"I Got a Crush...On Hillary" (take that obama girl!)

Truly bizarre music video. On several levels.

'Those thighs, those eyes'. 'You're the sexiest candidate'.


Views: 484,179

As is this, er, lesbian version by 'Hott 4 Hill feat. Taryn Southern'.

'The usa would be a better place if everyone could get a taste of you.'


Views: 1,100,219

NB: these vids are getting ten-times the numbers that official 'youth' campaign vids are getting.

• "I Got a Crush...On Obama"; By Obama Girl

10 Suckin' Years

Am I detecting a little trans-Atlantic ribaldry at the end of this back-to-form riff between Jon Stewart and Britain's own John Oliver?

'Memories ... '

It's funny what appalling titbits stick in the mind from that episode ...

US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs

The creator of this map has had the interesting idea to break down that gigantic US GDP into the GDPs of individual states, and compare those to other countries’ GDP.

read more | digg story

This is Web power · Challenging Cosa Nostra

PALERMO — Comittee Addiopizzo was started by a group of young Italians in Sicily against the Mafia.

They wanted to start a bar, but one of them asked:

“What if they ask us for the pizzo?”

'Pizzo' are the extortion payments made by local businesses for protection. The group says:

We have found a new strategy to fight mafia: critical shopping against pizzo. The campaign “Against pizzo change your shopping habits” wants to create a group of consumers in Palermo and in the region, ready to support businesses who stand up against racket and, overcoming fear, denounce their extorters.

“A WHOLE PEOPLE WHO PAYS THE PIZZO IS A PEOPLE WITHOUT DIGNITY” say stickers all over Palermo.

Those businesses are listed on their website. Over 7000 Sicilians have also put their names down.

Safety in numbers and this is the first time this has happened in Palermo.

The local business association, Confindustria, has now signed on - they will expel anyone found to be paying pizzo.

And they now know who many of those businesses are - and how much they were paying - as lists were found when bosses Berndando Provenzano and Lo Piccolo were arrested last year. Half Palermo's businesses are estimated to pay.

Sicilian authorities are now aggressively prosecuting those who refuse to testify against the Mafia in clear-cut cases of extortion, charging them with "aiding and abetting" Cosa Nostra.

"Now it is a bigger risk for us to pay than not to pay," said Ugo Argiroffi, an engineer who recently added his Palermo construction company, C.O.C.I. to Addiopizzo's list

The website is undermining the 'culture of fear', raising real hope of an end to the one a a half century long stranglehold of the 'shadow state'.

"This rebellion goes to the heart of the Mafia," said Palermo prosecutor Maurizio De Lucia, who has investigated extortion cases for years. "If it works, we will have a great advantage in the fight against the Mafia."

`It's a happy coincidence'' that Provenzano's capture corresponds to the banding together of businesses and consumers against the mob, Vittorio Greco, a University of Palermo professor and Comittee Addiopizzo founder said. ``The police forces were able to capture Provenzano just as civil society was able to reach this goal.

Unfortunately, some things are lost forever:


Villa Deliella, one of Palermo's historical monuments destroyed by Mafia corruption

And Addiopizzo has built on many before it, such as their hero, Libero Grassi, a merchant killed in 1991 for refusing to pay pizzo.

Libero Grassi has not been forgotten. A new station of Palermo's metro (underground) line and a technical school have been named in his honour. Recently a Palermo fashion show televised nationally was dedicated to his memory. He didn't consider himself exceptional.

Other Sicilians are also using the Web to spread the message, inspired by Committee Addiopizzo:

• Addiopizzo in Catania, Scicily's second-largest City.

TGR SICILIA TV news report

• [Video] Addiopizzo activists in Urbino, Central Italy

Palermo, November 15, 1983. Benedetto Grado's wife and daughters at the scene of his slaying. The family was already mourning his son Antonio. Mafia violence has felled generations of Sicilians, innocents and implicated.
· [Photoessay] Franco Zecchin: Fifteen Years of Mafia

• This is Web power: Kenyans need blogs

This is Web power · Kenyans need blogs

Back from a break and some new-ish sites to tell you about, all of which show more new tricks and more great uses for the web (and they're truly inspiring). More to follow, first to Kenya.

NAIROBI — Dipping in and out of the headlines but far from resolved, the Kenyan crisis has shown up many media organisations and quite a few journalists in their ignorance about Kenya. Many have actually openly said that they don't 'get' it.

