Gulf arms: complex motives From ISN Security Watch

Gulf arms: Complex motives

Image: Wikipedia

A Pentagon announcement of over US$10 billion in potential Gulf arms sales has again highlighted the tensions and international power plays driving the regional arms race.

By Dominic Moran in Tel Aviv for ISN Security Watch (14/12/07)

The US is pushing ahead with plans for a major boost in arms sales to Gulf states as it seeks to draw them into an alliance against Iran while protecting its regional strategic predominance against competing powers.

The Pentagon notified Congress on 5 December of the potential sale of up to US$10.4 billion in arms and military systems to the UAE and Kuwait. President George W Bush's administration pledged up to US$20 billion in military aid to its Gulf allies in July.

Arab Gulf militaries have been progressively expanding and improving their armaments since the first Gulf War, but this process appears to have picked up pace with Iranian nuclear and missile developments and the descent of Iraq into civil war.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates pushed for a joint regional missile shield and air umbrella, and integrated maritime surveillance and early warning systems in a speech to Gulf delegates at a security meeting last week in the Bahraini capital, Manama.

Gulf states are wary of being drawn into an official regional defense partnership with the US, which could be seen as a provocation by Tehran, but have increased the frequency of their joint military parlays.

Asked by ISN Security Watch if Gulf states are resisting incorporation in a regional defense pact, Chatham House's Dr Gareth Stansfield replied: "I would say that there has been some opposition to that. I think that one thing that has happened with this recent standoff with Iran is that the Arab Gulf states have become much more aware of their own regional interactions and relations."

Controversial sale

A further Pentagon announcement is expected in January concerning the Saudi purchase of a military package expected to include advanced US manufacturer Boeing-fabricated bomb guidance technology that transforms unguided bombs into precision munitions Reuters reports. This further notification was delayed after 116 Congressmen joined a Democratic initiative calling for more time to study the Saudi weapons package.

According to the article, less controversial upcoming deals may also include Patriot upgrades for several Gulf states and the Saudi purchase of ships from a new class of coastal patrol ships for the kingdom's Gulf fleet. Middle East Online reports that the Saudis are also interested in upgrades for their F-15s and AWACS at an estimated cost of up to $US620 million.

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False Alarm

comment |
posted December 10, 2007
(web only)

Ted Gup

At 5:23 am the fire alarm goes off in
the Charles Hotel. I spring out of bed; grab my pants, shoes and
T-shirt; sprint down the corridor toward the red exit sign; push open
the fire door; bolt down ten flights of stairs; and emerge into a dark
and chill December morning. Cambridge still sleeps.

I make my way to the hotel's front entrance and into the lobby. Behind
the reception desk a beleaguered woman is picking up the phone every
five seconds to say "It was a false alarm... it was a false alarm... it
was a false alarm." Beside me stands a man in a camel-hair overcoat and
red baseball cap. He is chewing the stub of a stogie. He is familiar but
the name escapes me, so I ask.

"George Tenet," he says. Read More

The Depressed Superpower

By Gabor Steingart in Washington

As frustration takes hold in the land of
optimism, Americans are beginning to resemble Germans. They are
collectively depressed over the Iraq War, the weak dollar and the aging
of the baby boomers. Presidential candidates are left to preach change
to an electorate that is afraid of it.

All it takes to find out why America is in such a bad mood is a look
at the local section of any American newspaper, at the photos of the
smiling faces of soldiers killed in Iraq.

REUTERS

Voters listen to Senator Hillary Clinton at a November campaign rally in Perry, Iowa.

All it takes to discover why Americans are beginning to doubt their own
greatness is to accept an invitation to a dinner hosted by Adrian
Fenty, the mayor of Washington, DC. His vision, says Fenty, is for
students in the District of Columbia to receive their books at the
beginning of the school year, not in the middle. When asked whether he
has other visions, the mayor nods enthusiastically. His goal, he says,
is to improve security in the city's schools. Fenty wants to make sure
students in the United States capital can once again leave the
classroom without facing the threat of violence.

All it takes to understand why the United States, a once-proud
economic power, seems so unsure about itself these days is a walk
through a supermarket with author Sara Bongiorni. In her book "A Year
without 'Made in China': One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global
Economy," Bongiorni describes how even those who call themselves smart
shoppers have mixed feelings when they purchase low-priced,
foreign-made products. "When I see the label 'Made in China,' part of
me says: good for China. But another part feels a rush of
sentimentality because I've lost something without exactly knowing what
it is."

Taking a trip down America's memory lane -- to Gary, Indiana, for
instance -- is a good way to understand why Americans today are so
anxious about the future. In the days when Gary was the home of the
world's biggest steel company, the running joke was that US Steel was
so hard up for workers that it would even hire dead people.

The company attracted workers from around the world, including the
family of future pop star Michael Jackson. Gary's steelworkers pumped
prosperity into America, and the country still retains a sizeable chunk
of the past that once thrived in Gary and other places like it.

Optimism Is Becoming an Endangered Species

But Gary is an ailing city today. US Steel has moved its
headquarters elsewhere and has severely cut back its Gary operations.
Nowadays, the city isn't doing any better than its most famous son.
Both have seen better days, but the difference is that Gary doesn't
even have the money for a facelift.

