A Few Links and Open Thread
A Guardian reporter was picked up by the Egyptian police yesterday, but they didn't take away his dictaphone. The recordings make for a remarkable report: Egypt protests: 'We ran a gauntlet of officers beating us with sticks'
Palestine papers reveal MI6 drew up plan for crackdown on Hamas
A Palestinian journalist about the Palestine Papers and criticism of Palestinians from the outside: Who says there's no coordination? - Maan
Why is the Telegraph the only one to carry this story? Kyrgyzstan president accuses US fuel supplier of trying to corrupt her son
Posted by b on January 26, 2011 at 17:57 UTC | Permalink
@Rick - thanks, but careful with "Twitter revolutions".
Egypt has cut off Twitter access so everything one gets on Twitter is not from the scene and does not give an on-the-ground-picture.
Said differently, Twitter can be easily be used as propaganda in this or that direction. For historic reference search: Iran, Green Movement.
b, Good point about twitter being cut off or used as propaganda, but can people in Egypt tweet via proxy servers? I think that is what's being done but I wonder what you think about that ability.
I've never used twitter to post ("tweet" I guess is the word) but the last 2 days the tweets have been very good and don't appear to be stuffed with a lot of propaganda or garbage.
Posted by: Rick Happ | Jan 26 2011 19:26 utc | 3
I've never used twitter to post ("tweet" I guess is the word) but the last 2 days the tweets have been very good and don't appear to be stuffed with a lot of propaganda or garbage.
Well the tweets are stuffed by people who have no first hand knowledge of what is going on - do you knwo what their intend is? Proxy use is generally low, very low. Only a few geeks use them.
Silly english person thinking that telling the egyptian thugs he was a journalist would save him. All he did was make sure that everyone in his batch got beaten as well. How else is Mubarek & Co going to teach western meddlers to stay away from matters that are none of their business?
Posted by: UreKismet | Jan 26 2011 20:11 utc | 5
"How else is Mubarek & Co going to teach western meddlers to stay away from matters that are none of their business?"
...especially when western meddlers are paying him billions of dollars not to attack israel.
Posted by: flickervertigo | Jan 26 2011 20:55 utc | 6
b, "Proxy use is generally low, very low. Only a few geeks use them."
You may be underestimating a lot of these protesters. Yesterday, the posts were full of various instructions on how to use proxy servers. Some linked to web pages or a youtube video with easy step by step instructions on finding a working proxy server and setting up Windows Internet Properties to use a proxy server. Also, many who reside near the protests have removed their security passwords for people to use wi-fi and spread information. I am very impressed with their general spirit and brains. Many of the tweets on 'jan25' appear to be from local sources and are genuine.
I am captivated as the videos and links continue.
Posted by: Rick Happ | Jan 27 2011 2:05 utc | 9
linkspinner: Aljazeera reporter right now saying: Electricity, Mobile phone networks, Landlines phone network and Internet is cut off from Suez. Hundreds of youth are in the streets"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh3tPSZb6Mk&feature=youtu.be
Posted by: Rick Happ | Jan 27 2011 2:13 utc | 10
flickvertigo - It's the water! Nice tune, by the way.
Posted by: euclidcreek | Jan 27 2011 2:13 utc | 11
flickvertigo - "archiving, saving stuff, biased, ego.." blast it all! This will all go down the digital rabbit hole, already has.... It's what you bring to the moment that matters. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, old Uncle Sam ain't nothin' but rust...
Posted by: euclidcreek | Jan 27 2011 2:50 utc | 12
very powerful editorial from editor in chief of Ma'an News Nasser Laham.
Posted by: annie | Jan 27 2011 2:51 utc | 13
annie, "very powerful editorial..."
Yes, but some of the comments below the article are disheartening.
Posted by: Rick Happ | Jan 27 2011 3:07 utc | 14
maybe we're being used...
hasnt gone down the rabbit hole
neither has this.
Posted by: flickervertigo | Jan 27 2011 3:10 utc | 15
CSN-great! Thanks for the tune, keep the faith, brother...
Posted by: euclidcreek | Jan 27 2011 3:21 utc | 16
UreKismet:"All he did was make sure that everyone in his batch got beaten as well."
