Italian Ventures

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's decision to cancel a long-awaited holiday trip to Italy and stay home appears to have been a deft political move.
Schröder was right to call off the family trip after Italy's junior minister for tourism, Stefano Stefani, refused to apologize for describing Germans as loud “supernationalist blondes“ who “invade Italy's beaches“ every summer and make life miserable for the locals.
It never took much for Germans and Italians to get mad at each other - their characters are simply too far apart. While the Germans lack the Italian lightness of being, the Italians do not share the
· Germans' seriousness of purpose [FAZ ]

STASI Western Spies

Major revelations are not expected from the “Rosenholz“ (Rosewood) files on West German residents who spied for the former East Germany, according to Marianne Birthler, the official responsible for administering the files of the East German security service,
· The Stasi [ FAZ]

Liberalize The Media

The media is kind of weird these days on politics. There are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party.
Fox News Network, The Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh -- there's a bunch of them and some of them are financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations
· And the rest of the media [TomPaine ]

Media Moblogs Seen as a Crystal Ball for a New Era in Online Journalism

But futurist Howard Rheingold says the ultimate democratization of the media will not be about technological advances; rather, it will entail upholding old-fashioned standards to earn viewers' trust.
· Trust [ OJR]

Evil men will take more and add less to the barn of the common goods.
-Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1480–1546)

Economics Christianity's Free-Market Tradition

Some of my Christian friends are suspicious of my interest in economics. They see economics as a product of Enlightenment rationalism, along with deism, atheism, the chaos of the French Revolution and other un-Christian aspects of the modern age.

So I am greatly pleased to be able to direct them to the just reissued edition of Alejandro A. Chafuen's Faith and Liberty: The Economic Thought of the Late Scholastics.
· Formerly titled Christians for Freedom [Mises ]

I deplore brutality. It's not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a special feeling of guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct.
-- William S. Burroughs, via Naked Lunch
(The Big, Bad, bullies & axemen of this bullying world the day of exposure is coming...)

I think if we throw him in the river and he floats he is most definitely guilty and we should therefore kill him; of course, if he drowns, then he can rest in peace, completely exonerated...
· As One Who Did not Drown, I am Richly Guilty [RoadtoSurfdom]

Blogging I'm not telling you everything

Come to think of it, anonymity is like virginity--once you've lost it, you can never have it back.
· I wish I could [Shesellssanctuary (Gianna)]

Corruption Corporate Corruption - legalized robbery!

How is it possible for corporations to get away with things that would have been illegal a few decades ago? This is easy when the guys who are supposed to be their "watchdogs" are them (the same guys). Most people in high level government positions today are intimately connected with big business. Many of them are former CEOs themselves. Many of the decision makers at the FDA (for example) are former high level employees of the drug companies. (Is this what the industries mean by "self-regulation"?) It's democracy of the rich, enslavement of the rest!
As for the corporations, the CEOs are absolute dictators! That's not the way it is supposed to be. Corporate boards of directors are supposed to be "overseeing" the work of the CEOs. Experts in corporate governance say a director should spend a minimum of four hours per week executing his duties for the board, which includes auditing the companies finances.* It's more likely they (the board) will meet a couple of times a year for an hour or two. They probably meet to determine the CEOs (and his staff's) compensation packages. Then this CEO travels to the corporations where members of his boards are themselves CEOs and sits on their board of directors to determine that CEOs compensation!
· It's a nice tight group across the corporate spectrum! [ ThePeople]

End of Secrecy Orwell's list of 'crypto-communists' to be released

The government has agreed to strip the final shred of secrecy from the leftwing author George Orwell's famous 54-year-old list of "crypto-communists" and put it in the public domain.
The Foreign Office is expected shortly to disgorge its copy of the document - until now held back as too sensitive. The public record office in Kew hopes to make the file openly available this summer.
· Timothy Garton Ash [Guardian of His Story]

Secrecy The Anti-information Administration

The Bush, Carr, Putin, you name it, administrations have a thing about secrecy; it can't get enough of it. Bit by bit, the administration have laid out policies curtailing the flow of information regarding fundamental activities of government.
· Alphabetical Order [ TomPaine]

AdWords Dancing With the Google Devil

Google's announcement of AdSense, a new program that enables publishers to serve text-based Google AdWords ads on their sites, is positioned as a grand opportunity for publishers to share in revenue generated by these ads. Instead it ought to send shivers down the spine of every publisher who counts on classifieds for income.
Google has the potential to do to newspapers (and others who sell business services classifieds off and online) what Monster.com and HotJobs.com did to newspapers with helped wanted ads: poach away that business.
· Cossak: Kazak [E&P ]

Media Moblogs Seen as a Crystal Ball for a New Era in Online Journalism

But futurist Howard Rheingold says the ultimate democratization of the media will not be about technological advances; rather, it will entail upholding old-fashioned standards to earn viewers' trust.
· Trust [ OJR]

Land of Queens Sunday Stories: Yes, They're Rednecks, & Big Bad Axemen

Brown, the primary colour of bulldust, described her culture shock at arriving in Brisbane to be confronted by suntanned Queenslanders who look like crustaceans decked out in floral prints and mirror sunglasses...
· Wealth is wasted on Queenslanders [Rupert Paper]
· 'Crazy' roo axed to death [ SMH]

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
- T.S. Eliot

There are no revolutions like the Internet. The Blue, Red, or Velvet Revolution, even revolutionary crossing of the Iron Curtain, pails next to this amazing initiative...

Infomaniacs of this rather fragile world, sadly peppered with liars & bullies, Unite!

Government Open Government Information Awareness

MIT just opened its Open Government Information Awareness site. The site offers a remarkable amount of information about all three branches of the federal government. The amount of information now at your fingertips is simply daunting. By way of example (and certainly not in limitation), the site gives a list of contributors to the campaigns of members of Congress, a detailed listing of the expenditures of those members, and their financial disclosure filings.
Well designed sites such as this raise any number of questions. For instance, given the proliferation of bloggers of all stripes (both in topic choice and political viewpoint) and the ready accessibility of information, the market for commercial alternatives, newspapers for instance, would seem to be seriously eroding.
· The implications are huge [OpenGovernment ]

Right to Know

The premise of GIA is that individual citizens have the right to know details about government, while government has the power to know details about citizens. Our goal is to develop a technology which empowers citizens to form a sort of intelligence agency; gathering, sorting, and acting on information they gather about the government. Only by employing such technologies can we hope to have a government 'by the people, and for the people.'

McKinley wanted to "seed" the site with such information to give people a sense of what was possible.

McKinley built two clever features into the system to help keep the information as accurate as possible. The first one enables users to rank the credibility of other contributors. The second feature automatically notifies the subject of a submission -- whether individual or organization -- and asks it to respond. They can confirm or deny the submission -- and denials are noted, though the submissions are not purged.

For instance, say a scandal breaks, but the politician in question is later exonerated because of a specific fact.
Users can poll the system to see if that fact was logged, and find out who contributed that fact, and when they did, without knowing their real name. They can then rank the credibility of that contributor, and ask the system to notify them if he or she makes further contributions in the future. Thus, they can learn whether they trust or mistrust a contributor, while the contributor still retains anonymity.

As more information gets added to the site over time -- from databases and from individuals -- the Open Government Information Awareness site has the potential to be a great source of ideas and data for journalists.
· I, for one, hope it catches on [ WashingtonPost]
Recent advances in information technology make possible new avenues for the public to participate in the development of government regulations.
· The Internet and Public Participation in Rulemaking [papers ]