Author: StrayRoots

Apparently Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elizabeth, is throwing a fundraiser for Obama in London, with such illustrious guests as Gwyneth Paltrow.  

The Murdoch family are used to people trying to decode their political stance and its implications from their public actions. Now Elisabeth Murdoch, Rupert’s daughter who runs a large independent production company, has thrown them a curveball by hosting a London fundraiser for Barack Obama.

In the most high-profile example yet of glitzy fundraising bashes for the US presidential hopefuls spreading across the Atlantic, a string of notable US ex-pats with jobs in media, the arts and finance will gather at the Notting Hill home Murdoch shares with her husband, PR guru Matthew Freud.

So-called “event chairs” at the fundraising evening include actress Gwyneth Paltrow, the wife of Coldplay singer Chris Martin, Warner Brothers UK chief Josh Berger and Julia Moffett, the director of strategy for the BBC World Service Trust.

Hosts at the bash, VIP tickets for which cost $2,300 (£1,160), include Joanna Shields, the international vice-president of social-networking site Bebo, which was recently sold to AOL.

I think this is more a matter of bribery than support.  It simply means he thinks the republicans and Hillary Clinton are losers, and he is giving a bribe to the likely next President.  He also supported Tony Blair,in England, when it became clear than the Tories couldn’t win. In return for that support Blair persecuted the BBC, and allowed him to consolidate more control over the British media.  He also gave Rupert a secret cabinet position in the run-up to the Iraq War, which Tony Blair supported.  When Tony Blair resigned owing to his unpopular support of the war, Murdoch offered him a position at News Corps. In 2006, when Clinton was seen as inevitable, Murdoch supported her with a fundraiser, and she has rewarded him by appearing on his network more than any other candidate, even when Barack and Edward’s had sworn them off.  

I sincerely wish Barack would refuse Murdoch’s support.   It doesn’t come without a price, and it looks bad to those of use who are worried about media consolidation. I think undermining the dominance of News Corp and other corporate broadcasters should be a top priority of any serious progressive.

I recently pulled out a parking lot, and forgot to turn on my headlights immediately, but I turned them on after a couple of seconds.

Yes, I was pulled over by the cops.

They asked me to produce proof of insurance, but my fricking glove box was jammed with the drivers manual.  He didn’t ticket me for not having my headlights on, but did ticket me for not having proof of insurance.  He told me if I would provide proof to the clerk of court this would be dismissed.  Failure to provide proof would result in a $385 FINE if I didn’t pay this fine, I would lose my license to drive. He let me go.  

The next day, I was able to pry my glove box open, and I provided my proof of insurance to the clerk of court.  The fine was dismissed but they gave me a $50 court fee  

I am a disabled bipolar agoraphobic. I am on a fixed income.  I really believe all this excessive fining and feeing will cause many poor people to lose their licenses to drive, rendering them permanently economically marginal.  I live in Iowa.  You literally can’t hold a job without a license. To call a license a privilege in a state like this is a joke.  I am not saying it was right for me to not have my lights on when I pulled out of the parking but I am a human being, and none of us are prefect.  I am not saying that I was right for not knowing my glove box was jammed up, but I am a human being and nobody is perfect.  I didn’t ask to have an illness, or to live on only $530 a month but that is the way things are for me, and for many others.

I called my Senator Herman Quirmbach, a Democrat, who is a Harvard/Princeton educated economics professor at Iowa State, to ask him if he could do something to lower fines, and his only response was that I should have produced Insurance and should have had my lights on, if not being able to pay such fines causes me to lose my driving privileges that is tough.   When I inquired about the court fees, that were charged despite the fact that charges were dismissed, he claimed I made them take me to court, so it is tough.  I said, what about the presumption of innocence, should the tax payers as a whole be paying the costs of the court, he changed the subject to my admission of not having my lights on. Remember this is a Democrat.  He literally sees no problem with losing your license for inability to pay fines and fees.  He sees no problem with not being able to drive in state where a person has to be able to drive to get a job.  

It just seems like if you are poor neither party gives a shit about you.  I literally have no-one to vote for, when voting for state representative.  I think I will just pass on voting for that seat just because he is the Democrat.  I live in an upper middle class college town.  They are liberal, but wealthy, and probably have no empathy for the poor.  I know it is not possible to get a primary challenge to him so I have no one to vote for.  I am a non-citizen practically.

I also fear I will eventually lose license for being human and poor.  I might as well commit myself to the loony bin then, otherwise I will starve.  I suppose both parties feel that people like me are suppose to fall back on our families, but my relationship with them is emotionally and sometimes physically abusive. Yes they maybe the reason I am messed up.  

God help me, but I am skeptical he exists.   I am feeling very depressed now.