WTF? Have you seen any of the videos coming out of Egypt? The police are beating people no matter who they are.
Posted by: Rick Happ | Jan 27 2011 4:45 utc | 18
one of mondoweiss's regular contributors ahmed moor (a palestinian living in beirut) was in cairo yesterday and wrote a report (plus excellent video).
Posted by: annie | Jan 27 2011 5:52 utc | 19
@flickervertigo
I have deleted a bunch of your comments. Some were racist, some were just spam.
Either you restrict your communication here to an appropriate number of purposeful on topic comments or you will get banned.
b didnt like that forty buck bag song, and he didnt like the implication that there's a deep awareness in america, in the common people, of exactly what's haywire with america.
the problem has nothing to do with racism, unless you count ashkenazi supremacism as racism.
Posted by: flickervertigo | Jan 27 2011 13:45 utc | 21
Somalia: ever higher numbers of war-wounded in Mogadishu hospitals
More than 6,000 patients were admitted to Keysaney and Medina hospitals last year, compared with 5,000 in 2009 and around 2,800 the previous year. Both Keysaney Hospital, run by the Somali Red Crescent Society, and the community-based Medina Hospital are supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
...
Around 2,300 women and children were admitted to Keysaney and Medina hospitals last year with war injuries – nearly 40 per cent of all such casualties. Many had been caught up in fierce fighting pitting Transitional Federal Government forces, backed by the African Union, against groups such as Al Shabaab.
I wouldn't want to be an 'official' Egyptian I/T guy during the next few days...
(WORLDWIDE) - Anonymous can not, and will not stand idly while people are being denied their basic rights and human liberties. Yet, there are still a lot of governments worldwide who fail to even aspire to the standard of freedom that was set by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.These governments believe they have the right and privilege to impose upon their own people an 'official' version of 'reality' which isn't in any way tampered by the truths of everyday life under which its citizens are living. Anonymous believes this is an outright crime which can not go unpunished.
The Egyptian people are living under inhumane conditions; being denied their basic rights to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and the free access to information. By imposing censorship upon its own people and condemning these freedoms, the Egyptian government has revealed itself to be criminal, and has made itself an enemy of Anonymous.
To the Egyptian Government: Anonymous challenges all those who are involved in censorship. Anonymous wants you to offer free access to uncensored media in your entire country. When you ignore this message, not only will we attack your government websites, Anonymous will also make sure that the international media sees the horrid reality you impose upon your people. Anonymous will not spare anybody who supports this suppression. It is in the hands of the Egyptian government to end this: continue your repression and you will be subject to civil protest - lend an ear to the claim of freedom from your people and the hostilities will cease.
To the Egyptian people: We stand together and united against this oppression. This struggle is not just for you alone, but for the whole of humankind. Citizens can no longer endure their governments abuse. When forced by the threat of oppression, we will be loud as hell - and when the people roar, it will send shivers down the spines of all those who stifle our freedom and take our precious liberties away.
Anonymous are your brothers and sisters, your sons and daughters, your parents and your friends, regardless of age, gender, race, religion, ethnicity, or place of birth. Anonymous is you. You will not be denied your right to free speech, free press, free association and your universal right to freely access information, both in real life and through the internet.
Join us on the IRC - irc.anonops.ru #opEgypt ! (http://twitter.com/anony_ops)
Join us in this battle for freedom of information worldwide!
For as Khalil Gibran once said: “Life without Freedom is like a body without a soul, and Freedom without Thought is like a confused spirit... Life, Freedom and Thought are three-in-one, and are everlasting and shall never pass away.”
We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us.
Ya gotta love it when the geeks get involved – and then you know it's serious. I wonder if Anonymous folks travel around in new VW Bugs painted black, sort of their own Geek Squad?
This article from the Spectator starts off ok, in fact I was rather taken by a couple of the goobers premises:
...Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences "undecided," "none of the above," or "tea party," these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well.
