OMG WTF IV

A Fucking Shame

Professor Juan Cole and Helena Cobban report on an incident in which a member of the government of Iraq was assaulted and humiliated by US troops.

I was going to say "member of the newly formed government", but it's been eigthy days, and that is quite enough time to drop the "new" status.

Correction: [22 Apr 2005] Iraq does not have a government yet. That has yet to be formed by the national assembly. Fattah al-Sheik is a member of the assembly, not the government.

Read Mr. Cole's account for the details. I quote Fattah al-Sheik, the person concerned (and mishandled), via Ms. Cobban:

"What happened to me represents an insult to the whole National Assembly that was elected by the Iraqi people. This shows that the democracy we are enjoying is fake," al-Sheik said. "Through such incidents, the U.S. Army tries to show that it is the real controlling power in the country, not the new Iraqi government."

Insult to the whole national Assembly: TRUE
The [Iraqi] democracy is a fake: TRUE
The army tries to show that it is the real controlling power: TRUE

I understand that, to help the soldiers to survive and keep their morale -- and in many ways, morale and survival are dependent on each other -- a certain attitude needs to be fostered. That attitude says "We're the best, fuck the rest". Why do you think so many Brits were shot down by Americans?

And this brings me to the central mess of the whole affair: What we need (for Iraq to become a stable democracy) is peacekeeper troops, not soldiers. We need less of the "shoot anything that moves" type of guy, and more of the de-escalation-savvy people. However, Iraq is by all accounts still extremely unsafe to be in, and keeping the peace is not enough when there still are daily bombings and attacks close to Baghdad and the supposedly safe Green Zone.

This is one of the few times where I simply don't have an answer. Show more respect and get cut down by the next suicide bomber who poses as a member of parliament? Submit every member of the ruling body to daily examination and humiliation?

The whole thing's a mess.

Email Tagging

I just listened to Clay Shirky's talk Ontology is Overrated in which he mentions the merit of collective tagging using del.icio.us as an example.

Hearing this, I had the idea that this could be useful for email. No wait, I'm mixing two talks up. Can't remember what the second one was.

Anyway.

Imagine:

• An Apple Mail plugin lets you tag your mail.
• Recipient(s) tag(1/s) it also.
• The two plugins communicate and consolidate the tags (never mind how).

Merits:

1. When you send mail to a lot of people (or even a mailing list), you may get that del.icio.us effect Mr. Shirky talked about, where you can say that a particular link (email in our case) is 90% blog, 17% internets, 9% cool and 1% bullshit (that being the percentages of people who applied those tags to the mail).

2. You can sort, classify, search and organize (redundancy redundancy) your mail by tags. I sure have a hell of a time finding years old email from "that dude at the university who always used his gmx address" (which means I can't find him by searching for in.tum.de)

Think about it.

Freenet Not Allowed To Suck

According to a news item on the infamous Heise News, freenet.de, a German internet provider, has been forbidden by law to call itself "Germany's second largest internet service provider".

Why would anyone call themselves "second largest"?

Yaaay! We're number ... two?

And why the hell would anyone care enough to dispute that claim? By the way, it was the GMX Internet Services GmbH, another German provider, who challenged it.

Very German, and very much evoking the impression of pygmies fighting over leftovers.

Gorgeous saving on gorgeous quality rx meds analgesic

I just got spam containing this:

                                                                                            
ps         bg xfm                                            
yth       ywq cqe                                               
 gl      khq                                                 
 evs     at   nmj    nclwe      gqob fk   ou pma   gtott     
  pjq   vuu   tmy  qmh   cgb  nbim rmgg   xpl    hiy   opr    
  gls   ahi   dpf        vjh  ps     fe   mo           njk  
   udr ejx    hkq  vmrjxgmqj  an     gg   ii     esjlfdktg  
    xp es     qaa xyu     rh  xa     ld   ds    iix     ep  
    slxgv     kng  mc    dkv  qdfb  vkg   ih     te    ehq  
     ghy      amv  saxmoy  rj   auxv kn   cu     cvnvdg  ksc
                                     ta                     
                              sodw yoeg                                                                                                     
                                 cyt                                                                                                        

          ud         qyj             cpernoa                                    
       mlgfnsdn    uutmnbp          ksdcrupwm                                   
      jqm rh mls  fii   qei         xe                                         
       tw vy      u      rp         elpgwaf                                          
        xhde            dj         dhvytvfmi                                          
          mvmmb      pobc                  lh                    
          we eic   oce                     hy                                                                  
      kw  jt  ee  bvg             ttu      kg                                           
      nlv qb qil mcr  qrghsx  dk   sqglilkqj                                          
       xiqasjs   efwjviqrduo  bap    gkdua                                            
          br                                                                           
          

Isn't this great? I love the ingeniousness that goes into tricking spam filters. I was already thrilled by the word soup they appended to their email body to throw bayesian filters off. But this is just fabulous.

OMG WTF III

We have eleven programs on the TV at home.

1: ARD	Pope's Funeral
2: ZDF	Pope's Funeral
3: BR	Pope's Funeral
4: ORF 1	Liebe Ohne Rückfahrschein
5: ORF 2	Pope's Funeral
6: RTL	Pope's Funeral
7: SAT 1	Pope's Funeral
8: Tele 5	Tarot Heute
9: Pro 7	talk talk talk
10: tv.münchen	Stadtgeflüster
11: RTL II	Mit Kisten, Kind und Kegel

Joseph Ratzinger is valiantly trying to speak the sermon in Italian. He must have buffed up on his pronounciation, in the not entirely unfounded hope that he might have to hold a lot more sermons in Italian for quite some time.

I Rule

I just won my first fight with my cat.

It's not the first fight, actually, just the first one I won.

I was sitting at my desk, typing, and he came in and naturally wanted to jump up on the window sill, as he always does, upsetting my cacti. I consider him personally responsible for the deaths of at least four of them.

Like I always do, I held out an admonishing finger, preventing him from jumping (with cats all you have to do is spoil their aim and they won't jump), and saying "No!" in a firm voice. That much was normal.

What I did differently was that I kept watching him, and as soon as he got ready to jump again, once more prevented him from doing so. I normally would have turned back to my computer, and he would have jumped up, taking some more hapless plants with him, I would have shouted at him, thrown him out of my room, and slammed the door after him.

But not this time. I was determined to not let him jump up, whatever the cost. So I, instead of typing, sat watching him and kept fobidding him to jump whenever he appeared to be contemplating it. Next, he started sniffing at a bag lying near the window to lull me into believing he had lost interest in the window sill. But I was not fooled by his attempt and no sooner had he glanced up to the window that I used my Admonishing Finger and Firm Voice to dissuade him from his ill-considered course of action.

We sat there, doing the mental equivalent of indian arm wrestling for (I kid you not) half an hour, until he lost interest, and left.

YES!

I know it does not seem like much, but I feel that human intelligence has triumphed over the base cunning of the beast. Chalk up another one for ol' homo sapiens!

P.S. What may be of interest to people who own domestic animals is a saying of my sister's that helped me a lot: The point in time when you have to scold an animal for a wrongdoing is when it thinks about doing it.

I have to go, he's coming in and it looks like he wants a second round.

Bring it on, pussy.