Entries Tagged 'Int’l Affairs' ↓

Re-Thinking The War II. Rethinking the war not in terms of geopolitics or anything, but in terms of the damage it has done to the US. To me, this is one of the most important aspects and always has been.

Xeni Jardin linked to an article in the IHT: Laptops, please: US law permits search, seizure at the border. On my way home from a recent trip from the US, I had this experience at Canadian customs. I was flagged by the guy and later he made a cursory look-see in my bag, he was most interested in the contents of my laptop. He was pretty chatty and said that one of their main missions at Canadian customs now was porn (along with guns and large sums of cash), which presumably was what he was checking on my machine.

Sy Hersh’s new article in The New Yorker is a must-read. It’s all about current US plans related to Iran and it’s nuclear weapons program, subtitled, “Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?” Terrifying, but oh-so-predictable.

a story in which it seems that Microsoft’s MSN service has taken down Chinese blogger’s site. Note that the suggestion is that MSN has done this, not that the Chinese government is responsible. Definitely a story to continue follow very closely.

last week was Nicholas Negroponte’s unveiling of the $100 laptop designed to meet the needs of people in relatively poor countries. The other day, Patrick noted that “… the minimum order [of the computer] is a million units, that’s 100 million US dollars” and that this seems to be quite a massive outlay for some poor countries. While that is true, one of the characteristics of such states is that there is a struggling “official” market system with thriving black markets of various kinds. The point of the huge investment that has to be made is not to make the barrier to entry too high but rather to ensure that the computers become so ubiquitous that the market value on the street trends towards 0. One thing is sure - it will be very interesting to see where this goes. I wonder if CIDA or the IDRC in Canada has any formal involvement with this project? Canada has been involved with many computing and networking initiatives in Africa, and it seems that this would fit in quite well.

The Forgotten Crisis, Aug 17 2004.

Europeans cannot criticize the United States for waging war in Iraq if they are unwilling to exhibit the moral fiber to stop genocide by acting collectively and with decisiveness. President Bush was wrong to go into Iraq unilaterally when Iraq posed no danger to the United States, but we were right to demand accountability from Saddam. We are also right to demand accountability in Sudan. Every day that goes by without meaningful sanctions and even military intervention in Sudan by African, European and if necessary U.N. forces is a day where hundreds of innocent civilians die and thousands are displaced from their land. […] My challenge to the U.N. and Europe is simple: if you don’t like American diplomacy under George Bush, then do something to show those of us in opposition here in the U.S. that you can behave in such a way that unilateralism is not necessary.