And this ain't so bad either:
While Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters whom they distrust, the American people's realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well nigh revolutionary attitudes. But only the realization was new. The ruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008. Machiavelli compares serious political diseases to the Aetolian fevers -- easy to treat early on while they are difficult to discern, but virtually untreatable by the time they become obvious.
And then this drivel:
...just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists. Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative "nonprofit" and "philanthropic" sectors and public policy.What he has left out is how prolific these "public policy" places are, and the fact that the majority of them are filled to the brim with rightwing zionist nutcases, or worse.
In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class.
Where can I get some of what Mr Codevilla is smoking... seriously, that's got to be some potent shit if you can write the above with a straight face. Or maybe he's telling the truth... Reagan wasn't taken seriously by anyone who gave a shit, they just did what they wanted and let him be the face (and almost a fatality) of their awful schemes. I think I'm glad Reagan had the constitution he did or imagine what would have happened had Bush I ascended the throne after an assassination rather than the rigged vote? Or maybe that was the popular vote? Shit, who can say? After the crap they pulled on Carter during the hostage crisis, nothing would surprise me. I'm still amazed after the recent information came out about how that piece-of-shit Rumsfield sold-out Carter to the Iranians and nothing happened... umm, isn't that treason?
I guess I should have known this would be a work of crap when a house-ad for reprints of the article proudly announces the booky-thing includes an introduction by Rush Oxylimbo...
Ahh, I'm ranting, again. Sorry.
President Obama mentioned in his State of the Union Address that we can educate our way back into prosperity. This is probably true if you assume that the more educated you are, the more money you make. But this assumption is wrong. Making money in America has little to do with how well educated you are. It mostly has to do with how well connected you are, including how good you are at ripping people off and getting away with it. Do a quick background check on all the people that have struck it rich in our rent-seeking society and you’ll have little doubt that I am wrong on this.
I suppose that if we return to a time when our society placed more value on making productive things like cars and other industrial products than on making non-productive things like credit default swaps and other financial products, we’ll see more people striking it rich by being well educated and highly skilled at doing productive work rather than by being well connected and highly skilled at doing unproductive work, particularly unproductive work that’s geared towards ripping people off. But I don’t see any of this happening until we face up to the fact that economic power is shifting to China not because our workers are less skilled and less educated than their Chinese counterparts, but because our well-connected, rip-off artists from the FIRE economy (i.e., Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) are better than their Chinese counterparts at turning their own country into a safe haven for rent-seeking parasites.
Posted by: Cynthia | Jan 27 2011 16:15 utc | 25
good twitter livestreaming plus excellent current video Lastest from Egypt: ‘Whether you are a Christian, a Muslim, or an atheist, you will demand your rights!’
Posted by: annie | Jan 27 2011 17:35 utc | 26
b #20. please oh please, this poster is ruining the site.
Posted by: annie | Jan 27 2011 17:36 utc | 27
b @ 22 - what that ICRC news release omits is who is responsible for much of that increase in civilian casualities
from an AP report last november, Ambulance service: 4,200 Somalis killed in 2 years
The only ambulance service in war-torn Mogadishu said Wednesday that more than 4,200 bystanders have died in warfare the last two years......
The head of the city's ambulance service, Ali Muse, said that pro-government forces from the African Union and Somali troops are to blame for the majority of the civilian deaths — about 80 percent.
"All of those victims are civilians killed either by stray bullets or hit by mortars or by artillery shells," said Muse, who is the head of the Lifeline Africa Ambulance Service. "About 80 percent of them died at Bakara market, which is the main target of the African Union peacekeepers."
and from an IRIN article one week later,
Civilian casualties of fighting between government forces, backed by African Union peacekeepers, and Islamist insurgents are rising in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, with civil society sources accusing the peacekeeping mission of being responsible for the bulk of them....
[Ali Muse, the head of the Mogadishu-based Lifeline Africa Ambulance Service, told IRIN] most shelling of Bakara Market comes from areas under the control of AMISOM troops. "I have no doubt in my mind as to who is responsible for the attacks on Bakara," he said.
"Not a day passes without the market coming under attack and almost all of the shelling is done by AMISOM," said a civil society activist who requested anonymity.