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Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Bush's Losing Iranian Hand

posted December 06, 2007 10:56 am

Whatever else the release
of the 16-agency National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian
bomb may be, it is certainly a reasonable measure of inside-the-Beltway
Bush administration decline. Whether that release represented "a pre-emptive strike against the White House by intelligence agencies and military chiefs," an intelligence "mini-coup"
against the administration, part of a longer-term set of moves meant to
undermine plans for air strikes against Iran that involved a potential
resignation threat from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and a "near mutiny" by the Joint Chiefs, or an attempt by the administration itself
to "salvage negotiations with Iran" or shift its own Iran policy, or
none of -- or some combination of -- the above, one thing can be said:
Such an NIE would not have been written, no less released, at almost
any previous moment in the last seven years. (Witness the 2005 version
of the same that opted for an active Iranian program to produce nuclear
weapons.)

Imagine an NIE back in 2005 that, as Dilip Hiro wrote recently,
"contradicts the image of an inward-looking, irrational, theocratic
leadership ruling Iran oppressively that Washington has been projecting
for a long time. It says: 'Our assessment that Iran halted the program
in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates
Teheran's decisions are judged by a cost-benefit approach rather than a
rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military
costs.'"

The Iranians as rational, cost-benefit calculators? Only the near
collapse of presidential and vice-presidential polling figures, and the
endless policy failures that proceeded and accompanied those numbers;
only the arrival of Robert Gates as secretary of defense and a representative
of the "reality-based community," only the weakening of the neocons and
their purge inside the Pentagon, only the increasing isolation of the
Vice President's "office" -- only, that is, decline inside the Beltway
-- could account for such a conclusion or such a release.

Whatever the realities of the Iranian nuclear program, this NIE
certainly reflected the shifting realities of power in Washington in
the winter of 2007. In a zero-sum game in the capital's corridors in
which, for years, every other power center was the loser, the
hardliners suddenly find themselves with their backs to the wall when
it comes to the most compelling of their dreams of global domination.
(Never forget the pre-invasion neocon quip: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.")

Read more on TomDispatch.com

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Primer for campaign 2008

July/Aug 2007 • Barack Obama • Mitt Romney

Sept/Oct 2007 • Rudolph Giuliani • John Edwards

Nov/Dec 2007 • Hillary Clinton • John McCain

Renewing American Leadership by Barack Obama July/August 2007 "The American moment is not over, but it must be seized anew. America cannot meet this century's challenges alone; the world cannot meet them without America."

Rising to a New Generation of Global Challenges by Mitt Romney July/August 2007 "We must strengthen our military and economy, achieve energy independence, reenergize civilian and interagency capabilities, and revitalize our alliances."

Toward a Realistic Peace by Rudolph Giuliani September/October 2007 "With a stronger defense, a determined diplomacy, and greater U.S. economic and cultural influence, the next president can start to build a lasting, realistic peace."

Reengaging With the World by John Edwards September/October 2007 "We must restore America's reputation for moral leadership and reengage with the world, moving beyond the empty slogan "war on terror" and creating policies built on hope, not fear."

Security and Opportunity for the Twenty-first Century by Hillary Rodham Clinton November/December 2007 "We must get out of Iraq, rediscover the value of statesmanship, and live up to the democratic values that are the deepest source of our strength."

An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom by John McCain November/December 2007 "America needs a president who can revitalize the country's purpose and standing in the world and defeat terrorist adversaries who threaten liberty at home and abroad."

The Costs of Containing Iran

Washington's Misguided New Middle East Policy
Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh
From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2008

Summary: The Bush administration wants to contain Iran by rallying the support of Sunni Arab states and now sees Iran's containment as the heart of its Middle East policy: a way to stabilize Iraq, declaw Hezbollah, and restart the Arab-Israeli peace process. But the strategy is unsound and impractical, and it will probably further destabilize an already volatile region.

Vali Nasr, Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Adjunct Senior Fellow for the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of "The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future." Ray Takeyh is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic."

Over the past year, Washington has come to see the containment of Iran as the primary objective of its Middle East policy. It holds Tehran responsible for rising violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lebanon's tribulations, and Hamas' intransigence and senses that the balance of power in the region is shifting toward Iran and its Islamist allies. Curbing Tehran's growing influence is thus necessary for regional security.

Vice President Dick Cheney announced this new direction last May on the deck of the U.S.S. John C. Stennis in the Persian Gulf. "We'll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats," Cheney said. "We'll continue bringing relief to those who suffer, and delivering justice to the enemies of freedom. And we'll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has expressed a similar sentiment: "Iran constitutes the single most important single-country strategic challenge to the United States and to the kind of Middle East that we want to see." Meanwhile, Iran's accelerating nuclear program continues to haunt Washington and much of the international community, adding to their sense of urgency.

Taking a page out of its early Cold War playbook, Washington hopes to check and possibly reduce Tehran's growing influence much as it foiled the Soviet Union's expansionist designs: by projecting its own power while putting direct pressure on its enemy and building a broad-based alliance against it. Washington has been building up the U.S. Navy's presence in the Persian Gulf and using harsh rhetoric, raising the specter of war. At the same time, it funds a $75 million democracy-promotion program supporting regime change in Tehran. In recent months, Washington has rallied support for a series of United Nations resolutions against Iran's nuclear program and successfully pushed through tough informal financial sanctions that have all but cut Iran out of international financial markets. It has officially designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and the IRG's elite al Quds Army as a supporter of terrorism, allowing the Treasury Department to target the groups' assets and the U.S. military to harass and apprehend their personnel in Iraq. Washington is also working to garner support from what it now views as moderate governments in the Middle East -- mostly authoritarian Arab regimes it once blamed for the region's myriad problems.

