Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Ask a Ninja

Da es ja immer Fragen gibt, die man mal stellen sollte:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpTaBulIL_w

Ohne weiteren Kommentar.

Monday, September 18, 2006

Folter für die Freiheit

Moin allesamt,

irgendwer scheint mehr Zeit zum Schreiben zu haben.

Ein längerer Aufsatz zum Folterverbot und dem Versuch, des US-Präsidenten dieses jetzt auch offiziell zu lockern. Der zuständige Senatsausschuss ist zwar noch dagegen, wie aber das Plenum entscheidet, ist derzeit offen.

Rechtlich scheint die Lage eindeutig zu sein. Wie ungern sich der Senat internationalem Druck beugt, ist leider ebenso eindeutig klar. Es bleibt also spannend.

http://de.blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-u.ep6Oslc6N6wsk0sRmpFGNz7G0p9Q--?cq=1

Friday, September 15, 2006

Plamegate

Falls es jemanden interessiert, was für Aufgaben Valerie Plame in der CIA hatte: What Valerie Plame Really Did at the CIA
Valerie Wilson was no analyst or paper-pusher. She was an operations officer working on a top priority of the Bush Administration. Armitage, Rove and Libby had revealed information about a CIA officer who had searched for proof of the President's case. In doing so, they harmed her career and put at risk operations she had worked on and foreign agents and sources she had handled.

[...]

Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group.

There was great pressure on the JTFI to deliver. Its primary target was Iraqi scientists. JTFI officers, under Wilson's supervision, tracked down relatives, students and associates of Iraqi scientists--in America and abroad--looking for potential sources. They encouraged Iraqi émigrés to visit Iraq and put questions to relatives of interest to the CIA. The JTFI was also handling walk-ins around the world. Increasingly, Iraqi defectors were showing up at Western embassies claiming they had information on Saddam's WMDs. JTFI officers traveled throughout the world to debrief them. Often it would take a JTFI officer only a few minutes to conclude someone was pulling a con. Yet every lead had to be checked. (The Nation)

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Shadowrun im Kino

Moin Chummer,

hier gibts zwei Kurzfilme und Kritiken für alle Shadowrun- und sonstigen Rollenspielfans.

http://de.360.yahoo.com/thehideousbigj

Das ist BTW Danielas - so die Hälfte von Euch Schreiberlingen dürfte sie kennen - Blog und vorläufige Homepage. Willkommen.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Lernpause

Ja, ich weiß, ich sollte lieber lernen anstatt zu surfen, und ich setze mich auch bestimmt gleich wieder an den Schreibtisch, aber der Artikel war einfach zu faszinierend:
Across the eastern United States, a gruesome ritual is in full swing. The praying mantis and its relative, the Chinese mantis, are in their courtship season. A male mantis approaches a female, flapping his wings and swaying his abdomen. Leaping on her back, he begins to mate. And quite often, she tears off his head.

The female mantis devours the head of the still-mating male and then moves on to the rest of his body. “If you put a pair together and come back later, you’ll just find the wings of the male and no other evidence he was ever there,” said William Brown, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia.

[...]

Some sexual cannibals, including female Chinese mantises, actually eat a lot of males. “One study estimated that 63 percent of the diet of females are male mantids,” Dr. Brown said. “So they’re the main food source.” (NYT)
Und dabei wollte ich doch nur 15min im Ikea-Katalog blättern....

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Iraqwatch

Interesting
"Bush administration officials now admit that Iraqi government's original plan to rein in the violence in Baghdad, announced in June, has failed. The Pentagon has decided to rush more American troops into the capital, and the new military operation to restore security there is expected to begin in earnest next month.

Yet some outside experts who have recently visited the White House said Bush administration officials were beginning to plan for the possibility that Iraq's democratically elected government might not survive.

"Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy," said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.

"Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect," the expert said, "but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy." (NYT)