I, Hans.

It's all about engaging with your constituency:

Switch to Español - washingtonpost.com:
"The idea was to put the news in context, to see if we could combat the tendency for infotainment," he says in Spanish. "I didn't want to be part of infantilization of the news."

On a recent night, KVEA did eight minutes on the Iraq war, spent five minutes on deplorable working conditions in Southern California car washes and had reports on narco-traffickers and the latest key legislation in the state legislature and Los Angeles City Hall. Meanwhile, the CBS affiliate had a reporter doing a trend piece on "night spas" that are open until midnight, and ABC was running an item on high-tech fitness equipment.

It's enough to make one wonder if it isn't time for our political leaders to turn off the English-language TV and encourage good citizens to learn Spanish, the language of civic-minded news.

The way Obama tapped into it.

Party Like It’s 2008 - New York Times:
Mr. Obama hardly created this moment, with its potent brew of Bush loathing and sweeping generational change. He simply had the vision to tap into it. Running in 2008 rather than waiting four more years was the single smartest political decision he’s made (and, yes, he’s made dumb ones too). The second smartest was to understand and emphasize that subterranean, nearly universal anticipation of change rather than settle for the narrower band of partisan, dyspeptic Bush-bashing. We don’t know yet if he’s the man who can make the moment — and won’t know unless he gets to the White House — but there’s no question that the moment has helped make the man.

It's almost always about the way, in almost everything, most certainly in communication.

What's easily forgotten:

Project Syndicate :
The change wrought by “’68” affected, above all, traditional culture, hidebound moralism, and the principle of hierarchical authority. It altered social life, ways of being, ways of talking, ways of loving, and so on. But, despite its scope, the movement steered clear of violence in order to create a new mode of rebellion. Students, workers, and families – all had their legitimate demands, and all nonetheless converged on the same desire for emancipation.

My Amex Card bears 68 as starting date, sure sign that I wasn't in the movement then. Nevertheless I always saw it as the major liberation force of the past century. I wont forget the the students (wearing ties and all) preceding the entering academic senate with the banner "Unter den Talaren, der Muff von tausend Jahren". Unfortunately the "postsessantottini" being such always thought and continue to think that it was about revolution which it was not.

Summing it up:

The Washington Note:
When Israel was bombing Lebanon in 2006, killing its civilians and destroying its infrastructure, Condoleeza Rice celebrated this as the "birth pangs of the new Middle East," a phrase that lives in infamy in Lebanon. The events of the last 24 hours in Lebanon were the death throes of the Bush plan for the new Middle East. In Iraq, instead of creating a democracy, the US introduced a civil war, sectarian militias, death squads and ethnic cleansing. It installed a series of ineffective dictators, Garner, Bremmer, Allawi. Then it surrendered to pressure from the sectarian Islamist Shiites it had empowered and agreed to elections, which of course ended in victory for sectarian Islamist Shiite militias who began slaughtering anybody they didn't like, especially Sunnis. Then the US decided it had had enough of its puppet prime minister Jaafari, who was not proving obedient enough, so they forced him out and replaced him with another sectarian Shiite Islamist, Maliki, who also proved a disappointment to them. But though they threatened to remove him, they have backed him as he loses popularity and even attacks more popular Shiite movements like the Sadrists. Meanwhile the US has introduced new Sunni militias composed of thugs and former murderers. Its icon was Abu Risha, the slain leader of the Awakening council in the Anbar.

In Palestine, furious that Hamas won democratic and fair elections, the US (along with the Saudis, Jordanians, Israelis, Egyptians and others), backed the unpopular Fatah and Mahmud Abbas, a traitor to his own people, collaborating with their occupiers. As Fatah tortured its opponents Gaza was suffocated and the Palestinian people punished for their decision to take part in elections. As Fatah thugs attempted a coup in Gaza, Hamas thwarted this threat with a counter coup and easily defeated the American backed Palestinian militias.

In Somalia, the Americans backed a coalition of hated warlords to go after the much more popular Islamic Courts Union, in the name of the war on terror. The Islamic Courts rise was the first reason for optimism in Somalia, the first time after 14 attempts to set up a government and 15 years of civil war. The Islamic Courts introduced peace and stability to Mogadishu and its environs, got rid of warlords and their militias who terrorized Somalis. Women were able to walk on the streets unharassed and exiled businessmen returned to rebuild the broken country. But it was an Islamist movement, and in the era of Bush, that means al Qaeda, so the US backed the war lords and its local proxy, the Ethiopians, who invaded Somalia and occupied Mogadishu and are now raping and killing civilians, while the Islamists radicalized and the situation in Somalia is worse than ever.

Things aren't going very well in Afghanistan either, where Hamid Karzai, a weak puppet who controls nothing, relies on the Americans to back an every strengthening violent resistance.

