese have not invaded Laos or Taiwan. The Marines have not landed in Cuba. The Congolese seem to be tiring. The UN proved able to cope with Khrushchev.

Who knows? We may talk ourselves out of the woods yet.

vim: firefox-like tab controls

I approve of this tip to make tab navigation in vim the same as with firefox. Life is too short to memorize multiple sets of commands.

:nmap  :tabprevious
:nmap  :tabnext
:map  :tabprevious
:map  :tabnext
:imap  :tabpreviousi
:imap  :tabnexti
:nmap  :tabnew
:imap  :tabnew

following irc with inotail

Being always in a several irc channels, it's helpful to have an overview of what's going on without tabbing through a dozen windows. Fortunately I can follow the logs using inotail:

$ find /home/dan/.purple/logs/ -name "`date +%F`*" | xargs inotail -fv

This would also work with tail -- the only problem is that _tail_ with so many files would put some strain on the filesystem.

Getting server messages via irc

irccat is a bot designed to facilitate sending server messages to an irc channel

The irccat bot joins all your channels, and waits for messages on a specified ip:port on your internal network. Anything you send to that port will be sent to IRC by the bot. IRCCat - as in, cat to IRC.

Using netcat, you can easily send events to irc from shell scripts:

echo "Something just happened" | nc -q0 somemachine 12345

That will send to the default channel only (first in the config file). You can direct messages to specific combinations of channels (#) or users (@) like so:

playing mp3s in orer

I often use mplayer to play all files in a directory:

mp ./*

*mp*, by the way, is simply an alias for mplayer, used to play things faster and with speed control:

$ which mp           
mp: aliased to mplayer -speed 1.21 -af scaletempo=speed=tempo

But what if I want to play them in date order? (useful to replay a stream with streamripper). I need a shell loop. A for loop will choke on filenames with spaces
:

$ for i in `ls -tr`  
do
mp "$i"
done

A while loop seems to give me some problem of mplayer reading too much from stdin:

$ ls -1tr | while read i       
do; mp '$i'
done  

So I end up using an array:

$ mp3files=( ./*mp3 )         
$ for d in "${mp3files[@]}"; do
  mp "$d"
done

phew! that was far too much work

urban agriculture

Via robokow, news of plant cultivation in an old IBM typewriter factory:

The location for the first commercia nursery in the world in an office is the former IBM typewriter factory on Johan Huizinga Avenue. The large factory building has already been empty for eleven years

It goes without saying that this is an area where the cannabis cultivators have a *big* headstart :)

Stuxnet under the bed

Botnets are convenient enemies, providing justification for the introduction of spyware and restrictions on computers.
Walter and Amelia have good posts on the subject, particularly in South Korea.

South Korea, it seems, is further along a path that can be expected also in Europe and elsewhere. The country's infrastructure has repeatedly been attacked by botnet-fuelled DDoS. These attacks strengthened demand for official regulation:

Popular support is rising for a helpful Zombie PC Act giving a government-controlled authority the mandate to access and scrutinize commercial, official and private datasystems. The authortity will help the government determine if the system is infected by any potential virus. Lacking appropriate anti-virus software shall, according to the bill, lead to repercussions.

That is, there would be a requirement for official intervention in every computer. With intervention comes inspection. And thus, the threat to alarm the paranoid -- a sideways approach by which governments could seize computers. Walter:

Your computer may become a target for a serach (and seizure) just because it is a computer. The cherry on the cake is of course that we also should expect governmental bodies to take enough care that backdoors installed for this very purpose will not be abused by those very nefarious people, the Zombie-operators, it aims to fight. To quote Top Gear: what could possibly go wrong?

ETA: Amelia has another post, laying all this out much more clearly.

To joyfully watch the fumbling coalescence as a community becomes self-aware

He had the sense, at the moment, of groping for intellectual support, of casting about and dimly receiving a hint here, a hint there. Like a radio technician delicately picking signals out of background static, he'd learned to recognise voices worth listening to, voices that meant something distinct even when they ued hte same compulsory words as everyone else. Here and there, people were speaking with secret passion

-- Francis Spufford, Red Plenty p.65

Cory Doctorow on the joys of writing for teenagers:

That's one of the most wonderful things about writing for younger audiences — it matters. We all read for entertainment, no matter how old we are, but kids also read to find out how the world works. They pay keen attention, they argue back. There's a consequentiality to writing for young people that makes it immensely satisfying. You see it when you run into them in person and find out that there are kids who read your book, googled every aspect of it, figured out how to replicate the best bits, and have turned your story into a hobby.
...
young people live in a world characterized by intense drama, by choices wise and foolish and always brave. This is a book-plotter's dream. Once you realize that your characters are living in this state of heightened consequence, every plot-point acquires moment and import that keeps the pages turning.

Next in the continuing saga of Rolling Stone printing surprisingly good long-format journalism: The Stoner Arms Dealers.

Packouz was baffled, stoned and way out of his league. "It was surreal," he recalls. "Here I was dealing with matters of international security, and I was half-baked. I didn't know anything about the situation in that part of the world. But I was a central player in the Afghan war... It was totally killing my buzz. There were all these shadowy forces, and I didn't know what their motives were. But I had to get my shit together and put my best arms-dealer face on."

The author, Guy Lawson, seems to have written a string of in-depth articles on international crime in Rolling Stone.

Although you suspect Rolling Stone is also dropping serious money on lawyers, to let them say things like:

The Albanians cut him out of the deal, informing AEY that the repackaging job would be completed instead by a friend of the prime minister's son. What Trebicka had failed to grasp was that Thomet was paying a kickback to the Albanians from the large margin he was making on the deal. Getting rid of Thomet was impossible, because that was how the Albanians were being paid off the books.