Washington's goal is to eliminate Iran's influence in the Arab world by rolling back Tehran's gains to date and denying it the support of allies -- in effect drawing a line from Lebanon to Oman to separate Iran from its Arab neighbors. The Bush administration has rallied support among Arab governments to oppose Iranian policies in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. It is trying to buttress the military capability of Persian Gulf states by providing a $20 billion arms package to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates. According to Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, one of the arms sales' primary objectives is "to enable these countries to strengthen their defenses and therefore to provide a deterrence against Iranian expansion and Iranian aggression in the future." And through a series of regional conclaves and conferences, the Bush administration hopes to rejuvenate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process partly in the hope of refocusing the energies of the region's governments on the threat posed by Iran.

Containing Iran is not a novel idea, of course, but the benefits Washington expects from it are new. Since the inception of the Islamic Republic, successive Republican and Democratic administrations have devised various policies, doctrines, and schemes to temper the rash theocracy. For the Bush administration, however, containing Iran is the solution to the Middle East's various problems. In its narrative, Sunni Arab states will rally to assist in the reconstruction of a viable government in Iraq for fear that state collapse in Baghdad would only consolidate Iran's influence there. The specter of Shiite primacy in the region will persuade Saudi Arabia and Egypt to actively help declaw Hezbollah. And, the theory goes, now that Israel and its longtime Arab nemeses suddenly have a common interest in deflating Tehran's power and stopping the ascendance of its protégé, Hamas, they will come to terms on an Israeli-Palestinian accord. This, in turn, will (rightly) shift the Middle East's focus away from the corrosive Palestinian issue to the more pressing Persian menace. Far from worrying that the Middle East is now in flames, Bush administration officials seem to feel that in the midst of disorder and chaos lies an unprecedented opportunity for reshaping the region so that it is finally at ease with U.S. dominance and Israeli prowess.

But there is a problem: Washington's containment strategy is unsound, it cannot be implemented effectively, and it will probably make matters worse. The ingredients needed for a successful containment effort simply do not exist. Under these circumstances, Washington's insistence that Arab states array against Iran could further destabilize an already volatile region.

NEW AND DISAPPROVED

Iran does present serious problems for the United States. Its quest for a nuclear capability, its mischievous interventions in Iraq, and its strident opposition to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process constitute a formidable list of grievances. But the bigger issue is the Bush administration's fundamental belief that Iran cannot be a constructive actor in a stable Middle East and that its unsavory behavior cannot be changed through creative diplomacy. Iran is not, in fact, seeking to create disorder in order to fulfill some scriptural promise,

Read more

Age of Microcelebrity, and Why Everyone's a Little Brad Pitt

By Clive Thompson 11.27.07 | 12:00 AM

Illustration: Abbot Miller/Pentagon

Whenever Peter Hirshberg is at a party, someone eventually pulls out a camera and takes a snapshot with him in it. Hirshberg — chair of the executive committee at the blog-search company Technorati — performs a quick mental calculation: Does the photographer look like one of those people who will immediately dash home and post all their candids to Flickr? "If I think it's going to end up on the Web, I straighten up more, try to smile the right way," Hirshberg says. "Because if it goes online, people I know will probably see it."

Hirshberg has a blog, which means a couple hundred people — some strangers, some friends — regularly follow his comings and goings, his Facebook updates, his online photo trail. Any time he does something embarrassing or stupid, those people will know. So in essence, Hirshberg has to behave like a very minor version of Brad Pitt. He's got to watch out for the paparazzi, be careful with his public image.

But he's not a celebrity. He's a microcelebrity.

Microcelebrity is the phenomenon of being extremely well known not to millions but to a small group — a thousand people, or maybe only a few dozen. As DIY media reach ever deeper into our lives, it's happening to more and more of us. Got a Facebook account? A whackload of pictures on Flickr? Odds are there are complete strangers who know about you — and maybe even talk about you.

Geoffrey Grosenbach, a programmer in Seattle, wrote a Twitter post about a new office chair he got — then discovered people in Australia chatting about his purchase. Afriend of mine learned that her microfans had formed a Yahoo group (with 125 members!) to discuss her blog. I've been touched by this trend, too: I once stumbled upon a discussion-board thread arguing over whether it's healthy for me to have a nanny look after my son during work hours — a personal detail I had revealed online.

Some of the newly microfamous aren't very happy about all the attention. Blog pioneer Dave Winer has found his idle industry-conference chitchat so frequently live-blogged that he now feels "like a presi-dential candidate" and worries about making off-the-cuff remarks. Some pundits fret that microcelebrity will soon force everyone to write blog posts and even talk in the bland, focus-grouped cadences of Hillary Clinton (minus the cackle).

But I think these gloomy predictions are probably wrong. The truth is that people are developing interesting social skills to adapt to microfame. We're learning how to live in front of a crowd.

If you really want to see the future, check out teenagers and twentysomethings. When they go to a party, they make sure they're dressed for their close-up — because there will be photos, and those photos will end up online. In managing their Web presence, they understand the impact of logos, images, and fonts. And they're increasingly careful to use pseudonyms or private accounts when they want to wall off the more intimate details of their lives. (Indeed, fully two-thirds of teenagers' MySpace accounts are private and can be viewed by invitation only.)

I now use a few coy tricks to communicate with the small group of people who follow me online. When the backlog of unanswered messages in my inbox grows too huge, I'll post a message to Facebook or Twitter pleading "Snowed under by work!" in the hope that my audience — including, ahem, my Wired editor — will cut me some slack.

