This is very good news. At current count Pakistan has blocked 450 websites on the Internet.

I enjoy the logic the used. Originally just the offending page was blocked, but then lawyers pushed to block the whole website because the website allowed that page to exist.

I would implore the government to block ALL of the Internet, because the Internet brought you the website that brought you the webpage. In turn you might also want to take away all of the computers as well, because they brought you the Internet that brought you the website that brought you the webpage.

You can see where I am going with this. Soon, Pakistan will be reduced to basic rock tools. Hopefully all other Islamic cultures will follow suit as well. This will make the world a safer place.

from MSNBC:

“The Facebook page “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!” encourages users to post images of the prophet on May 20 to protest threats made by a radical Muslim group against the creators of the animated American television series “South Park” for depicting Muhammad in a bear suit during an episode earlier this year.

“Public sentiment has been growing,” said Siraj, the Nayatel CEO. “The government was monitoring it and there seemed to be public unrest, so it had to take a decision.”

In an attempt to respond to public anger over the Facebook dispute, the Pakistani government ordered Internet service providers in the country to block the controversial page Tuesday.

But members of the Islamic Lawyers Forum asked the Lahore High Court on Wednesday to order the government to fully block Facebook because it allowed the page to be posted in the first place.

The regulatory body said it has blocked more than 450 Internet links containing offensive material, but it is unclear how many of the links were blocked in the last two days.”

If you have ever played the game Half-Life then you are aware of the storyline of the bespectacled  scientist with a goatee battling aliens and creatures not of this earth. You know the nerdiness & sheer fun of not using a gun in the game, but rather a crow bar as a weapon against the aliens.

If you are a nerd or science buff then you are aware of the Large Hadron Collider. You may have read more than one alarmist comment on how the LHC will cause the end of the world, open up a rift in time, and/or a great many other evil things.

Read on, laugh and admire how awesome this is:

These people are geeks. And they are the Internet’s unofficial hall monitors.

This is not an insult; it’s a badge of honor. Geeks can help give context to the scientific community. Thanks to the Internet, scientists find themselves and their work increasingly scrutinized, absorbed and distributed by legions of geeks worldwide.

Scientists have this incredible, laser-vision approach to specific disciplines, but it takes a geek to make the less-obvious connections. Just as geeks spotted an unassuming electrical engineer in the background of a publicity photo and made a connection to the “Half-Life” character, their cultural depth is different from that of the scientists. And the geeks comfortably straddle both worlds.

It was the geeks who grasped the importance of the LHC, who knew the questions to ask about the project, and who made winking connections to all manner of science fiction, from creation of out-of-control black holes to time travel jokes to science fiction references and other video game references.

Just as the Air Force was completing their project:

“The Air Force team ordered the hardware, spent days unboxing it and imaging each unit to run Linux, and then… Sony removed the Linux install option a couple months later. (One can only imagine what happened to those 2,000 PS3 controllers and other unneeded accessories.)”

Very interesting article.

How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it?

A few months back, four geeky college students… decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.

They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support.

They announced their project on April 24. They reached their $10,000 goal in 12 days

“‘The underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well’s channel.’ It’s so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities, and it only didn’t work once.”

I am no all encompassing Obama supporter, but I hate the extreme views taken by the left and right, to the exclusion of sane sensible moderate thought.

So let me dismantle the NRO idea that Obama “dislikes” the free movement of information if he can’t control it (thereby hating technology) and get to the heart of this NRO article: net neutrality.

NRO: “President Obama’s disdain for new media has become so consistent that it is hard to dismiss as mere posturing.”

COUNTER: Dis-proven by the writer himself who says in the next sentence “This is all the more ironic because Obama’s political movement supposedly mastered the new art of communication.” Obama used a number of new technologies in the campaign as did and do the right as well. But perhaps he means that he has been consistent only since taking office, okay, lets go on then.

NRO: “Obama has sounded downright nostalgic about the old newspaper era, all the while warning that the new communication revolution is producing more information than people can digest.” The writer calls this a criticism, and shows an Obama quote saying “information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.”

COUNTER: Yes, Obama is right about the amount of data and the amount of distraction. Do you disagree, NRO, that the sheer amount of data available on the Internet cannot be digested by a single person? Do you honestly think that things such as facebook are not distractions?