I suspect part of the reason Rolling Stone can support this kind of journalism is that they force their writers to be entertaining. Not only does this mean people read and appreciate the long-form articles (and thus build demand for more of them), but it forces the writers to properly get to grips with their subject.

open matching in vim

To open in vim all files matching a regex:

$ grep -l foo ./* | xargs vim -p

Forced-labour asparagus

Adrian Mogos describes the use of forced labour in Central European. They were producing food for Tesco, among other outlets:

Corina says they worked in the fields under Ukrainians carrying shotguns who hit anyone that dared ask about the wages they’d been promised or protested over the conditions and hours.
Around 400 hundred men and women were kept working around the clock, sleeping in a dormitory, and they were not allowed to leave the fields unless their Ukrainian bosses transferred them to constructions sites or slaughterhouses.
...
After two months of working for free under these armed guards, Corina knew she’d never get any money. When she and her husband protested, they threatened to sell her off to a pimp to work as a prostitute in Prague. Finally, she, her husband and one brother-in-law fled the camp by night in the summer of 2008.

vim outliner (snippet)

Vim has a plugin for outlines, clearly described here. Create a file with the extension otl, and you'll get some visual help in managing an outline.

Whitespace denotes indentation level, colons mark text content. It builds on the vim folding commands:

• zc: collapse hierarchy


• zo: expand hierarchy one level


• zO: expand hierarchy all the way


• [z: move to header (]z move to next header]

There are also some commands specific to vimoutliner. these are introduced with a double comma, and listed in the documentation

Finally, it's possibe to get ascii checkbox functionality, a little like emacs org-mode. This requires installing a plugin-for-the-plugin, and I've not yet tried it. Details in :help vimoutliner

The real get out of my head command is this perfect incarnation of my own notation for marking tasks as done:

 ,,T  normal   Pre-pend timestamp (HH:MM:SS) to heading

HTTP authentication (snippet)

And the reason for that faff is to start using this blog more to keep track of snippets of code and config that I'm constantly re-using. That is, the things you have half inside your head anyway, but need to look up exactly what the command is.

One from today: setting up basic HTTP Authentication with Apache:

vps:/etc/apache2/sites-enabled# htpasswd -c /etc/apache2/anaad.passwd admin
New password: 
Re-type new password: 
Adding password for user admin

edit .htaccess:

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Anaad"
AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/anaad.password 
Require valid-user

Syntax Highighting

Whenever I try to put code snippets up here, I end up frustrated that they turn up deprived of any highlighting. So I've tried following these instructions to fix things. With luck, this post should be an example ;)

So this goes in <head>:




And for the highlighted text you have 2 options.

First is with <pre> tags:


or a slightly more longwinded version, which provides for escaping of html tags:

<script type="syntaxhighlighter" class="brush:html"><![CDATA[ <a href="http://exampe.com/blah">blah</a>]]</script>

This, alas, interacts badly with blogger's pre-posting HTML validation. It's easier to handle the escaping from the command-line beforehand:

$ xclip -o  | perl -MHTML::Entities -ne 'print encode_entities($_)' | xclip

The education scam

Oh boy, I find myself agreeing with Peter Thiel:

Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is over-valued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe. The excesses of both were always excused by a core national belief that no matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated.

Gambling in Azerbaijan

RFE/RL:

The ban on gambling dates back to a 1998 scandal involving the current president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev. Media reports claimed that he lost up to $6 million to a Turkish businessman while gambling in a nearby country.
Aliyev's father Heydar, then president of the oil-rich country, denied the charges and promptly banned casinos and gambling activity in a morality drive.

Sally Bowles wakes up screaming

Sheila O'Malley is still one of the most powerful writers around:

And so when Liza Minnelli sings "Life is a cabaret, old chum," there is a crazy hope behind those glittering scary eyes. The world is about to end. Everything is about to fall apart. Bowles has been in bed with the wrong people. The waking-up-screaming is coming, but until that day? She plants her legs wide apart on that empty stage, and wails out her life force, defiantly declaring her belief that the party was worth it. In a strange way, Minnelli's version can be seen as a triumph. At least from Bowles' perspective. That's why it's such a good performance. It's complicated. There are no easy answers. Bowles launches herself, willfully, above the horror in that moment, and insists—she insists, all evidence to the contrary, that life IS a cabaret. She will not have it any other way. But when you think about the wider picture of what is happening in Europe at that time, that mindset becomes disgusting, soulless.

Small change and a nosebleed

Smaller bits stolen from B&T:

dsquared: "If you look at really durable dictatorships they're nearly always mass membership political parties."

Russian TV: "Assuming that everything on reality TV is fake seems to me less a product of Soviet cynicism and more robust common sense, butcalling your reality TV company "Potemkin Productions" is a nice touch"

One sub-point of Paul Mason's revolution-analysis tour de force: "are we creating a complete disconnect between the values and language of the state and those of the educated young? Egypt is a classic example - if you hear the NDP officials there is a time-warped aspect to their language compared to that of young doctors and lawyers on the Square. But there are also examples in the UK: much of the political discourse - on both sides of the House of Commons - is treated by many young people as a barely intelligible "noise" - and this goes wider than just the protesters.

As Sudanese police lure activists to a fake 'protest', and arrest them: "any calculation of the actual effect of social media on protest comes down to the question "how smart are the local cops?"'

Zombies are workers, vampires are aristocrats, werewolves are yokels -- what are the middle-class monsters? Answers: possessed people, doppelgangers.And:

Haunted houses might factor in there too - is there anything more fundamentally middle-class than the desire for home ownership even though it might eat you?

Censors to the left of them, censors to the right of them

This is a relevant point in terms of Western criticisms of Chinese censorship. The ultra-nationalists are being censored as much as the liberals, and when did you last hear an NGO earnestly complaining about that?

If you went to websites such as KDnet, you get the liberal viewpoints; if you went to websites such as WYZXSX, Strong Nation or Iron Blood, you get the ultra-nationalistic viewpoints.

Neither of these groups are actually supportive of the government. Tha Nationalist forums are hostile to what they perceive as westernization but also think that the CPC are a bunch of softies for not invading Taiwan right now. And like liberal or reformist opinion, nationalist expression is also liable to censorship.

Egypt arming Libyan rebels

WSJ:

Egypt's military has begun shipping arms over the border to Libyan rebels with Washington's knowledge, U.S. and Libyan rebel officials said.

The shipments—mostly small arms such as assault rifles and ammunition—appear to be the first confirmed case of an outside government arming the rebel fighters

Compare this to Robert Fisk's piece from a fortnight ago,

the Americans have asked Saudi Arabia if it can supply weapons to the rebels in Benghazi. The Saudi Kingdom...has so far failed to respond to Washington's highly classified request...
But the Saudis remain the only US Arab ally strategically placed and capable of furnishing weapons to the guerrillas of Libya.

