December 2010
7 tags
Dec 31st
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Dec 31st
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Dec 31st
430 notes
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I don't make resolutions, but I do have some...
More international travel! (Hopefully satisfied with two months in Guatemala, but if I can make it happen, I’d love to also visit friends in London and potentially spend next Christmas somewhere interesting.) Keep volunteering with Coalition for the Homeless in NYC. Get more involved with the Amnesty International and STAND chapters at my school (easier when I’m not working 40 hours...
Dec 31st
4 tags
I Was Born Free: I was so befuddled by this... →
ohheybill: I was so befuddled by this article today, and I decided to become one of those crazy people who emails the writer. Here is what I came up with: Hey there Josh, I am really just so fascinated by this piece that you have written for the Post. I am curious about a few things. Obviously,… Guys, you totally need to read this. Because Bill is awesome.
Dec 31st
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“The lesson is that we should not dream of overnight breakthroughs, or allow...”
– Ban Ki-moon
Dec 31st
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United Nations Needed More Than Ever | smh.com.au →
esthet: The United Nations today leads what seems at times like a double life. Pundits criticise it for not solving all the world’s ills, yet people around the world are asking it to do more, in more places, than ever before - a trend that will continue in 2011. It is not hard to see why. Newspapers, television and the internet make clear the sheer scale of the need. Conflicts rage in too...
Dec 31st
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Dec 30th
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“For me it’s a revolution. The fact that the project to develop this vaccine was...”
– Dr. Cathy Hewison, MSF Medical Advisor in the MSF special report Ten Stories That Mattered in Access to Medicines in 2010 (via doctorswithoutborders)
Dec 30th
23 notes
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Ivory Coast on ‘Brink of Genocide,’ New UN... →
Ivory Coast is “on the brink of genocide,” according to the country’s new United Nations ambassador appointed by Alassane Ouattara, who is regarded by the UN, the African Union and the U.S. as the winner over incumbent Laurent Gbagbo in the Nov. 28 presidential election. Youssoufou Bamba, the Ouattara government’s first officially recognized envoy, said after presenting his credentials today in...
Dec 30th
23 notes
7 tags
Army edits its history of deadly battle of Wanat →
jonathan-cunningham: nwbtcw: History is written by the winners - and revisionism is an important part of letting us know how “good” those winners were. It’s rare to catch a glimpse of it in progress, but that’s exactly what Greg Jaffe has done for us in this Washington Post piece from today.  The Army’s official history of the battle of Wanat - one of the most intensely scrutinized...
Dec 30th
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Dec 30th
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Dec 30th
109 notes
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Wired (Poulsen, specifically) admits Lamo is full... →
jonathan-cunningham: Should I act surprised?  Or maybe just depressed that it took Greenwald’s hounding and explicit and repeated exposition of Lamo’s lies just to get the admission, and people STILL defend Wired and attack Greenwald?  Why are they still refusing to publish the full chat logs, which would help verify or refute the several inconsistencies in Lamo’s story about how he got...
Dec 30th
8 notes
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Dec 29th
99 notes
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Microcredit Loans Trigger Wave of Suicides in... →
abbyjean: more on the microcredit crisis in india. it’s a big problem.
Dec 29th
40 notes
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Suffer the Little Children  →
According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 42 percent of American children live in low-income homes and about a fifth live in poverty. It gets worse. The number of children living in poverty has risen 33 percent since 2000. For perspective, the child population of the country over all increased by only about 3 percent over that time. And, according to a 2007 Unicef report on child...
Dec 29th
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Dec 29th
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Next Year's Wars: The 16 brewing conflicts to... →
Across the globe today, you’ll find almost three dozen raging conflicts, from the valleys of Afghanistan to the jungles of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the streets of Kashmir. But what are the next crises that might erupt in 2011? Here are a few worrisome spots that make our list. The list: Côte d’Ivoire, Colombia, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Venezuela, Sudan, Mexico, Guatemala,...
Dec 29th
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“The bottom line from Hansen and Poulsen is that they still refuse to release any...”
– Glenn Greenwald (via azspot)
Dec 29th
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“We see the emerging opportunity to ‘snackify’ beverages and ‘drinkify’ snacks as...”