I believe very strongly that his crusade against the netroots candidates is motivated by support for Iraq war.  I believe they are trying to replace candidates that are strongly against the Iraq war with candidates that are for it, but won’t commit vocally in favor of it.  Their latest entry is Acuri in NY.  Acuri won’t commit to a position on withdrawal, other than vague statements  that he believes the troops should stay until Iraq is stable.   Duckworth is another stand for nothin.   Harold Ford, Schumer’s mentoree, openly says he loves Bush and doesn’t want a pullout until the job is done.  

Please realize, Schumer is a member of a neocon front group named Foundation for Defense of Democracy. He is not all that stealth about his own beliefs, and we should stop being willfully blind to his motivation. Here is some information on Schumer’s ties to this group from right web.

Chuck Schumer

He serves on “The Board of Advisors” to “The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies”

According to right web.

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) has become one of the most prominent and influential in the array of traditionally right-wing and neoconservative think tanks. [b]President Bush’s speech on the “Global War on Terrorism” on March 13, 2006 at an event sponsored by FDD elevated the think tank’s national and international profile. Bush’s choice of FDD as a forum was widely regarded as a sign that the administration has not backed away from the neoconservative foreign policy despite the problems of the Iraq War[/b] and U.S. Middle East policy in general.

He serves on this board with:

Republican Party insiders dominate FDD’s board, and its president, Clifford May, is the former director of communications for the Republican National Committee (1997-2001) and was the editor of Rising Tide, the party’s official magazine. FDD’s three board members are Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, and Jeane Kirkpatrick. As a way to achieve widespread acceptance of its positions on counterterrorism and on Middle East affairs, FDD has two bipartisan advisory groups.

Its four “Distinguished Advisers” are Newt Gingrich, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Louis J. Freeh (former FBI director), and James Woolsey. FDD also has a Board of Advisers, whose members are: Gary Bauer, Donna Brazile, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), Frank Gaffney, Amb. Marc Ginsberg, Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ), Charles Jacobs, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Hon. Richard D. Lamm, Richard Perle, Rep. Jim Marshall (D-GA), Sen. Zell Miller (D-GA), and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY). 3

Schumer should not be believed when he claims he is motivated by concern for red state candidates. The red districts are opposed to the war too.  He isn’t a triangulator.  He is an ideologue that genuinely supports the Iraq war.  It was an awful mistake to put him and his buddy Rahm in charge of Congressional Election Committees.  

Finally, we need to stop whining about Schumer and Emanuel’s interference in local elections and nationalize the progressive side.  We need to encourage the netroots to promote the progressive antiwar candidates and contribute money to their campaigns.  This interference isn’t going to stop just because we don’t like it.  If anything our complaining will encourage the behavior to continue.

It is absolutely critical that we keep a prowar consensus from getting elected, and this is most safely done in the primaries.  Also, someone who won’t commit on the war should be asked to  to commit, or we should work against them, in favor of a candidate that does.  IF they oppose the war they should say it, and if they favor it they should say it.  If you are at any “question and answer” session with one of the stand for nothins, ask them where they stand, if they won’t commit against the war work for people that will.

If the Democrats don’t recruit these working class Latinos they are truely lost.

Crossposted from Dameocrat Blog

More Than 500,000 Rally in L.A. for Immigrants’ Rights – Los Angeles Times: “More Than 500,000 Rally in L.A. for Immigrants’ Rights
By Teresa Watanabe and Anna Gorman, Times Staff Writer
2:51 PM PST, March 25, 2006

Joining what some are calling the nation’s largest mobilization of immigrants ever, hundreds of thousands of people boisterously marched in downtown Los Angeles Saturday to protest federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants, penalize those who help them and build a security wall on the U.S. southern border. Spirited crowds representing labor, religious groups, civil-rights advocates and ordinary immigrants stretched over 26 blocks of downtown Los Angeles from Adams Blvd. along Spring Street and Broadway to City Hall, tooting kazoos, waving American flags and chanting ‘Si se puede!’ (Yes we can!). The crowd, estimated by police at more than 500.000, represented one of the largest protest marches in Los Angeles history, surpassing Vietnam War demonstrations and the 70,000 who rallied downtown against Proposition 187, a 1994 state initiative that denied public benefits to undocumented migrants.

The marchers included both longtime residents and the newly arrived, bound by a desire for a better life and a love for this county.

Arbelica Lazo, 40, illegally immigrated from El Salvador two decades ago but said she now owns two business and pays $7,000 in taxes annually.

Jose Alberto Salvador, 33, came here illegally just four months ago to find work to support the wife and five children he left behind; in his native Guatemala, he said, what little work he could find paid only $10 a day. ‘As much as we need this country, we love this country,’ Salvador said, waving a stick with both the American and Guatemalan flag. ‘This country gives us opportunities we don’t get at home.'”

If only the antiwar movement could pull off a demonstration that big from out of the blue, we’d kick ass.  

As Nick Miroff  points out the Latin American left are doing by far the best job countering the influence of the Bushistas.  Bush has truely united them.  He is doing a better job of uniting them than Che ever dreamed of.

Has Latin America ever had such a unifying figure?