I guess either the Saudi request got nowhere, or at least has only happened behind the scenes. Besides, whatever Fisk thinks, Egypt is obviously better placed to move weapons into the East of Libya


The WSJ also has some interesting comment on the various positions among Arab states:

Lebanon took a lead role drafting and circulating the draft of the resolution, which calls for "all necessary measures" to enforce a ban on flights over Libya. The United Arab Emirates and Qatar have taken the lead in offering to participate in enforcing a no-fly zone, according to U.N. diplomats.

Libyan rebel officials in Benghazi, meanwhile, have praised Qatar from the first days of the uprising, calling the small Gulf state their staunchest ally. Qatar has consistently pressed behind the scenes for tough and urgent international action behind the scenes, these officials said.

Qatari flags fly prominently in rebel-held Benghazi.

Egypt and the intellectuals

I've not found any English translation online -- here's part of the German version from the FAZ, via the Egyptian-German Network on Facebook:

Die Revolution geht weiter. Das Ringen zwischen den verschiedenen Strömungen ist jetzt auf seinem Höhepunkt. Die einen wollen den Fortbestand des Mubarak-Regimes, nur mit neuen Gesichtern. Die anderen wollen die Revolution, eine Revolution der blühenden Bäume, die sich mitten auf den Plätzen bewegen und ihren Duft überall verströmen.
Wo steht Amerika? Wo steht Europa? Das weiß keiner so genau. Wahrscheinlich unterstützen sie immer noch das Mubarak-Regime, allerdings mit einem großen Kulissenwechsel und mit kleinen, winzigen Schrittchen in Richtung Entwicklung. Heute mögen sie wohl gerade mit Spezialisten aus Hollywood verhandeln, die sich auf den Bau politischer Kulissen verstehen. Oder mit dem Regisseur des Spielfilms "Wag the Dog - Wenn der Schwanz mit dem Hund wedelt".
Und hier setzt die Rolle des Intellektuellen ein. Er muss Licht werfen auf die Details und Entwicklungen der Konterrevolution. Der Kampf wird noch lange dauern. Aber diesmal wird er nicht überdeckt sein von einer Schicht aus Propaganda, mit der die Anführer versuchen, ihre Ziele hinterhältig durchzusetzen. Vielleicht wollen sie die Wildtaube töten, bevor sie aus dem Ei schlüpft. Vielleicht versuchen sie, die Wurzeln wieder festzusetzen, damit sie ihren Mund nicht noch einmal aufmachen. Aber was, so frage ich Sie, was machen sie mit dem Duft von Zitronen und Äpfeln und Freiheit?

Avoiding hate figures

It's common to talk about dictators' personality cults, but maybe that's just because they don't work?

The second [reason China won't follow Egypt] is the lack of personality cults, and of criticism of the top leadership. China's done a very, very good job of keeping the foibles of the top leaders out of the public eye, for the most part; gossip about the central leadership and their families is extremely restricted. Without a clear dictator, there's a lack of focus for rage.

This is tedium as insulation against protest. China's got it, Europe's got it, so does the world business elite if you want to count that as a regime.

Against the referendum

In Egypt, the protest movement is mainly calling for a no vote to Saturday's referendum on constitutional amendments:

The upcoming referendum on the proposed amendments to the Egyptian constitution, scheduled March 19th, gives people a sense that the revolutionary process is reaching its end. The limited scope of the amendments, the majority dealing with electoral matters (such as presidential term limits, reduced length of the president’s term, judicial oversight of elections…), imply that the 11 men of the amendment drafting committee were not attempting to upend the existing order, but were attempting to establish a legal framework for the transition from Mubarak’s rule.

Yet, over the last few days, the legal community – including human rights lawyers, law professors and lawyers in general practice – has begun to coalesce around a consensus in favor of completely rewriting the constitution as the necessary next step in the political process. Many legal professionals believe that the amendments represent a dangerous step backward. As a result, many in the legal community have begun to organize a call for the referendum to be scrapped and/or for people to cast a “no” vote in protest to the entire process.

[not sure how representative this position is, but it's one I'm running into a great deal online]

Spanish Bombs

At Arabist, Abu Ray has a powerful account of the view in Libya from the rebels' side:

“It is just like the Spanish Civil War,” said Raoul, a Spanish TV journalist, “like Homage to Catalonia.” Benghazi in this scenario becomes civil war Barcelona, with an exuberant explosion of revolutionary thinking and fervor that is eventually crushed under the boot of the fascist armies after it turns out enthusiasm doesn’t beat out lots of equipment on the front.

"Why yes, I am God" -- Great Firewall edition

The Joy of Censorship:

It must be an immensely satisfying job being a Chinese net censor, at least in an oversight role. 450 million people surging hither and yon across multiple platforms intent on a dizzying variety of satisfactions. Squeeze this. Promote that. Block the other. Occasionally, a call comes down for a real work of art: carving a Namibia shaped hole in the Chinese internet after a company associated with the president’s son gets itself in a little difficulty down there, for instance.

It's a genuine problem that the devil has so many of the best technical jobs. Not just censorship, but data-mining, surveillance, military technology -- many, many jobs which are technically fascinating and morally repulsive.

The weapons (really!) aren't meant to be used

As I seem to be spending my Saturday compiling Blood and Treasure's Greatest Hits:

The actual military weapons we sell to the the Middle East aren’t meant to be used, unlike the paramilitary ones. They’re there partly to provide manufacturers with opportunities for selling training and spares, partly as a kind of military Harrods – prestige goods for regimes that depend on such things - but mainly as a form of political insurance for the governments concerned, which are buying lobbying power. You buy the fancy goods so that you get a pass on using the pepper spray and water cannon…which of course we’ll also be very happy to provide you with at reasonable rates.
...
In fairness I should add something about Douglas Alexander’s weaselly contribution, but that’s the point where words fail me. I will say that the idea that “Labour made us do it” is generally the founding big lie of the current government, but in foreign policy – Middle eastern policy especially – Cameron and co were dropped right in it

Boxun, vector for Chinese jasmine copycats

Blood and Treasure on who dreamt up the idea of importing the 'jasmine revolution' into China:

The messages are being circulated on Boxun once more, the overseas Chinese website which is something of a clearing house for anti-regime news, views and propaganda. This points to some individual or group from the exiled dissident community. The question then becomes why they haven’t identified themselves. There are all sorts of fractious, mutually competitive groups out there who would like to take the credit for starting something within China.

