New York, 1917. "Landship Recruit on Union Square." The U.S.S. Recruit, a wooden battleship erected by the Navy, served as a World War I recruiting station at Union Square from 1917 to 1920, when it "set sail" for Coney Island. This is the first in a series of photographs depicting life around and aboard the landlocked boat. 5x7 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection.

Landship Recruit: 1917 | Shorpy :: History in HD

As someone who was brought up in Tibet, I found Slavoj Žižek’s regurgitation of the Chinese Communist Party line mind-boggling (Letters, 24 April). Žižek accuses the Western media of imposing ‘certain stories’ on the public but seems himself to have swallowed whole China’s version of the story of Tibet. Before 1949, he writes, Tibet was an ‘extremely harsh feudal society, poor . . . corrupt and fractured by civil wars’. China’s state publications on Tibet are full of this sort of language. Žižek’s letter reminded me of propaganda material we had to study at school in which Tibetans were described as ‘most barbaric, cruel, dark and backward’. We were told that our Chinese brethren came to Tibet to civilise us and bring us into the ‘modern world’. This is still one of the principal justifications used by the Chinese government to explain the invasion and continued occupation of Tibet. Admittedly, Sino-Tibetan history is complex. Neither Tibet nor China can be said to have exercised sovereignty in the modern sense over their respective territories. China was plagued by warlords, civil war and foreign aggression, and didn’t have a centralised government capable of enforcing law and order within the territories it claimed until the 1950s.

Also surprising is Žižek’s attempt to shift the blame for the destruction wreaked by the Cultural Revolution onto the Tibetans. The destruction of Tibetan monasteries and historical monuments began years before the Cultural Revolution. Monasteries in Kham and Amdo were the first to be ruined by the Chinese army when Tibetans rebelled against Chinese rule in the 1950s and the destruction spread to western and central Tibet. Farming villages and nomadic communities, towns and individual households were targeted as well as monasteries during the Cultural Revolution as a result of Mao’s explicit instruction to destroy the ‘Four Olds’. The campaign was spearheaded by Chinese cadres. Some Tibetans did take part, but faced with the alternatives – torture, starvation and death – what choice did they have?

Not only does Žižek rely on Chinese propaganda for his understanding of Tibet’s past, he also interprets the current tragedy through TV images selected and transmitted by the Chinese government. These images repeatedly show footage of riots, but not the peaceful protests whose brutal suppression triggered the uprising. The Chinese authorities haven’t produced any evidence to show that there was a programme of organised violence by Tibetans: the wave of human rights protests and demonstrations in support of the Dalai Lama was vociferous but predominantly peaceful. In the incredible pictures of nomadic protesters on horseback in Amdo Bora (Gannan in Chinese) captured by a Canadian TV crew, for example, not a single weapon is being brandished. These nomads have guns so that they can protect their cattle, and it is their custom to carry swords and kn... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

LRB · letters page from Vol. 30 No. 11

wii remote projects, $14 steadycam, giant paint balloon slingshot, projector calibration, brain-computer interaction, kinetic typography, electric cello,...

Projects of they Johnny Lee

Johnny Chung Lee - Projects

They do they good with they wii.

Wat

TED | Talks | Johnny Lee: Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote (video)

Goosh goosh.org 0.4.4-beta #1 Tue, 03 Jun 08 22:59:00 UTC Google/Ajax

Welcome to goosh.org - the unofficial google shell.

This google-interface behaves similar to a unix-shell.
You type commands and the results are shown on this page.

goosh is powered by google.

goosh is written by Stefan Grothkopp
it is NOT an official google product!

Your language has been set to: en (use lang to change it)
Enter help or h for a list of commands.

guest@goosh.org:/web>

Oh wow, so much better than the site.

goosh.org - the unofficial google shell.

This trip was going to be different.

I for one, have never updated my will before any other trip. And I wasn't alone. Out of the five of us that were going, three updated their wills and/or life insurance policies in the weeks before we left.

Where were we going?

Angola

An epic bike journey through Africa.

Very long (keep clicking), but AMAZING read, with great pics. Especially enjoyed the part where he befriends guys wounded by his own batallion in the South African - Angolan war.

Gold Star.

Angola, it's not like they said. - ADVrider

WASHINGTON — Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

They dupe they?

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 06/05/2008 | Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?

From Fiction to Freedom
Sat, 05/17/2008 - 09:45 — ScreaminIke

Paranoid Linux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of "chaff" communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you're doing anything covert. So while you're receiving a political message one character at a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack.
~Cory Doctorow (Little Brother, 2008)

When those words were written, ParanoidLinux was just a fiction. It is our goal to make this a reality. The project officially started on May 14th, and has been growing ever since. We welcome your ideas, contributions, designs, or code. You can find us on freenode's irc server in the #paranoidlinux channel. Hope to see you there!

ParanoidLinux.org

Raising money for your company is brutal. It is time consuming, frustrating and can be a real blow to your ego. And that's if you already know what you're doing. You are dealing with people who invest money for a living. You, on the other hand, have likely never done this before. There is a lot to learn about the process - far more than you can imagine. Don't wait until you need capital to start learning, then it will be too late. You need to being the process of educating yourself now. Here are three resources that I would suggest you go to.

GT VentureLab: Thinking of Raising Money for your Startup?

First, by some accounts, the emo subculture is identified with homosexuality in Mexico. As Mexico City youth worker Victor Mendoza told Time.com: "At the core of this is the homophobic issue. The other arguments are just window dressing for that."

Gustavo Arellano, the author of Ask a Mexican and an editor at OC Weekly, said that the sexual ambiguities cultivated by emo fashion helped set the group up for targeting by more macho groups.

"What do you do when you are confronted with a question mark about sexuality in Mexico?" Arellano said. "You beat it up."

Anti-Emo Riots Break Out Across Mexico | The Underwire from Wired.com