At political rallies, his visage is held aloft as a beacon to regional independence and self-determination. He’s helped forge new trade partnerships to spur economic growth and alleviate poverty. And his leadership has fanned a gale-force electoral trend that’s sweeping the hemisphere to topple one pro-Washington government after the next.

Who is this grand inductor of Latin American leftism? Venezuelan fireball Hugo Chavez? Blue-collar Brazilian Lula Ignacio da Silva? Bolivia’s coca-farmer-cum-president, Evo Morales?

¡Epa! It’s George W. Bush, the accidental revolutionary…………

The macroeconomic proposals of the Washington consensus have not been working,” says Guillermo Delgado, professor of Latin American Studies at UC Santa Cruz. “That model was supposed to create prosperity and, after so many years, such prosperity has not been seen and class polarization has grown deeper.”

Sensing an opportunity, new social and political movements in the region began marshalling their forces. Then George W. Bush came along, combining Yankee hubris with a Che-worthy radicalizing touch.

Bush has since presided over one of the most significant political re-alignments in the history of the Western Hemisphere. By this summer, every major Latin American nation but Colombia is likely to be run by elected leaders with stronger backgrounds in Marx than free markets. If Cold War-era “domino theory” has been a bust in the Middle East, it’s working with textbook precision in Latin America.

Of coarse the modern dlc democrats are perpetually antiworking class. Remember how they reacted to the transit strike? They will probably ignore this just as they willfully ignore the peace protesters, and marginalize antiwar candidates.

Those of us in the antiwar movement could throw a monkey wrench into the system by courting this energetic and vital immigrant group.  I doubt Cegelis could have lost if we did that.  What potential might Ned Lamont have if he appeals to this group.

I am pretty sure that ordinary Americans didn’t have this in mind, when they they attempted to install a Democracy in Iraq.

Crossposted from Dameocrat Blog

Shia Death Squads Target Iraqi Gays: “Shia Death Squads Target Iraqi Gays

Three Years On, Americans Ignore Pleas of Repression Even Worse than Saddam’s

BY DOUG IRELAND

Courtesy OutRage! London

Left, Ammar, aged 27, was abducted and shot in back of the head in Baghdad by suspected Badr militias in January 2006. Right, Haydar Faiek, aged 40, a transsexual Iraqi, was beaten and burned to death by Badr militias in September 2005.

Following a death-to-gays fatwa issued last October by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani,death squads of the Badr Corps have been systematically targeting gay Iraqis for persecution and execution, gay Iraqis say. But when they ask for help and protection from U.S. occupying authorities in the Green Zone, the secure area officialdom has carved out within Baghdad, gays Iraqis are met with indifference and derision.

“The Badr Corps is committed to the sexual cleansing of Iraq,” said Ali Hili, a 33-year-old gay Iraqi exile in London who, with some 30 other gay Iraqis who have fled to the United Kingdom, five months ago founded the Abu Nawas Group there to support persecuted gay Iraqis. The group is named for a revered eighth-century classical poet of Arab and Persian descent known throughout Middle East cultures and famous for his poems in praise of same-sex love.”

This apparently follows a fatwa given by the supposedly moderate Iranian cleric Ayatollah Sistani.

The Ayatollah Sistani, the 77-year-old Iranian-born cleric who is the supreme Shia authority in Iraq, is revered by SCIRI as its spiritual leader. His anti-gay fatwa–available on Sistani’s official Web site–says that “people involved” in homosexuality “should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.“

Apparently Badr Corp, isn’t just killing them when they find them either.  They are actually entraping them, in what gay advocates are calling systematic “sexual cleansing”

“Badr Corps agents have a network of informers who, among other things, target alleged immoral behavior,” Hili continued. “They kill gays, unveiled women, prostitutes, people who sell or drink alcohol, and those who listen to Western music and wear Western fashions.”

“Badr militants are entrapping gay men via Internet chat rooms,” Hili said. “They arrange a date, and then beat and kill the victim. Males who are unmarried by the age of 30 or 35 are placed under surveillance on suspicion of being gay, as are effeminate men. They will be investigated and warned to get married.

“Badr will typically give them a month to change their ways. If they don’t change their behavior, or if they fail to show evidence that they plan to get married, they will be arrested, disappear, and eventually be found dead. The bodies are usually discovered with their hands bound behind their back, blindfolds over their eyes, and bullet wounds to the back of the head.”

This result, of the Shia taking over, if we toppled Saddam, was both predictable and predicted.  This is not worth any American life.   Iraqis clearly do not want a “liberal democracy,” and it is impossible for a foreign power to install one.  Maybe one day they will want one, but we only prolong that day when we associate gay rights with oil imperialism in the minds of the muslim world.  Needless to say the oil men, the defence contractors, and christian fundamentalists that pushed this war have no empathy for gays either. This callousness toward the gays of Iraq proves that they weren’t fundamentally motivated by a concern for Human Rights.

