xer-files
Saturday, September 30, 2006
  Absurdities and atrocities
/../ Thence continuing to walk over palpitating limbs, or
through ruined buildings, at length he arrived beyond the
theater of war, with a little provision in his budget, and
Miss Cunegund's image in his heart.

When he arrived in Holland
his provision failed him; but
having heard that the inhabitants of that country were all
rich and Christians, he made himself sure of being treated
by them in the same manner as the Baron's castle, before he
had been driven thence through the power of Miss Cunegund's
bright eyes.

He asked charity of several grave-looking people, who one
and all answered him, that if he continued to follow this
trade they would have him sent to the house of correction,
where he should be taught to get his bread.

He next addressed himself to a person who had just come from
haranguing a numerous assembly for a whole hour on the
subject of charity. The orator, squinting at him under his
broadbrimmed hat,asked him sternly, what brought him thither
and whether he was for the good old cause?

"Sir," said Candide, in a submissive manner, "I conceive there
can be no effect without a cause; everything is necessarily
concatenated and arranged for the best. It was necessary that
I should be banished from the presence of Miss Cunegund; that
I should afterwards run the gauntlet; and it is necessary I
should beg my bread, till I am able to get it. All this could
not have been otherwise."

"Hark ye, friend," said the orator, "do you hold the Pope to
be Antichrist?"

"Truly, I never heard anything about it," said Candide, "but
whether he is or not, I am in want of something to eat."

"Thou deservest not to eat or to drink," replied the orator,
"wretch, monster, that thou art! hence! avoid my sight, nor
ever come near me again while thou livest."

The orator's wife happened to put her head out of the window
at that instant, when, seeing a man who doubted whether the
Pope was Antichrist, she discharged upon his head a utensil
full of water.
Good heavens, to what excess does religious zeal transport
womankind!

A man who had never been christened, an honest Anabaptist named
James, was witness to the cruel and ignominious treatment showed
to one of his brethren, to a rational, two-footed, unfledged
being.
Moved with pity he carried him to his own house, caused him to
be cleaned, gave him meat and drink, and made him a present of
two florins, at the same time proposing to instruct him in his
own trade of weaving Persian silks, which are fabricated in Holland.
/../

Voltaire's Candide
i came to read the book again, because Ahmadinejad made me laugh
some months ago, when he said something like,

"God, i'm lucky my enemies are ridiculous."


I didn't make a note of it, but he was definitely referring to
Voltaire
.


IN Holland in the meantime, e tres maintenant:
Het Kopgeld van Rita Verdonk



 
  Leb'nan, Iran, Iraq. In small doses.
Talked with some recent Leb'nan visitors in CafeHappyChaos, heard Abjeez (!!) at the party of Radio Zamaneh, and tonite i saw, and certainly heard, Farida and some others:
• Film, debate and music
What is the alternative for political violence?
- Film, Iraq, Song of the Missing Men
- Debate with prominent guests:
Bassam Alhussaini: shia hoofdadviseur van de Iraakse premier
Ayad Samarrai: vooraanstaand lid van de grootste Iraaks-sunni regeringspartij
Oras Haddad: studentenactiviste uit Bagdad
Joost Hiltermann: Iraq-expert International Crisis Group
- Farida with friends and family! ;)

fine week. nice weather!


(and i was told that there's no prove that Depleted Uranium is as disastrous as i believe/d.
hm.)
 
Thursday, September 28, 2006
  Hanzo:web commitment
Reliable access
Hanzo servers continually crawl the web as directed by you, archiving your chosen sites and providing free access to the archives forever. Even if you cancel your account, the archive content will remain, as will your access to it.
Respect for content
All archived pages, links and sites are stored exactly as they appeared on the web. Pictures, objects, links and flash are all retained as they are, preserved as originally conceived.
Durability
Hanzo stores all archived content and user metadata in open web archive standards-based formats.

Hanzo are proud to join the Internet Archive and European Archive at PICNIC'06 Cross Media Week in Amsterdam on 27 September 2006 for a workshop on "Avoiding Digital Memory Loss". There is a keynote from Brewster Kahle in which he will describe his experience of building the Internet Archive followed by a number of other talks on building, curating and preserving borne-digital content, from numerous European experts. See this blog entry for more details.