In essence, I'm sending out press releases. Adapting to microcelebrity means learning to manage our own identity and "message" almost like a self-contained public relations department. "People are using the same techniques employed on Madison Avenue to manage their personal lives," says Theresa Senft, a media studies professor and one of the first to identify the rise of microcelebrity. "Corporations are getting humanized, and humans are getting corporatized."

You could regard this as a sad development — the whole Brand Called You meme brought to its grim apotheosis. But haven't our lives always been a little bit public and stage-managed? Small-town living is a hotbed of bloglike gossip. Every time we get dressed — in power suits, nerdy casual wear, or goth-chick piercings — we're broadcasting a message about ourselves. Microcelebrity simply makes the social engineering we've always done a little more overt — and maybe a little more honest.

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U.S. report contradicts Bush on Iran nuclear program

Mon Dec 3, 2007 2:27pm ET

By Matt Spetalnick

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new U.S. intelligence report says Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and it remains on hold, contradicting the Bush administration's earlier assertion that Tehran was intent on developing a bomb.

The new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released on Monday could hamper U.S. efforts to convince other world powers to agree on a third package of U.N. sanctions against Iran for defying demands to halt uranium enrichment activities. Iran says it wants nuclear technology only for civilian purposes, such as electricity generation. Tensions have escalated in recent months as Washington has ratcheted up the rhetoric against Tehran, with U.S. President George W.
Bush insisting in October that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to World War Three.

But in a finding likely to surprise U.S. friends and foes alike, the latest NIE concluded: "We do not know whether (Iran)
currently intends to develop nuclear weapons." That marked a sharp contrast to an intelligence report two years ago that stated Iran was "determined to develop nuclear weapons." But the new assessment found Iran was continuing to develop technical capabilities that could be used to build a bomb and that it would likely be capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon "sometime during the 2010-2015 time-frame."

Continued...

New Home Sales Cut in Half

Friday, November 30, 2007 | 11:30 AM

I was chatting with a friend about our earlier post taking apart the New Housing Sales data (Sales drop 23.5%), and he asked -- "Gee, how far do you think that's from the top?"

A few clicks later -- and courtesy of Asha G. Bangalore, we learn that sales of new single-family homes are down 47.6% from their peak in July 2005.

To contextualize this, if the current path continues into 2008, Centex CEO Timothy Eller said to Bloomberg, "This looks like it's going to be the deepest correction of any housing correction since World War II."

Truly amazing.

Sources:

Existing Home Sales - Sales and Prices Are Down, Inventories Keep Climbing Up
Asha G. Bangalore,
Northern Trust, November 28, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/28wh2o

Housing Slump's Third Year Will Be `Deepest' Since World War II
Dan Levy and Brian Louis
Bloomberg, Nov. 30 2007
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aW1lrGeadgHI&

Tree

photographs by Myoung Ho Lee		Tree #5 - A Series of Tree from the project, Photography-Act © 2007 Myoung Ho Lee View the photographs in more detail as a large-format slide show in a new window.

Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)

Dir: Philip Kaufman

Playlist review

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30 minute weekend

42 is here !!

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Nuovo cinema Paradiso (1988)

Dir: Giuseppe Tornatore

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

From The Telegraph

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor

Last Updated: 6:01pm GMT 14/11/2007


An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.

Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

The E8 pattern (click to enlarge), Garrett Lisi surfing (middle) and out of the water (right)

In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi says. "It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."

Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.

Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.

Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.

Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.

"Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years," Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.

"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."

The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.

He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model,...........

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The Nerd Handbook

Tech Life An annoyingly efficient relevancy engine

The Nerd Handbook

A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.

It’s unlikely that this project is a nerd’s day job because his opinion regarding his job is, “Been there, done that”. We’ll explore the consequences of this seemingly short attention span in a bit, but for now this project is the other big thing your nerd is building and I’ve no idea what is, but you should.

At some point, you, the nerd’s companion, were the project. You were showered with the fire hose of attention because you were the bright and shiny new development in your nerd’s life. There is also a chance that you’re lucky and you are currently your nerd’s project. Congrats. Don’t get too comfortable because he’ll move on, and, when that happens, you’ll be wondering what happened to all the attention. This handbook might help.

Regarding gender: for this piece, my prototypical nerd is a he as a convenience. There are plenty of she nerds out there for which these observations equally apply.

Understand your nerd’s relation to the computer. It’s clichéd, but a nerd is defined by his computer, and you need to understand why.

First, a majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”. Nerds know how a computer works. They intimately know how a computer works. When you ask a nerd, “When I click this, it takes awhile for the thing to show up. Do you know what’s wrong?” they know what’s wrong. A nerd has a mental model of the hardware and the software in his head. While the rest of the world sees magic, your nerd knows how the magic works, he knows the magic is a long series of ones and zeros moving across your screen with impressive speed, and he knows how to make those bits move faster.

The nerd has based his career, maybe his life, on the computer, and as we’ll see, this intimate relationship has altered his view of the world. He sees the world as a system which, given enough time and effort, is completely knowable. This is a fragile illusion that your nerd has adopted, but it’s a pleasant one that gets your nerd through the day. When the illusion is broken, you are going to discover that…

Your nerd has control issues.
Your nerd has built himself a cave.
Your nerd loves toys and puzzles.
Nerds are fucking funny.
Your nerd has an amazing appetite for information.
Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head.
Your nerd might come off as not liking people.

Advanced Nerd Tweakage:

Map the things he’s bad at to the things he loves.
Make it a project.
People are the most interesting content out there.