Crossposted to Dameocrat Blog

City Pages – Bin Laden’s Game: “CP: Can you talk about the role that the Iraq war has played in his recruiting successes?

Scheuer: I have to tell you, Sir, I’m not an expert on Iraq. I don’t know what the threat was from Saddam.My own judgment is, as a nation-state [Saddam’s Iraq] was probably containable. But our invasion of Iraq broke the back of our counter-terrorism policy, because it validated in the Islamic mind so much of what bin Laden had said through the past decade. He said, Americans will do anything to defeat a strong Muslim government. We took Saddam out. He said we would take on and defeat any Muslim state that threatened Israel. I think Iraq is an indication of that being true, from their perspective. He said we would occupy their sanctities and try to destroy their religion. From the Islamist’s perspective, we occupy all three of their sanctities now–the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and Jerusalem. The Israelis hold Jerusalem, but increasingly in the Islamic world, Americans and Israelis are viewed interchangeably. He said we were going to try to take all the oil from the Muslim world. And certainly the view predominates that one of the reasons we went to Iraq was oil.

And so, in terms of perception, the Iraq war was a validation of what bin Laden had said. In addition, bin Laden and Zawahiri are not trained Islamic clerics or jurists. The argument was always made that they had no authority, therefore, to declare a jihad. Well, when we invaded Iraq, it was kind of a textbook example of an event that necessitates jihad in the Islamic world. Now, any number of well-credentialed clerics and jurists and scholars have authorized jihad against the United States around the world, because we invaded a Muslim land. In my view, the invasion of Iraq accelerated the transformation of al Qaeda from a man and an organization into a philosophy and a movement.

We’re at the point where it’s still very important to kill–preferably to kill, or else to capture–Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri. But because of Iraq, our problem is far from over if that happens.”
 

Michael Scheuer is an ex cia analyist.  He has written a book called “Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam and the Future of America“

Crossposted at Dameocrat Blog

This story probably won’t stop the hasbara people from making the claim that “Arafat launched the last intifada,” but many Israeli officials privately acknowledge “this is not true,” which means unilateral disengagement and the idea that there is “no partner for peace,” is also bunk. Just read the comments by former Shin Bet agent Yuval Diskin.

Haaretz – Israel News – Brainwashed by intelligence people: “Brainwashed by intelligence people
By Akiva Eldar

American and Israeli parents found out in recent days that their governments are sending their sons to kill and be killed in inane wars. Paul Pillar – until recently, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia – publicly declared that President George Bush had tweaked assessments in order to justify the war in Iraq. On the same day almost, Israel’s Channel 10 aired parts of a lecture in which Shin Bet security service chief Yuval Diskin asserted that the riots in the territories were not premeditated, and that ‘an Arafat-devised contingency plan did not spark them off.’

These statements undermine claims by political and military officials that the intifada was a stage in a plan by Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat to crush the Oslo Accords on the way to the destruction of Israel. Diskin’s statements also cast much doubt on the argument that the Palestine Liberation Organization is not, and never has been, a partner, and that since September 2000, Israel has been waging a just and unavoidable war.“

It goes without saying that the government and the ruling party, which has thrived magnificently on the no-partner theory, did not make a big fuss of the bomb dropped by the Shin Bet chief. And even the left-wing opposition waived the elections gift it received from the head of the organization responsible for intelligence assessments in the territories.

Diskin is not the first to challenge the basic premise on which Israel’s peace and security policy has rested ever since Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount. He was preceded by Major General (res.) Amos Malka, head of Military Intelligence at the time of the start of the intifada. In June 2004, Malka told Haaretz that MI did not have a shred of evidence to indicate that Arafat had initiated the riots.

This means that the late Sharon’s Kadima party platform is based on bunk. There are indications of a revolt against Olmert within the ranks of Kadima by another former Shin Bet agent Avi Dichter. As reported by Jpost, Dichter largely concurred with Diskin.

“It was not at all a political statement, it was a professional statement,” he told Israel Radio.

“It is totally clear that when Yuval Diskin is invited to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, he is essentially being invited to the program ‘Meet the Press,’ since all of his comments will be publicized after that, but with alterations as each Knesset member relates them. Therefore, I am convinced that when he spoke in Eli, just like when Ami Ayalon spoke in the past in yeshivas… I’m sure Yuval took into consideration that what he said would be published. I’m sure he was fully aware,” Dichter emphasized.

Dichter is also on record opposing further unitateral withdrawals.

n his first interview with an Israeli newspaper since he entered politics, Dichter said he would accept any portfolio offered to him in a prospective Kadima-led government and explained why the road map was the best diplomatic solution for Israel.

Speaking at party headquarters in Petah Tikva, Dichter said the perception among the public that Kadima would withdraw from much of Judea and Samaria regardless of what happens with the Palestinians was incorrect.

Dichter, a supporter of the Gaza Strip disengagement plan, said the West Bank was different from Gaza.