In Lebanon, the Americans view Hizballah as a terrorist threat and have pressured their Sunni proxies not to compromise. Hizballah, the most popular movement by far among Lebanese Shiites, and very popular among other groups (not to mention throughout the region) was demanding a national unity government so that it could have a more equitable share of political power, but Hizballah, despite its military power, was not even asking for a a larger share for Shiites but instead it sought a larger share for its non Shiite allies in the opposition. This was in order to have a say in strategic issues and prevent the weapons of the resistance from being threatened, while also maintaining Lebanon outside the American and Israeli sphere of influence.

Save your time, read and learn at heart the whole Nir Rosen piece.

Hm.

Technology versus terror - Haaretz - Israel News :
The company founders include Prof. Shlomo Breznitz, a professor of psychology whose research specialization is stress situations (and who is also a former Knesset member from Kadima)

Stress situations as in torture ?

The cost of peace.

Project Syndicate :
The first cost-benefit analysis of peacekeeping initiatives reveals that the risk of future conflict depends upon the scale of military deployment. Compared with no deployment, spending $100 million on a peacekeeping initiative reduces the ten-year risk of conflict from around 38% to 16.5%. At $200 million per year, the risk falls further, to around 12.8%. At $500 million, it goes down to 9%, and at $850 million drops to 7.3%.

Because of war’s massive costs, each percentage point of risk reduction is worth around $2.5 billion to the world. The most expensive deployment reduces the risk of conflict by a massive 30 percentage points, with ten-year gains of $75 billion, compared to the overall cost of $8.5 billion. This is a very promising investment.

The Land Grab produces something you might call reverse Potemkin.

TPMCafe | Talking Points Memo | Counting West Bank Checkpoints--Making Gulliver Look Lilliputian:

On March 31st , the army placed three obstructions made of boulders and dirt piles on the road running between Deir al-Ghussun and al-Jarushiya, which lie about one kilometer apart, north of Tulkarm. According to local residents, the next day, an Israeli bulldozer removed the three obstructions, while an army film crew documented the obstructions before and during their removal. These obstructions appear...on the list of physical obstructions that the army contends were removed as part of its efforts to 'ease' Palestinian movement.

The Land Grab.

Since starting this blog I title all news from Israel "the Land Grab" because it's not the words that count in this part of the world, it's only the facts.

TPMCafe | Talking Points Memo | Counting West Bank Checkpoints--Making Gulliver Look Lilliputian:

Current count--612.Count during the previous Rice visit on March 30th (when Israel promised the removal of 50)--580
Count when Annapolis launched (November '07)--561.And just to round it all off: the count when Secretary Rice negotiated the Agreement on Movement and Access (November '05, designed to systematically reduce the closure and the date from which OCHA keeps score)--376.

Woman is the nigger of the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5lMxWWK218
Race to the Bottom:

In the course of Hillary Clinton's historic run for the White House--in which she became the first woman ever to prevail in a state-level presidential primary contest--she has been likened to Lorena Bobbitt (by Tucker Carlson); a "hellish housewife" (Leon Wieseltier); and described as "witchy," a "she-devil," "anti-male" and "a stripteaser" (Chris Matthews). Her loud and hearty laugh has been labeled "the cackle," her voice compared to "fingernails on a blackboard" and her posture said to look "like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court." As one Fox News commentator put it, "When Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear, Take out the garbage." Rush Limbaugh, who has no qualms about subjecting audiences to the spectacle of his own bloated physique, asked his listeners, "Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?" Perhaps most damaging of all to her electoral prospects, very early on Clinton was deemed "unlikable." Although other factors also account for that dislike, much of the venom she elicits ("Iron my shirt," "How do we beat the bitch?") is clearly gender-specific.

What newspapers in Italy write not:

1.Of today 516 000 young Italians have been denounced to police authority for smoking a joint (may cost you driver license!) and 250 000 years of jail for drug related crimes have been consumed as well (heard on radio radicale, said by Franco Corleone).

2. Recent elections were won by the right country wide and in Rome with a law and order campaign. A campaign that owns its success to the unrelenting hammering away by the newspapers on the sicurezza theme.

Check for yourself how big a problem this is in Italy compared to other European countries:

Actual figures in Rome are these:

And now what ?

How Much Did Rumsfeld Know? - TIME:
To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I had never seen any approved CENTCOM campaign plan, either conceptual or detailed, for the post�major combat operations phase. When I was on the ground in Iraq and saw what was going on, I assumed they had done zero Phase IV planning. Now, three years later, I was learning for the first time that my assumption was not completely accurate. In fact, CENTCOM had originally called for twelve to eighteen months of Phase IV activity with active troop deployments. But then CENTCOM had completely walked away by simply stating that the war was over and Phase IV was not their job.

That decision set up the United States for a failed first year in Iraq. There is no question about it. And I was supposed to believe that neither the Secretary of Defense nor anybody above him knew anything about it? Impossible! Rumsfeld knew about it. Everybody on the NSC knew about it, including Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, and Colin Powell. Vice President Cheney knew about it. And President Bush knew about it.

