Bruno Unna

Today I witnessed something I thought I would never see.

While traveling on the subway system, quietly listening to my music, the usual bastard with a cd player and a loud, loud loudspeaker, selling pirate music, came into the same wagon I was in. Stood by me and turned his music on. Incidentally, he saw me and my anger at his presence. In a matter of seconds, he turned off his music, and started keeping his cd player into the bag he used to carry the disks to sell.

At first I thought -although just for some moments- that I found a civic pirate. Perhaps one with little time in business, consciuous enough to keep silent at the vision of one as upset at his noise as I visibly was.

Then the man came. Tall, dressed like a civilian, with a newspaper in his hand, rapidly came to the place we were, and practically without speaking to the pirate, just indicated him to stand by him. And they descended from the wagon at the next station. The rest of the trip was very pleasant.

I only hope I'm begining to witness the waking-up of the authority. The sudden relevance of the civic action. I encourage the authorities to keep up that work.

Me parece que sería de muy, muy buen gusto escribir correctamente el nombre del comisionado en el título de la transcripción de su discurso de toma de posesión.

A trip by the subway. I'm trying to listen to some music, while concentrating on my Heidegger reading. But station after station, time after time, and even twice at a time, the fucking ambulant pirate CD sellers enter the wagon, with their nauseabund shouts and their estrident "music", coming out from portable amplifiers. And they shout and they pollute the entire wagon with their shit for the whole length of the trip between stations. It is evident I'm bothered, and they don't mind. They don't give a single piece of shit about me or what I think or feel. I start thinking I should hit one of them very hard in the nose, but I believe another seven or eight will come and do the corresponding to me. Fucking people, unevolved simians, uncivilized animals! Needless to say, I can barely concentrate on Heidegger, and I just can't listen to my music.


Surfacing from the subway, what I find is not any better than what I had below the surface. I don't know whether I'm in Mexico or in New Delhi. I'm walking among pigs. Huge crowds of pigs. That's the place I was born: a huge, immense crowd of pigs (someone with a better knowledge of english I will thank for hinting me a better way to say this), of extremely selfish, futureless, pigs.


I go dining with Sebastian and Juan, to KFC. What I find in there is as depressing as what I found at the subway. This time, however, the shit comes from the "ambient" loudspeakers. It is incredible how low can be the "quality" of the contemporary "music". I can't believe there is one single person, no matter how brain-damaged, who enjoys that kind of noise. Anyway, the problem is not that there exists such a shit, but that the KFC staff believes we, the consumers, must consume that noise as well. Fucking bastards! Unbelievable! Because of that, KFC is losing one more customer. A set of unexperienced, pity-worthy teenagers.


It almost make me cry the extremely sad state of this country. A country in which a large part of the population has completely lost the civic sense. Mexico is a country without mexicans, or with only a handful of them. And the rest, the selfish animals, are damaging even more what is left of this otherwise great country.


I wonder what does it take to correct the situation. Let's take an example: the ambulant pirate CD sellers at the subway. What does it take? Who do I have to bribe in order to have them expelled? Oh, yes: perhaps I don't have the whole picture, perhaps it would take more resources than those available to aprehend them and punish them (there is a reglament for the use of the subway). That would explain that there are still some of them, but... I have never seen one of them caught! Not one single seller caught! Come fucking on, it is not hard to find them. All you have to do is enter the subway and take a train for about... 10 seconds. Or perhaps I don't know that there are legal issues tying the hands of the law-enforcers. Oh well... how about changing the regulations, doing whatever it takes to solve the problem. All I've left to think is that authorities receive their share of the cake, in exchange for doing... nothing.


Now, who is at the end of the day responsible for such a phenomena to happen? How many pirate CD sellers would it be, if nobody would buy the shit they sell? How many unhealthy taco stands would it be, occuppying 80-90% of the available pedestrian way, if people wouldn't eat them? By the way, how would that reduce the number of digestive-related illnesses? But my city and my country are the scenario of vicious circles. I've ranted previously about the kind of shit the drivers at this city have in their small skulls in order to completely ignore the red lights, the pedestrian pathways, the entrances, and every other kind of signaling. And the more the people ignores the existence of a city around them, the more likely is that the city gets ignored. If there was a god, I would hate it for bringing me to the world in this city.

What does Benjamin Franklin have to teach us about Web 2.0?

Josh Petersen (43 things) has a couple of ideas about that, and he shares with us some experiences he had while building his site.

It was a delighting podcast!

