micah holmquist's irregular thoughts and links |
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Welcome to the musings and notes of a Cadillac, Michigan based writer named Micah Holmquist, who is bothered by his own sarcasm. Please send him email at micahth@chartermi.net. Holmquist's full archives are listed here.
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Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution) Aljazeera.Net English Blogs that for one reason or another Holmquist would like to read on at least something of a regular basis (always in development) Thivai Abhor |
Sunday, February 01, 2004
Biggest Win of Season So Far With this win, MSU is now 5-2 in conference play and 10-8 on the season. It seems to once again be clear that doubting Izzo is a mistake. *** Amnesty International on China's policy toward the internet (January 28 report). No doubt, due to a link from Drudge, the biggest news out of this report is that Microsoft has sold some "[t]echnology," in the words of Nick Mathiason of The Observer, "to the Chinese government has been used by Beijing to censor the internet, and resulted in the jailing of its political opponents." Reminds me of a certain other set of business dealings. There is a tendency to see "technology" as leading to dystopia and another tendency that sees it leading to utopia. Both are incorrect as the impact of "technology" ultimately results from how the economic and political systems of the world use it. Moreover it is important to keep in mind that some of the worst atrocities in human history resulted from modern and post-modern conditions and ideologies. We can be the monster just as surely as not. *** In a January 29 story that is quite related, Agence France Presse writes: "Up until now, space has been militarized in the sense that military operations have made a lot of use of satellites ... either for communications, for navigation, for eavesdropping or for surveillance," Therese Delpech, the director for strategic affairs at the Atomic Energy Commission in Paris, told AFP in Stockholm.It is almost, if not completely, pointless to try to stop the "weaponization" of space as such because so long as war and military struggles exist, it is foolish to think that the conflict can be kept out of this arena. If it can be used to kill, somebody will use it for that purpose is the undeclared motto of humanity. *** "The Israeli army is under growing pressure to explain a series of deaths of Palestinians in a three-week operation in the West Bank city of Nablus. According to witnesses and medical evidence, at least two of the 19 deaths during the operation have the hallmarks of executions," Conal Urquhart writes in today's Observer *** In Friday's Guardian, Marie Phillips writes,
*** *** And you thought humanism was bad! *** |