[yes, my procrastination time today is being spent paging through the Blood and Treasure archives. Can you tell?]

Now North Koreans aren't starving, are they becoming more rebellious?

In the Asia Times, an argument that North Korea's greater prosperity could become a source of rebellion. Interesting, but not entirely convincing, argument:

People seldom rebel when their lives are desperate: they are too busy looking for food and basic necessities. Most revolutions happen in times of relative prosperity and are initiated by people who have time and energy to discuss social issues and to organize resistance....

There is little doubt that the North Korean elite welcome signs of economic growth, but paradoxically, this growth makes their situation less, not more, stable. North Koreans are now less stressed and have some time to think and talk

The converse argument, of course, is that when you're literally starving you have nothing to lose, so may as well join a violent rebellion. But there's a decent economic literature talking about the hunger trap of being too malnourished and insecure to engage in economic activity; the same arguments can presumably be transposed to political activity.

[via blood and treasure, whence also this (more explicitly fantastical) article imagining how North Korea could become a world empire]

Leigh, Assange, BAE and Saudi Arabia

The Telegraph reports a (not yet public) wikileaks cable) discussing the massive corruption in BAE's Al-Yamamah arms deal to Saudi Arabia.

BAE has earned more than £40 billion from the deal, by selling military planes to Saudi Arabia. There's long been strong evidence of corruption -- but the SFO abandoned an inquiry into the deal, quite possibly under political pressure.

Now, via Wikileaks, we have more details both of the evidence, and on how the SFO were pressured to drop the case. The SFO had evidence that:

• BAE paid £73 million to a Saudi prince who had “influence” over the Al-Yamamah defence contract and that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe another “very senior Saudi official” received payments;


• The contractor was being covertly investigated by the SFO for carrying out a “potential fraud” against a government department;


• BAE allegedly circumvented anti-bribery laws by making “substantial payments” to overseas agents employed by the Saudi government;


• Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, then British ambassador in Riyadh and now a BAE Systems’ director, “had a profound effect” on the decision by Robert Wardle, then SFO director, to end the investigation.

There's also some media politics going on here. The Guardian was long the most active newspaper following the Al-Yamamah deal. Much of their investigation was conducted by David Leigh, who also led the Guardian's Wikileaks coverage, and is now publicly squabbling with Wikileaks' Julian Assange.

So David Leigh has seen another newspaper get a scoop connecting two of his biggest investigations -- surely the result of some kind of personal politics. It also makes me wonder whether the Guardian does have all the Wikileaks documents. Surely Al-Yamamah is one of the first things David Leigh would have looked for, once he got his hands on the cables?

Or perhaps I'm over-thinking this, and the Telegraph just happened to read the relevant cable before Leigh did.

Post-scarcity job creation

Nice CT thread on (in effect) post-scarcity economics. Won by Hidari:

Much work has already been done to deal with the problem of the employment prospects of the over-educated. For example, what about “self-important newspaper columnist”, regurgitating semi-understood gobbets of semi-digested factoids gained via skimming through (and then quickly googling) whatever happens to be ‘trending’ on Twitter? This is a job that didn’t exist 50 years ago, and which no one asked to be created, for the good reason that the ‘product’ of this trade was something no one wants or needs. Nor does it require any skills or abilities to be a ‘columnist’ which hasn’t stopped it being almost exclusively the preserve of the white middle classes.

But the moral of the story is: don’t discount the capacity of capitalism to simply create whole new swathes of meaningless employment for the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie, and then creating equally meaningless ‘qualifications’ which price these (pointless, but well paid) jobs out of the grasp of the proletarian hordes. Cf, advertising, management consultancy, most ‘research’, most work in ‘think tanks’ etc. etc. etc. In a de-industrialised country like the UK, most work is already simply the intellectual equivalent of digging a hole and then filling it in again.

widerspruchlich

Here's a nice comment from Condi Rice about Gaddafi:

"When he can laugh talking to international journalists, when he is slaughtering his own people, only underscores how unfit he is to lead," she said, referring to his interview with international news organisations today.

I want to combine that with some footage of, say, Bush talking to the White House Correspondents' Association. Fat chance, but I like to believe

@sandmonkey on intergenerational support for protest

Here is the Egyptian blogger/tweeter @sandmonkey, tweeting about the relationship between parents and their activist children.

this story more than anything highlights the generational rift in egyptian society over the #Jan25 revolution. 
It also is a prime example of how people could live in the same house & have totally different backgrounds. Sumthin all JAN25's can relate 2
This revolution not only facilitated the peaceful transition of power from government to people, but from our parents generation to ours.
This transition is based on both guilt & regret, because they never did anything similar & they allowed the mafia regime to continue.
And it was a Mafia Regime. It was always better to be with the Don than against the Don, for those against him were crushed or killed.
So, they allowed the thugs to rule, allowed corruption to spread, & learned to adapt to the system, cause that's all they had.
And not only did they enable the regime, they tried to stop us from doing anything to stop, believing that it can't be stopped.
And we defied them, despite the threats & the yelling & the guilt trips & emotional blackmail, & we proved them wrong. #jan25
This naturally came as a shock to them, cause they never thought it could be possible. They truly believed they were protecting us. 
So now they feel sad & guilty, cause their lives were wasted accepting evil & they even tried to stop us from eradicating it. #jan25
So, our parents are now divided into 3 types: 1) The "we don't know what's going on, so we will depend on u to inform us" type #jan25
2) The "I will suddenly be proud & brag of ur revolutionary nature to all my friends, coz I need to jump on the bandwagon now" #jan25
3) The Angry " y'all dunno what u r talkin about, u r destroying this country, democracy will never work, human rights meen" type. 

You can imagine that, can't you, in the UK or anywhere else once protests finally get somewhere? [he's also getting an encouraging about of backchat from young egyptian activists, saying their parents were with them all along [NadaPrudence @Sandmonkey my mom was there with me from day 1 ! she's my tear gas buddy !!]

