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Archive for the 'Politics' Tag
50 post(s) are associated with this Tag
Video: Obama Rickrolling
Is it April 1st or already November 5th.
Well I guess it had to be done. Senator Obama RickRolled - BarackRoll’d (like a rickroll… only Presidential)…
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Internet warfare: All Georgia Government web sites down
About a month ago the website of Georgia’s President was under a distributed denial of service attack and offline for some time. Based on forensic analysis it became clear that the root of these attacks were to be found in Russia.
Now with a state of war declared as it seems all official Government web sites of Georgia are not responding, not reachable or do not display any content…
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i-Patriot, Censorship, Internet 2 and the day the routers died
Last week again saw strong discussions on the changes happening on the Internet, this time fueled by an video where Lawrence Lessig provided insides on an potential i-Patriot Act ante portas - similar to the 9/11 crashing of civil rights. Watch the “video” or read “the highlights” of it - the points raised make a lot of sense in the context of the changes seen the last 12/24 months.
When listening to the discussions it reminded us of the song “The day the routers died” from the RIPE 55 conference. While definitely not intended to be political in the context of an i-Patriot act it gets a completely new twist (particularly some of the verses)…
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Sexual assault in the US military
When you are just starting to believe that you have heard all the mind blowing stories about the US military in Iraq, what their contractors do, the enormous corruption and abuse going on at that place and there can’t be anything worse in their closets anymore you see a story like this.
GAO released a report last week and the CNN has written an editorial on the report and the House panel investigating the way the cases are handled. Rep. Jane Harman, D-California said that her “jaw dropped” when she was told that 4 of 10 women serving in the US military have been raped or otherwise sexually harassed by “fellow” US soldiers. And the GAO report indicates that…
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RIP: Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Much can be said about Alexander Solzhenitsyn who died this weekend in Russia, and many will certainly do. With a courageous person like him having left us a few words by us might be allowed as well. He was…
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Politics: The opening statements of the “Constitutional Limits of Executive Power” committee
The House Judiciary Committee yesterday held a hearing titled “Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitations”.
While almost every speaker tried to express that this is “not a Bush impeachment hearing” it was setup to examine legal and legislative responses to allegations of misconduct and expansions of executive powers by the Bush administration.
In short there has been at least a committee put into place to speak up on these outrageous things that have deteriorated the standing and reputation of the US around the globe.
While we do understand the anger of the millions of Americans, particularly of those who lost their husbands, wives and children in a “war” for Oil and Trillions of Dollars “for the boys” and all those who have lost their homes, life’s work, pensions or possibility to get looked after when their ill, unfortunately history is telling us a rather crude and sad reality.
Many impeachment movements also of the very few (17) in the history of the US that…
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Image: Where is Waldo with Obama
Yesterday Sen. Barack Obama held a speech in Berlin and 200,000 were listening in enthusiastically.
For those who want to get an impression how 200,000 people look like from the viewpoint of the speaker we found an excellent shot at Flickr.
Note that the image only shows the front rows of…
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CNCI - A new cybersecurity program
It’s G.W. Bush’s single largest request for funds in the 2009 intelligence budget and its a “highly classified, multiyear, multibillion-dollar project“.
It goes by the name CNCI aka “Cyber Initiative” and the director National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, calls it a pro-active measure to protect the US Government computing infrastructure and in the future potentially also the computing environments of (US) private entities.
While the secrecy surrounding the program does not even provide specific funding figures or a breakdown, the House Intelligence committee in its report on the program “recognizes” that “…it will be imperative that the government also take into account the interest and concerns of private citizens, the US information technology industry, and other elements of the private sector…“.
They call it a public-private partnership and outlined how the oversight should happen by a panel of lawmakers, executive branch officials and some private sector representatives. And the House has already approved 90% of the requested budget.
So far so good, sounds all nice and positive - a fresh start, “unlike any model currently existing“, well, well, well if your memory in that branch of IT goes back long enough (10 years+) then you will say together with us: Nice words but we have heard them before and when we acted within the scheme we got heavily burned and a bunch of gov. crooks around the world filled their pockets with Billions of Dollars.
So if its a “fresh start” back up your words with actions!
Demonstrate that you have learned from the past mistakes and…
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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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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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