US Politics, USA

McCain fries Barbara Ann.

And he not only owes an apology to the Beach Boys for his musical stunt – “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” (video on youtube). Did John McCain suddenly decide that American Idol is the more promising competition? Although I suppose most contenders there have understood that doing electoral math usually has a very early victim in the US: one’s very own self respect. American Presidential campaigns are just no fun anymore. Now candidates are making jokes so they can decide after the public reaction if they were serious or not.

Looking forward to John Stewart’s take on this.

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Bürgerrechte, intellectual property rights

Traurig, aber leider nicht vollkommen falsch…

Bettina Winsemann interviewt Walter M. Miller für Telepolis: “Das Urheberrecht ist der Schlüssel zur Vollbeschäftigung”

Der vielfach gescholtene 2. Korb des neuen Urheberrechtes ist nach Meinung des Künstlers und Ökonoms Walter M. Miller nicht nur das “Beste, was es seit langem gab”, er wird auch die Arbeitslosigkeit endgültig beenden. Telepolis gab das medienscheue Genie eines seiner wenigen Interviews.

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almost a diary

Das Nichts

Das Nichts (I). Sollte sich irgendjemand über die geringe Schreibfrequenz wundern – die hat vor allem damit zu tun, daß ich aufgrund von Kommentar-Spam-Problemen A Fistful Of Euros von Movable Type nach WordPress portiert habe, was doch deutlich aufwendiger war als angenommen. Aber ich habe dabei einen Weg gefunden, MT-Blogs als Kategorien nach WP zu importieren – sollte irgendjemand daran interessiert sein, einfach eine Email schicken.

Das Nichts (II). Ich bin heute beim entspannenden Segelfliegen in Google Earth mal wieder auf eine der Grenzen von hochauflösenden Bildern und niedrigauflösenden Bildern gestoßen und fühlte mich plötzlich an das alles verschlingende Nichts aus der Unendlichen Geschichte von Michael Ende erinnert… aber zum Glück weiß ich ja, daß bei Google Earth das Nichts mit der Zeit schon verschwinden wird.

Update: Das Nichts (III). Da der urheberrechtliche Schwachsinn soweit zu gehen scheint, daß selbst Screenshots, die Google explizit (für Menschen, die sich nicht primär in Legalese unterhalten) für die nicht-kommerzielle Nutzung freigegeben sind, ist das Nichts tatsächlich verschwunden. Zumindest von dieser Seite. Mehr zu dem Thema bei Robert Basic.

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Allgemein

Spielzeug für die Kinder von Gan-Israel.

<!--enpts-->Spielzeug<!--enpte-->Gerade habe ich im Blog von Julia Seeliger, von wo ich auch das Bild habe (ich hoffe, das ist ok), gelesen, daß

“[i]n der Nacht zum Sonntag, den 25. Februar 2007, … Unbekannte antisemitische Drohungen an die Fassade des Kindergartens Gan-Israel in Berlin-Charlottenburg [geschmiert haben]. “Scheiß Juden”, “Auschwitz”, “Weg hier”, dazu Hakenkreuze und Runen. Wie sehr sich der Anschlag nicht nur gegen eine jüdische Einrichtung, sondern gerade auch gegen die Kinder richtete, zeigt die Tatsache, dass die Täter Spielzeug der Kleinen mit SS-Runen beschmierten und zerstörten.”

Das sind so die Dinge, die bei mir wirklich physische Übelkeit hervorrufen und die ich auch nicht kommentieren möchte.

Was kaputt ist, vor allem psychisch, ist wohl leider kaputt. Aber neues Spielzeug kann man glücklicherweise kaufen – oder dafür Spenden. Das geht, laut Julia Seeligers Blog, hier –

Amadeu Antonio Stiftung
Stichwort “Spielzeug”
Deutsche Bank Bensheim
Konto: 030 331 331
BLZ: 509 700 04

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France, media

What’s in a title.

Clearly demonstrating a profound lack of understanding of social media as well as the urgency of a useful legal framework for “citizen journalists”,

[t]he French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.

Source: France bans citizen journalists from reporting violence | InfoWorld

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Allgemein

Comparing Apples with… Apples.

In all the years – ok the couple of years – that I’ve been using blog-CMS I’ve not seen a more pointless discussion of the relative merits of the systems Movabletype and WordPress. Still, enjoy the absurdity…

The Multiplicative Hypothesis » God I Hate WordPress

By the way, almostadiary.de was first on Blogger/blogspot, then on MT, then, briefly, on Expression Engine, and now it is on WordPress. All systems have strengths and weaknesses. But they are usually related to the way they are handling content, not the templating. Currently, in my opinion, EE is the most flexible, but also the most complex system and spam protection did not work well. WordPress is less flexible, mostly because it’s a single blog system, but it’s fast, easy to SEO, there’s a hack or plugin for everything, and it’s good on Spam protection.

That’s why I’m using WP at the moment. But the login effect is hardly impossible to overcome. And WP really needs todo something about the admin interface.

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cinema, media

The Life of Others II

I’m not too sure what I’m thinking about “Daily Variety” reports from Hollywood indicating the possibility of a Hollywood remake of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s “The Life of Others” - “Das Leben der anderen”. After all the original just won the Oskar for “best non-English language film.”

Of course, those allegedly interested in midwifing the project, Bob and Harvey Weinstein as well as Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, aren’t just anyone. But since the only successful Hollywood remakes of a European films I can think of off the top of my head were “Nikita”, “True Lies”, and “Three men and a baby” – all of which weren’t exactly rooted in French culture, a remake of “The Life of Others”, seems like a natural candidate for a “lost in translation”-style disaster. I’m saying this inspite of my sympathy for every project exposing the danger of the eavesdropping culture that is slowly being established in the US as well as in Europe.

Maybe it was that what Steven Spielberg meant, when he, according to Donnersmarck’s own words, congratulated him after the ceremony by saying – “You’ll never get over this.”

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oddly enough, Science

The new feminism?

Given that really no one, including self-identified feminists, really knows what feminism actually is, or, rather, can agree upon a useful definition thereof, I find it strange that hardly any day passes in Germany these days without yet another public demand for a “new feminism (today featuring Thea Dorn, in the Parliamentary Publication “Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte”, in German).” Well, maybe that is all well, and if more choice is really helping, I’m only happy to help to add to the confusion and propose a “medical” version – which, I may add, goes back to the origins of the term, as Sally Haslanger and Nancy Tuana write in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

“[i]n the mid-1800s the term ‘feminism’ was used to refer to “the qualities of females”, and it was not until after the First International Women’s Conference in Paris in 1892 that the term, following the French term féministe, was used regularly in English for a belief in and advocacy of equal rights for women based on the idea of the equality of the sexes.”

Probably thinking of those humble origins, reporting from the sixth annual meeting of the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health, Salon.com explains today that science is only now realising something most men have always known on some level – no one, not even women themselves, really know anything about women. In what may be the scary state of art in scientific exploration of female sexuality,

“… sexologist Michael Sand told the Tribune, “We don’t understand normative, healthy sexuality well enough to make judgments about what’s dysfunctional.” … According to one of the governing models, it “starts with desire, progresses through excitement or arousal and ends with orgasm.” Sand received a prize for his research on female sexuality…”

But there’s hope for the discipline: Medical companies are known to be busy investing in their own model of feminism, although it is unclear if the result will be little pink pills…

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