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.

There has been a dispute between Mena Trott and Ben Metcalfe about "niceness".

The details of the dispute and the detailed way in which it settled down are not relevant (not to me, anyway). What is relevant is a question the former expressed in her blog:

Is it possible to have the sort of productive face-to-face connection or conversation that Ben M. and I had offline in an online world?

In my experience, this is a not an issue, for the following reasons:

1. Intelligent people carries out intelligent discussion, and usually ends up with a satisfactory escape from the clinch.



2. The aggresive people, the one which finds it difficult or useless to be nice, enjoys being rude. And if they find some equals to argue with in a rude manner, they will enjoy the situation. Why souldn't that occur?



3. Solutions to personal issues on-line are favoured by the fact of the impersonal nature of the on-line media. Distance facilitates forgiveness, let's say.

Anyway, I'm glad Mena and Ben are obviously both intelligent persons, flattened out the problem and provided the rest of us with some material to chew with the brain.

Dice Zenon Grocholewski, un padrecito del Vaticano, que los homosexuales no son bienvenidos en la iglesia católica:

porque [la homosexualidad] contradice "absolutamente la antropología humana" (sic).

Me impresiona su sabiduría milenaria.

• Seguramente los homosexuales son una aberración reciente, en la historia de la humanidad (la humana, por supuesto).
• Seguramente los homosexuales son menos humanos que los demás humanos (los que estudia la antropología humana, vamos), especialmente menos humanos que los sacerdotes que se prohíben (al menos en teoría) ejercer su sexualidad (y que cuando la ejercen lo hacen sobre niños).
• Seguramente las mujeres también contradicen la antropología de los hombres, y por eso no las dejan ejercer el sacerdocio. Habrá que crear una antropología «sólo para mujeres» que les abra un espacio.

Oremus.

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!

Meet David Irving.

The guy is under arrest in Austria, because he has publicly stated his doubts about the "official" number of deaths in the so called "holocaust".

This whole incident of a law suit against an historian because of his point of view reminds me of the authoritarian/presidentialist regime of Mexico after the revolution of 1910.

It reminds me as well of the witch-burning tendences the Europeans showed in the XVI century. Perhaps a characteristic?

The issue reflects the fact that there is no freedom of speech in those countries, and that those societies are (or so they pretend) deeply injured, sensitive to the matters in question beyond any rational judgment.

The truth is that there are things you can't talk about in Europe, for what I can see. Surprising.

"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.

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a consumer electronics company called Sony. And this company was a good, sucessful one, until the day it decided to enter the mass media market.

It joined forces with another mass-media company called BMG, and it started the domination of the media in the planet this story takes place. It became a bad, bad company.

One day, the bad company decided to tighten up its control on the consumers. So it added a trojan horse (a rootkit, as a matter of fact) to the music CDs it sold to the public.

Thus, when a consumer bought a CD and put it to play in his/her computer, a rootkit would be secretly installed in the computer, thus giving Sony access and control of the consumer's machine.

That way of protecting their interests, besides, proved to be unremovable: if the DRM drivers are removed, the machine gets broken.

Fortunately, this is pure fiction and such an abuse from a company on the consumers could not possibly take place in the real life! It would prompt for a position from the general people: would people swallow and tolerate such an abuse? Or would it stand up and fight against it, perhaps boycotting the evil company?