NOTE: I disagree with Obama on his last point, that the Internet and technology is a source of “empowerment”. It is a source of whatever we want to make it a source of. Hence gaming, hence the distractions. So I will give a POINT to NRO.

NRO:  Obama continued to share is opinion of free flow of information with this quote, which the writer obviously disagrees with: “part of what’s different today is the 24-hour news cycle and cable TV and blogs and all this. They focus on the most extreme elements in both sides. They can’t get enough of conflict. It’s catnip to the media right now. And so the easiest way to get 15 minutes of fame is to be rude to somebody. In that environment, I think it makes it more difficult to solve the problems the American people sent us here to solve.”

COUNTER: Who in their right mind would disagree with this? Have you WATCHED the news channels lately? Have you read the BLOGS? I mean seriously, the “news” media is an exercise in yellow journalism these days, either tilted left or right. There is hardly any center any more. But then, the NRO comes from a SLANT itself, so it can hardly be objective, can it?

NRO: “when Obama nominated his solicitor general, Elena Kagan, to the Supreme Court, Kagan did not speak to the media, new or old — though the White House released an “interview” with her on its official website.”

COUNTER: Tell me the last time, dear NRO, when any administration made a Supreme Court nominee available for interview prior to Senate hearing. This from CBS news: “it’s worth noting that it seems to be unprecedented for the nominee to be heard from at all before the confirmation hearings, other than in the initial introduction and in brief photo ops with senators.”

NRO: says that Obama missed the “old days” when “three liberals — say Cronkite, Reasoner, and Brinkley — had a monopoly over deciding what the news was every day, and synthesized it every night on TV. Then they let the New York Times echo those views the next morning. Those were the days.”

COUNTER: This assumes, I guess, that no Conservatives had any voice in the old days. This perplexes me, as Ronald Reagan was elected in the “good old” days. How in the world could this happen if all minds in America were controlled by only liberal news media? What about Nixon? Republicans and conservative thought existed prior to new media.

NRO: “it’s beginning to dawn on this White House that the Internet is not its friend and, in fact, that the web stands for the opposite of what has emerged as the Obama administration’s animating spirit. The Internet is centrifugal, dispersing power outward; the Obama administration is centripetal, concentrating power at the center. “

COUNTER: A couple of things bother me here. The central point, that ANY political administration would like to control the message I do not disagree with. However, the idea that the web “stands” for anything is, essentially, silly. It doesn’t stand for anything, not now, not ever. It is what it is. Also I don’t think the White House thought the “web” in it’s entirety was its “friend”. After all, during the campaign the birther movement was founded on the web. How could that be anything remotely friendly?

NRO: “The Obama administration, conversely, prides itself on offering top-down governance by the best and the brightest — not realizing that, as most Americans see it, that type of thinking creates a self-selected elite prone to hubris and atrocious error.”

COUNTER: This assumes that NO other administration was ruled “top down”. What, did the Bush administration rule by consensus? Also, I was wondering how long it would take for the writer to throw the “elite” word around. Oh, nothing stings more than being elite. After all, we should rely on commoners to run things right? No one should be an expert in anything. Instead we should take someone who knows nothing about the job and throw him in it! In fact, lets burn down the schools too!!!

NRO: “The FCC recently announced that it will ignore its own previous determination — and a court ruling — and proceed to regulate broadband communications”

COUNTER: Now we get to the heart of it. The writer is AGAINST the “net neutrality” rules that the FCC wishes to adopt. In the NRO’s mind eye, this is an attempt by “Obama” to “control” the Internet. But, ironically, the net neutrality proposals are all towards maintaining the open internet. It wants to prevent a provider such as comcast from, say, blocking a particular part of the web that comcast finds offensive from you. It wants to ensure that providers serve up internet that is unfiltered to users. You know, that whole free internetty thing that the NRO writer seems to be singing so loudly about.

Imagine what would happen if NRO was content filtered? I think they would suddenly have a change of heart about net neutrality then.

Read the story here.

The WSJ sums up why I have slowly but surely turned away form the Republican party in recent politics. I beg the party: drop the attacking of “elites” Stop dumbing down the party in order to try & get votes. We need smart people to run the country.