Read the Full Article

Washington tells EU firms: quit Iran now

UK, French and German companies begin pullout under US pressure

David Gow in Munich and Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Friday November 9, 2007
The Guardian

The US vice-president, Dick Cheney, has warned firms that stay in Iran they will have trouble doing business in the US. Photograph: Tim Sharp/AP

Multinational companies are coming under increasing pressure from the US to stop doing business with Iran because of its nuclear programme. European operators are facing threats from Washington that they could jeopardise their US interests by continuing to deal with Tehran, with increasing evidence that European governments, mainly France, Germany and Britain, are supporting the US campaign.

It emerged last night that Siemens, one of the world's largest engineering groups and based in Germany, has pulled out of all new business dealings with Iran after pressure from the US and German governments. This follows the decision by Germany's three biggest banks, Deutsche, Commerzbank, and Dresdner, to quit Iran after a warning from US vice-president Dick Cheney that if firms remain in Tehran, they are going to have problems doing business in the US.

The Foreign Office, while sympathising with City firms, has privately backed the US warnings in recent weeks, telling companies such as Shell and BP of the risks of continuing business with Iran. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has urged French energy firms Total and GDF not to pursue new business in Iran. Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor, is joining him in pressing for new sanctions, probably at EU level.

The US is tightening its economic squeeze on Iran and last month unilaterally imposed a new round of sanctions. It regularly complains in private to the British and other European governments that American efforts are being undermined by European companies continuing to do business with Tehran. If economic sanctions fail to have an impact by next year, pressure will mount from Mr Cheney to launch air strikes against Iran.

The under-secretary for political affairs at the US state department, Nicholas Burns, and the under-secretary at the Treasury, Stuart Levey, have made frequent trips to Europe to warn companies they face the loss of American business if they continue to deal with Iran.

BP said back in 2005 that "politically Iran is not a flyer" because of the company's huge presence in the US. Rival Shell has been tentatively moving forward with engineering studies on a large gas project in Iran but has insisted in the past that it would only take a final decision once it knew it was commercially viable. A spokesman for the company would not comment last night but industry sources said it was a "very sensitive issue", given the scale of Shell's oil business in the US.

The two British banks most frequently mentioned in Washington in relation to Iran are HSBC and Standard Chartered. Both banks have scaled down their operations in Iran but maintain a modest presence in Tehran.

Siemens insiders said the group, which is in the throes of clearing up a series of bribery and corruption cases involving payments of some €1.3bn (£900,000), would carry out existing contracts in Iran which have attracted government export credit guarantees, but would seek no new contracts. The engineering group won a contract four years ago to supply 24 power stations to the Iranians and last year secured a provisional €450m deal to supply 150 locomotives for Iran's railways.

Officials said Siemens' Iranian business amounted to less than 1% of annual group turnover of €84bn last year. This compares with sales of $21.4bn (€14.4bn or £10.1bn) in the US where the group employs 70,000. It is understood that 80% of the company's trade is in power generation but sources insisted that Siemens had no involvement in Iran's nuclear power programme. Germany is Iran's biggest trading partner, with a 2006 surplus of €4bn, but trade was down 18% in the first half of this year. UK exports to Iran fell 7% last year to £431.4m, according to the British-Iran chamber of commerce.

Beauties, like tyrants, old and friendless grown,
Yet hate repose, and dread to be alone……
As hags hold Sabbaths, less for joy than spite,
So these their merry, miserable night;
Still round and round the ghosts of beauty glide,
And haunt the places where their honour died.
See how the world it’s veterans rewards!
A youth of frolics, an old age of cards;
Fair to no purpose, artful to no end,
Young without lovers, old without a friend;
A fop their passion, but their prize a sot;
Alive ridiculous, and dead, forgot!
--Pope

The Right Brain vs Left Brain test

September 26, 2007 10:00pm

The Right Brain vs Left Brain test ... do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.

LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS uses logic detail oriented facts rule words and language present and past math and science can comprehend knowing acknowledges order/pattern perception knows object name reality based forms strategies practical safe

RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS uses feeling "big picture" oriented imagination rules symbols and images present and future philosophy & religion can "get it" (i.e. meaning) believes appreciates spatial perception knows object function fantasy based presents possibilities impetuous risk taking

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Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing, Persian-born, Rhodesian-raised, London-residing novelist, wins the Nobel Prize in Literature... NY Times ... AP ... London Times ... Guardian ... Telegraph ... LA Times ... WP ... Nation ... Open Democracy ... NY Sun ... The Valve

Those who know me also know that I have been talking about Lessing for years, and having heard the term "Doris who?" so many times makes this a personal vindication. I highly recommand SHIKASTA the first book in the Canopus in Argos trilogy for the Utopian minded, plus The Golden Notebook considered by many as the first truly feminist novel.

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Stop Wasting Time Online

The Web is replacing the TV as the #1 time-thief in our lives. And, unlike the TV, the Web does not respect the boundaries of work. Thus the time you spend on the web "working" is inherently intertwined with the time you spend "playing." As you can tell from our How To: Traverse Corporate Firewalls wiki entry, this cause for excessive amounts of stress for everyone and particularly affects those who charge by the hour (and thus actually lose money to procrastination, in addition to less free time).

Here are a few tools that you can use to help the watchful eye of your employer relax a little, and maybe focus on someone else for a change.

MeeTimer

MeeTimer is a Firefox extension that uses a two-pronged attack to curb your misplaced time online. First it makes you aware of your time expenditures, explicitly showing you which activities and sites are taking up most of your time. Second, it actively deters you from using a site, in case your willpower is not up to the task.