“The Palestinians haven’t enforced any of the many plans that we signed with them,” he said. “We have time. We are not in a hurry. We’re not going to try to end the problem without solving it. We’re not going to withdraw from the West Bank unilaterally just because it was done in Gaza.”

Crossposted from Dameocrat Blog

Several interesting news items related to this.

Quote:
Microsoft Clarifies Support for Windows 98, Windows Millennium

Microsoft announced a clarification in extended security update support for Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, and Windows Millennium (Me) Editions for critical security issues. Windows 98 and Windows 98 Second Edition support was scheduled to end on January 16, 2004. The continual evaluation of the Support Lifecycle policy revealed, however, that customers in smaller and emerging markets needed additional time to upgrade their product. Therefore, critical security updates for Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, and Windows Me will be provided on the Windows Update site through June 30, 2006.
Key Dates:

* Paid incident support for Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, and Windows Millennium Edition (Me) is available through June 30, 2006.

• Critical security updates will be provided on the Windows Update site through June 30, 2006.
• Customers may request non-critical security fixes for Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Me, and the most current version of their components until June 30, 2006 through typical assisted-support channels.
• Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, and Windows Me downloads for existing security issues will continue to be available through regular assisted-support channels at no charge until June 30, 2006.
• No-charge incident support and extended hotfix support for Windows 98 and Windows 98 Second Edition ended on June 30, 2003.
• No-charge incident support and extended hotfix support for Windows Me ended on December 31, 2003.

Microsoft is already leaving these customers high and dry for the WMF security flaw, according to cnet.

Quote:
Windows 98, ME users left vulnerable to WMF bug?
January 5, 2006 5:17 PM PST

Microsoft on Thursday rushed out an update to address a serious security flaw in Windows. Patches are available for Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003, but Microsoft left out Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition.

The flaw lies in the way the OS software handles Windows Meta File images. Microsoft deems the issue “critical” only for Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, the problem is not as big for Windows 98 and Windows ME because it is harder to exploit on those OSes, the company said in its MS06-001 security bulletin..

Experts from iDefense, F-Secure and SANS agree that no attacks that target the older Windows versions have surfaced. Yet that might only be a matter of time, said Mike Murray, director of vulnerability and exposure research at nCircle, a vulnerability management company in San Francisco.

Releasing a patch for Windows 98 and Windows ME would be the right thing to do, according to Murray. “Even Microsoft acknowledges that the vulnerability exists in those OSes, someone will figure out how to exploit it,” he said. …….

Here is someone in the reply section.

Quote:

MS is wrong not to support 98
Reader post by: Bill Dautrive
Posted on: January 8, 2006, 2:51 PM PST
Story: Windows 98, ME users left vulnerable to WMF bug?

Why?

Simple. Around 50% of the windows world is using something other then XP. So why would that mean that MS should still support it?

The intenet is an extremely dangerous place and MS is the primary reason for it. With so many older MS OS’s out there unprotected, it causes serious problems for everyone.

No one should have to pay to have problems that MS neglected fixed. We are not talking features here, but security problems that are the fault of Microsoft. All these people using the lame car anology are missing the point and clearly lack understanding of the issues. Even if a 1950 whatever is found to be defective, how many are on the road, how many has 100% original parts? That anology does not even come close to fitting this situtation, stop being ignorant.

Bottom line: These are serious security issues that came about through incompetance and negligence on Microsofts part. Asking anyone but Microsoft to pay for this is beyond ignorant.

Korea is responding by trying to go linux.

Quote:

The nation’s six ministries including the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) convened of late to discuss ways of reducing dependence on Microsoft, the world’s biggest software maker.

“We agreed to cut down on our heavy reliance on Windows while promoting open-source programs such as Linux as an alternative,” an MIC official said.

As action plans, the six ministries agreed to make Internet banking services and programs dealing with public grievance operable on a Linux-empowered system. Up until now, the programs could be run only through Windows.

“To secure broad-based adoption of non-Windows programs, the government will evaluate ministries regarding how much they brace for open-source programs,” the official said.

But, is the linux community offering an alternative to these former customers of Microsoft? Afterall, while there may be distros designed to work on older legacy computers, none of them are designed to be as easy to use as windows 98. Problems include, having to mount the disk drive from the command line, no control panels for easier customization on many of their light windows managers, like fluxbox and icewm, and the greater difficulty encountered when installing a linux program. I can untar tarballs, but I can never configure one. make and “make install” never work. Also the more feature rich Guis like KDE and Gnome are often to resource intensive to work quickly with anything under Pentium 3 or AMD K6-3. They both need at least 256 mb of memory to operate at a good clip. The typical windows 98 system, was Pentium I-MMX or Pentium II with 64-128 mb of memory.

According the same article more asinine members of the linux community are probably gearing up to infect these people with viruses in July.

Quote:
`Windows 98 is still widely used. Some people would replace their programs with advanced systems like Windows 2000 and XP. But some will continue to bank on Windows 98 even after this July,” Seung Jae-mo, the researcher at the Korea Information Security Agency, said.