One good example was China's first statement, issued on Monday (14th). They, rightly, criticised colonialism's legacy, but also said:

"The Western 'democracy' transplanted to Africa is unsuited to local conditions and has sowed the seeds of disaster."

African bloggers have already picked this up and called it 'racist' — western media have so far missed it entirely.

What interested bystanders can now do though is get a wide range of Kenyan opinion and reporting 'on the ground' via blogs. If you really want to get some idea of what's happening and why, blogs are your best source.

There are dozens of Kenyan blogs. Some are by white people but most aren't, many are by expats. Some support President Kibaki, many the opposition but most aren't political. Many are religious or business blogs. Across the range you get endless eye-witness accounts and background, including from members of the Kikuyu, and one incredible photo-journalist's blog.

Saying far more in a few photos than yet another news-free monotone sob story from the BBC's Orla Guerin or ITV's Neil Connery (many Kenyan bloggers have praised Al-Jazeera's coverage), Joseph Karoki's blog has been documenting what's happening since the stolen election.

Joseph Karoki

Karoki has been sourcing photos from all over - I noticed today that a New York Times photographer is now contributing. And linking to others such as this Flickr collection.

He, along with the other bloggers, have managed to build up a fact-heavy network which is trying to talk peace and preach calm. Anything else, particularly 'tribalism', is being shouted down by other Kenyans in their blogosphere - it's great to watch this network evolving, even if the circumstances are appalling.

Kenyan blog Mentalacrobatics, has another positive angle - which, again, I'm not seeing in the MSM:

I have been expecting many of the younger voters to come and express their anger at me for getting their hopes up that their vote was as powerful as anyone else’s vote. Instead what I have seen is very encouraging; people are engaged in the political process as never before.

For example, earlier on Tuesday a group of youth were busy calculating how many votes you need to be elected Speaker of parliament. At petrol stations you hear debates about whether Nominated MPs are nominated before or after the speaker is elected, people come up to me and ask if there is anything that can prevent Kibaki from stealing all the Nominated MP positions for his own party in defiance of tradition which states the nominated positions are given out in proportion to the number of seats won, and the most requested document request I receive by email these days is for the Constitution.

Tuesday’s parliamentary proceedings were broadcast live on TV and the whole country was watching and taking note. When Marende [opposition candidate] was elected speaker we could hear shouts of celebration from Kibera and Kawangware [Nairobi slums]. This engagement is not exclusive to the middle class. It looks like stealing an election is a fantastic way to get the public engaged in civic education. Now that is a massive silver lining!

The exasperation with leaders is constant, as is the demand for fair elections. One sign of blogging's growing power in Kenyan politics is that they've rapidly developed as an avenue for counter-opposition propoganda.

Another rapidly growing angle is the use of video. This has been circulating news of acts of police violence — The following video may disturb you - which have transferred to MSM.

• More video

All of which gives the lie to the opinion expressed not just by the Chinese but by many Westerners - that democracy won't work in Africa. Online you can watch Kenyans trying to build their democracy. I find this inspiring and the cynical, sometimes racist, attitudes to their efforts somewhat depressing and lazy.

Karoki and other bloggers are working with Mama Mikes - the big electronic money transfer business - with an appeal for Kenya. There, you can buy a shopping voucher which will be used by Kenya Red Cross for food, water, blankets, clothes, sanitary products, toys for children etc. (And maybe condoms).

There's also another excellent blogger initiative called Usahidi (Swahili word for 'witness') which is recording all acts of violence (on a Google Map).



As many bloggers have explained, what's happening - especially with the continuing total news media blackout imposed by the government - has shown exactly why the Internet is so important for Africa.

• Kenyan blogs aggregator
• Mashada (online chat which connects with SMS)
  

Addendum: Wikipedia is a good source on British colonialism in Kenya (stuff you wouldn't know from school). Did you know we (the British) had over a million Kenyans in concentration camps within living memory - during the 1950s uprising?

• Kenya Wikipedia page

• Postscript

This is Web power · Challenging Cosa Nostra

What kind of blogger am I?

According to Blog Action Day's Professor Blogstein (summarising every sterotype of 'scientist' known to western man ... ):



Socialite? Ya think?

