George Soros, someone for whom I’ve cultivated a slight liking and very high regard, has some words of wisdom for the Bush administration on aspects of their Middle Eastern policy:
While other problem areas of the Middle East are freely discussed, criticism of our policies toward Israel is very muted indeed. The debate in Israel about Israeli policy is much more open and vigorous than in the United States. This is all the more remarkable because Palestine is the issue that more than any other currently divides the United States from Europe.
It’s a dangerous statement to make. Even when a taboo is plain for everyone to see, it still remains a taboo. Soros, Jewish himself, sets himself up as a target for scathing criticism from organisations like
AIPAC and the
American Jewish Committee. In his own words:
The case against those who disagree with Israel’s current policy is spelled out in detail by Alvin H. Rosenfeld in a pamphlet published by the American Jewish Committee. After reviewing the rise of new anti-Semitic currents, particularly in the Muslim world and Europe, Rosenfeld equates anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism and asserts that Jewish critics of Israeli policies reinforce both.
Soros’ defence of his views in light of his Jewish heritage makes for fascinating reading. [
New York Review of Books]
Popularity: 13% [?]
In the future, only smart people will play games. Or will gamers simply be the smartest people around? Ryuta Kawashima might become the father of the smartest gaming generation yet. The science could be junk, but the reception has been welcoming none the less.
Popularity: 42% [?]
Steve Martin, Mike Meyers, Jim Carrey, Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams, what became of them? These once great comedians with street cred to kill for have gone on to produce some of the greatest comedy stinkers known to man. The high-flying investigative journalists at Cracked have gone deep to find an answer to this question. This is their summation of the depths Mike Meyers sank to:
An actor mincing around in a cat costume terrifying children. And while the last half of that sentence is an admirable career goal, one could argue that you hardly need to embarrass yourself with a cat costume when a loaded gun could achieve the same result.
If you took all of Myers’ most annoying characters from his days on SNL, put them in a blender, poured the resulting acidic stomach bile into an ice cube tray, stuffed the resulting ice cubes into a sock and beat your mother to death with it until the sock was soft and dripping, you’d have no real idea what Myers’ career has become, but you would probably be wanted by the police.
The comedy gold, it would be fair to say, now rests with the Cracked staffer who wrote this.
Popularity: 17% [?]
New adventures in digital insurrection: an interesting Wikipedia entry is doing the rounds of the usual blogs, explaining how one level of copy protection on some bank notes works. The notes contain a very specific combination of five circles, dubbed EURion by the hacker who discovered them:
The EURion constellation is a pattern of symbols found on a number of banknote designs since about 1996. It is added to help software detect the presence of a banknote in a digital image. Such software can then block the user from reproducing banknotes to prevent counterfeiting using colour photocopiers.
The high-end colour copiers in use today might end up being the standard tomorrow, and that might mean endless hassles for consumers who need (perfectly legal) copies of documentation, in which this pattern happens to occur. But what would happen if we turned this around, and whipped up a rubber stamp of this pattern in very light ink? What if every document you could lay your hands on, official or not, ended up with this pattern all over it?
Imagine the bureaucratic nightmare of just a tenth of one percent of documents in a paper-based administration turning out to be copy protected. Perhaps this would finally demonstrate to those in government the impact of Digital Rights Management (DRM) measures on regular people, and show them why losing control of your information qualifies as a bad thing.
Popularity: 16% [?]
In a country where only 14% of adults believe the theory of natural selection to be the gospel truth, it comes as no surprise that a girl of 13 can still believe in Santa Claus. A girl described as an “incredibly bright child” should not need to have the non-existence of Santa spelled out: the mere improbability of an omnipresent and near omnipotent being who rewards good people and punishes the bad should be quite obvious to any teenager. Or perhaps there lies the rub. American belief in angels, demons and direct supernatural interference in everyday life has reached levels probably not seen since medieval times. To which degree is the average American still able to distinguish reality from fantasy, and, more importantly, how did this situation come about?
Popularity: 19% [?]
When your evening out ends in a news report like this, it’s a success in my book:
Reports say he was able to identify himself to police only after a rubber ball had been removed from his mouth.
Although poor Israeli Ambassador Tzuriel Refael probably considers it one of his lesser achievements in El Salvador.
Popularity: 10% [?]
Or, as it turns out, 10 things I did know about Wikipedia, but there’s no harm in reminding ourselves what makes this open information project show such massive promise. Such as their liberal copyright policy, Wikipedia’s infinite memory, and their support from small or dying languages. All of which combine to make this one of the truly worthy projects of the Internet Age.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Fox News clearly has a political agenda, something much stronger than a political bias, as proven by this excellent collection of screen captures on Pottersville. Republican scandals and defeat are given a positive spin, disgraced Republicans like Mark Foley are “mislabelled” as Democrats, and facts are simply distorted to hide the truth. Why are they allowed to get away with it? While more democratic broadcast media are regulated into extinction, why are the pushers of newsporn given a free ride?
Popularity: 14% [?]