If nothing else, electing Obama may be good not only for those who supported him (I voted for him) but also for the Republican Party. Maybe now a more mature party that returns to it’s traditional conservatism will rise.

People don’t have faith in plumbers when the economy is in the tank. They want to hear from real serious thinkers about how their country can be saved. Or at least they used to, before the GOP programmed its followers that the uininformed opinions of people like Rush & Hannity, whom are more likely to spout “talking points” and insults than actual fleshed out policy from trusted sources.

——————————————
Finita la commedia. Many things ended on Tuesday evening when Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States, and depending on how you voted you are either celebrating or mourning this weekend. But no matter what our political affiliations, we should all — Republicans and Democrats alike — be toasting the return of Governor Sarah Palin to Juneau, Alaska.

The Palin farce is already the stuff of legend. For a generation at least it is sure to keep presidential historians and late-night comedians in gainful employment, which is no small thing. But it would be a pity if laughter drowned out serious reflection about this bizarre episode. As Jane Mayer reported recently in the New Yorker (“The Insiders,” Oct. 27, 2008), John McCain’s choice was not a fluke, or a senior moment, or an act of desperation. It was the result of a long campaign by influential conservative intellectuals to find a young, populist leader to whom they might hitch their wagons in the future.

And not just any intellectuals. It was the editors of National Review and the Weekly Standard, magazines that present themselves as heirs to the sophisticated conservatism of William F. Buckley and the bookish seriousness of the New York neoconservatives. <b>After the campaign for Sarah Palin, those intellectual traditions may now be pronounced officially dead.</b>

What a strange turn of events. <b>For the past 40 years American conservatism has been politically ascendant, in no small part because it was also intellectually ascendant.</b> In 1955 sociologist Daniel Bell could publish a collection of essays on “The New American Right” that treated it as a deeply anti-intellectual force, a view echoed a few years later in Richard Hofstadter’s influential “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” (1963).

But over the next decade and a half all that changed. Magazines like the Public Interest and Commentary became required reading for anyone seriously concerned about domestic and foreign affairs; conservative research institutes sprang up in Washington and on college campuses, giving a fresh perspective on public policy. Buckley, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Peter Berger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz — agree or disagree with their views, these were people one had to take seriously.

Coming of age politically in the grim ’70s, when liberalism seemed utterly exhausted, I still remember the thrill of coming upon their writings for the first time. I discovered the Public Interest the same week that Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and its pages offered shelter from the storm — from the mobs on the street, the radical posing of my professors and fellow students, the cluelessness of limousine liberals, the whole mad circus of post-’60s politics. <b>Conservative politics mattered less to me than the sober comportment of conservative intellectuals at that time; I admired their maturity and seriousness, their historical perspective, their sense of proportion.</b> In a country susceptible to political hucksters and demagogues, they studied the passions of democratic life without succumbing to them. <b>They were unapologetic elites, but elites who loved democracy and wanted to help it.</b>

<b>So what happened? How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? </b>It’s a sad tale that began in the ’80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an “adversary culture of intellectuals.” It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with “ordinary Americans” whom they hardly knew. In 1976 Irving Kristol publicly worried that “populist paranoia” was “subverting the very institutions and authorities that the democratic republic laboriously creates for the purpose of orderly self-government.” But by the mid-’80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the “common sense” of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by “our disoriented elites,” which is why “so many people — and I include myself among them — who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism.”

The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders’ intellectual virtues — indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. <b>But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. </b>They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

<b>Back in the ’70s, conservative intellectuals loved to talk about “radical chic,” the well-known tendency of educated, often wealthy liberals to project their political fantasies onto brutal revolutionaries and street thugs, and romanticize their “struggles.” But “populist chic” is just the inversion of “radical chic,” and is no less absurd, comical or ominous. </b>Traditional conservatives were always suspicious of populism, and they were right to be. They saw elites as a fact of political life, even of democratic life. What matters in democracy is that those elites acquire their positions through talent and experience, and that they be educated to serve the public good. But it also matters that they own up to their elite status and defend the need for elites. They must be friends of democracy while protecting it, and themselves, from the leveling and vulgarization all democracy tends toward.

Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives’ “disdain for liberal intellectuals” had slipped into “disdain for the educated class as a whole,” and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn’t care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it.

Source: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html