Hanzo will present two new products:

  1. We will present Hanzoweb v2 - the first, publically available, continuous web archiving service, incorporated a new crawler, RSS archiving capabilities and our new preservation strategy. Hanzoweb v2 will also be available as a white-label product for institutions who wish to run their own archiving services.
  2. Secondly, we will present our new product for Enterprise archiving, designed to provide the ability to capture an organisations digital output and retain it in accordance with their commercial needs and regulatory compliance requirements.

http://www.hanzoweb.com/
 
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
  Web users worried about privacy
Cyber rights hacking group creates browser that makes it possible to 
surf the net anonymously.

Web users worried about privacy can now use a modified version of
Firefox that lets them browse the net anonymously.

The Torpark browser has been created by a hacking group and uses
technology backed by digital rights group the Electronic Frontier
Foundation.

Torpark uses its own network of net routers to anonymise the traffic
people generate when they browse the web.

The browser can be put on a flash memory stick so users can turn any
PC into an anonymous terminal.

Full story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/2/hi/technology/5363230.stm

RELATED INTERNET LINKS
Torpark
http://torpark.nfshost.com/
Electronic Frontier Foundation
http://www.eff.org/
Hacktivismo
http://www.hacktivismo.com/
Tor
http://tor.eff.org/
Cult of the Dead Cow
http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cms/main.php3


 
  May God afflict the perpetrators of this cruel hoax

Without further ado, then, here is Secretary Jackson's talk:

Dear Friends,

It is with great joy that I announce to you today a brand new Department of Housing and Urban Development. Everything is going to change about the way we work, and the change is going to start right here, today, in New Orleans.

Our charter is to ensure that affordable housing is available for those who need it. This year in New Orleans, I am ashamed to say we have failed.

For the past year, as various interests have battled it out for this city, we at HUD have often ended up on the wrong side of that battle, forgetting our charter and making decisions that cheat both contractors and ourselves of the chance to make a big difference.

Today, as Governor Blanco said, we need housing for our workers. Yet until today, we at HUD planned to demolish 5,000 units of perfectly good public housing here in New Orleans, and put commercial housing in its place. Almost all of these apartments have no damage at all, many were on high ground, and their former occupants are by and large begging to move back in and start contributing to their city once again.

Today, we're going to help them to do that. But that's only the start. With your help, we're not going to destroy much-needed housing, we're going to make it work - for all of us.

We've got a three-step plan:

1. The first step is to let these folks go home right now.
2. Next, we're going to help them create the opportunities they need to thrive.
3. Finally, with your help, we're going to give back to Mother Nature what she needs to protect this city for all of its citizens.

All of this is going to require your help to an unprecedented extent, and we are very pleased to announce a contracting budget of 1.8 billion dollars.

"An irresponsible, unemployed, middle-class huckster posed as an assistant to HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson and insinuated himself into a Gulf Coast Reconstruction Conference YESterday."


 
Monday, September 25, 2006
  Ratzinger [Papa Dont Preach]
(or the Fallacy of Fallaci)
Naeem -found a new t-shirt- "Sometimes it's good to get behind the news cycle. By the time I came back up for air, gallons of ink (and a wee smidgen of blood) had been spilt over the Vatican's new video game "Holy War: Part XXXII". Tariq Ali, Karen Armstrong, everyone and their mother has weighed in on this, so I don't have to.

The Muslim world, as always, genius at PR moves. A nun shot in the back, just to prove that the Pope was wrong. I'm non-violent, and I'll shoot anyone who says otherwise. Smooth.

The interesting concept to tease out is this idea of Muslim rage in response to critique. A rage that is directly proportional to a sense of impotence. There is almost a palpable sense of disappointment among the rightwing that more crazy stuff did not happen."
::  

"The Pope's remarks were dangerous, and
will convince many more Muslims
that the
west is incurably Islamophobic"

Karen Armstrong
Monday September 18, 2006
In
The Guardian

::

SO LET'S SING: RATZINGER PAPAAAA'


 
Friday, September 22, 2006
  Streamtime.org
Streamtime does some hardware works. (and eventually can't be reached for that reason)
 
Monday, September 18, 2006
  "A proposito del petrolio, Oriana"
"Chi ha qualcosa da dire si faccia avanti e taccia"
('Who has something to say comes forward and stays tacit' - Karl Kraus)


