Wis[s]e Words – Page 636 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

Google buys blogger

Published on February 16, 2003Leave a comment

From a story done for the San Jose Mercury News and reported on Dan Gillmor’s weblog:

But now Google will surge to the forefront of what David Krane, the company’s director of corporate communications, called “a global self- publishing phenomenon that connects Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation.”

“We’re thrilled about the many synergies and future opportunities between our two companies,” he said in a statement on Saturday. He didn’t elaborate further on what those synergies and opportunities might be, but said more details would emerge soon. Users of the Blogger software and hosting service won’t see any immediate changes, he added.

For Williams and his five co-workers, now Google employees, the immediate impact will be to put their blog-hosting service, called Blog*Spot, on the vast network of server computers Google operates. This will make the service more reliable and robust.

That last is good news at least. For the rest we’ll have to wait and see, but if there’s one company I trust not to fuck things up, it’s Google.

Just another day in the War against Drugs

Published on February 14, 2003Leave a comment

You probably have seen this story elsewhere, about the 19 year old kid who got 26 years in jail for
selling marijuana:

Alexander was 18, a senior at Lawrence County High with two classes left before graduation. The “new kid” turned out to be an undercover drug agent. And four sales, together worth about $350, landed Alexander a 26-year prison sentence.

Which is bad enough and has been the cause of much outrage and astonishment in the blogworld. But if you read on, it gets worse:

Alexander was not arrested with marijuana at school. Prosecutors secured enhancements on his sentence because of a state law that adds five years when someone sells drugs within three miles of a school or housing project.
Though on an isolated country stretch, the Alexanders’ property met both standards.

Now I can understand the law being tougher on people selling (illegal) drugs to minors, but this sort of automatic sentencing is just silly, as you can see in this case. This is a case of a teenager selling dope to other teenagers, not an evil drugs dealer addicting kindergarten kids. That the place of the “crime” was in technically in the limits but in reality fairly isolated makes it all the more absurd.

He doesn’t deny he sold marijuana. It was easy money. But authorities’ depiction of him as some sort of kingpin is far from the truth, he said. “I’ve been in maybe one fight in school my whole life, and now I’m sentenced to 26 years in the pen,” he said. “That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

After his arrest and expulsion, Alexander found a private school where he completed his classes and got a high school diploma. He also graduated from a drug treatment program, found a job as a bricklayer and enrolled in Calhoun Community College.

In other words, even after his life got ruined and with the threat of along prison sentence hanging over him he’s doing quite well. Doesn’t sound like a dangerous criminal who needs to be kept away from society, does he?

But what lead to Alexander’s arrest in the first place? Overzealous school officials.

The crackdown that led to Alexander’s arrest began soon after Ricky Nichols took over as principal in fall 2001.

Nichols, an Army Reservist who target-shoots with sheriff’s deputies, considers himself a front-line soldier in the war on drugs. His training includes police courses on drug identification. The drug task force has given him pointers on searching students’ cars for contraband.

Once a girl came in the school office asking for aspirin. She admitted having a hangover and failed a breath test. Nichols searched her car. “She didn’t really have a choice,” he said. “I don’t have to have probable cause. The police have to have probable cause.”

Glad I went to school in a sane country. Sure, drugs prevention should be part of a principal’s job, but car searches? Undercover police officiers? In this sort of fascistoid climate it’s easy to justify hitting a teenager with a prison sentence longer then he has been alive, for a “crime” that didn’t hurt anybody, which is only a crime because the government choose to make it a crime, not because it’s inherently immoral.

Auntie Beeb

Published on February 13, 2003Leave a comment

Chris Bertram is talking about the BBC on his weblog, after he recieved a link from the Biased BBC weblog. He notes some things I’m annoyed with as well:

So what do I think about the BBC? I’m not particularly keen on the way it is financed (by a regressive poll tax) and I’m sure that will change given the multiplication of channels. The BBC’s current position strikes me as untenable given the way it uses the licence fee to subsidise its aggressive competition with the private sector via ventures such as BBC Choice, BBC4, BBC Style, BBC Everything Else and in the magazine market with its range of music, gardening, history etc etc offerings. I think I’m right in saying that they’ve now been barred from surreptitiously advertising some of these products on their main TV channels, but, all the same, magazines like History Today have to compete in a market against a product bearing the imprimatur of the prestigious public service broadcaster and containing numerous TV tie- ins, listings and so on. That strikes me as unfair.

I don’t really agree on the licence fee, as it does make the BBC more independent from the government than if they had to depend on funding from general taxes. I was against the similar arrangment we had here, true, but that was because we had the worst of both worlds: a licence fee *and* lots of commercials.

