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Archive for the 'Politics' Category
Rants’n Raves: Euro 2008 Football (soccer) championship
Been sitting around this afternoon watching the semifinals of the Euro 2008 football championship via the Internet (there is no post on this site how to use a proxy to watch German TV from the US - go look somewhere else). Have to admit that I normally never watch football or golf or TV in general since they’ve replaced most of the interesting stuff with game shows, but today I made an exception.
So I’m sitting here nibbling on Lieber’s Kosher Winkies (that’s what my Deli had for sweets - not bad anyway, but full of artificial flavors) and watching parts of that game - the Germans win and there’s that big huha going on, everybody’s celebrating - besides the Turks of course - and dancing people anywhere as if they would have contributed to the result.
Then what would you expect German TV to do - interview some players, the coach, your grand uncle who knows everything about soccer - NO WAY!
They go straight ahead for some political schmoozing and…
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Data-Visualization: Oil prices 1861-2008
If every “close encounter” with a petrol station these days gets you into a bad mood and you slowly start believing these gas prices are from another planet, this diagram might not be helping either.
Forbes Magazine brushed up a chart with data from the Commodity Research Bureau and the US Department of Commerce showing the development of oil prices from 1861 to 2008. Data is charted in real prices (constant 2008 Dollar) and nominal.
When you look at this diagram it shows…
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Nazi-Germany Anthem used at European Football championship
One event currently has, during evenings, swept almost half of Europe’s population off the streets (the other half is most likely watching it in so called public viewing zones) - the European Football championship.
Now this Monday, Swiss TV who together with Austrian TV for the two hosting nations Austria and Switzerland is transmitting the TV footage from the games, had a bit of a problem staying up to date with changes in neighboring Germany during the last 60 years. To be more precise it turned back time to the 1940s of Nazi Germany.
When the two teams at the beginning of the match between Germany and Austria were singing their National Anthems, Swiss TV used the verse for the German Anthem in its sub titles that was sung until the fall of the Third Reich.
The TV station mentioned in their apology, that it all happened by mistake. Officially the incident was blamed on two junior members of the TV team that have “copied the wrong text from the Internet“. And while these sub titles…
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US Credit Crisis: Fed borrowing shown as a chart
If you would like to see the “official version of how much money the Fed is pumping into banks and financial institutions recently, have a look at the chart below.
The gray shaded areas are times officially recognized as recessions. The underlying data is available at the St. Louis Fed web site together with a charting application that allows you to further customize the range and other parameters.
To better visualize the substantial change we have split the data into two charts:
The larger chart shows the borrowing from the FED for the period 1919 to 2007 and the smaller one data for 2008 only. As you can see during these almost 90 years borrowing remained continuously within a range of almost none to max 8 Billion USD per month.
Since the beginning of 2008 the numbers have drastically changed and are now at about 155 Billion USD per month. The monthly figures for 2008 in detail…
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USA: The never ending story of money motivated war crimes in Iraq continues
What BBC’s popular political TV magazine Panorama yesterday night called the greatest heist in history or Daylight Robbery seems now to be going into another round of new discoveries.
In the more than one hour long broadcast Panorama’s Jane Corbin tells us some of the stories of those who became rich from the war and those who stood up against the crimes and “got burned”.
…If you believe that such corruption happens by pushing around brown envelopes with money under the table, sorry, but that might just be a very small part of it. We have compiled a short list of the most common activities identified within Iraq below. Some of them have also been mentioned in the report of Panorama yesterday night…
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Quote of the day: Driving a car called Politics
American politics are much like driving. To go backward, put it in R. To go forward, put it in D.
anonymous, found on the Internet
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Quote of the day: Civic courage
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.
The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations.
Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, famous Russian dissident writer, Nobel prize and Templeton Prize winner, Harvard University address (1979)
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Data-Visualization: Visualizing Corporate America
Based on data from the SEC for 60,000 directors or high-level employees, Toby Segaran created this graphical network of major US companies that share board members or CEOs. A bit like a social network graph for companies.
Besides the relationship between the companies the diagram also visualizes…
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Humor: Make Love
Great compilation, lots of kisses and dances - well just to get you forget what politics was all about - or is this actually what it is about.
The last flick alone is worth watching - young G.W. is showing us one of the building blocks of New Republican thinking.
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Quote of the day: Blowing out torches
Blowing out torches is not an Olympic discipline yet - it does nevertheless require members of Olympic teams to participate
anonymous
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