Tiziano Terzani: ... "A proposito del petrolio, Oriana, sono certo che anche tu avrai notato come, con tutto quel che si sta scrivendo e dicendo sull'Afghanistan, pochissimi fanno notare che il grande interesse per questo paese è legato al fatto d'essere il passaggio obbligato di qualsiasi conduttura intesa a portare le immense risorse di metano e petrolio dell'Asia Centrale (vale a dire di quelle repubbliche ex-sovietiche ora tutte, improvvisamente, alleate con gli Stati Uniti) verso il Pakistan, l'India e da lì nei paesi del Sud Est Asiatico. Il tutto senza dover passare dall'Iran. Nessuno in questi giorni ha ricordato che, ancora nel 1997, due delegazioni degli "orribili" talebani sono state ricevute a Washington (anche al Dipartimento di Stato) per trattare di questa faccenda e che una grande azienda petrolifera americana, la Unocal, con la consulenza niente di meno che di Henry Kissinger, si è impegnata col Turkmenistan a costruire quell'oleodotto attraverso l'Afghanistan. È dunque possibile che, dietro i discorsi sulla necessità di proteggere la libertà e la democrazia, l'imminente attacco contro l'Afghanistan nasconda anche altre considerazioni meno altisonanti, ma non meno determinanti. È per questo che nell'America stessa alcuni intellettuali cominciano a preoccuparsi che la combinazione fra gli interessi dell'industria petrolifera con quelli dell'industria bellica - combinazione ora prominentemente rappresentata nella compagine al potere a Washington - finisca per determinare in un unico senso le future scelte politiche americane nel mondo e per limitare all'interno del paese, in ragione dell'emergenza anti-terrorismo, i margini di quelle straordinarie libertà che rendono l'America così particolare. Il fatto che un giornalista televisivo americano sia stato redarguito dal pulpito della Casa Bianca per essersi chiesto se l'aggettivo "codardi", usato da Bush, fosse appropriato per i terroristi-suicidi, così come la censura di certi programmi e l'allontanamento da alcuni giornali, di collaboratori giudicati non ortodossi, hanno aumentato queste preoccupazioni. L'aver diviso il mondo in maniera - mi pare - "talebana", fra "quelli che stanno con noi e quelli contro di noi", crea ovviamente i presupposti per quel clima da caccia alle streghe di cui l'America ha già sofferto negli anni Cinquanta col maccartismo, quando tanti intellettuali, funzionari di Stato ed accademici, ingiustamente accusati di essere comunisti o loro simpatizzanti, vennero perseguitati, processati e in moltissimi casi lasciati senza lavoro. Il tuo attacco, Oriana - anche a colpi di sputo - alle "cicale" ed agli intellettuali "del dubbio" va in quello stesso senso. Dubitare è una funzione essenziale del pensiero; il dubbio è il fondo della nostra cultura."


"Lettera da Firenze"

di Tiziano Terzani

(Corriere della Sera, 8 ottobre 2001)



'Letters Against War' --> http://www.tizianoterzani.com/TT_letterenglish.pdf



 
Friday, September 08, 2006
  Digging ...

i took it here
 
Monday, September 04, 2006
  Burn ZimbaBaby Burn

:: Firepussy ::

"There’s this small sculpture on my desk. I found it lying in the dust near a once thriving artists market in Harare. It’s a soap stone carving of a woman’s body, gorgeously curvaceous. It feels amazing, a mixture between really, really smooth with rough patches that tickle my palms. Its got lots of scrapes and scratches on it because its one of the “victims” of Operation Murambatsvina the mass eviction campaign spearheaded by the Mugabe regime which left over 700 000 Zimbabweans homeless last year. And in fact, many Zimbabweans remain homeless today because Mugabe’s promises of new and better housing was just revolting rhetoric.

Fighter planes (4 of them) have been buzzing Harare skies lately. I don’t think that they’re practicing for any national event or anything. The air force is simply putting their new purchases from China through their paces."


:: Zimbabwe debates 'oppressive' bugging laws - The Register ::
-- The Interception of Communications Bill, the topic of hearings before the African country's Parliament on Wednesday, allows for email and phone interception warrants against targeted individuals that might be extended indefinitely, under the control of politicians and with little or no judicial oversight. The bill also calls for the establishment of a monitoring centre, reportedly outfitted with bugging equipment supplied by China. Telecoms providers would be obliged to install snooping equipment onto their networks, linked to the proposed monitoring centre. ISPs, not the Zimbabwean government, would be forced to foot the bill.

 
You know Stone's 'Hidden History of the Korean War'?