Last Straw

Ahh, yes, there’s nothing like a little American exceptionalism to get one going in the morning.
According to Reuters, Colonel Greg Julian, a U.S. military spokesman in Kabul, has been complaining that the Taliban is violating international law by parading a captured U.S. soldier on camera.
It seems Colonel Julian didn’t get the memo: the U.S. tore [...]

Amazon has remotely wiped a book that people had already purchased for the Kindle (an ebook reader).
As John Gruber notes:
It’s one thing to stop selling them. It’s something else entirely to remove them from the Kindles of those who already bought them. That this happened with1984, of all the books that have ever been written, [...]

Kottke’s giant Apollo 11 post. I’ve spent the last couple of hours or so reading it and checking out all the great links.
(via Daring Fireball)

“Blair in frame to become first EU president, says Glenys Kinnock.”
A war criminal as president of Europe? I think the accompanying comments tell the real story.

Afghanistan is spun as a war we should be fighting.
In fact, a fact long forgotten by the Western media and others involved in the invasion of Afghanistan is that, on 14 October, 2001, the Taliban publicly offered to hand over Osama bin Laden to a third country, provided the U.S. halted the illegal bombing of [...]

Chris Walker, writing to the The Herald (webpage removed):

It’s one of life’s more savage ironies, but one which has become drearily familiar, that your headline “Death toll rises in Afghanistan” (Leader, The Herald, July 11) means British military fatalities.

These are given piquancy because they exceed similar losses incurred in Iraq. Thus the headline.

As a matter of fact, combined, they approximate the loss of Iraqi civilian lives only last week—repeat, week—in Mosul and Baghdad. But that’s how war’s rhythms (and its successes and failures) are calibrated. That hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis have died since 2001 hardly raises an eyebrow, far less engendering a headline. But, then, death “over there” was held to be one of the reasons for invasion, and for stopping it “over here”, on the streets of Leeds, London or Glasgow. Or so it is said. Thus death over there, excepting ours, is inconsequential in our mindset: even a million deaths by invasion and occupation.

Someone’s cottoned onto the fact that they’re being conned:

[The town of] Bundanoon’s battle against the bottle has been brewing for years, ever since a Sydney-based beverage company announced plans to build a water extraction plant in the town. Residents were furious over the prospect of an outsider taking their water, trucking it up to Sydney for processing and then selling it back to them. The town is still fighting the company’s proposal in court.

Then in March, Huw Kingston, who owns the town’s combination cafe and bike shop, had a thought: If the town was so against hosting a water bottling company, why not ban the end product?

On Wednesday, 356 people turned up for a vote — the biggest turnout ever at a town meeting.

Only two people voted no. One said he was worried banning bottled water would encourage people to drink sugary drinks. The other was Geoff Parker, director of the Australasian Bottled Water Institute — which represents the bottled water industry.

Costa Rica is the greenest and happiest country in the world, according to a new list that ranks nations by combining measures of their ecological footprint with the happiness of their citizens.1

And, surprise surprise, unlike places like Britain and the U.S. (which figure low on the index) Costa Rica is run by left-wingers not self-serving right-wingers, [...]

Abel & Cole have upgraded their website and added new lines of products. Great website. Great company. Highly recommended.