The source said many parts of the city were shelled daily "and in some areas you can apportion blame and accuse all sides of responsibility, but there is no dispute as to who is targeting Bakara Market."
Muse said by the end of November, the ambulance service had recorded 6,024 injured and 2,318 dead in Mogadishu since January 2010. He said the number of casualties could be higher, due to the fact that many people are buried where they die, and many injured are looked after by relatives unable to get them to hospital.
civilians in insurgent strongholds have been targeted indiscriminately. some of it may be attributed to the use of indirect fire - sometimes in response to incoming fire, but not always - and some of it may be attributed to incompetence and inexperience on the part of AMISOM and tfg-aligned forces. one should also not rule out it being a policy - perhaps official, perhaps agreed but not necessarily specified in writing - of counterinsurgency tactics/strategy to depopulate neighborhoods and territories through attrition and the advantage of overwhelming violence.
there are some other factors that anyone considering the ICRC numbers may want to help understand the context - the 2010 increases in AMISOM forces, the increased int'l support for AMISOM (not just financially but also in terms of arms, logistics & training), and the UN push that year for creating a space in mogadishu in which the transitional govt can operate.
Posted by: b real | Jan 27 2011 19:03 utc | 28
28 between government forces, backed by African Union peacekeepers
cough
Posted by: annie | Jan 27 2011 19:40 utc | 29
annie @ 27 - i agree
as somone who cannot particpate as fully as i'd like - i read everything here & for the most part - it always follows how it was borne - thoughtful, considered & passionate comment combined with excellent sourcing & strong links
i'm afraid with flickervertigo i don't see the point - perhaps i am too dumb & too humanist to comprehend & i took great umbrage at the insults levelled at debs who has a demonstrably proven history here of giving a great deal that is both rich & informed
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 27 2011 21:02 utc | 30
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 28 2011 10:27 utc | 31
Google Comes Under Fire for 'Secret' Relationship with NSA
and...
Obama Justice Dept advocates long-term data retention by ISPs.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 28 2011 10:28 utc | 32
& i took great umbrage at the insults levelled at debs who has a demonstrably proven history here of giving a great deal that is both rich & informed
I'll drink to that...
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 28 2011 10:31 utc | 33
Here is an interesting little read that is right up Uncle $cam's alley:
Yellowstone:Why manipulate the facts?
This is the sort of thing that would normally be 'off the radar' except for the Internet... why would anyone want to scare the bejesus out of folks? What purpose would such an obviously false interview provide? Who benefits?
Which kind of brings me to Les Visible's most recent piece... yeah, he's a freak (who ain't?) but despite the seemingly 'out there' subject matter I think he is on to something.
What we believe is what we end-up with...
I wish I were a member of the überclass. It sounds so cushy. You get perks that are to denied people who are far more statistically likely to need them, and since The War Against Abstract Nouns has become official policy, you don't even have to worry about the drudgery of covering anything up anymore.
Maybe one day, if I kiss enough ass and mindlessly parrot back enough party line, they'll teach me the secret handshake and I can have my lifestyle subsidized by the blood, sweat and suffering of billions of plebes, too. That's the life for me!
Posted by: Monolycus | Jan 30 2011 4:38 utc | 35
IN LIGHT OF CURRENT EVENTS ...3 Projects to Create a Government-less Internet, and Why It’s Needed [w/ updates]
the Egyptian Government effectively removed Egypt from the internet. Nearly all inbound and outbound connections to the web were shut down. The internet intelligence authority Renesys explains it here and confirms that “virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.” This has never happened before in the entire history of the internet, with a nation of this size. A block of this scale is completely unheard of, and Senator Joe Lieberman wants to be able to do the same thing in the US.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Feb 1 2011 6:28 utc | 36
meanwhile, Wall Street's Best Year Ever
As predicted, total Wall Street pay in 2010 rose to its highest level in history: $135 billion. Income as a percentage of revenue was up, as was average compensation per employee. They couldn't have done it without you, America. [WSJ]
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Feb 3 2011 20:41 utc | 37
The comments to this entry are closed.
http://twitter.com/search?q=Jan25
Posted by: Rick Happ | Jan 26 2011 18:29 utc | 1