There's not a doubt in my mind that they all embraced this decision to some degree. And if it had not been for the moral courage of Gen. John Abizaid to stand up to them all and reverse Franks's troop drawdown order, there's no telling how much more damage would have been done.

In the meantime, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily wounded, maimed, and killed as a result. In my mind, this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty.

Hm.

Why Some Countries Find it So Hard to Get Rich - Finance Blog - Felix Salmon - Market Movers - Portfolio.com:
t fell to Hausmann to inject a dose of realism. Looking at the 24 OECD countries, he said, not one had its peak GDP per capita before the year 2000. But out of 112 developing countries, 58% had their peak GDP per capita before the year 2000, and many of them had their peak GDP per capita in the late 1970s, 30 years ago. In all those countries, the decline in exports was bigger than the decline in output. And if you take a snapshot of what countries exported in 1992, their future growth was very strongly correlated with the sophistication of those exports.

What Twitter is good for.

Last weekend CNN lead with a big story about James Buck, a
graduate student in journalism from the University of
California-Berkeley who was arrested last month in Mahalla, Egypt
while covering an anti-government protest. Thinking quickly, James
was able to send a one-word Twitter update: "Arrested." His
followers in Egypt and back in the US reacted by contacting the
university and the consulate on his behalf. Before long, James was
updating Twitter with another one-word message, "Free."

via Twitter News and Updates

The new trend.

Can Web Apps Get Too Drunk on Aggregation? - ReadWriteWeb:
There's a mind-numbing amount of cTheonversations and transactions going on around the internet these days and quality aggregation of content is a very hot trend. When is more too much, though? Are some aggregation services shooting themselves in the foot by sacrificing quality for breadth? Is this madness and does it need to stop?

It's the point of view. Always.

Filmmaker Errol Morris Gets to the Truth Behind the Abu Ghraib Photographs:
He recalls coming across what appeared to be an underlined word in a document shown in a book by Jean-Claude Pressac, a onetime Holocaust denier who published an extensive work on documents related to the design and construction of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Morris was researching his film Mr. Death. "You see the printed document in the book, and you can see that it's been underlined, and the underline looks like someone really underlined it," he remembers. "And the word is vergasungskeller. Gas chamber. OK? Now, I started to get curious. Was this underlined on the original? Or on a copy? When was it underlined? And why was it underlined? The Nazis were very careful about not using explicit references to the fact that they were gassing people." His hunch was that the emphatic underlining was intended to draw the original author's attention to a mistake in the document.

When he went to the building archive at Auschwitz, he got to see the original — which was in fact not the original but the original carbon copy that had been retained in the archive, the document itself having been sent to Berlin, where it was presumably destroyed. The underlining was in red pencil, which had bled through the carbon. At the top of the page, in the same red pencil, which was not visible in the black-and- white version reproduced in Pressac's book, was a dated instruction to the SS captain who authored the document, indicating that using the word vergasungskeller was something he should never have done and he should be careful never to do again. By looking in the archive, rather than online, Morris found a rare, handwritten reminder that the Nazis consciously worked to eliminate from official documents all mention of what they were doing — this absence being one of the chief arguments used by the Holocaust deniers that Morris portrayed in Mr. Death.

France's next Bastille.

In France, Prisons Filled With Muslims - washingtonpost.com:
This prison is majority Muslim -- as is virtually every house of incarceration in France. About 60 to 70 percent of all inmates in the country's prison system are Muslim, according to Muslim leaders, sociologists and researchers, though Muslims make up only about 12 percent of the country's population.

I prefer the USers to be intelligent.

History will condemn us if... (Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog):
It's that conflict paradigm that could kill our global economy just as easily as protectionism. Indeed, the former enables the latter.
Between Obama's trade pandering and McCain's war pandering, you really have to wonder if America is hell-bent on destroying an international liberal economic order that is our gift to humanity, doing so right at its moment of global apogee.
History will condemn us for our stupidity if this is all we can manage.

Waiting for Larry.

Commission and France clash over policy co-ordination:
Larry Summers shows sympathy with those who say that free trade makes them worse off. He says that the policy elites cannot continue to take that arrogant position for the very simple reason that it is not true, and that current politics moves in the opposite direction. He says that the big political task is to realign the interest of working people and the middle classes with globalisation.

Don't write the US off, says Zakaria, and is a 100% right.

RealClearPolitics - Articles - The Future of American Power:
The United States, on the other hand, is creating the first universal nation, made up of all colors, races, and creeds, living and working together in considerable harmony. Consider the current presidential election, in which the contestants have included a black man, a woman, a Mormon, a Hispanic, and an Italian American.

Publicis isn't in the creative biz!

“‘We’re seeing more requests outside of creative services to switch to Macs from PCs,’ notes David Plavin.” In fact, the operations manager for the Publicis Groupe explained to Galen Gruman (infoworld.com) that he’s received so many requests that he “now supports 2,500 Macs across the U.S. — nearly a quarter of all Publicis’ U.S. PCs.”

But then I always thought so.
via Apple Hot News