Reality Macedonia on Atrios

Eschaton (Atrios), one of the most popular blogs on the web (currently with 33959 visits per day according to The Truth Laid Bear) posted a link to Reality Macedonia article "Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt" by Umberto Eco (originally published in the Utne Reader, November 1995).

According to the independent web counter SiteMeter, this provided for additional several thousands visitors to come to the site over the last weekend.

Predicting Away

Thought Viper posed an interesting question in the post from Sept 1, 2003, inspired by the Telegraph article "Astrologers fail to predict proof they are wrong." Excerpt:

If you wrote a sci-fi novel set in a world where astrology actually worked, you'd come up with a world far different than the one we live in. Astrology would be a priority project for the Pentagon, and NASA would be the most heavily-funded government agency of all. Apollo wouldn't have been about landing a man on the Moon, it would've been about building the ultimate deep-space telescope on the Dark Side.

Besides horoscopes, psychohistory is another aledged future-predicting method to be examined on its own terms.

Take the Money and Run

Antiwar.com  provided links to two likable articles on economic matters today:

• Will the US Privatize Iraq? Should It?
• AfghaniScam: Livin' Large Inside Karzai's Reconstruction Bubble

Toward a Weblogging Empire

According to this Wired News article, Jason Calacanis (also known as "some dude") is attempting to build a blog-based business venture.

"Weblogs are sort of reinventing the space that I was part of, the class of 1995 publishers," Calacanis says.

Ditto, man. I hear you. (Link via #seir topic by Deckard.)

MP3s? Tip of the Iceberg

The global AIDS crisis has reached epidemic proportions in the Republic of South Africa, where nearly 1 in 10 citizens are HIV positive. While patients in the West enjoy widely accessible treatments that allow them to live longer, fuller lives, treatment in Africa is practically non-existent. The drugs, manufactured by U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies with exclusive patents, are priced far out of the range that even Africa's most developed nations - including South Africa - can afford.

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Applying the Lessons of Macedonian War

The recent article by Robert Fisk on American tactics of appeasing its guerilla adversaries poses interesting moral questions. Reporting on the content of the letter by Major General David Petraeus to suspected Iraqi war criminal General Sultan Ahmed who afterwards surrendered to the occupator, Fisk writes:

In his quite extraordinary letter to General Ahmed the US officer says that "although we find ourselves on different sides of this war, we do share common traits. As military men, we follow the orders of our superiors. We may not necessarily agree with the politics and bureaucracy, but we understand unity of command and supporting our leaders [sic] in a common and just cause." Thus far have the Americans now gone in appeasing the men who may have influence over the Iraqi guerrillas now killing US soldiers.

What is presumably supposed to be seen as a gesture of compromise is much more likely to be understood as a sign of military weakness - which it clearly is. Historians will also have to ruminate upon the implications of the meaning of "supporting our leaders in a common and just cause". Are Saddam and Mr Bush supposed to be these "leaders"?

Online Music Issue, Explained

Keith Knight, an artist who does both comics and music, candidly and conciselly explains the current predicament of the music industry. The comics is on Salon.com, so you will need to let it show you through an commercial to get a "day pass" to read it.

Ecoterrorism?

Ted Rall writes:

The environmental crisis is, hands down, the most important matter facing humanity today. Who cares about peace in the Middle East if the region is under water, stricken by famine or choked by dust storms? Weather systems are becoming increasingly violent and unpredictable, species are going extinct and virgin-growth forests are vanishing at an alarming rate. While smog has diminished somewhat in places like Denver and Los Angeles, air pollution is getting worse nationally. Ohio's EPA, for example, announced that 2002 was the most toxic summer on record in 14 years.

Non-Review: Dune Messiah

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy." (p.183-184)

I read the book Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert last week. It chronicles the time after the events described in the colorful movie by David Lynch, which coincidently aired on a local TV station few days before I picked this tattered volume. Of course, the movie served as a reminder to the early strategy game by Cryo - ah, sweet memories.

Truth suffers from too much analysis.
- Ancient Fremen Saying (p.79)

Instead of writing about how I feel about this story of Paul's struggle to break away from the jihad he started, court intrigue and conspiracy--all very good read--and how it all relates to our life, universe and everything, I decided to offer several quotations.

Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual. (p.54)

 

Cyber-what?

Among many an interesting information item in the new Wired article by Bruce Sterling “The Growth Market in Walls,” dealing with some globalizing aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (forwarded by Deckard by way of #seir, again), this particularly attracted my attention:

Soon, thanks to the Wall, Sides I and P really will be two different sides, physically and permanently. They won't even be able to see each other; suddenly, the enemy will become little more than a blank concrete slab. Humanizing interaction will become impossible, except for email - but even that medium has found the two sides at odds: In 2001, Mona Awana, a bright and pretty young Side P activist and journalist, used her cyberchat skills to lure a 16-year-old Side I boy named Ofir Nahum into a deadly Kalashnikov ambush.

This sounds like a pretty significant story, and the only excuse I got for missing it at the time, was that I was too busy absorbing domestic news of war in 2001.

When you don’t get results, you get excuses and fries with that. Anyway, here’s a Reuters photo of Mona and Ofir, from some Hungarian site:

NewsFactor cited several possible motives in their article about the case: nationalism, robbery, and:

Still another possibility, according to one Palestinian source, was that Rahum's murder might have been an "honor killing" because relations between Palestinian women and Israeli men are prohibited and seen as a blight on the family name. It's possible, the source continued, that Awana might have offered up Rahum in exchange for her own life.

In addition, this really unmade my day:

Whatever the motive, Rahum's bereaved parents told an Israeli newspaper that children "should not use the Internet because the Internet kills. The killers attracted" their son through the Internet "and took him to where they wanted to kill him."

Most recent piece I found about Mona is Jerusalem Post article from some January 23 (year unknown) informing that she “petitioned the High Court of Justice yesterday, demanding the right to meet with a lawyer.”