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Sunday, Apr 21, 2002

carter centered

"There are two existing factors that offer success to United States persuasion. One is the legal requirement that American weapons are to be used by Israel only for defensive purposes, a premise certainly being violated in the recent destruction of Jenin and other villages. Richard Nixon imposed this requirement to stop Ariel Sharon and Israel's military advance into Egypt in the 1973 war, and I used the same demand to deter Israeli attacks on Lebanon in 1979. (A full invasion was launched by Ariel Sharon after I left office). The other persuasive factor is approximately $10 million daily in American aid to Israel. President George Bush Sr. threatened this assistance in 1992 to prevent the building of Israeli settlements between Jerusalem and Bethlehem."

dish tv

"But this technological togetherness has not created the human bonds that were promised. In some ways, global satellite TV and Internet access have actually made the world a less understanding, less tolerant place. What the media provide is superficial familiarity -- images without context, indignation without remedy. The problem isn't just the content of the media, but the fact that while images become international, people's lives remain parochial -- in the Arab world and everywhere else, including here."

monty burns

"After last weekend's shocking events in Venezuela, in which President Chavez was ousted in a free and fair democratic coup, only to be returned to office two days later on what seems to have been little more than the whim of the people, the leaders of the Free World have clearly been forced to reconsider the nature of democracy."

drugstore

the guardian is on drugs.

Friday, Apr 19, 2002

organ grinders

"When elements of the Venezuelan military forced president Hugo Chavez from office last week, the editorial boards of several major U.S. newspapers followed the U.S. government's lead and greeted the news with enthusiasm."

wright of way

"In this week's Nation, political scientist Richard Falk contests the standard view that Israel's offer at Camp David was eminently fair. But Falk's argument, embedded in a larger critique of American foreign policy, doesn't get deeply into the nuts and bolts of the issue. If you want to see Camp David from Arafat's point of view, a better place to look is a New York Review of Books piece that appeared back in August and was co-authored by Robert Malley, special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs in the Clinton administration. Malley was at Camp David and found Arafat's behavior there intensely frustrating, but he doesn't buy the interpretation that is favored on the right�that Arafat's rejection of the deal amounts to rejection of a two-state solution."

duogooders

"SAN FRANCISCO--U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and database billionaire Larry Ellison were named this year's most notorious American violators of personal privacy by leading advocacy groups on Thursday."

copychatter

"The purpose of this project is to capitalize on the distributed nature of digital information systems to collect, organize and distribute graphic and audio materials associated with music copyright infringement cases in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century on. This documentation, especially for cases over twenty-five years old, is difficult to obtain and has never before been systematically collected or published in print or electronic format. Our goal is to accumulate and publish a complete collection of music copyright infringement opinions, comments about the musical works they consider, and graphic and sound files of relevant portions of these works"

the answer man

got a question? googles got the answer for a price.

Thursday, Apr 18, 2002

spies like us

"Imagine a huge $30-billion conglomerate. It operates in one of the few businesses that might genuinely be described as cut-throat. Its competitors have changed dramatically, and so have its products and technologies. But its structure is the same as when it was founded, in 1947. Nobody leads this colossus (there is just an honorary chairman) and everyone exploits it. Demoralised and bureaucratic, it has just endured its biggest-ever loss. The response: the firm has been given even more money, and nobody has been sacked."

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