[insert boilerplate rant, viz: if only we had a medium where I could forward this without copy-pasting a dozen segments into an email. *sigh*]

Nahost Kundgebung in Berlin, heute 1500

Nochmal ein Aufruf zur Demonstrationen, die nicht gut verbreitet wurde:


Bitte weiter leiten! Für Freitag 15.00 Uhr Brandenburger Tor
____________________________________________________________

Internationaler Solidaritätstag
mit den kämpfenden Völkern des Nahen Ostens und Nordafrikas!

Spätestens seitdem in Tunesien der korrupte Präsident Ben Ali aus
dem Amt gejagt wurde, hat sich in der arabischen Welt der Funke des
Aufruhrs in Windeseile verbreitet. Die Verzweiflung über Armut und
Perspektivlosigkeit, über Willkür und Folter hat die Menschen auf
die Straße getrieben.

In Ägypten hat der Aufstand alle Schichten der Gesellschaft erfasst.
Millionen von Menschen in allen Landesteilen, Arbeiter, Bauern und
Intellektuelle, Frauen und Männer, Alte und Junge, Muslime,
Christen und Säkulare haben sich auf den Straßen und Plätzen
vereint.

Jemen, Bahrain, Algerien, Jordanien, Irak und nun Libyen sind die
Länder, wo die Völker sich gegen die sie Unterdrückenden auflehnen
und die Tyrannei abwerfen. Die Diktatoren wollen Zeit gewinnen, um
die herrschenden Strukturen zu erhalten. Doch die neue Bewegung ist
nicht aufzuhalten. Die Völker brauchen unsere Solidarität und
Ermutigung.

Zur Stärkung der Kraft der betroffenen Völker findet
am Freitag, dem 25. Februar 2011 ab 15.00 Uhr
am Brandenburger Tor (Pariser Platz) eine Mahnwache statt.

Sie dient der Vernetzung und dem solidarischen Miteinander mit den
Bürgern aus dem Nahen Osten und Nordafrikanischen Raum in unserer
Stadt.

V.i.S.d.P. Deutscher Friedensrat e.V. (mailto:saefkow-berlin@t-online.de)

Al-Jazeera

Nir Rosen on Al Jazeera:

In Egypt, when established opposition parties and Muslim Brothers went to Umar Suleiman to cut a deal, Jazeera played a key role in scuttling this betrayal of the revolution by going back to the demonstrators and airing their demans and challenging the opposition leaders. Jazeera asked people what they wanted if Mubarak left, if they wanted Suleiman, etc and it pressured political leaders who were more inclined to compromise with the regime. Jazeera forced them to hear what the street was saying and prevented them from compromising.

In Libya, as in Egypt, Jazeera has been naming names and shaping public opinion, challenging people. People who come on Jazeera are calling on people by name, Libyan guests are naming senior government people and military people, like regional commanders, asking why aren’t they moving in to Tripoli. Its not necessarily Jazeera naming these officials, but it gives others the chance and then it interviews Libyan officials to ask them what they think

List of Libya/Arab solidarity demos

On Facebook, we've been compiling a list of demonstrations in support of the protests in the Arab world. This is the same information, for those without facebook

Please go to the list on facebook if possible -- the version here will go out-of-date quickly.


MONDAY (21st)
-------------------
Boston, MA - Libya
...http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=185352221505381

London, UK - Libyan Embassy
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=195945897101494

Cairo, Egypt - Libya
http://twitter.com/#!/SultanAlQassemi/status/39429405340082177

Manchester, UK - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=131959340208250

Berlin, Germany - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=192616717425685

Paris, France - Libya
http://www.demosphere.eu/node/22927
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=190459450986797

Lyon, France - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=165054680210039

Brussels, Belgium - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=199904060020563

Tunisia
http://www.mosaiquefm.net/index/a/ActuDetail/Element/13310-Manifestation-de-soutien-au-peuple-Libyen-devant-l-ambassade.html
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=201680616509063

Sacramento, CA - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=110998615645366

Amman, Jordan - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=189905307707931

Seattle, WA - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=204806872866343

TUESDAY (22nd)
----------------------
New York, US - Bahrain
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=202224233128244

London, UK - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=195945897101494 (Libyan Embassy)
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=131240333612231 (Downing Street)

Glasgow, UK - Arab Solidarity
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=135386309861565

Berlin, Germany - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=192616717425685

Bonn, Germany - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=191396744226496&index=1

Tunisia - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=200387639988338

Rabat, Morocco - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=181209048588995

Montreal, Canada
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=185800944792021

Melbourne, Australia
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=136206069778177

Alger, Algeria - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=203131753034942

Minneapolis, USA - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=152930121431194
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=181973065177856

Alexandria, Egypt - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=104070656339318

WEDNESDAY (23rd)
------------------------
London, UK - Libyan Embassy
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=195945897101494

Geneva - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=164994166886344

New York, USA
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=133883690011027

THURSDAY (24th)
----------------------
London, UK - Libyan Embassy
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=195945897101494

FRIDAY (25th)
----------------------
New York, US - Libya, Yemen & Bahrain
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=202227446461128

London, UK -
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=195945897101494 (at Libyan embassy)
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=169885193058579 (Bahrain embassy, to Libyan embassy, to Downing Street)

Nottingham, UK
4pm onwards, Old Market Square

Lake Eola, Orlando, USA
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=157201641001407

London, UK - Iran
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=165285383522107

SATURDAY (26th)
----------------------
London, UK - Iraq Reform Demo
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=192937684059227

Toronto, Canada - Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=193043330720427

London, UK - Libyan Embassy
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=195945897101494

26th March
----------
London, UK - Egypt
http://socialisimo.tumblr.com/post/3364674148/stay-4-one-day-turn-hyde-park-into-tahrir-square-for

On Going
------------
More lists of Libyan protests.
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=185352221505381
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=103799509699530
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=178395958872261 (embassy protests)

Manchester, UK - Libya (daily protests)
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=194916707193449

Freeze Mubarak's Assets
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=178077995570504

Human Rights for Libya
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=111867918891103

Bahrain Petition
http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5904/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=5615

Notes
--------
Please be sure to post videos of any protests you attend.

