A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
Human Rights Watch have a public letter to U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, asking the Bush administration to strengthen it’s policy on China’s human rights record specifically with regard to the Beijing Olympics. I think that history will not look kindly on U.S. and European tolerance of the human rights abuses that are taking place in China.
Valentin Zacharias has been experimenting with Yahoo! Pipes and SPARQL, with a web service to make easy calls to SPARQL Protocol endpoints using JSON. Neat.
Juan Cole has a list of the top ten myths about Iraq in 2007. I’d also recommend Professor Cole’s recent appearance on Radio Open Source discussing how Napoleon’s war in Egypt mirrors what is currently going on in Iraq under US occupation.
Ed Brayton has an excellent post up on his unfortunate reluctance in supporting Ron Paul’s campaign. I agree (theoretically, of course, I’m a British citizen and therefore have only an academic interest in US politics). You know how Ron Paul could win? Forget all the conspiracy shit and all the “OMG, the Jews are using con-trails and Bilderburg’s puppet governments to cover up the truth about WTC and Roswell!” people who listen to Alex Jones. Those people are unhinged cranks, and not a good basis on which to build a political campaign.