A core design principle is to 'advise' you, rather than 'force' you. This is because there are plenty of times where you legitimately need to bend the rules - e.g. to check some new resource for work - and thus you waste time (not to mention become frustrated) fighting against tools that try to block the Web. MeeTimer does not fight, it guides.

Super Kiwi Cloak

A GTD (Getting Things Done) tool that helps you focus by blocking access to certain websites during work hours, yet allows hourly breaks.

Helps you focus on GTD by blocking access to all "Included Pages" during work hours. Because a script is so easy to get past, this script also allows you to browse freely during a defined period each hour. The goal is to stay on task, by giving you less incentive to break your rules.

By default, the script is set to block access from 9am to 5pm, to allow you to access sites during a ten-minute window at the top of each hour (from 5-till to 5-after), and to only run on weekdays. These settings can all be changed within the script.

You can block a page by adding it to "Included Pages" or whitelist it by adding it to "Excluded Pages" through the "Manage User Scripts" menu. You can also block all pages (except whitelisted ones) by adding * to the "Included Pages".

Super Kiwi Cloak is a modification of the original Kiwi Cloak script by Jeremy Freese and Lucy Pigpuppet (which was, in turn, based on Lifehacker Gina Trapani's Invisibility Cloak). It has been edited so that it will function across hours, or even across days.

Stealth Kiwi

A completely rewritten version of GTD tool Super Kiwi Cloak that doesn't penalize you for missing the top of the hour. Now, you can take a surfing break whenever you want, and then block webpages and stay focused for the next hour.

This is an updated version of Super Kiwi Cloak that allows you greater flexibility and will help you stay even more on task.

Stealth Kiwi is a GTD tool that blocks access to all "Included pages" during work hours. Because a script is so easy to get around, SK relaxes its guard every hour. By giving yourself a future break time, you have less incentive to break your rules, and more chances to Get Things Done.

Responding to popular demand, I've reworked Stealth Kiwi so that you can take a break any time after the hour has passed, instead of just during a scheduled period. You will have 10 minutes from whenever you start the break to play, after which SK will block you until an hour has passed. This way, you can focus on work instead of the clock, taking breaks when you really need them, not just when the internet comes back.

By default, the script is set to block access from 9am to 5pm on weekdays. It is set to allow a ten-minute window of surfing, after which it blocks the internet from bring used for 50 minutes (for a total cycle time of one hour). These settings can all be changed within the script. Once you begin using the blocked pages, the cycle begins anew, giving you a break period and then blocking for the rest of the hour.

You can specify a page to be blocked by adding it to "Included Pages" or whitelist it by adding it to "Excluded Pages" through the "Manage User Scripts" menu. This script is set to block all pages by default, but you can remove this by removing * from the "Included Pages".

Invisibility Cloak

Greasemonkey users can download a script created by Lifehacker Gina Trapani called Invisibility Cloak and set it to blank out specific sites, like Gawker. The script also displays a message prodding you to get back to business.

Time To Go Script

Inspired the Invisibility Cloak, Time To Go acts more as a gentle tap on the shoulder, rather than a backhanded, pimp-slap to the face that reminds you to get back to work. It allows you to visit an addictive site for, say, one minute only. Once the time is up, the screen turns blank, and you get back to work. The list of features includes:

* Big count-down counter - In the last 10 seconds, a big, BIG count-down counter will appear to tell you it’s about time to go.
* If you really, really need a bit more time to stay, click the counter to “recharge” it for 10 more seconds.
* The counter can be set to keep counting across different pages of the same site. Thus you won’t be able to surf indefinitely by keep navigating different pages of the site (you know that’s cheating, dude).
* Option panel - Apart from about:blank, you can set it to redirect to any other page. How about: your boss’s portrait with an angry face that you’ve uploaded to Flickr!
* Open the option panel by selecting Greasemonkey menu > User Script Commands > Time to Go::Options, where you can change a few settings.
(You may also use the hotkey Alt-G.)

Greasemonkey basic - You have to enable your time-wasting website to use my script first. Otherwise, the counter and option panel won’t show up. To do that, right click on the Greasemonkey status bar icon , select Manage User Scripts, click on Time to Go, and then Add the site to Included Pages by entering something like http://www.yoursite.com/* .

The Procrastinator's Clock

The Procrastinator's Clock (for Windows/Mac/web) is guaranteed to be up to 15 minutes fast. However, it also speeds up and slows down in an unpredictable manner so you can’t be sure how fast it really is. Furthermore, the clock is guaranteed to not be slow, assuming your computer clock is sync’d with NTP; many computers running Windows and Mac OS X with persistent Internet connections already are. So what will motivate you to be on time if you use this clock? FEAR, UNCERTAINTY and DOUBT! Use of this clock shows that, although your friends have created a separate timetable just to accommodate your legacy of tardiness, you really care about being on time. By assuming that the clock might actually be telling the correct time, you'll hopefully assume that that afternoon meeting is sooner than you thought and get back to work. Hopefully.

All text shared under a Creative Commons License

Editorial Guidelines

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (August 21, 1872 – March 16, 1898)

Beardsley was aligned with the Yellow Book coterie of artists and writers. He was art editor for the first four editions and produced many illustrations for the magazine. He was also closely aligned with Aestheticism, the British counterpart of Decadence and Symbolism.

Most of his images are done in ink, and feature large dark areas contrasted with large blank ones, and areas of fine detail contrasted with areas with none at all.