Archive
----------------------
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=178220665555569
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=185352221505381
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=186889371343992
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=152559051466719
http://twitter.com/#!/Palaestina/status/38354404482482176
http://twitter.com/#!/sara055/status/38766411249614848
http://twitter.com/#!/LamiaMoussa/status/38721362717720576
http://twitter.com/#!/Sandmonkey/status/38932651502993408
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=110998615645366
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=107198712691545
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=187343441305362
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=193043330720427
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=155547864499863
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=195945897101494
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=154050244653491

Libyen Kundgebung

Edit Noch eine Kundgebung -- Morgen, 1530, nochmal vor der Libyschen Botschaft.

Das Folgende bekam ich heute durch einen Verteiler. Ich weiß nichts mehr darüber, aber propagiere es gerne weiter:


Freiheit für Libyen!


Als ein Teil der arabisch sprechenden Völker hier in der Bundesrepublik verfolgen wir mit großer Sorge
alles, was jetzt in unserem Bruderland Libyen geschieht sowohl auf politischer,
wirtschaftlicher, juristischer und konstitutioneller Ebene als auch auf der
Ebene der Sicherheit. Die letzten Ereignisse, soweit sie uns durch die
Nachrichtendienste und andere Medien zur Kenntnis gelangen, sind höchst
erschreckend und verachtungswürdig. Ghaddafi setzt das Militär und ausländische
Berufssoldaten gegen gewaltfreie Demonstranten ein, die sich für Gerechtigkeit, Meinungsfreiheit und
Demokratie versammeln, lässt mit scharfer Munition und von Hubschraubern
aus schießen, setzt Scharfschützen ein, die von Dächern aus auf Kopf, Brust und
Herz von Menschen zielen und sie bei einem Trauermarsch töten. Bis zum heutigen
Tage sind, jedoch unsicheren Nachrichten zufolge, seit Mittwoch, dem 16. 2.
2011, mindestens 1.500 Personen durch
Gewalt gestorben.

Im Sommer vergangenen
Jahres ließ Ghaddafi 1.500 politische Gefangene, die sich im Gefängnis Abu
Salim befanden, erschießen. Sein Sohn Saif ul Islam versuchte dann, die
Angehörigen der Getöteten durch Bestechungsgelder daran zu hindern, dass sie
sich an internationale Menschenrechtsorganisationen wendeten. Er verbot den
Familien, Trauerfeiern abzuhalten.

Ghaddafis Gewaltherrschaft, die seit über 41 Jahren besteht, und sein Terror mit
Unterstützung von weltweiten Terroristengruppen ist der Welt seit langem bekannt,
z. B. bei den Anschlägen auf Lockerbie 1988 und La Belle 1986 etc.

Libyen in ein Gefängnis zu verwandeln und den verschiedenen Sicherheitsbehörden zu erlauben, jegliche
Form der Freiheit zu unterbinden, wird dem Land sowie dem Volk ungeahnte Katastrophen bereiten.

Auch sind wir der Ansicht, dass das dauernde Ignorieren der Gesetze, die vielen Begünstigungen für die mächtigen Gefolgsleute sowie die ständige Anwendung des Ausnahmegesetzes in seinen unterschiedlichsten
Formulierungen den Menschen in Libyen ihr Recht auf Gerechtigkeit, Entwicklung
und bessere Zukunft rauben.

Wir glauben, dass mit dem Fortbestand des Ausnahmezustands, der Fernhaltung der Gerechtigkeit, den
Begünstigungen einer bestimmten Gruppe von Verwandten und Gefolgsleuten Ghaddafis sowie dem Ausplündern der
libyschen Wirtschaft das Ziel der persönlichen Bereicherung verfolgt wird und damit das Land Stück für Stück ruiniert wird.

Ghaddafi erhält jährlich 37,5 Milliarden Dollar für Erdöl und genau soviel Milliarden für Erdgas. Er
besitzt genug Geld, so dass es dem Volk gut gehen könnte. Stattdessen missbraucht er das Volksvermögen für Terrormaßnahmen oder Besitz und Erwerb von Liegenschaften im Ausland für seine Söhne.

Ghaddafis Versuch der Einschüchterung der zivilgesellschaftlichen Kräfte und der Gewerkschaften mit dem Ziel der
Machterhaltung und der Vererbung der Macht an seine Söhne wird keinen Erfolg haben. Diese Politik wird die Lage in
Libyen komplizierter machen und einen unvermeidbaren Zusammenstoß herbeiführen.

Wir fordern die Aufhebung des Ausnahmezustands und der daraus resultierenden
Umstände sowie die sofortige Freilassung der noch in Haft sitzenden politischen
Gefangenen.

Wir fordern auch einen friedlichen Machtwechsel und soziale Gerechtigkeit.
Wir lehnen strikt den Staatsterror, die Korruption und Vetternwirtschaft ab.
Hände weg von den zivilgesellschaftlichen Institutionen, Parteien und Gewerkschaften!

Wir versammeln uns

am Montag, dem 21. 02. 2011, um 15:00 Uhr

vor der Libyschen Botschaft
Podbielskiallee 42, U-Bahnhof Podbielskiallee

______-

Liebe Alle,
Morgen, Montag den 21.02.2011 um 15 Uhr findet vor der libyschen Botschaft
eine Kundegebung statt!!!
Bitte bemüht Euch, zahlreich zu kommen. Qadhafi verübt ein Massaker, es
gibt bereits hunderte von Toten - und aus dem Westen scheint sich niemand dazu
äußern zu wollen (wir brauchen ihn ja, um die Flüchtlinge zurückzuhalten...)
Lasst uns bis Freitag Qadhafi loswerden, damit wir uns dann endlich Ali
Abdallah Salih, Bouteflika und Konsorten zuwenden zu können!
Liebe Grüße,
Firas Maraghy und Wiebke Diehl

father ted is not english, and other ignored obvious truths

It's intriguing how often we, as consumers, are willing to believe (without evidence) that something originates in our own country. Somehow, in the back of my head, I had the idea of Father Ted coming from England. I mean -- a more Irish setup would be hard to imagine. Yet somehow I choose to belive in the home-origin.

