OnePeople buy when there’s blood in the streets

"If we ever want to kneecap al-Qaeda, just get them to adopt our procurement system. It will bring them to their knees within a week," a former Pentagon official said.

[WaPo via Schneier]

Bruce Schneier is one of the top computer security researchers in the world. Among many other things, he invented the term "security theater." He interviewed Kip Hawley, the TSA Administrator. It's a fantastic conversation. It's serialized here:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/07/conversation_wi_4.html

How do you know you've made it to the big time? You get your own google.

Sugata Mitra installed a computer in a concrete wall, facing an alley that local children used as a bathroom. In short time, these mostly illiterate children became computer-literate -- downloading MP3s, drawing with MS Paint, and playing games on disney.com.

The children create their own metaphors to do this. To give you an idea of what I mean, a journalist came up to one of these kids and asked him, "How do you know so much about computers?" The answer seemed very strange to her because the kid said, "What's a computer?" The terminology is not as important as the metaphor. If they've got the idea of how a mouse works and that the Internet is [like a wall they can paint on], who cares if they know that a computer is called a computer and a mouse is called a mouse? In most of our classes here at NIIT, we spend time teaching people the terminology and such. That seems irrelevant to me with these children.

An outstanding visualization of the federal budget, complete with zoomy interface.

Budget Graph

Kerry Howley of Reason interviews Kirby Dick, who's promoting his film This Film Is Not Yet Rated:

Reason: Has there been any retaliation from the MPAA since they saw your film and slapped it with an NC-17 rating?

KD: They pirated my film.

...

The attorney from the MPAA who makes the animated appearance in my film calls me up and says "Kirby, I have to tell you, we have a copy of your film. But you don't have to worry, because it's safe in my vault." Well, you can imagine how reassuring that was.

...

The MPAA, this paragon of anti-piracy, has taken my film eight months before its theatrical release, and has copies circulating I don't know where. Maybe the film is in Malaysia by now. I hope so.

Interviewed for the film, Alexander Haig, then a U.S. military adviser and later secretary of state, quoted Johnson as saying "we simply must not allow the American people to believe that Fidel Castro could have killed our president."

"And the reason was that there would be a right-wing uprising in America, which would keep the Democratic party out of power for two generations," Haig said.

[Y!]

A wonkalicious collection of government, think-tank and NGO reports.

Of course capital would like nothing better than a population that defines politics as the decision to shop or not to shop; business interests spent most of the last century trying to convince us to find meaning in such gestures. When we do that, capital wins, since unless you’ve got the capacity to grow your own food and ride a horse and buggy to work, you’ve obviously got to start shopping again at some point.

Impotent gestures like Buy-Nothing Day are symptoms of a left that prefers doing something to nothing, even if that something doesn’t even reach the level of an empty gesture. Fantasizing our power isn’t the same as building it, and we’re unlikely to build it by advertising our powerlessness in ephemeral pursuits.

[Brooklyn Rail]

VATICAN CITY (AP) A Vatican document posted on the Internet by a Catholic news agency says sexually active homosexuals are not welcome in the priesthood unless they have gotten over homosexual tendencies for at least three years.

So how do we know? Odometers in their pants? Homo-sexo-meters?