Hat-tip: JackP

Guardian shows Beeb how to tell stories

This is how to do it. The California firestorm is a big, visual, story. Show me a 'play' button.

The BBC has only started experimenting with Flash in-page video (on technology pages) because it has too much tied into single platforms — the main criticism of the iPlayer vis Microsoft. The Guardian can just do this with no problem from their previous investment and ability to experiment.

I also notice the Guardian's using Google free tools to display tagged content.

Neither is letting me post their content though. Yet.

Beware rip currents

Palm Beach

Reading the terrible story of the parents who drowned in Portugal trying to save their kids I was reminded of my own experience of rip currents.

Here's what they are:

A rip is a strong current of water running out to sea. Waves normally wash up onto the beach and ebb back into the sea. In some places the ebbing water forms a strong channel pulling out to sea. On many beaches the force of this escaping water can drag you far out to sea.

As I found out on my first venture into the sea in Sydney, at idyllic Palm Beach at the top of the North Shore, on the fringes of Ku-Ring-Gai Chase National Park.

Like all the other Sydney Beaches it's public and used by lots of ordinary people, even though the surrounding suburb is millionaire's row.

I'd got burned, literally, at Bondi. Like most arriving Brits I'd venture. When we travelled around we went first to Palm Beach. Somewhere I'd recommend, though it's not on the tourist trail.

Palm Beach, showing the rip

Even I couldn't resist swimming and, bobbing around, I eventually noticed 'Oh, the shore seems a way off'. I had just floated out in the rip, from the middle of the beach, not realised and not fought - which is probably what saved me (alongside the bloke on a board who pulled me onto the board and back to the beach, with my trunks half off).

The advice is:

If caught in a rip, don't panic. Tread water or float. Once out past the breakers, swim parallel to shore and catch waves in. Or signal for help and wait for a lifesaver to rescue you. If you are a strong swimmer you can swim at 45 degrees across the rip into the wave area, then catch a wave back to shore.

I really didn't realise the seriousness of what happened at the time but when I did it gave me a big fear of deep water. Stories like this bring it all back.

So if you're heading off to a beach, be wary of rip currents :}

To avoid rips, look out for:

• A darker colour because the water is deeper
• A calm rippled surface, generally with smaller waves
• Debris or foam floating on the surface out to sea

Here's the rip at Tamarama (aka Glamarama), next to Bondi.



Coastal (most) Aussie kids all know this, coming from a fairly beachy culture, but Brits like these parents, a similar age to me, aren't taught it.

• More about the Palm Beach rip

Shock: The youth want 'boring' TV documentaries

America's Next Top Model: 'I love it because her ankle looks broken'

Really funny and revelatory incident on Charlie Booker's Screenwipe on BBC4 last night.

Booker is known as "the most vicious pen in TV criticism", firstly for his Guardian columns and now for his TV show. I love him.

Last week he lanced 24hr TV News — eliciting the explanation from an idiot BBC News Editor that the reason that they hired a helicopter to follow the McCanns back from Portugal was because the paper's were covering it (hence, 'public interest').

This week he went for 'youth television', picking on a vile 'America's Top Model' episode where a bunch of fatuous ugly queens + Twiggy got the teens posing as murder victims (I don't jest - 'I love the way that leg looks ... broken').

He then showed a bunch of teenagers TV supposedly aimed at them, especially the mind numbingly bad 'Whatever' from Channel Four. He got them to hold up 'bored' cards when they were and almost immediately most of them were saying 'bored'. (They did like Four's Skins, however).

So Booker tried something left-field. he showed them Adam Curtis' documentary The Power of Nightmares, about Neoconservatism and Islamism.

One of the teenagers, after a while has passed, held up the 'bored' card. The rest sat intently watching. All of them said afterwards, basically, we're learning about the world, why wouldn't this interest us? They felt patronised in the extreme by TV. And they're right.

Yay! Someone's posted the whole thing on YouTube. Godbless Web 2.0.

'Model' is in part 2, 'Nightmares' in part 3.

Pt.1

Pt.2

Pt.3




And here's the three parts of The Power Of Nightmares, courtesy of archive.org
- I love that they offer multiple downloads and a host of other resources like this cute animated thumbnails around the video, plus a lengthy reviews section.

