Martin Luther King Jr has been inspiring for many great people and a lot of other human beings. This is a Bible-inspired speech I found.
I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.
You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.
You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.
Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.
And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.
You died when you refused to stand up for right.
You died when you refused to stand up for truth.
You died when you refused to stand up for justice.
Just a short notice. I discovered a very simple and relatively powerful Internet privacy solution, Ultrasurf, for those of us who may be interested in browsing the Internet in near complete anonymity: hide IP addresses and locations, clean browsing history, cookies & more …
When you’re a company big on data crunching, when you have a file, you can’t help it: You must explore it and draw conclusions. This is what Google is doing with its Human Resource files. They use algorithms to identify more easily people ready for a promotion, for an additional review, or people on the verge of quitting.
This is probably quite feasible supposing that you have enough data and enough CPU/database power. Google has it all (and plenty of power for sure).
I am not quite sure if this undeniable technical step forward is really good news for individual liberties.
Belgian Kimberley Vlaeminck, 18, went to a tattoo parlor and asked for 3 tattooed stars. But, she fell asleep and woke up with 56 black stars. In a sense, this is nice, but she seems pissed off.
PETER DECONINCK/AFP/Getty Images
Update on 24-June: It appears that after some time and media pressure, Kimberley admitted that this was not a mere issue of misunderstanding between the tattooist and her. Frightened by her father reaction to her stars, she tried to explain that it was not her fault. But she actually requested 56 stars from the beginning. So, she was lying…
It seems that everything has already been said about the riots and protests that are currently observed following the presidential elections in Iran.
Up to now, I felt unable to even comment about it. But I wanted to add my own little pebble to the building of putting light onto the events that are probably at the core of a real re-foundation of the Iran nation and society.
Like many others, I have the intense feeling that this is a battle between two factions inside the same political regime. The difference between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad still is more a difference of degree than a difference of nature and even if the results have been rigged by the State direction (see on the right the Iran TV announcing results in favor of Mousavi, then correcting them in favor of Ahmadinejab – while the Ministry of the Interior had already unofficially informed Mousavi of a victory that would come to be quickly denied), the candidates were no less pre-approved before the elections.
Call me pessimistic, but I fear this revolt will not be the revolution awaited by some many people out of Iran.
In the meantime, people are killed while fighting for their liberty. This is exactly the kind of fight that is bringing democracy in a country… in the end.
According to the Guardian, change was long overdue. 8 years of Democrat presidency in Washington was much too much. Now that Al Gore is leaving the oval office, it’s time to go to more serious stuff.
You can appreciate it if you read the first paragraph:
No one thought Al Gore would be a loveable president, but, after eight years in the White House, he has gotten truly tiresome. The droning voice, the purchase of an eco-friendly robot dog, the campaign for carbon-free diamonds – all these things were hard to take, and he has been way too smug about reversing global warming. I think we’ve gone too far in the opposite direction, especially in light of the glacier that recently crushed Wasilla.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948 at Palais de Chaillot, Paris (France). So, tomorrow, this important milestone for Human Rights will be 60-year old. Of course, many people are denied their rights for plenty of reasons.
But this is a fight of every day, this is our fight, a fight to make the world better, a place where every Human Being can live free.
Seth Brau decided to celebrate this 60th anniversary by creating a video where it injected more life in these words, with animated graphics (View in larger size/higher-def here: www.humanrightsactioncenter.org. Created by Seth Brau, Produced by Amy Poncher, Music by Rumspringa courtesy Cantora Records):
Let’s be precise, I admire that country the United States of America because they can build a major historical event: The voters of America made a new country out of old values.
B.Obama and J.McCain are impersonating exactly that. The new America is a young President holding high the ideals of Democracy, Liberty, Opportunity and Hope but -already so many others told so- it is not only a victory of African Americans but an enormous example of Democracy put in action by the people of a great country. Who would have thought that a black man would walk into the White House while the people who walked with Martin Luther King are still alive?
Old values -and who could embody them best that John Mc Cain?- were at the center of this election. After Presidential Elections in 2004 where values have been continuously promoted and over-promoted, 2008 comes showing millions of people walking to the polls, oblivious of the age of their democracy and decided to make history with the same impetus as those voting for the first time in countries with much shorter history of liberty and votes.
On September 11, 2001, we were all Americans. Today, I am proud that some people from this great country consider me as a friend.
the web site of the Scotch Whisky Association if you want to share your passion with other amateurs.
But this is not enough for some people (real alcohol geeks). Wired discovered that true US amateurs are pushing sunday afternoon distillery in a country where moonshine is still prohibited. It’s quite easy, and the result is supposed to be very good.
Here is a startling idea to ensure that your luggage will not be lost at the airport and will receive real good treatment from the airline personnel (that is a rare condition). Matt Brandon proposes to declare the presence of a starter pistol. Right! you don’t need a permit or a license of any case, but it is still classified as a firearm and needs to be delcared on checking-in. TSA and other official authorities will identify your bag and ensure that it is the object of all cool attention (they don’t want any weapon potentially lost in an international airport!)
For once, the a… from security will make sure your bags fly securely.
When you have a web site, it becomes quite common that some people feel so easy to just borrow your images that they do not even take the time to make a copy on their own web site. Not only do they use your artwork, but they also use the bandwidth you paid for.
Normally, there is a solution. You can modify slightly your website to ensure that if this happens, the image served is not the original one, but a modified one (either a big red X, or a message to the reader). But it is a little difficult to do by hand. A wbe site tool comes handy for this: HTMLbasix – Htaccess Disable Hotlinking Code Generator.
In September 2007, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported that the Terrorist Screening Center (the FBI-administered organization that consolidates terrorist watch list information in the United States) had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 – and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month. [1]
Interestingly, this statement allows to believe that by June 2008 the list will have grown to 1 million terrorists in the US of A. I believe that Americans can be silly, but I doubt that one out of 230 is a dangerous moron attempting to end western civilization next time he or she will take a plane.
I suggest that you have a look at the astonishing list of “unlikely suspects” displayed in this article from ACLU. It includes US Senators and US Congressmen (and their spouses), war heroes, John Does with a common name, dead 9/11 hijackers, foreign presidents (dead as Saddam Hussein or alive like Evo Morales), pop star singers and toddlers.
Most people did not really notice this bit of information: The United States of America reached a point where 1,6 million Americans are in jail. This is nearly one percent of the 230-million population.
I am starting to believe that this is (maybe not only) a way to manage a significant part of unemployment. When a society has 1% of its people behind bars, this is becoming not only a marginal management of violence but a strategy to economic management of population. One of the first advantages there is that it has a visible impact on unemployment (jailed people do not look for a job).
Has jail become a nation-wide population control system?
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In September 2007, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported that the Terrorist Screening Center (the FBI-administered organization that consolidates terrorist watch list information in the United States) had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 – and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month. [