As for Chris’ other points, I quite agree. I get very annoyed with the amount of advertising the BBC does themselves for channels I’ll never see and I do think the BBC has gone too commercial in the last five years or so: BBC World e.g. is nothing but a rebranded CNN with british accents. I also think the quality of the two main channels has drastically gone down: too much socalled reality programmes showing some rich upper class twits getting their life laundried or their gardens the size of Devon redone or buying a second home, a small little castle near Windsor. The less said about [fx: annoying Scottish accent]Fame Academy[/fx] the better. And spare me Pauline “can’t act, can annoy” Quirk, please. However, Chris has a point when he says:

At the same time, I thing a great deal of what the BBC produces (like the Robert Hughes programme on Gaudi and the documentary on Algeria I mentioned recently) is really great stuff. And a lot of the best drama of recent years has been on the BBC (would Denis Potter ever have gone so far without it?). Channel 4 used to provide an alternative arena for good programming, but in recent years it has become dominated by reality TV, crap gameshows, chat programmes from hell and other dross (yes, even more than the BBC).

The strength of the BBC at the moment seems to me to lie in its non-fiction programmes. Series like “What did the Victorians do for us?”, “The Blue Planet” or “Life of Mammals” are just plain brilliant and it’s hard to see any other tv channel doing them.

Holland was safe. Safe behind the dykes

Published on January 31, 2003

Even if you know next to nothing about the Netherlands, you know that our history has been one of struggle, a continuing struggle against the sea and its might. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that we conquered this country from the sea, polder by polder and dyke by dyke. Even in the earliest mention of what once would become our country, in the works of the Roman historian Pliny the Elder this struggle was evident, as he spoke of “a people living between water and land”.

More than a quarter of the country lies below the waterline and would flood if there weren’t dykes and dunes to keep the sea out. You see, the western and especially the south western part of the country, the part I’m from, is nothing more then a massive delta, a place where three of Europe’s great rivers come together: the Rhine, the Schelde and the Meuse, flowing into each other and into the sea, creating a borderland of islands and estuaries: Zeeland, “sealand”.

Yes, the force of the sea was well known, as flood after flood had made clear through the centuries. But by 1953 all this had changed. Thanks to the high modern dykes, the risk of another flood was minimal. The last serious flood, in 1944, had not even been a natural disaster, but was caused by the Allies bombing the dykes of Walcheren –which dominated the approach to the vital harbour of Antwerpen– to flood out the Germans. Since then, the dykes and dunes had been repaired and rebuild:
Holland was safe again.

Until that fateful moment, today exactly fifty years ago, when during the night and onto the next morning it turned out the dykes weren’t high and strong enough and the North Sea delivered a nasty surprise to the Dutch South West. On that day, the worst flood, the worst natural disaster in Dutch modern history began. Before it was under control, 1835 people would be dead, some 750,0000 people were affected; many lost their homes, had to be evacuated, had to flee the coming water with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. The amount of livestock lost is unknown, but must number in the (tens of) thousands. Material damage was unmeasurable. Below is a map of the afflicted area:

a map of the area hit by the flood

Over the next few days I would like to tell the story of the disaster, the relief operations and its aftermath here at Wis[s]e Words. The disaster is one of the events that has shaped modern Holland, both figurally but aslo literally, as after the disaster drastic steps were undertaken to ensure it would never happen again. It is a story I find worth telling, hopefully y’all will find it worth reading as well.

Gretta Duisenberg

Published on January 22, 2003Leave a comment

If you’re involved in political campaigns, you know there are always a few people on your side whose heart is in the right place, whose dedication is absolute, but who are absolutely the last persons you should trust to argue your point of views, because they will fuck it up. Gretta Duisenberg is one of them.

For those who don’t know her, she campaigns for Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories and for the right of the Palestinian population to self determination. A cause which has my sympathy as well. Unfortunately, she has an incredible tin ear, lacks tact and has a tendency to speak before she thinks. She first came in the news when she flew a Palestinian flag from her Amsterdam home, something which her Jewish neighbours took umbrage with. In her attempts to resolve the situation, she showed herself to be less than tactful.

Recently, she canalised her unease with the situation into real action and went on a mission to Israel and the Occupied Teritories with the Dutch Stop the Occupation action group and again became the centre of a row. In an interview with a Dutch newspaper, she stated that “with the exception of the Holocaust, the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian areas is worse than the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands“, which may not be the stupidest thing you can say on the subject, but certainly comes close.

It’s not that Gretta Duisenberg is an anti-semite –at least not as far as I know– it’s just that she has a poor impulse control and doesn’t think before she says something. Quite apart from the inherent tackiness of Nazi comperisions (especially in this context!), it just isn’t true. Taking the Holocaust out of the equation is as silly as saying that with the exception of the WTC attacks, Al Quaida has not managed to kill many Americans.

Furthermore, the best way to get neutral people to stop listening to you and think of you as either a kook or an anti-semite is comparing Israel to the Nazies. It is borderline anti-semitic, it denigrates the Holocaust and it makes you look like an ahistorical dork. Israel’s occupation is awful and the suffering it causes innocent Palestinians is wrong, wrong, wrong, but it’s not genocidal. Israel is comparable to Apartheid era South Africa, not to Nazi Germany, like South Africa it can change. But it won’t happen because of Gretta Duisenberg, if she continues this way.

What also irritates me is how she, just because she’s the wife of the president of the European Central Bank gets all this media attention. If she was more competent it wouldn’t be such a problem, but because of her antics she’s doing quite a lot of damage to the cause she supposedly supports.