Aubrey Beardsley was the most controversial artist of the Art Nouveau era, renowned for his dark and perverse images and the grotesque erotica, which were the main themes of his later work. His most famous erotic illustrations were on themes of history and mythology, including his illustrations for Lysistrata and Salomé.

Beardsley was a close friend of Oscar Wilde and illustrated his play Salomé in 1893 for its French performance; it was performed in English the following year. He also produced extensive illustrations for books and magazines (e.g. for a deluxe edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur) and worked for magazines like The Savoy and The Studio. Beardsley also wrote Under the Hill, an unfinished erotic tale based loosely on the legend of Tannhäuser.

Beardsley was also a caricaturist and did some political cartoons, mirroring Wilde's irreverent wit in art. Beardsley's work reflected the decadence of his era and his influence was enormous, clearly visible in the work of the French Symbolists, the Poster art Movement of the 1890s and the work of many later-period Art Nouveau artists like Pape and Clarke.

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Beardsley was a public character as well as a private eccentric. He said, "I have one aim — the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing." Wilde said he had "a face like a silver hatchet, and grass green hair."

Although Beardsley was aligned with the homosexual clique that included Oscar Wilde and other English aesthetes, the details of his sexuality remain in question. Speculation about his sexuality include rumours of an incestuous relationship with his elder sister, Mabel, who may have borne his miscarried child.

Beardsley died in Menton, France on March 16, 1898. It is generally accepted that Beardsley died of tuberculosis, although suicide is also rumored. He was 25.

Beating the Drums for the Next War

Scott Horton

October 1, 2007

Last week brought heads of state and senior diplomats in number to New York for the opening of the General Assembly of the United Nations. It also brought President Bush and President Ahmadinejad to the podium. For the larger audience in the world community, however, one of the most important questions of the day remains whether the verbal blows traded between these two pugnacious leaders will turn in the fullness of time into bullets and bombs. And the sense of the best-informed was clear: yes. I spoke with a number of European diplomats who are keeping track of the issue, and I found a near uniform analysis. These diplomats believe that the United States will launch an air war on Iran, and that it will occur within the next six to eight months. I am therefore moving the hands of the Next War clock another minute closer to midnight and putting the likelihood of conflict at 70%. It’s still not certain, and it’s still avertable, but at this point it has to be seen as conventional wisdom to say that America is headed for another war in the Islamic world—it’s fourth since Bush became president, if we include the proxy war in Lebanon. And this time it will be a war against a nation with vastly greater military resources, as well as a demonstrated ability to wield terrorism as a tactic—Iran. Let’s take quick stock of the further indicators from the last week or so. Shifting Targets On Sunday, Sy Hersh’s latest piece appeared, offering a good take on the Bush Administration’s changing plans for a war on Iran. The headline from the Hersh piece, called “Shifting Targets,” makes clear that the Pentagon has been tasked to redraft its plans for a war against Iran. The new plans are very close to what was reported in the London quality press a few weeks ago: an aerial war with a somewhat narrower focus on specific units of the elite Republican Guard. Hersh’s piece is full of color, and after reading it I immediately understood why the European diplomats were so convinced that the decision to bomb Iran was all-but-final. Here’s a key passage reflecting a series of discussions which give some flavor of the war spirit in the White House: the President told [Crocker] that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British “were on board.” At that point, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interjected that there was a need to proceed carefully, because of the ongoing...................

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Global Ham Television Postcard Universes

Monday, October 1, 2007

The Net is a Waste of Time

By WILLIAM GIBSON

Published: July 14, 1996

I COINED THE WORD "CYBERSPACE" IN 1981 IN ONE OF MY first science fiction stories and subsequently used it to describe something that people insist on seeing as a sort of literary forerunner of the Internet. This being so, some think it remarkable that I do not use E-mail. In all truth, I have avoided it because I am lazy and enjoy staring blankly into space (which is also the space where novels come from) and because unanswered mail, E- or otherwise, is a source of discomfort.

But I have recently become an avid browser of the World Wide Web. Some people find this odd. My wife finds it positively perverse. I, however, scent big changes afoot, possibilities that were never quite as manifest in earlier incarnations of the Net.

I was born in 1948. I can't recall a world before television, but I know I must have experienced one. I do, dimly, recall the arrival of a piece of brown wooden furniture with sturdy Bakelite knobs and a screen no larger than the screen on this Powerbook.

Initially there was nothing on it but "snow," and then the nightly advent of a targetlike device called "the test pattern," which people actually gathered to watch.

Today I think about the test pattern as I surf the Web. I imagine that the World Wide Web and its modest wonders are no more than the test pattern for whatever the 21st century will regard as its equivalent medium. Not that I can even remotely imagine what that medium might actually be.

In the age of wooden television in the South where I grew up, leisure involved sitting on screened porches, smoking cigarettes, drinking iced tea, engaging in conversation and staring into space. It might also involve fishing.

Sometimes the Web does remind me of fishing. It never reminds me of conversation, although it can feel a lot like staring into space. "Surfing the Web" (as dubious a metaphor as "the information highway") is, as a friend of mind has it, "like reading magazines with the pages stuck together." My wife shakes her head in dismay as I patiently await the downloading of some Japanese Beatles fan's personal catalogue of bootlegs. "But it's from Japan!" She isn't moved. She goes out to enjoy the flowers in her garden.

I stay in. Hooked. Is this leisure -- this browsing, randomly linking my way through these small patches of virtual real-estate -- or do I somehow imagine that I am performing some more dynamic function? The content of the Web aspires to absolute variety. One might find anything there. It is like rummaging in the forefront of the collective global mind. Somewhere, surely, there is a site that contains . . . everything we have lost?

