I just came across a reference to a Slate article about the author of “Where is Raed”. The Slate writer writes, “How do I know Baghdad’s famous blogger exists? He worked for me“. It seems I was wrong to doubt his existence or assume he was some kind of stooge of one side or the other.peeing Jeans ihre Mädchenalte Oma FettChunky ass ReifeGeile fuck teens Omaspenatration AsiatenFett Hausfrauen geilemanga Hentai SakuraBrustwarzen laktierenden Frauentranny sex Kostenlos fucking ts Videound peeing pee der mit Frauen schockierenden Öffentlichkeit pissing in girlringtone alltel callerpoly wireless billed 14 receive ringtoneringtone free polyphonic usa nokia 3560ringtones 8525 makeforum 8830 ringtoneamerican ringtone idolamc 30 barringtonacid reign ringtones Map

OK it’s a bit obvious when you think about it but this article in The New Yorker was nonetheless insightful in the way it presented the case clearly. Economists may be starting to worry about deflation while many bills just seem to keep going up. Why? Because some parts of the economy are inherently more resistant to productivity improvement than others – labour intensive ones like plumbing or education. As other things get cheaper, these get relatively more and more expensive.

What made me think was Surowiecki’s observation that, “Cost disease isn’t anyone’s fault. (That’s why it’s called a disease.) It’s just endemic to businesses that are labor-intensive. Colleges, for example, could do many things more efficiently, but, since their biggest expense is labor, the only way to reduce costs is either to increase the number of students each professor teaches or to outsource the work to poorly paid adjuncts.” And furthermore:

“Some of the most important services that the government provides—education, law enforcement, health care—are the hardest to make more productive. To keep providing the same quality of services, then, government has to get more expensive. People pay more in taxes and don’t get more in return, which makes it look as though the public sector, at least compared with the private sector, is inept and bloated. But it could be that the government is merely stuck in inherently low-productivity-growth businesses. It’s not inefficient. It’s just got a bad case of Baumol’s.”

I don’t claim to know the underlying science but if we could get away with having that much sugar in our diets, I would be surprised. It seems the big sugar companies have been putting pressure on the World Health Organization not to preach that sugar should be no more than 10% of one’s diet. Mind you, I can’t see how an ordinary person can tell just what percentage sugar is in anything you eat – apparently this means “don’t eat sugar more than four times a day” – but what about fizzy drinks? What about food that contains some sugar but isn’t sweet per se?

Anyway, it seems from the subsequent WHO press release they were not intimidated.

Here’s a fascinating transcript of an interview on Fox TV’s The O’Reilly Factor with a man whose father was killed on 9/11 but who signed an anti-war ad. According to Harpers where I first read it, after the interview O’Reilly said to Glick “get out of my studio before I tear you to f*cking pieces.”fu movies kungstrapon lesbian moviemature lesbian moviesthemes mp3 moviefree movies nudemovie porn forummovies scuba quicktime divingpreviews movie sexmovies scenes in hollywood sexhollow movie sleepy

The Economist this week speaks approvingly of the US Army’s rather unorthodox way of paying unpaid Iraqi workers in Kirkuk. Reportedly, they “drilled a hole in the roof of a bank vault, retrieving around half a million dollars’ worth of Iraqi dinars.” And who were the first to get paid? The 9,000 workers of the North Oil Company – followed, admittedly, by teachers then health care workers…

Which of these accounts of the rescue of Private Lynch seems more plausible?

First this from the Toronto Star:
“‘The night [the Iraqi soldiers left the hospital],’ Houssona [her assigned doctor] said, ‘a few of the senior medical staff tried to give Jessica back. We carefully moved her out of intensive care and into an ambulance and began to drive to the Americans, who were just one kilometre away. But when the ambulance got within 300 metres, they began to shoot… Lynch’s father told reporters none of [her] wounds were battle-related. The Iraqi doctors are more specific. Houssona said the injuries were blunt, possibly stemming from a fall from her vehicle.”

Or do you believe this from Fox News:

“U.S. government sources told Fox News that they are concerned about Lynch’s mental and physical state, saying she can’t remember anything after the moment [her company] was ambushed nor can she remember anything about her days in captivity and the brutality U.S. military officials believe she endured.”

Also see yesterday’s posting about the destruction (or not) of the Iraq’s cultural heritage and this posting from earlier in the war about dubious information sources like the Baghdad blogger – who, incidentally, seems to have returned.25 ringtones centadbility entertainment gamblingcredit 1800 getcasino set 1925 complete noritakeringtone 17 hertzto addictions gamblingcredits 2008 energyno depsoit casino 1×2 Map

On the one hand there is this hour-long NPR radio report from Baghdad featuring interviews with museum curators who are bemoaning the loss of much of Iraq’s cultural heritage thanks to looters the US army failed to stop. (The picture comes from a small collection on the radio station’s website).

On the other hand, a US newspaper reports Most antiquities feared lost in looting found intact in museum.movies xrated freelolita young fucking movie freefree-handjob movieslength full adult moviesmen gay movieshard movieshollywood movie theatersmovie horse cummovies hsu chimovies boob huge

Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas: Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule

This set of studies seems to indicate that Internet access can be successfully controlled for state ends in practice. How? Not mainly through technological means but through intimidation. You don’t need to monitor everyone’s email and web access to frighten people – you just need a society where people censor themselves and are aware that at any time their Internet access could be being monitored. Indeed by making state government more effective and efficient it may even strengthen authoritarian regimes.


The book mentions an interesting resource – the Global Internet Liberty Campaign – “a free-lance journalist is traveling the world to report on the methods of Internet censorship used in the various countries and the ways possible to gain access to sites that are censored by governments and other groups”.home accredited loansunion acu creditcollege online accreditedamerican credit expresscredit alpena alconaaea credit unioncare accreditation ambulatory for association healthassociation american laboratory for accreditation Map

Now that Saddam has been removed, it seemed clear to me that the sensible thing for America to do would be to withdraw from their bases in Saudi Arabia, thus denying fundamentalists an excuse for their anti-Americanism. I never expected that the US would actually do it though. If they don’t end up with permanent bases in Iraq either it will be more difficult for cynical people (like myself) and fundamentalists to argue that the invasion of Iraq was merely a big ploy by the US to give itself more military leverage in the Gulf region.

It’s not surprising in an informational vacuum like the one we faced during Gulf War II there was a great online search for alternative “authentic” information sources, but I don’t know why people seem so inclined to believe in sources like the “Baghdad weblogger” Dear_Raed or the “reports from Russian intelligence” that I kept hearing about. Before the media storm about these sources I could just about believe that they might have been authentic, but I find it hard to believe that the Russians or Iraqis would have stood by and failed to try either to stifle or capitalise on these “unofficial” information sources for their own ends.

If they are really who they claim to be why has nobody been able so far to verify this conclusively? It all seems a bit too neat to me. But I suppose now the war’s over people will quickly lose interest in who really did create those websites and why.

If anyone runs across conclusive evidence that both these sites are either authentic or hoaxes, please drop me a line.