He expected hacking and virus attacks would rage in the latter half of this year as global crackers would launch full-throttle attacks on Windows 98-outfitted computers that will not be updated regularly.

I personally feel the efforts of all those code vigilantes would be better spent creating an “easy to use” distro for older computers, but what do I know?

According to Wikipedia, small business customers of Microsoft who can’t pay for an upgrade to xp are being offered a thin client but the program is getting no advertising from Microsoft, and it is not being offered to home users of of Win 98 and ME. There is a something like a thin client being offered developing countries called “Windows XP Starter Edition,” but Microsoft is not offering this to home users in the developed countries and we may not be able to afford the latest thing either.

Yes, I am biased because I am a “Win 98” user. I switched to feather as a dual boot, but I don’t find it easy to use, and I started out with a DOS system, so I am not ignorant of command lines like most 98 people. The heavier distros just run way slow. I have tried “Debian Woody” with KDE and and “Red Hat 7.3” with Gnome. Neither Gnome nor Kde were much easier to use than Feather’s Fluxbox despite the more familiar appearance. They still made it difficult to install programs, and there plug n play wasn’t nearly as good as Feathers. They also didn’t have easy to use control panels though the control panels existed.

“Windows 3.1” and 95 users were left in the cold in 2002.

This didn’t harm 3.1 users as much since the hackers focused on 32 bit Windows after 95 was invented, but most any virus that involved NT/Xp will harm 95, 98, and ME.

Sober Virus harmed 95 users badly.  I remember having to work on a number of friends computers as a result of it.

Anyhoo, if you want to keep your computer safe after this time. Here are your alternatives.

Install an antivirus program, and keep it updated. If you have one of those thirty day trials and you let it expire, you should purchase it. If you can’t afford it, use a free alternative like AVG.

Get, a spyware program and keep it updated. Many are offered free. I personally like the spyware checker on my cousins’ yahoo toolbar. My personal favorite is “Spyware Search and Destroy.”

Only use “Internet Explorer” if you have to. It will save you tons of headaches. Otherwise, use Firefox or Opera, Netscape, or some other browser completely unrelated to IE. Opera is now completely free. Firefox now has a user agent switcher extension, which makes Internet Explorer only websites(bill paying and online banking mostly) think you are using Internet Explorer. Opera has this feature built in. If you must use IE, out of necessity or bad habit, please tweak the security setting to ask for prompts before downloading unsigned active x controls. I personally set Firefox and Opera to erase cookies when I close my browser. I make exceptions for frequently visited sites like my.yahoo. I believe you can do this with Internet Explorer as well.

Don’t use “Outlook Express. It is the “kick me” sign of the internet. It automatically executes attachments when you open an email. The majority of viruses are made to take advantage of this feature. “Sober Virus” took advantage of this execution then raided the address book of Outlook. I personally use Thunderbird. It is just much safer then OE, and it has a really good spam filter, which learns over time and becomes better the more you use it. There are many other good free email programs out there that you can try. The M2 client on Opera is really cool.  It threads your email just like google mail does.  Pegasus is my old standby. Using webmail, like yahoo, google, mail.com, is also very safe. If you must use Outlook Express, turn off the setting that automatically opens attachments. This may or may not help. Some viruses turn them on, even when they are off. It is the most popular email program so hackers make most of their viruses for it. Not using it is the best and most inexpensive way to protect yourself.

Like it or not,you probably need a firewall these days. I personally use a freeware program called “Tiny Personal Firewall,” but it involves a lot of good guessing as far as what to let through and what to refuse. Basically I let traffic through if I have just opened a new program, and it is obviously related to that program. I have heard “Zone Alarm” is easier to use, but whenever I tried it, I found it too resource intensive.

Radical alternatives: Get rid of Windows 98/Me. This means installing a light distro of Linux. hat means many new things to learn, and some greater difficulty in certain areas.

Light distro to look at.

“Feather Linux”: This is my old favorite thus far. It is quick. It does plug and play very well for a Linux distro, and set up my dsl modem really easily. It installs in less than 10 minutes generally. You update it with a program called apt-get. You will need to install “Open Office” if you want a word processor with a dictionary. The dictionary in Abiword doesn’t work. The nicest feature of Feather is that it automatically mounts floppy drives. This distro has to be burned. The only drawback is its use of a desktop “windows manager” called Fluxbox.  It is very quick, and light, but it is not easy to use if you are used to Windows.  Instead of having a “Start Menu” you access all your programs from the right click of your mouse. It has no control panel for easy customization. You have to use configuration scripts.