ETA: I'm doubly an idiot. Father Ted was, in fact, made for Channel 4

The Inefficient Everything Hypothesis

The Efficient Markets Hypothesis may be looking a bit shabby after the financial crisis. But it's still looking pretty damn good compared to any other area of public life. Where's the Efficient Media Hypothesis? The Efficient Academia Hypotheis? The Efficient Politics Hypothesis? The Efficient Courts Hypothesis? Anybody eve proposing them would be laughed out of the room.

bits of the constitution

The articles Mubarak is proposing to amend:

Article.76***:(Amended, Not present in the Constitution any longer) The People’s Assembly shall nominate the President of the Republic . The nomination shall be referred to the people for a plebiscite. The nomination for the President of the Republic shall be made in the People’ Assembly upon the proposal of at least one third of its members. The candidate who obtains two thirds of the votes of the members of the People’s Assembly shall be referred to the people for a plebiscite . If he does not obtain the said majority the nomination process shall be repeated two days after the first vote. The candidate obtaining an absolute majority of the votes of the Assembly members shall be referred to the citizens for a plebiscite. The candidate shall be considered President of the Republic when he obtains an absolute majority of votes cast in the plebiscite. If the candidate does not obtain this majority, the Assembly shall propose the nomination of another candidate and the same procedure shall follow concerning his candidature and election.

Article.77**: The term of the presidency shall be six Gregorian years starting from the date of the announcement of result of the plebiscite. The President of the Republic may be re-elected for other successive terms.

Article.88: The Law shall determine the conditions which members of the Assembly must fulfil as well as the rules of election and referendum, while the ballot shall be conducted under the supervision of the members of a judiciary organ.

Article.93: The People’s Assembly shall be competent to decide upon the validity of the membership of its members. The Court of Cassation shall be competent to investigate the validity of contestations on membership presented to the Assembly after referring them to the Court by the Speaker of the Assembly. The contestation shall be referred to the Court of Cassation within fifteen days as from the date on which the Assembly has been informed thereof while the investigation shall be completed within ninety days from the date on which the contestation is referred to the Court of Cassation. The result of the investigation and the decision reached by the Court shall be submitted to the Assembly to decide upon the validity of the contestation within sixty days from the date of submission of the result of the investigation to the Assembly. Memberships shall not be deemed invalid expect by a decision taken by a majority of two-thirds of the Assembly members

Article.178: The judgments issued by the Supreme Constitutional Court in constitutional cases, and its decisions concerning the interpretation of legislative texts shall be published in the Official Gazette. The law shall organize the effects subsequent to a decision concerning the unconstitutionality of a legislative text.


Article.189: The President of the Republic as well as the People’s Assembly may request the amendment of one or more of the articles of the Constitution. The articles to be amended and the reasons justifying such amendments shall be mentioned in the request for amendment . If the request emanates from the People’s Assembly, it should be signed by at least one third of the Assembly members . In all cases, the Assembly shall discuss the amendment in principle, and the decision in this respect shall be taken by the majority of its members. If the request is rejected, the amendment of the same particular articles may not be requested again before the expiration of one year from the date of such rejection. If the People’s Assembly approves an amendment, in principle, the articles requested to be amended shall be discussed two months after the date of the said approval. If the amendment is approved by two thirds of the members of the Assembly, it shall be referred to the people for a plebiscite. If it is approved by the people it shall be considered in force from the date of the announcement of the result of the plebiscite.

Source: Wikisource

Buxton Index

Dijkstra:

The Buxton Index of an entity, i.e. person or organization, is defined as the length of the period, measured in years, over which the entity makes its plans. For the little grocery shop around the corner it is about 1/2,for the true Christian it is infinity, and for most other entities it is in between: about 4 for the average politician who aims at his re-election, slightly more for most industries, but much less for the managers who have to write quarterly reports. The Buxton Index is an important concept because close co-operation between entities with very different Buxton Indices invariably fails and leads to moral complaints about the partner. The party with the smaller Buxton Index is accused of being superficial and short-sighted, while the party with the larger Buxton Index is accused of neglect of duty, of backing out of its responsibility, of freewheeling, etc.. In addition, each party accuses the other one of being stupid. The great advantage of the Buxton Index is that, as a simple numerical notion, it is morally neutral and lifts the difference above the plane of moral concerns.

Egypt: getaway plans

Issandr El Amrani on managing protest:

My own experience is that elite Egyptians tend to think in terms of getaway plans, because they are either deeply in bed with the regime or because they expect an uprising to become a class war

[doh: it'd be interesting to map the world in terms of how much consideration elites give to escape plans. You'd come out with some combination of physical insecurity, political insecurity, and paranoia. Who in Europe has a second passport 'just in case'? Or realy, really wants one? Almost nobody. But in Egypt? In Israel? In China?]

There has been a dramatic state failure to maintain basic health services and deliver good education. This is perhaps Egypt's biggest failure. And as in all Arab countries, autocratic political systems have de-intermediated citizens from their rulers. What I mean by this is that the channels to relay popular grievances to governments have been deeply eroded by money and power. This is dangerous, because in the end it blindsides the regimes to the popular mood, and means there are people at the local level who have the moral authority to calm the situation should there be an outburst of anger.

Egypt link-dump

I know nothing about Egypt. Or Tunisia. Or Sudan. Or Lebanon. Or Albania. Or -- there's a lot of news happening at the moment, isn't there?

But here are some of the articles I've found about Egypt that get beyond "woo! riots!":

Al-ahram on the significance of the date:

Police Day [Jan 25] is meant to mark the day when the police forces took to the street in Ismailia to fight the British Occupation.
...
"The decision may be controversial but I think it was a good choice," says Essam El Erian, the media spokesperson of the Muslim Brotherhood, the country's largest opposition group. "Six decades ago the police did their patriotic duty and fought the British occupation, now we ask them to also fight against a corrupt government that has rigged the elections."

Marc Lynch on the Arabic media:

During the key period when the protests were picking up steam, Al Jazeera aired a documentary cultural program on a very nice seeming Egyptian novelist and musical groups, and then to sports. Now (10:30am EST) it is finally covering the protests in depth, but its early lack of coverage may hurt its credibility. I can't remember another case of Al Jazeera simply punting on a major story in a political space which it has owned.

