WikiLeaks was hosted by the Amazon’s S3 cloud hosting platform until Dec 1st, 2010. The U.S. government pushed WikiLeaks off the servers of Amazon, thanks in part to an effort by the Senator Joe Lieberman, who celebrated the success of his boycott campaign.
Source: Times article Why WikiLeaks s winning its info war, Dec 8th, 2010
Amazon pulls Wikileaks but cashes from it
Posted by
on December 10, 2010
The British Museum is Falling Down
Posted by
on August 01, 2010
The title is not related to sabotaging by the Greek to take the Elgin sculptures back home or lack of public funding. It is the title of a novel by David Lodge.
Penguin publishes a collection called Decades with a selection of books from the 50′s to the 80′s that helped shape modern Britain. The novel was published in 1965. Adam Appleby braves through the anxieties and contradictions of Catholics in their compliance to the ultra-orthodox ruling of sex and reproduction by the Church.
Our hero is tormented by the prospect of having his wife pregnant of who would be their fourth kid at a time when he sees no end to his thesis. The drama unfolds in an ever unsatisfying and very miserable British style. This sentence summarizes the whole approach to life of a whole nation:
At last he was in the open air. He filled his lungs, and coughed.
Age of consent for religion
Posted by
on July 24, 2010
A legal minimum age to be exposed to religion is just one of the proposals of The People’s Manifiesto by Mark Thomas.
The book is a hilarious compilation of spontaneous proposals by the audience of Mark Thomas radio shows. They are ideas of people who think that they can do a better job than the politicians that represent them.
Some of the policies would, if enforced, result in the end of the civilisation as we know it, like making party political manifestos legally binding or ending tax havens, including the many British ones (and bomb Switzerland). Other are deceptively simple like legalising all drugs or enforcing that members of parliament have no other job than, well members of parliament.
I go for these two: the right to use a product without having to reference a user manual and the opt-out system for organ donations.
Finance regulator in a state of shocked disbelief
Posted by
on July 03, 2010
There is a direct route from power to disaster: it’s called ideology. From the horse’s mouth:
“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
Alan Greenspan admitted in October 2008 that there was a “flaw” in this “ideology”. Now, that is a tautology. He mounted a defense of this last 25 years as Fed chairman based on two axis:
- The scale of the crisis was much bigger than the room of maneuvre of the regulator
- Forecasting is futile: nobody could have prevented the housing bubble and the criminal activities of the banks in the US