The finest and most secret pleasure afforded new users of the Web rests in submitting to the search engine of Alta Vista the names of people we may not have spoken aloud in years. Will she be here? Has he survived unto this age? (She isn't there. Someone with his name has recently posted to a news group concerned with gossip about soap stars.) What is this casting of the nets of identity? Do we engage here in something of a tragic seriousness?

In the age of wooden television, media were there to entertain, to sell an advertiser's product, perhaps to inform. Watching television, then, could indeed be considered a leisure activity. In our hypermediated age, we have come to suspect that watching television constitutes a species of work. Post-industrial creatures of an information economy, we increasingly sense that accessing media is what we do. We have become terminally self-conscious. There is no such thing as simple entertainment. We watch ourselves watching. We watch ourselves watching Beavis and Butt-head, who are watching rock videos. Simply to watch, without the buffer of irony in place, might reveal a fatal naivete.

But that is our response to aging media like film and television, survivors from the age of wood. The Web is new, and our response to it has not yet hardened. That is a large part of its appeal. It is something half-formed, growing. Larval. It is not what it was six months ago; in another six months it will be something else again. It was not planned; it simply happened, is happening. It is happening the way cities happened. It is a city.

Toward the end of the age of wooden televisions the futurists of the Sunday supplements announced the advent of the "leisure society." Technology would leave us less and less to do in the Marxian sense of yanking the levers of production. The challenge, then, would be to fill our days with meaningful, healthful, satisfying activity. As with most products of an earlier era's futurism, we find it difficult today to imagine the exact coordinates from which this vision came. In any case, our world does not offer us a surplus of leisure. The word itself has grown somehow suspect, as quaint and vaguely melancholy as the battered leather valise in a Ralph Lauren window display. Only the very old or the economically disadvantaged (provided they are not chained to the schedules of their environment's more demanding addictions) have a great deal of time on their hands. To be successful, apparently, is to be chronically busy. As new technologies search out and lace over every interstice in the net of global communication, we find ourselves with increasingly less excuse for . . . slack.

And that, I would argue, is what the World Wide Web, the test pattern for whatever will become the dominant global medium, offers us. Today, in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time, to wander aimlessly, to daydream about the countless other lives, the other people, on the far sides of however many monitors in that postgeographical meta-country we increasingly call home. It will probably evolve into something considerably less random, and less fun -- we seem to have a knack for that -- but in the meantime, in its gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes phase, surfing the Web is a procrastinator's dream. And people who see you doing it might even imagine you're working.

"Dad of all Bombs" - Russia's new super-weapon

		INFOgraphics
		19:24 | 28/ 09/ 2007

Russia tests the world's most powerful vacuum bomb, whose effect is comparable to a nuclear charge. It is more powerful than the U.S. Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), colloquially known as the Mother of All Bombs, a large-yield satellite-guided, air delivered bomb described as the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in history.

Diane Arbus

Text from The Encyclopedia of Photography (1984)Arbus, Diane (wiki)
American, 1923-1971
A pivotal figure in contemporary documentary photography, Diane Arbus produced a substantial body of work before her suicide in 1971. Her unrelentingly direct photographs of people who live on the edge of societal acceptance, as well as those photographs depicting supposedly "normal" people in a way that sharply outlines the cracks in their public masks, were controversial at the time of their creation and remain so today.

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Arbus was born Diane Nemerox, to a wealthy family in New York City. Her father owned a fashionable Fifth Avenue department store. She was educated at the Ethical Culture School, a progressive institution. At age 18 she married Allan Arbus and began to express an interest in photography. Her father asked Diane and her husband to make advertising photographs for his store. The couple collaborated as photographers from then on, eventually producing fashion pictures for Harper's Bazaar.
Between 1955 and 1957 Arbus studied under Lisette Model. Model encouraged Arbus to concentrate on personal pictures and to further develop what Model recognized as a uniquely incisive documentary eye. Soon after Arbus began her studies with Lisette Model, she began to devote herself fully to documenting transvestites, twins, midgets, people on the streets and in their homes, and asylum inmates. Arbus's pictures are almost invariably confrontational: the subjects look directly at the camera and are sharply rendered, lit by direct flash or other frontal lighting. Her subjects appear to be perfectly willing, if not eager, to reveal themselves and their flaws to her lens.
She said of her pictures, "What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own." And of her subjects who were physically unusual, she said, "Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. [These people] were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."
Arbus's photographs drew immediate attention from the artistic community. She was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1963 and 1966 to continue her work. In 1967 her work was mounted in the New Documents show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, along with the work of two other influential, new photographers: Gary Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. For the most part, the exhibition received extremely good reviews.
In 1970 Arbus made a limited portfolio containing 10 photographs; by then she had established an international reputation as one of the pioneers of the "new" documentary style. Her work was often compared with that of August Sander, whose Men Without Masks expressed similar concerns, although in a seemingly less ruthless manner. In July 1971 Diane Arbus took her own life in Greenwich Village, New York. Her death brought even more attention to her name and photographs. In the following year Arbus became the first American photographer to be represented at the Venice Biennale. A major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1972, which traveled throughout the U.S. and Canada, was viewed by over 7.25 million people. The next year, a Japanese retrospective traveled through Western Europe and the Western Pacific. The 1972 Aperture monograph Diane Arbus, now in its twelfth edition, has sold more than 100,000 copies.