Fearmonger In Chief. Bush was the principal author—along with his straight-shooting vice president—and now he is hoisted by his own fear-mongering propaganda. The basic hysteria was invented from risks of terrorism, enlarged ridiculously by the president’s open-ended claim that we are endangered everywhere and anywhere—he decides where. Anyone who resists that proposition is a coward or, worse, a subversive. We are enticed to believe we are fighting a new Cold War. But are we? People are entitled to ask. Bush picked at their emotional wounds after 9/11 and encouraged them to imagine endless versions of even-larger danger. What if someone shipped a nuke into New York Harbor? Or poured anthrax in the drinking water? OK, a lot of Americans got scared, even people who ought to know better. Read the rest of this entry »
At Berkeley theology school, evangelicals advise on using media. “Electronic Christian Media” has been taught before at Berkeley’s Holy Hill campus, but the difference this semester is that Heller, a politically moderate, interdenominational Christian, has recruited nationally known evangelical Christians as guest lecturers. Each guest will show the course’s 17 students how evangelical congregations have mushroomed with new and younger believers in the last decade, in part by putting down hymnals full of 150-year-old songs and picking up digital video cameras.
Less Freedom, Less Speech. In 1989, in two speeches in Austria, Irving said, among much else, that only 74,000 Jews died of natural causes in work camps and millions were spirited to Palestine after the war. An arrest warrant was issued. Last November Irving was arrested when he came to Austria to address some right-wing students. Last week, while Europe was lecturing Muslims about the virtue of tolerating free expression by Danish cartoonists, Irving was sentenced to three years in prison. Read the rest of this entry »
When writing truth is a crime – Los Angeles Times. Arab journalists and their counterparts throughout the Muslim world willing to speak up at all deserve the full measure of their Western colleagues’ support not only because they are defending one of the fundamental principles that make a civil society possible, but also — and most important — because they are agents of transformative hope. Read the rest of this entry »
A Failure of the Press. We two come from different political and philosophical perspectives, but on this we agree: Over the past few weeks, the press has betrayed not only its duties but its responsibilities. To our knowledge, only three print newspapers have followed their true calling: the Austin American-Statesman, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Sun. What have they done? They simply printed cartoons that were at the center of widespread turmoil among Muslims over depictions of the prophet Muhammad. These papers did their duty.
DMCA axes sites discussing Mac OS for PCs. Apple Computer appears to have invoked the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to stop the dissemination of methods allowing Mac OS X to run on chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. The chatter at the OSx86 Project was stifled Friday after the forum was served with a notice under the DMCA, according to a posting on the site.
This strongly suggests that Apple is using the DMCA to stop even a discussion of how to use its new operating system. The DMCA itself is bad enough, but abusing an already bad law would only make matters worse.
The company has a long history of challenging speech. This looks like yet another unsavory example. Read the rest of this entry »
We are staying at a hotel that offers broadband Internet connections in the rooms. The daily price is not cheap, to put it mildly, but that’s a small irritation next to the trick the hotel and its access provider — an outfit called iBAHN — play on people who travel with more than one laptop: requiring a separate signup for each computer rather than a rate covering the room.
Unfortunately, this is a fairly common scheme, designed to extract every last penny from people who are already paying through the teeth. I let the iBAHN “customer support” person know how I felt about this. He was totally indifferent, but at least he didn’t deny it. I also told a hotel manager that this was the kind of thing travelers especially loathe. He didn’t seem terribly interested, either. Read the rest of this entry »
The cartoon crisis which has left embassies ablaze and sparked riots from Beirut to Bangkok and Jarkarta was a set-up job, planned and executed by a group of Muslim leaders from Denmark in concert with leading lights of the Islamic world. The conspirators used supremely inflammatory phony cartoons never published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten to gin up a campaign of violence and intimidation against Denmark, the EU, and the West. Read the rest of this entry »
Surely it is those without a sense of humor and justice, those that threaten violence because they are so easily offended, that we must demand peace and tolerance from. When did outrage to such simple and easy provocation ever justify our fear and insincerity?
OSx86 Project: Adobe: “Universal? What’s That?” But in light of their announcement yesterday that we may not see Universal apps like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Illustrator, and the rest until 2007, it would seem that they have been nowhere to be found during the switch. Since Adobe knows that the millions of creatives who use Macs at work would at least need Photoshop, couldn’t they at least switch one or two apps over and then give us the suite next year?
My impression is that Adobe has been shifting its focus strongly toward Windows, and has been doing so for some time. Apple is competing with some of Adobe’s products, too.
I think this is a strategic error by Adobe, but it’s theirs to make.