A Nigerian state governor has denied reports that he escaped charges of money-laundering in the UK by disguising himself as a woman.

However, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha told the BBC that he could not remember other details of his journey back to the oil-rich southern Bayelsa State.

He insisted that he was innocent and that the £1.8m ($3.2m) found in cash and bank accounts was not his.

More information?

---

A US company has been given a two-year contract to help fight piracy off the Somalia coast - seen as among the world's most dangerous waters.

The $50m contract has been awarded by Somalia's transitional government.

More information?

---

America's Army is one of the most popular computer games on the planet and like many games, it is a shoot-em-up, get-the-bad guys kind of affair.

But unlike other games, America's Army is truly a product of the US military. The Army first released the game a few years ago as a recruiting tool.

But, at the recent Serious Games Summit in Washington, DC, the Army showed off a new use for its computer game - training soldiers for combat.

America's Army now has six million registered users, and scores of fansites, worldwide. That is not just because the Army gives the game away online for free.

More information?

---

Tomado de La Jornada:

En la construcción del país es necesario ir "pian pianito", aseveró el presidente Vicente Fox, quien de nueva cuenta alertó contra quienes, de cara a las elecciones de 2006, prometen resolver los problemas nacionales "de la noche a la mañana".

¿No es éste el muchachito que nos iba a resolver no sé qué importante problema nacional en 15 minutos?

¿Más información?

---

Encabeza el teniente coronel Moisés la Comisión Intergaláctica del EZLN.

¿Más información?

---

El diplomático estadunidense Joseph Wilson aseguró ayer que el primer ministro británico Tony Blair fue engañado por el presidente George W. Bush en torno a la guerra en Irak.

Wilson, quien sostiene que la Casa Blanca republicana reveló el nombre de su esposa, la agente especial de la CIA Valerie Plame, en venganza por haber rebatido las afirmaciones de Washington de que el régimen de Saddam Hussein poseía armas nucleares, sostuvo que funcionarios de la presidencia estadunidense llevaron un "doble juego" con sus aliados británicos".

¿Más información?

Otra jugarreta de bush:

Un reporte de inteligencia del Departamento de Estado estadunidense caracterizó en 1991 al fósforo blanco como arma química, después que fue utilizado por Saddam Hussein contra los rebeldes kurdos al término de la guerra del golfo Pérsico, declaró hoy el periodista italiano Sigfrido Ranucci, autor del reportaje que denunció que el ejército estadunidense utilizó esa arma contra civiles iraquíes en la ciudad de Fallujah, en noviembre de 2004.

El documento del que dio cuenta Ranucci en conferencia de prensa en Roma, señaló que en febrero de 1991 una fuente de inteligencia reportó que durante el alzamiento de la población kurda que siguió a la victoria de los aliados que sacaron a Irak de Kuwait, "fuerzas iraquíes leales al presidente Saddam Hussein probablemente utilizaron armas químicas de fósforo blanco contra los rebeldes kurdos y la población en Erbil y Dohuk".

"Cuando Saddam usó el fósforo blanco, éste era arma química", dijo Ranucci, pero "cuando los estadunidenses lo usan es arma convencional. Sin embargo, las heridas que esta arma provoca son terribles".

¿Qué ha hecho el mundo para merecer a bush y sus secuaces? ¡Ya perdónanos, diosito!

"The soldiers started shooting at us from all over," he told reporters. "I slowed down and pulled off the road, but they continued firing.

"I saw my family killed, one after the other, and then the car caught fire. I dragged their bodies out."

Since the US-led invasion in 2003, there have been repeated incidents in which American troops have fired on civilian vehicles.

Unbelievable. Disgusting. Indignant. I have no words to express what I think about this US government.

Culture is remix, and remix, culture. That's the message from an IT Conversations favorite, Lawrence Lessig, at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology (ETech) conference in 2005.

Humans have always made new culture by taking and remixing existing cultures, and have always been free to do so. Until recently the written word was the central medium for remix. As technology has advanced the mechanisms by which we remix our culture have changed to keep pace but the law has not. The question at hand is: should our freedom> to remix culture change when the ordinary means we use to remix culture changes?

As our technology and our culture become enslaved at the hands of the RIAA, MPAA, and others, Lessig proposes 4 steps we must take to counteract the degradation of our remix rights: 1) connect, 2) teach, 3) punish, and 4) politicize.

Following Professor Lessig's presentation, Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation asks Lessig questions that further illuminate Lessig's concepts.

Very interesting one. If you are interested at all in the human digital rights, this podcast you must listen to.