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Last week the world was again ’stunned’ by leaked documents on wikileaks. This time it was documents that detailed the war in Afghanistan. These documents show that, by matter of course, the war is more brutal and ‘dirty’ than told to the public (in the USA, anyway). Who is utterly shocked? No body. But I’m… not shocked, but still suprised how little effect this seems to have on everyday news…

I think this headline of CNN is telling. Not the US is shocked, but Afghanistan… What the fuck? Why aren’t Americans crying out to their goverment that they do not want to be lied to anymore?

Salon Aricle: The WikiLeaks Afghanistan leak

It is amazing to see that predicting the reaction is so very easy:

It’s not difficult to foresee, as Atrios predicted, that media “coverage of the latest leak will be about whether or not it should have been published,” rather than about what these documents reveal about the war effort and the government and military leaders prosecuting it.

Some commenter tries to explain:

You know how this will go. They’ll condemn WikiLeaks, they’ll soft peddle the import of the leaked materials as in “we’re aware mistakes have been made” but “we’re in the process of correcting them” and “it’s still absolutely essential for America’s safety and security that we stay the course and not cut and run” . . . blah, blah, blah, blah.

And it will work because as you said the vast majority of Americans are disconnected from the actual human cost, they can’t conceive of the moral issues at play because they think in comic book morality narratives, and they can’t possibly compute the financial cost v. theoretical benefits (or more accurately the fantasy that there any benefits) because they are too busy following the gossip that passes as news in this country.

This comment may very well be right. But I’m stunned by the lack of … outrage by most of the people. It does not help my trust in democracy…

The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.

Churchill is supposed to have said this. I’m afraight he is very right…

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This is, in a a way, a very sad story…

The bills for his seven years of medical care totaled $618,616, almost two-thirds of which was for his final 24 months. Still, no one can say for sure if the treatments helped extend his life.

Whole story here.

It is a tale about the spiraling costs of health care – everywhere in the western world. It is a almost impossible weighting of (somewhat) extending live against extreme costs. When are you spending too much on a life? Who could make a decision like this? Should you even try to do this? Or should the government step in? I don’t know. But it is a problem this is fast increasing, and it will not go away. We need to solve this, one way or another…

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How do people even come up with stuff like this?

Similarly, students at Harriton High School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania just discovered that school officials had given laptops to students to take home with remotely-activated webcams, that could be used to take photos in student’s homes and transmit them back to school officials. Incredibly, this was discovered not by students or their parents examining the laptops, but because school officials used the feature to take a photo of a student in his bedroom, and then confronted him about “inappropriate” behavior, not considering that the students and their parents might consider it “inappropriate” that the school snuck spy cams into their bedrooms. (The school has issued a denial claiming, “At no time did any high school administrator have the ability or actually access the security-tracking software” — which doesn’t seem to make sense, since the lawsuit was filed in the first place because the student was told by the assistant principal that the webcam had caught him engaging in “inappropriate behavior.”) What was the school thinking? Probably, they were thinking, “These are minors, we can do what we want.” If their student clientele had been comprised of adults, they never would have dreamed that they could confront a student about behavior in their room that they captured with a hidden camera. (Ironically, the school may end up in more trouble for spying on minors, as this editorial argues, since the school officials may now be guilty of recording and possessing child porn, depending on what the cameras “captured” in the students’ rooms!)

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It always amazes me that people even think they can get away with it. And what kind of a sick basterd do you need to be to watch what those cameras transmitted? Does anyone sue the school for this?

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Very thought-provoking piece on the Huffingtonpost:

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Semi-quote:

So where does that take us? Information is available and so are solutions. And where does that leave us? It strikes me, that with so much knowledge, we still don’t know better. If the world is not changing could it be because people are not changing?

This is what troubles me a about a lot of videos from TED, or many other interesting post/blogs/whatever. The trouble is not by any definition that we don’t know what should be done, or what needs to be done or even how to do it. The trouble seems to be that ‘we’ are just not doing it.

So the question should be more about: how can we pursuade people to start doing the right things? Of course, the trouble starts with defining what the ‘right thing’ is. And that is where most efforts will stop, because people will not even agree on what the right thing is. So that moves the problem again: how can you get people to subscribe to a problem?

Given the recent experience with the ‘Climate-gates’ and all the problems and escapes you see people using to try to wiggle out of this problem, I’m not very hopefull at all. People will deny a problem even if they know it exists if denying it will give them something they value more than solving the problem.

Again, the problem moves: how can you shift the burden of not solving the problem to the people that should be able to solve it, but don’t. And again, recent events (ie: the credit-crises) does not give me a lot of hope that this will happen. There, the exact opposite happens. The people who created the problem go more or less unhindered, and can simply continue doing what they always did and what created the problem in the first place.

Still, I think this might be the only way forward: start burdening people who can actually change things with the problem. That will lead to solutions.

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“She is someone who can make a difference.”

What difference? Don’t have a clue…!

It is just scary just like I told a friend yesterday. TV is so very much about the picture, that no one cares about what you say anymore. It is just mindbogglingly true… :-(

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It has been shown before that learning from the past is hard – very hard. But that is is this hard… I would not have guessed. Amazon is getting into the digital download business, both with movies and with books. But the prices they ask are, simply, outrageous. Check this out:

You can buy the DVD, or download it. Of course, when you buy the DVD, you get to loan it out to a friend, you get maybe a few extra’s on the DVD, etc. When you download this, you need to store it yourself, back it up, use your internetconnection to download it, and don’t have the luxury to view it on your TV. Figures that you pay more to get less!! :-(

Same thing with the Kindle:

As you can see here, the Kindle edition costs exactly as much as the paperback edition! Amazon, while I like shopping with you, I like money even better. Digital books are going the way of digital music if you keep this up. If I get a digital book, I get nothing more than a (small!) textfile. (Yeah, I know, I get stiffening DRM as well, but let’s keep things simple here!) I expect to pay at the most half for that! As long as you keep charging prices like this, very few people will buy the book electronically. But lots more people will be find out about electronic books. And start downloading them at a massive scale. Don’t think people will not do it. They will. And you will have brought it on yourself!

These industries seem bend on doing things the same way the music industry did. And see where they got to….

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As a atheist, it strikes me again and again how the church does not answer any questions. They circumvent them. As if the rescuing of a few jews, however commendable, negates the effect of decades of antisemitism before.. and so on, and so on… :-(

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I think the following article is spot-on:

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Many of the people putting us in our recession at the moment never had to really, really, do something for anything. They are like spoiled children. This morning I was sitting next to 2 young men in the train, and I was strongly reminded of them reading this article. They were the prototype of the young men who have everything coming their way. Never had any kind of doubt that the next paycheck would be more than the previous. Completely unfazed by the fact that they flew all over the globe for their jobs, of course business class. They could have not been any older than 35, yet they where both in their second (bought) home. And they thought it was only natural, logical, and of course, fully deserved – some way….

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The music industry is once again trying to kill itself…

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It is trying to force Apple to pay, even for samples. Just keep on doing this, and you might make a few $$$ more – just before even the top-selling artists will leave you….

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