Simon Tisdall in the Guardian

Egyptians have been here before. The so-called Cairo spring of 2005 briefly lifted hopes of peaceful reform and open elections
....
But Tuesday's large-scale protests were different in significant ways, sending unsettling signals to a regime that has made complacency a way of life. "Day of Rage" demonstrators in Cairo did not merely stand and shout in small groups, as is usual. They did not remain in one place. They joined together – and they marched. And in some cases, the police could not, or would not, stop them.
....
an ad hoc coalition of students, unemployed youths, industrial workers, intellectuals, football fans and women, connected by social media such as Twitter and Facebook, instigated a series of fast-moving, rapidly shifting demos across half a dozen or more Egyptian cities. The police could not keep up – and predictably, resorted to violence. an ad hoc coalition of students, unemployed youths, industrial workers, intellectuals, football fans and women, connected by social media such as Twitter and Facebook, instigated a series of fast-moving, rapidly shifting demos across half a dozen or more Egyptian cities. The police could not keep up – and predictably, resorted to violence.

Obligatory riot porn: Stopping a water cannon, Tiananmen-style. And something less violent

And, since they seem to be mentioned almost nowhere else, Global voices lists the demonstrators' demands

• To raise the minimum wage limit to LE 1200 and to get an unemployment aid.


• To cancel the emergency status in the country , to dismiss Habib El-Adly and to release all detainees without court orders.


• Disbanding the current parliament , to have a new free election and to amend the constitution in order to have two presidential limits only.

Also, Anonymous are in the thick of it. Again. They've apparently turned LOIC on Egyptian government websites. This is after Tunisia, where they were about the first outside group to get involved. Meanwhile in Spain, having contributed to the December protests which prevented passage of an anti-download law, they're back at it as the government takes another shot at it.

It's like the gang of bored teenagers on the street corner has turned into a politicised mob.

Women, Men, and Music: the XY Factor, Part 1 | Bad Reputation

Rhian @ bad reputation:

I intellectually analyse the music I love, scouring its lyrical content and its social and cultural context for meaning to enhance my enjoyment of it, but not necessarily to justify my enjoying it in the first place. I am equally interested simply in experiencing its rhythm, its flow, its grind, its melody, the way it makes me want to move as well as the mechanics of how it achieves that, its impact on my body as well as my brain. I attach as much weight to a physical and emotional response as to a cerebral anatomising of music.

Yes, yes, yes! Probably I place far more weight on interpretation compared to Rhian, but the way she phrases things:)

Palin schoss mit!

Reading about the connection of the Bild to Rudi Dutschke's shooting, I can't help thinking about the parallels to the Gifford shooting in the US. The anti-Springer slogan in '68 was "Bild schoss mit!". Perhaps now we need 'Palin schoss mit'?

origin of the fourth estate

Where the term Fourth Estate comes from:

The idea of the press as a "Fourth Estate" came to prominence during the nineteenth century. In 1837 Robert Carlyle referred to "A Fourth Estate of Noble Editors" in The French Revolution: A History, and in On Heroes and Hero Worship (1841) stated that "Burke said there were Three Estates in parliament; but in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all". Carlyle continued: "Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy. Invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable."

Informational Hygiene

'Informational Hygiene' is a concept dreamt up by Neal Stephenson in his classic cyberpunk novel 'Snow Crash'. Stephenson riffs on the idea of memes as mind viruses; his conceit is that memes exist with the power not only to propagate themselves and convey ideology as a side-effect, but to destroy the minds which play host to them. Ancient cultures, plagued by these mind viruses, developed forms of cultural protection against them:

Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew - that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance.

Information hygiene has developed a life beyond the pages of this book. [it's not the only concept to do so -- Snow Crash is also the book that inspired Google Earth]. It has a slighty creepy feel, but the principle is sound. The processes inside your head depend on what you put into it. So you should be careful about what you read, for example -- an idea, even one you consciously disagree with, will have mental side-effects.

You could take informational hygiene as an injunction not to read, say, racist or sexist rants. I'm not so bothered about that side of things; I believe you can reject such ideas more-or-less consciously.

Informational hygiene is more interesting to me in the context of the attention economy. Political, social and cultural developments are dictated not just by what people believe, but by how much time they spend talking and thinking about it.

If a European spends all her time reading about politics in America, for example, she'll end up feeling alienated and disempowered. She has few levers with which to change policy in another country, so learning in detail about it is a waste of intellectual and emotional effort. Better to learn about a topic she can affect, and the ways she can affect it.

Depressive hedonia: blast from (450 years in) the past

On depth of pleasure...something not all that apposite, but which has been rocking around in my mind, and so which I may as well expunge by copying here.

Here's Roger Ascham on Jane Grey, Anglicanism's favourite geeky teenage quasi-martyr:

I came to Brodegate in Lecetershire, to take my leave of that noble Lady JaneGrey, to whom I was exceeding much beholding. Her parents, the Duke and Duchess, with all the household Gentlemen and Gentlewomen were hunting in the Park: I found her in her Chamber, reading Phædon Platonis in Greek, and that with as much delight as some gentleman would read a merry tale in Bocase. After salutation, and duty done, with some other talk, I asked her why she would carry out such pastime in the Park? smiling she answered me: I know all their sport in the Park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in Plato: Alas good folk, they never felt what true pleasure meant.

More on depressive hedonia

Ian Bogost and his commentators have some interesting reactions to K-Punk's argument on 'depressive hedonia'. First, Ian connects it to the never-ending debate over 'hard' theory:

Yet, as Fisher points out, when students "want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger" they miss the fact that "the indigestibility is Nietzsche."

My answer here is probably to say that nothing is inherently worthwhile /because/ it is hard. It can perhaps, though, be good in spite of hardness, and the hardness (if measured in the depth of attention possible/required) can open a door oto stronger feeling/understanding.

Then there is an interesting comment about distraction as a defence mechanism. Of a student wearing headphones in class:

What if the student needed the headphones primarily as a type of anxiety management against the classroom, placing a symbolic barrier of sorts between himself and the room in which he was expected to participate with a degree of fluency, articulateness and incisiveness that, in this society, it's just as likely he would feel eminently unequal to. To me, the headphones seem much more a way to insulate one from the angst of socio-academic participation in than it is "to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand."

This, IMO, is also true as a much more general rule. The cycle of seeking new things, seeking short-term gratification or acceptance -- it's the result of insecurity. If you have the confidence of being surrounded by love and acceptance, you don't need by-the-minute demonstration thereof.

Incidentally, for reference, this is the post which formed the basis for that section of Capitalist Realism.