Old Stuff  -

The war in Iraq is still going fine. Some quotes from CPA administrator L. Paul Bremer, U.S. Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, U.S. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, Halliburton executive vice-president and CFO C. Christopher Gaut and Iraq's new prime minister, Iyad Allawi (read the entire article here)...

"As the Coalition's rule draws to a close, the numbers show that we have an awful lot to be proud of," Bremer said Tuesday. "As anyone who's taken a minute and actually looked at the figures can tell you, the vast majority of Iraqis are still alive—as many as 99 percent. While 10,000 or so Iraqi civilians have been killed, pretty much everyone is not dead."

"There are vast sections of the country where one can go outside unarmed during the daylight hours," Kimmitt said, speaking from a heavily guarded base outside of Baghdad. "Even in cities where fighting has occurred, many neighborhoods have not been torn apart by gunfire. And, throughout the country, more towns than I could name off the top of my head have never been touched by a bomb at all."

ProjectM looks like a very cool game to me. I'll be checking it out... (Link via SmartMobs). This is what they have to say for themselves...

It's time to step into the Warriors Training for global change.

Tool up. Make sure you're no 'rebel without a clue'. Learn about communication, media manipulation and power play. Play Project M and determine the future of the world.

You take part in a media-driven global power struggle between corporate interests, social and environmental activists and international powerblocks. Which side will you choose?

Persuade others to pledge their support for your global leader.
How? That's up to you!

Play the game. It's a rehearsal for reality!

If you want to participate, hurry. The game starts at the 18th of june...

Dutch television today had quite an exclusive (all of it is in Dutch though, email to redactie@tweevandaag.nl to get them to put up some info in English), a rare interview with South Korean cloning expert professor Woo Suk Hwang and an exclusive tour through his lab. Regrettably, most of the talking is in Korean, but there are some pieces in English. Anyway, it's online...

WOW. I wish my government was like this... If they'd start solving some of the obvious poverty related issues in their society I might even go live there... Nice scenery if anything...

Read it (in CS monitor) and weap.

"... But the rise of threats and attacks against election workers are a troubling sign that the Afghan government and its Western allies may be unable to provide enough security to ensure the success of September's elections. Iraq faces similar daunting challenges to prepare for polls just four months later in January."

The first step in nation building should be to provide a secure environment capable of sustaining the development of civil society. To bring democracy, one should focus on bringing justice and the rule of law. In a just, law abiding society, the populace will find its own way to forma government to its liking...

Whether or not Iran has been playing the US on Iraq, it is surely playing the US on nuclear research, as the Christian Science Monitor points out:

"In a watershed decision supported by all of Iran's power centers, Iran last December signed the Additional Protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which permits intrusive snap inspections. Tehran expects help in return for its atomic-energy program - a right codified in the NPT.

But tough US rhetoric hasn't eased. One result, analysts say, is that Iran may be deliberately slowing its cooperation. "The Americans have politicized this process so much," says Mohamed Hadi Semati, a political scientist at Tehran University who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington."

I stumbled across this book "The wisdom of the crowds" at Smartmobs. I have and will not read it. While I'm all for collaborative approaches and can be convinced of the phenomena of "group intelligence", I do not subscribe to the prime thesis of the book, that "crowds" are inherently more "intelligent" then smaller groups, even given the constraints put forward in the Q&A on the books website.

Luckily, the site features an experiment "designed to prove that, under the right circumstances, collective intelligence (The Wisdom of Crowds) is greater than the individual intelligence, no matter how brilliant or informed the individual is." We are asked to estimate the number of jellybeans in a container. "A prize of $100 Amex Gift Certificate will go to the best individual guess, but according to The Wisdom of Crowds, the most accurate guess of all will be the average of all guesses made. "

My far fetched theory is gaining credibility. The Times reports (The Times and Chalabi have a history together remember?):

"Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader and former ally of the Bush administration, disclosed to an Iranian official that the United States had broken the secret communications code of Iran's intelligence service, betraying one of Washington's most valuable sources of information about Iran, according to United States intelligence officials."

Spirit of America is too cool an initiative to be banned to the linkdump. To see why, read Jeff Jarvis' post on Buzzmachine. This initiative needs to be expanded! Spirit of the World! And not only in Iraq, a lot of developing countries could benefit from an approach like this, I hope they will...

Although Mr. B. promissed the Iraq warwould lower oil prices, I read in The Times:

"Scrambling to control high oil prices, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries will meet Thursday, June 3, and may pursue a plan to raise quotas sharply or do away with them entirely, an OPEC spokesman said yesterday."

But it gets worse:

From Empire Notes:

"Whenever someone talks about impending environmental collapse, the right wing loves to jump in and talk about the previous apocalypse-mongering and how woefully incorrect it has turned out -- from Malthus to the Club of Rome's 1971 report, "The Limits to Growth."

And, indeed, these days only a fool makes specific predictions -- i.e., in 30 years industrial civilization will collapse because of lack of oil. Indeed, one can almost say that any specific prediction is likely to be wrong. At the same time, there are so many gathering, proliferating threats, with attendant uncalculatable synergistic effects, that even if specific predictions are wrong a general prediction of catastrophic events in the near future is very unlikely to be wrong.

We should also be clear about what this means. It's fair to say that large parts of the world are today living through major catastrophes. 22 million people, mostly in Africa, have died of AIDS. In some African countries, the incidence of HIV infections is over 25%. According to some estimates, global warming has already killed hundreds of thousands or more because of famine and general drops in productivity.

Future catastrophes will look like instensifications of these kinds of trends, with effects reaching into the First World as well. They most likely won't look like a sudden tidal wave engulfing New York -- at least not for quite some time."

Why would Iran want the US to invade Iraq? It is a crucial question to be answered in the Chalabi-Teheran saga... Let me float a theory. Now, the Iranian leadership wasn't that fond of Saddam to begin with. On top of that, Iran was illegally involved in nuclear technology and featured high on Mr. B's "axis of evil" list. As a matter of fact, Iran posed a much greater WMD-threat then Iraq and it's leaders do have a history of sponsoring Islamic terrorism. If a case for war centered around WMD and terrorist sponsoring was to be made, Iran was it's main target.