There is more to Nelson Mandela than the genial old man seen shaking hands with the great, the good and the famous. Paul Vallely recalls the persecuted activist and prisoner
Published: 02 September 2007

Every Thursday at one point during Nelson Mandela's long incarceration on Robben Island he and a group of other black prisoners would be taken outside and told to dig a trench six feet deep. When it was complete, they were told to get down into it, whereupon their white warders would urinate on them. Then they were told to fill in the trench and go back to their solitary cells.

Years later, when Nelson Mandela was about to be inaugurated as the first president of South Africa elected by all its people, he was asked who he would like to invite to his first dinner as president. The warders from Robben Island, he said. "You don't have to do that," his advisers told him. "I don't have to be president either," he replied. The first time he sat down to break bread as head of state those same warders were his guests.

i was thinking a few weeks ago about who I would pick as the 3 greatest people of the 20th Century
2 where for me a complete no brainer to pick
Nelson Mandela
Gandhi
the third i found a puzzle but eventually settled on FDR -- by restoring American faith in capitalism and democracy -- even if it was only actually by asserting there was nothing to fear but fear itself -- America was ready and able to assert American values militarily and economically during and post WW2 -- thus the two great autocratic threats to freedom were defeated

A monument to Mandela: the Robben Island years - Independent Online Edition -- Africa

America, the shining city on a hill, swollen over centuries into a reluctant empire, faces a long march into the twilight of its greatness. Our duty now is to supervise our relative decline. Other superpowers shall rise to match us: China, surely, and newly consolidated Europe, and maybe Russia or Japan. From ancient Rome through the Ming Dynasty, from the days of the Spanish Armada to the British Empire, the implacable rule of history is that no one stays on top forever.
...
All this strikes me as the cue to place a bet on America. Don't despair: double down.

absolutely
i would bet on the US being THE global power in 50 years

Bet on America - washingtonpost.com

A Polk County judge on Thursday struck down Iowa's law banning gay marriage.

The ruling by Judge Robert Hanson concluded that the state's prohibition on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional and he ordered the Polk County recorder to issue marriage licenses to six gay couples.

That's ain't them damn liberals in Massachewsetts doin' this. It's pig raisin' country!

Update Having now read the opinion, the following line really stands out.

"So far as this court can tell, (symbol thingy I don't have a key for)595.2(1) operates only to harm same-sex couples and their children."

(underline in the original p.55)

That sounds pretty damning to me...

Gay Marriage in Iowa? Yep! - DesMoinesRegister.com

In Paulson's world, and Bush's, excess and its ruinous consequences are the natural result of market activity, which is itself sacrosanct. So it will fall to Congress and the presidential candidates to put the truly pressing issues on the agenda. The United States badly needs progressive, pro-market leaders who will advance a legal and regulatory framework to reduce excesses in lending and derivatives and to monitor opaque market actors, like hedge funds and private equity firms. The goal must be to avert or at least mitigate crises that otherwise do damage far beyond the immediate investors.

And to succeed, the country must first stop digging the hole it is in. That will require federal budget discipline, especially health care reform and higher taxes.

It will also require higher private savings. And all of that will require leaders who will level with Americans about the depth of the country's economic problems, including its vulnerability to global turbulence, and the sacrifices it will take to address them.

i think that since hedge funds are such a huge part of the global economy then we need regulation to give us much more clarity and less secrecy
apart from anything else it is global security question -- i don't believe there will be a global economic crash but the prospect has loomed and we know from the 1930s that a global economic depression causes wars thus the argument that hedge funds are private instituations and privacy applies is outweighed

the bold in the quotation is mine

Market turmoil and threats to the broader economy - International Herald Tribune

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, yesterday announced Russia had resumed long-range flights of strategic bombers capable of striking targets deep inside the United States with nuclear weapons.

calling Dr Strangelove -- Attention Dr Strangelove

Putin revives long-range bomber patrols | Russia | Guardian Unlimited

On a scorching July afternoon, as the temperature creeps toward 118 degrees in a quiet suburb east of Phoenix, Ric Hoogestraat sits at his computer with the blinds drawn, smoking a cigarette. While his wife, Sue, watches television in the living room, Mr. Hoogestraat chats online with what appears on the screen to be a tall, slim redhead.