– Indra Nooyi - PepsiCo CEO This is pretty sick though.  We are moving ever closer to the society envisioned by WALL-E.  Liquified food.  Dumb, fat humans marching towards our extinction with a 40 oz. Slurpee and a straw.  Terrific. (via evangotlib) I’ll plagiarize Michael Pollan here…“Don’t eat...
Dec 29th
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Dec 29th
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Clooney, Google, UN team up to watch Sudan border →
A group founded by American actor George Clooney said Tuesday it has teamed up with Google, a U.N. agency and anti-genocide organizations to launch satellite surveillance of the border between north and south Sudan to try to prevent a new civil war after the south votes in a secession referendum next month. Clooney’s Not On Our Watch is funding the start-up phase Satellite Sentinel...
Dec 29th
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Why Cote D’Ivoire Matters →
The incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo lost a November 28 election to challenger Alasanne Ouatarra. Gbagbo is refusing to step down and is using his control of the army to foment violence, including direct assaults on the building in which Outarra has set up his government in waiting. This kind of election related violence is nothing new for Africa. A similar situation unfolded in Kenya in late...
Dec 29th
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Dec 29th
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Dec 29th
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Dec 29th
17 notes
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Dec 29th
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Dec 29th
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I feel like I survived the opening to a David...
Dec 28th
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“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in...”
– Eisenhower on the Opportunity Cost of Defense Spending (via wilwheaton)
Dec 27th
259 notes
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Dec 26th
294 notes
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I'm tolerating a lot of outrageous stuff from MK's...
I adore MK, and I appreciate having a place to go for Christmas, but I’m kind of thinking I might make other plans next year.
Dec 26th
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Dec 25th
2 notes
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Listenshelterfromthenorm: “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”...
Dec 25th
6 notes
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Dec 24th
2 tags
WatchWatch
thedailywhat: Lights Out: Apparently BC2010, the folks behind the stunning sci-fi short Modern Times, produced it “with no money, just a little time and a lot of passion.” If that’s true, then God help us all if they ever get their hands on some cash. See Also: Making of. [gizmodo.]
Dec 23rd
274 notes
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Dec 23rd
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Dec 23rd
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Dec 23rd
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Building a censor-resistant web with distributed... →
Aaron Swartz’s “A Censorship-Resistant Web,” is a good high-level view on distributed hash-cacheing, a fairly credible system for augmenting the web to make it harder to censor and spoof sensitive information: What’s nice about this system is that it gets you censorship resistance without introducing anything wildly new. There are already certificate authorities. There are already hash-to-URL...
Dec 23rd
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B of A snaps up $EXECNAMEsucks domains prior to... →
Bank of America has started snapping up “sucks” and “blows” domains for its executives in seeming preparation for the coming Wikileaks dirty-little-secrets-haemorrhage. In a stunning tribute to the financial acumen of BofA’s C-suite, they seem to have missed the fact that total combinations of $FIRSTNAME/INITIAL + $LASTNAME +...
Dec 23rd
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NY TIMES: Los Angeles schools to seek corporate... →
jjarichardson: inothernews: Yikes. Facing another potential round of huge budget cuts, the Los Angeles school board unanimously approved a plan on Tuesday night to allow the district to seek corporate sponsorships as a way to get money to the schools. The district is not the first to look for private dollars as a way to close public budget gaps — districts in Sheboygan, Wis., and...
Dec 23rd
35 notes
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Bradley Manning Speaks About His Conditions →
spytap: Bradley Manning speaks to his conditions in military prison. Bottom line: they’re pretty horrific.
Dec 23rd
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Dec 23rd
148 notes
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WatchWatch
Happy Holidays
Dec 22nd
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Dec 22nd
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Robert Reich: The Attack on American Education →
robertreich: Over the long term, the only way we’re going to raise wages, grow the economy, and improve American competitiveness is by investing in our people — especially their educations. You’ve probably seen the reports. American students rank low on international standards of educational performance…. Yes, yes, and yes. Read this.
Dec 22nd
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Dec 22nd
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“I am not going to sit on my ass as the events that affect me unfold to determine...”
– Cameron, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (via crookedindifference)
Dec 22nd
284 notes