Pt.1

Pt.2

Pt.3

Dictatorship 2.0: Bloggers as targets

Reporters Without Borders 2007 Worldwide rankings — done on their website as plain, flat web pages and hence very easy to find useful info — have highlighted a number of countries slipping down the index because "of serious, repeated violations of the free flow of online news and information".

A decade ago, regime opponents in Vietnam or Tunisia were still printing leaflets in their basements and handing them out to fellow militants at clandestine meetings. Independent newspapers were no more than a few hastily-stapled photocopies distributed secretly.

These days, “subversive” or “counter-revolutionary” material goes on the Internet and political dissidents and journalists have become “cyber-dissidents” and “online journalists.” Most of them know how to create a blog, organise a chat group, make phone calls through a computer and use a proxy to get round censorship.

New technology allows them to receive and share news out of sight of the authorities.

The Web is also a blessing for human rights groups, which can now build a file on a political prisoner with a few mouse-clicks instead of over weeks and sometimes months.

The Web makes networking much easier, for political activists as well as teenagers. Unfortunately, this progress and use of new tools by activists is now being matched by the efforts of dictatorships to fight them. Dictators too have entered the world of Web 2.0.

According to the group at least 64 people are currently imprisoned worldwide because of postings on the web, eight of them in Vietnam.

They flagged up the case of Abdel Kareem Soliman, an Egyptian blogger jailed for four years after he used his web log to criticise the country's top Islamic institution, al-Azhar university, and President Hosni Mubarak, whom he called a dictator.

The governments of repressive countries are now targeting bloggers and online journalists as forcefully as journalists in the traditional media.

More and more governments have realised that the Internet can play a key role in the fight for democracy and they are establishing new methods of censoring it. The governments of repressive countries are now targeting bloggers and online journalists as forcefully as journalists in the traditional media.

In Malaysia (124th), Thailand (135th), Vietnam (162nd) and Egypt (146th), for example, bloggers were arrested and news websites were closed or made inaccessible.

China maintains its leadership in this form of repression, with a total of 50 cyber-dissidents in prison.

Talking about Burma:

The Burmese government’s Internet policies are even more repressive than those of its Chinese and Vietnamese neighbours. The military junta clearly filters opposition websites. It keeps a very close eye on Internet cafes, in which the computers automatically execute screen captures every five minutes, in order to monitor user activity. The authorities targeted Internet telephony and chat services in June, blocking Google’s Gtalk, for example. The aim was two-fold: to defend the profitable long-distance telecommunications market, which is controlled by state companies, as well as to stop cyber-dissidents from using a means of communication that is hard to monitor.

During the recent crisis the Net was, of course, a huge boon for journalists, but then the regime (like the Chinese) turned the tables, undercutting whether the Net makes any real difference:

Several Burmese journalists confirmed that the security services are circulating photos of demonstrators taken by citizen journalists or foreign reporters in police stations and among police informers. Scores of people have reportedly been arrested on the basis of these photos.

The same photos sent over the Web, before the regime shut it down.

The Internet was not designed to protect message confidentiality. It is fast and fairly reliable but also easy to spy on and censor. From the first mouse-click, users leave a trail and reveal information about themselves and what their tastes and habits are. This data is very valuable to commercial firms, who sort through it to target their advertising better.

The police also use it. The best way to spy on journalists a few years ago was still to send a plainclothes officer to stand outside their house. This can be done more cheaply and efficiently now, because machines can spy, report back and automatically prevent subversive conversations.

Cuba has installed spyware in cybercafé computers so that when users type “banned” words in an e-mail, such as the name of a known political dissident, they see a warning that they are writing things considered a “threat to state security” and the Web navigator then immediately shuts down.

China keeps a tight grip on what is written and downloaded by users and spends an enormous amount on Internet surveillance equipment and hires armies of informants and cyber-police.

It also has the political weight to force the companies in the sector - such as Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems - to do what it wants them to, and all have agreed to censor their search-engines to filter out websites overcritical of the authorities.

China has already signed an agreement with Skype to block key-words, so how can we be sure our conversations are not being listened to? How do we know if Skype will not also allow (or already has allowed) the Chinese police to spy on its customers?

It has become vital to examine new technology from a moral standpoint and understand the secondary effects of it. If firms and democratic countries continue to duck the issue and pass off ethical responsibility on others, we shall soon be in a world where all our communications are spied on.

• Google Board rejects shareholder challenge to its ethics