Good luck, America.
The Huffington Post | Happy New Year: You Can Now Be Detained Indefinitely
WASHINGTON — Indefinite military detention of Americans became the law of the land Saturday, as President Barack Obama signed a defense bill that codified that authority, even as he said he would not use it. (read more)
Photo Essay - North Korea - The Land Of No Smiles
With the death of Kim Jong Il, the eyes of the world are very much on North Korea at the moment.
What goes on inside North Korea is a mystery to many of us. This is a photo essay which was published online on Foreign Policy two years ago, which gives some sense of life there.
Foreign Policy put some context on the photos:
“Renowned documentary photographer Tomas van Houtryve entered North Korea by posing as a businessman looking to open a chocolate factory. Despite 24-hour surveillance by North Korean minders, he took arresting photographs of Pyongyang and its people — images rarely captured and even more rarely distributed in the West. They show stark glimmers of everyday life in the world’s last gulag.”
How Fox News is helping Barack Obama's re-election bid
Excellent piece in The Guardian last week, showing how Fox News is skewing the GOP Primary to its liking, and in the process creating a highly beatable candidate for the General Election, unattractive to the centre.
Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it is not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world.
It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizon.
Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy that things are going well or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. It is hope above all which gives us the strength to live and try new things.
Václav Havel (1936-2011)
This is one of my favourite inspirational quotes, and the man who spoke these words has now passed. Rest in peace.
Occupy Legoland…and other stories from the news in Lego in 2011
See the full gallery on Flickr, from The Guardian.
Mother Jones magazine on Tumblr: Two quotes on North Korea.
From WaPo’s obituary of dead dictator Kim Jong Il:
The leader, reputed to have had a taste for cigars, cognac and gourmet cuisine, was believed to have had diabetes and heart disease.
From PBS’s report last week on famine in North Korea:
About 60 percent of North Korea’s 24.5…
Classified documents reveal US military mindset at time of Haditha massacre
This is shocking stuff.
When the fog of war descends, during the chaos, these kind of atrocities are going to happen. Although he didn’t leak this specific incident, that fact that Bradley Manning is looking like he will end up in jail, and George W. Bush, who facilitated what happened in Iraq, is free is a travesty.
This massacre, at Haditha, Iraq, in 2005, is described in today’s Irish Times (and orginally published in the New York Times):
That morning, a military convoy of four vehicles was heading to an outpost in Haditha when one of the vehicles was hit by a roadside bomb.
Several marines got out to attend to the wounded, including one who eventually died, while others looked for insurgents who might have set off the bomb. Within a few hours 24 Iraqis – including a 76-year-old blind man and children between the ages of three and 15 – were killed, many inside their homes.
Townspeople contended that the marines overreacted to the attack and shot civilians, only one of whom was armed. The marines said they thought they were under attack.
Chief Warrant Officer KR Norwood, who received field reports on the day from Haditha and briefed commanders, testified that 20 dead civilians was not unusual.
“I meant it wasn’t remarkable, based off of the area I wouldn’t say remarkable, sir,” he said. “And that is just my definition. Not that I think one life is not remarkable, it’s just … ”
An investigator asked the officer: “I mean remarkable or noteworthy in terms of something that would have caught your attention where you would have immediately said, ‘got to have more information on that. That is a lot of casualties.’ ”
“Not at the time, sir,” the officer testified.
Pump Up The Volume - A History of House Music
I discovered this ten year old documentary showing the history of house music a little while ago on the excellent Brain Pickings blog.
The documentary was originally broadcast on UK television, but is now available on You Tube in thirteen parts. It follows the origins of house from it’s beginnings in Chicago and Detroit, and it’s further development in the UK and beyond. The only disappointing this is that it stops in 2001. It would be interesting to see an updated version of the series, taking it from 2001 to 2011.
The documentary is well put together, manages to interview many of the key players in the development of house music, and of course has a wonderful soundtrack.
