rants and raves

Its soon here, the TV Turnoff Week 2003. Between 21st and 27th of April Adbusters wants us to turn off the TV and do other better things. For the campaign the Adbusters movement want to buy commercials on MTV. But MTV is looking nervous. If you like to remind MTV that the medium should be open to all expressions, also those trying to make people watch less TV, then Adbusters could use your help. Head on over to their site and you will find information on how to contact MTV […]

“We don’t do body counts” General Tommy Franks, US Central Command Norwegian newspapers report that 750 Iraqi soldiers have been killed in the battle for Najaf so far. There are no official numbers for how many civilians have been killed. A site that tries to put together information about civilian casualties is the Iraq Body Count site. At the time of this post the site claims the minimum civilian casualties of the war so far has been 213, maximum 292 souls. The site has published its methodology for gathering its

As an off-topic poster John ;) JD on MX: Breaking news sources

This is typical of the american government’s hypocrisy: Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld told CBS that if they are indeed coalition soldiers, “those pictures are a violation of the Geneva Convention.” Arab TV Shows Captured American Troops (washingtonpost.com) But, of course, the Afghan prisoners held in Cuba aren’t prisoners of war, at least according to US government.

“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater

BeastieBoys.com is supporting the anti-war movement by changing their web site to let everyone know what they think about the war. “We felt it was important to comment on where the US appears to be heading now. A war in Iraq will not resolve our problems. It can only result in the deaths of many innocent civilians and US troops. If we are truly striving for safety, we need to build friendships, not try to bully the rest of the world.” – Adam Yauch “Being together, writing and recording, we

By Jackson Browne From his album “Lives in the Balance“, 1986 As if I really didn’t understand That I was just another part of their plan I went off looking for the promise Believing in the Motherland And from the comfort of a dreamer’s bed And the safety of my own head I went on speaking of the future While other people fought and bled The kid I was when I first left home Was looking for his freedom and a life of his own But the freedom that he

Interesting story in the Guardian today: Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war Secret document details American plan to bug phones and emails of key Security Council members I wonder when this story will be picked up by the US Media.

Doc Searls isn’t blogging much today, but he did say that Emergent Democracy is required reading, and I have to agree with him. Its about society, democracy, weblogs and other interesting topics. Well worth using some 10’s of minutes to read.

From what I have read about Nameprotect and their web-bots, I shouldn’t have been surprised that they are lying when they claim to respect robots.txt: […]Practices the following best practices to ensure non-invasive crawling: Honoring robots.txt files – to exclude the NPBot crawler, please use “NPBot” as the user-agent name in your robots.txt file […] I have added the necessary line to my robots.txt file to exclude the NPBot from my site, but they are still indexing without caring about what the robots.txt file says. Its also worth noting that