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Month June 2009

Mistaking hope for knowledge

I’ve been fol­low­ing a debate between Sam Har­ris and Philip Ball, in which Har­ris takes Ball and Nature magazine to task over their capit­u­la­tions to reli­gion. In one pas­sage I was reminded of one of many dis­cus­sions I’ve had over the years with my mother about reli­gion. In this par­tic­u­lar dis­cus­sion she became very dis­tressed and…

Neda’s death used selectively as a propaganda tool

Neda Agha-Soltan is a young women from Iran who was shot dead while protest­ing against repres­sion in Iran. She has a page on Wiki­pe­dia. Pho­tos and video and of her death have been widely broad­cast by the West­ern media, with copi­ous amounts of faux sym­pathy. She deserves our sym­pathy because she appears to be a…

Video of women bundled to ground for requesting badge number

The Guard­ian has video of two women being bundled to the ground by police for dar­ing to ask a police officer for his badge number.

Another theory on Iran’s presidential election

I was sur­prised today to find one of my favour­ite tech­no­logy com­ment­at­ors, John Gruber of Dar­ing Fire­ball, declar­ing that no doubt remains as to whether the elec­tion was fraudulent. Really, because a theo­cratic gov­ern­ment is crack­ing down on dis­sid­ents? If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my exper­i­ences in the Middle East it is that all is not…

Blair’s scared he’ll end up in the dock for war crimes

Looks like Blair is run­ning scared he’ll end up in the dock for war crimes. Not sur­pris­ing con­sid­er­ing the lengths he went to to help bring about the war of aggres­sion against Iraq.

Free Ezra Nawi

Sign and send a mesage: freeezra.org Join Naomi Klein, Neve Gor­don, Noam Chom­sky and thou­sands of oth­ers and tell Israel not to jail Ezra Nawi, one of Israel’s most cour­ageous human rights act­iv­ists. His crime? He tried to stop a mil­it­ary bull­dozer from des­troy­ing the homes of Palestinian Bedouins in the South Hebron region. Nawi, a…

Another whitewash hardly surprising

If Gor­don Brown were to open the way for a truly inde­pend­ent and open inquiry into the inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Iraq he would quite likely find him­self in the dock for war crimes.

Prefer more than a caricature of North Korea?

Look no fur­ther than Media Lens: How much do you know about the increased polit­ical ten­sions on the Korean pen­in­sula? The answer, even for dili­gent read­ers of the main­stream press, is likely to be ‘not much’. In place of ser­i­ous, pen­et­rat­ing ana­lysis the pub­lic has been sold a car­toon ver­sion of events based on a…

Why so many things are badly designed

Jason Snell of Mac­world on why Apple excels at product design: Apple excels at cre­at­ing products that the gen­eral pub­lic likes because the com­pany is driven by design, not by engin­eer­ing. Most tech products  —  heck, most products in gen­eral  —  aren’t as good as they can be because they’re put together by the people with the tech­nical knowledge…

How the UK break EU voting rules

No Right Turn on how the UK breaks pro­por­tion­al­ity and EU vot­ing rules: I’ve been crunch­ing some num­bers on the UK’s European Par­lia­ment elec­tion res­ults. And des­pite the sys­tem they use sup­posedly being “pro­por­tional”, they show sig­ni­fic­ant disproportionalities.

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