He's never met the woman outside of the computer world of Second Life, a well-chronicled digital fantasyland with more than eight million registered "residents" who get jobs, attend concerts and date other users. He's never so much as spoken to her on the telephone. But their relationship has taken on curiously real dimensions. They own two dogs, pay a mortgage together and spend hours shopping at the mall and taking long motorcycle rides. This May, when Mr. Hoogestraat, 53, needed real-life surgery, the redhead cheered him up with a private island that cost her $120,000 in the virtual world's currency, or about $480 in real-world dollars. Their bond is so strong that three months ago, Mr. Hoogestraat asked Janet Spielman, the 38-year-old Canadian woman who controls the redhead, to become his virtual wife.

he woman he's legally wed to is not amused. "It's really devastating," says Sue Hoogestraat, 58, an export agent for a shipping company, who has been married to Mr. Hoogestraat for seven months. "You try to talk to someone or bring them a drink, and they'll be having sex with a cartoon."

Moneyweb - Wall Street Journal - Is this man cheating on his wife?

Cash-strapped ISPs have begun a campaign to use the launch of the BBC's iPlayer on demand service to squeeze more cash from web TV viewers.

The iPlayer is still in beta and due to be fully launched in autumn. It expects to have 500,000 users before the big marketing push.
...
The move is among the first public attempts in the UK by carriers to corral subscribers into this kind of bandwidth protection pen. Traffic shaping hardware makes it possible for ISPs to deprioritise the hybrid peer-to-peer/streaming distribution systems that iPlayer, Joost, 4OD, and other new services rely on to be anywhere near watchable.

where America leads ...
ps nice to see Joost get mentioned

ISPs hijack BBC in tiered services push | The Register

I am so done with it all.

People who publicly bash my projects as evil or malicious, while privately asking me for the source code. (and I don't mean Jikto)

People who write entire articles dismissing my contributions as irrelevant, but at the same time are so frighten by them that they purchase Google ad words on my name to ride on my success.

People who publicly question my integrity from moral high ground, and then offer me a beer like nothing has happened.

Instead of feeling hurt or angry, I just feel plain sad. Because once you’ve been sued for doing the right thing, once you’ve been tarred and feathered for being smart, you really don’t care about impressing much of anyone. But for some reason folks sure feel the need to feel more impressive than you.

I’m a curious hacker. That’s what I do. The fact that someone wants to pay me to be curious is just a happy coincidence for me. Lawsuits and mud-raking and “drama” and two-faced “friends” and the many other things I’ve seen so far, and all the things I’m sure to see in the future really don’t factor into it for me. They aren’t going to change what I like to do, what I’m damn good at, and what I’ll continue to do. They are, if anything, unfortunate, sad roadblocks.

I stand by my achievements, whether they are appreciated or not.
I stand by who I am.
I stopped caring how people accept me a long ago.

Drama

Welcome to the paradoxical world of counterinsurgency warfare -- the kind of war you win by not shooting.

The objective in fighting insurgents isn't to kill every enemy fighter -- you simply can't -- but to persuade the population to abandon the insurgents' cause. The laws of these campaigns seem topsy-turvy by conventional military standards: Money is more decisive than bullets; protecting our own forces undermines the U.S. mission; heavy firepower is counterproductive; and winning battles guarantees nothing.

My unnerving encounter on the highway was particularly ironic since I was there at the invitation of the U.S. Army to help teach these very principles at the Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy.

Fight Less, Win More - washingtonpost.com

Anthony Wilson, the music mogul behind some of Manchester's most successful bands, has died of cancer.

If you've ever listened to Joy Division, New Order, or the Happy Mondays, (or listened to white pop music for the last 15 years) or you've ever been to a rave or club in the last 20 years, you have this man to thank. He literally helped found a whole genre of music, but impacted culture in incalculable ways. For a great primer, see 24 Hour Party People.

Anthony Wilson dies from cancer, or my friends, we are getting older...