Damn Small Linux a.k.a. DSL. It is similar to feather, but I haven’t tried it much. This distro can be purchased as well as burned. It uses the Icewm windows manager. Icewm is like Windows 9x, only it doesn’t have a control panel for customization. Like Feather and Luit, DSL uses Tiny X server instead of xorg or xfree86. This means it can be used on very old computers, including 386 DX so long as they have at least 24 Mb of memory. These specs don’t apply to the programs in the package necessarily. Firefox will always require at least 64 mg of memory and at least Pentium MMX or greater. The same goes for Open Office. Fortunately nearly all Win98/ME computers should do just fine with these specifications, but if you have lessor specs there are alternatives, which can be searched for at debian.org. Siag, and Ted or good WP suites for low resources systems, and link2, with the graphics switch links2 -g, is an amazing little browser. DSL has hacked version of Dillo, which runs on very low system resources. They modified it to handle frames and Javascript.

Luit Linux. Basically “Damn Small” with XFCE. XFCE is very easy to use for a light desktop. It has a control panel and is generally easy to customize, and figure out, relative to Icewm and Fluxbox.

BTW, Feather, DSL and Luit are all live CDs. This means they will run from the cd rom. This is great because, you can try them out, set them up, and experiment with them, before you install them on your hardrive. This is a great advantage, from a configuration standpoint.

Xubuntu: Ubuntu with XFCE desktop. This is what I am currently using. XFCE is a very light desktop, with some very easy-to-use features. It is not offered as a separate distro. You have to order the Ubuntu CDs, then you need to do a server install of Ubuntu, then you install the xubuntu-desktop with apt-get from the command line. There are instructions for this at the Ubuntu website. If you have dial-up, downloading the Xubuntu desktop may take as much as ten hours. If you have highspeed, it will take two or less. The next distro will be out sometime in June and by then they may offer Xubuntu as a separate distro. Let’s cross our fingers, because this will really benefit dial-up users. I like XFCE a lot. It is very light and feature rich with an easy to understand control panel. Xubuntu doesn’t use tiny x though. Tiny X makes it possible for Feather, DSL and Deli to go on computers as old a 386DX with 24 Mb of memory. Xubuntu probably won’t go that far, but it works just fine on the MMX/Pentium II era machines. The biggest advantage of this distro is the Ubuntu community, which is extensive and helpful. It also helps that you can get the installation disks for free and without a cd burner, or shipping fees. If you go their website, you will likely get sent several installation disks rather than just one. I think Ubuntu developers want you to share this distro with your friends.

All three of these distros are based on Debian. The default desktop of Ubuntu is Gnome. It will operate pretty slowly, on most Pentium I and II computers. It can be tweaked some by using hdparm, but I don’t like it very much. I upgraded my hardrive from 4 Gb to 30Gb three years ago, so I installed a dual boot of 98 and “Debian Linux.” A dual boot configuration is a good thing if you are scared of getting rid of 98 completely. Admittedly I couldn’t get the winmodem dial up working on my first install of Debian Linux, so keeping 98 was handy. Buying a larger disk drive to accommodate both is fairly inexpensive. You can probably buy a 30 Gb hardrive for less than 20 dollars on Ebay nowadays. That is more than enough to accomodate Windows 98 and Linux, yet it is cheap because today it is considered a dinky diskdrive.

Do your research before you install Linux. You should get a manual for your distro online, or from the library or bookstore. The Ubuntu community has a lot online. This is why I have started to using Ubuntu. Pay particular attention to the problem of Windows specific dial up modems. When I first installed Debian, I had to get an external modem, because I just couldn’t get my winmodem to work. If you have an internal modem, it is probably a winmodem. Cable and DSL modems that are connected to a USB hub, rather than an ethernet adapters are also a drag. They aren’t well identified by Linux at all. I have no experience with wifi. Ubuntu has a quick start guide that should help if you are new to Linux.

There are some promising new distros on the horizon that could benefit 98/ME users. I am currently paying close attention to “STX Linux,” a Slackware-based distro, that employs the “Equinox Desktop.” This desktop looks and feels very much like “Windows 98”. It even has a really good control panel. They just came out with their first full release a month ago. They claim that it runs on a 486DX with 32 megabytes of memory. I’ll be paying close attention to the buzz on this one, but I currently don’t know any users.

Mepis has a very good reputation among former Windows users. They have been beta testing a light version for a while now. Unfortunately, it appears they are using KDE which in my experience runs slower than Gnome on my AMD K6 II.

Some people are also making a distro called Ubuntu lite,but it is in beta testing now. It will employ Equinox or Icewm.

Anyway, there’s a run down of your alternatives, as I see them.  I will be following this story in the future.

Crossposted from Dameocrat Blog

Flemming Rose – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Flemming Rose” the man who published those cartoons depicting Mohammed as a suicide bomber, has some disturbing ties to campus watch, and seems to be obsessed with the “clash of civilizations”.
According to the Wiki article

There is some controversy over whether political ideology informed Flemming Rose’s decision to publish the offending cartoons. Allegations of ties to neo-conservative thought abound, but so far have not been lucidly substantiated. In 2004, he travelled to the USA to visit the Neoconservative Daniel Pipes and subsequently wrote and published a generally positive account of Daniel Pipes, which has been held up as apologetic by certain critics. Rose does not comment on Pipes’s ideology in the profile.

He was certainly providing an echo to Daniel Pipes, when he made this statement.

“About the question of integration and how compatible is the religion of Islam with a modern secular society – how much does an immigrant have to give up and how much does the receiving culture have to compromise.”

The paper that published this appears to have refused a similar cartoon about Jesus.

Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that have caused a storm of protest throughout the Islamic world, refused to run drawings lampooning Jesus Christ, it has emerged today.

The Danish daily turned down the cartoons of Christ three years ago, on the grounds that they could be offensive to readers and were not funny.

In April 2003, Danish illustrator Christoffer Zieler submitted a series of unsolicited cartoons dealing with the resurrection of Christ to Jyllands-Posten.

Zieler received an email back from the paper’s Sunday editor, Jens Kaiser, which said: “I don’t think Jyllands-Posten’s readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact, I think that they will provoke an outcry. Therefore, I will not use them.

Now Flemming Rose, thats Flem for short,(cough, cough) is coordinating with the Iranian paper that is publishing the inflammatory protocols cartoons.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Danish paper pursues Holocaust cartoons: “Danish paper pursues Holocaust cartoons

John Plunkett
Wednesday February 8, 2006

The Danish paper responsible for the original caricatures of the prophet Muhammad is set to stoke the row further by running cartoons satirising the Holocaust.

Flemming Rose, the culture editor of Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, said today he was trying to get in touch with the Iranian paper, Hamshari, which plans to run an international competition seeking cartoons about the Holocaust.

‘My newspaper is trying to establish a contact with the Iranian newspaper, and we would run the cartoons the same day as they publish them,’ Mr Rose told CNN.

Article continues
The Danish editor was also defiantly unapologetic about the original publication of 12 cartoons – one of which featured the prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb – in his paper five months ago.”

Flem is an old cold warrior like Rummy and Cheney.

Crossposted from Dameocrat Blog

Excellent two part article from the guardian about whether Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians can be compared to Apartheid.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Worlds apart: “As far back as 1961, Hendrik Verwoerd, the South African prime minister and architect of the ‘grand apartheid’ vision of the bantustans, saw a parallel. ‘The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state,’ he said. It is a view that horrifies and infuriates many Israelis.

A prominent Israeli political scientist, Gerald Steinberg, responded to an invitation to appear on a panel at a Jerusalem cultural centre to debate ‘Is Israel the new apartheid?’ by denouncing the organiser, a South African-born Jew, for even posing the question.

‘As you are undoubtedly aware, the pro-Palestinian and anti-semitic campaign to demonise Israel focuses on the entirely false and abusive analogy with South Africa. Using the term ‘apartheid’ to apply to Israel’s legitimate responses to terror and the threat of annihilation both demeans the South African experience, and is the most immoral of charges against the right of the Jewish people to self-determination,’ he replied.

Many Israelis recoil at the suggestion of a parallel because it stabs at the heart of how they see themselves and their country, founded after centuries of hatred, pogroms and ultimately genocide. If anything, many of Israel’s Jews view themselves as having more in common with South Africa’s black population than with its oppressors. Some staunch defenders of Israel’s policies past and present say that even to discuss Israel in the context of apartheid is one step short of comparing the Jewish state to Nazi Germany, not least because of the Afrikaner leadership’s fascist sympathies in the 1940s and the disturbing echoes of Hitler’s Nuremberg laws in South Africa’s racist legislation.

Yet the taboo is increasingly challenged. As Israel’s justice minister, Tommy Lapid, said, Israel’s defiance of international law in constructing the West Bank barrier could result in it being treated as a pariah like South Africa. Malaysia’s prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, has called for a campaign against Israel of the kind used to pressure South Africa.”

Second part of the two part series on Israel and Apartheid.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Brothers in arms – Israel’s secret pact with Pretoria: “srael’s critics say that as the threats to the Jewish state receded it came more and more to resemble the apartheid model – particularly in its use of land and residency laws – until the similarities outweighed the differences. Liel says that was never the intent.

‘The existential problems of Israel were real,’ he says. ‘Of the injustice we did, we’re always ashamed. We always tried to behave democratically. Of course, on the private level there was a lot of discrimination – a lot, a lot. By the government also. But it was not a philosophy that was built on racism. A lot of it was security-oriented.’

Goldreich disagrees. ‘It’s a gross distortion. I’m surprised at Liel. In 1967, in the six day war, in this climate of euphoria – by intent, not by will of God or accident – the Israeli government occupied the territories of the West Bank and Gaza with a captive Palestinian population obviously in order to extend the area of Israel and to push the borders more distant from where they were,’ he says.

‘I and others like me, active after the six day war on public platforms, tried desperately to convince audiences throughout this country that peace agreements between Israel and Palestine [offer] greater security than occupation of territory and settlements. But the government wanted territory more than it wanted security.”