湯浅誠

日本社会で個々の人間が貧困状況に追い込まれるプロセスには5つの排除構造が存在する。

1. 教育課程からの排除： 親世代が貧困状態である場合、その子供たちは多くの場合中卒あるいは高校中退で社会に出なければならず、貧困脱出のための技術や知識・学歴を獲得することが極めて難しい。
2. 企業福祉からの排除： 非正規雇用の人々は、正規雇用の人々に与えられている雇用保険や社会保険、企業による福利厚生、安定した雇用などから排除されており、容易に貧困状態に滑り落ちてしまう。
3. 家族福祉からの排除： 低負担・低福祉である日本社会では親族間の相互扶助が、社会的転落を防ぐセーフティーネットとしての重要な役割を果たしているが、貧困状態に陥る人々はもともと頼れる家族・親族がいないことが多い。
   
4. 公的福祉からの排除： 現在の日本では生活保護担当の公務員は、申請者をあれこれ理由を付けて追い返す、門前払いにすることばかりに力を入れており、いよいよ追い詰められた状況でも生活保護受給にたどりつけない者が非常に多い。
5. 自分自身からの排除： 上に述べた4つの社会的排除に直面した結果、自分自身の存在価値や将来への希望を見つけられなくなってしまう状態を言う。

David Zucchino

Seventeen years ago, Gregory Flynt Taylor was a crack cocaine abuser convicted of killing a prostitute during a late-night prowl for drugs.

On Wednesday, Taylor was a free man, the first convicted felon in U.S. history to be exonerated by a state-mandated innocence commission.

A jury convicted Taylor after prosecutors said blood was found on the SUV he was driving the night Thomas was beaten to death in Raleigh in 1991. But testimony at the commission hearing last week revealed that a follow-up test -- showing that no blood was on the vehicle -- was never passed on to the court.

The hearing also exposed flaws in the state's case involving eyewitness testimony and allegations by a jailhouse snitch who implicated Taylor in the killing.

gutefrage.net

mögen Japaner die Deutschen?

Ich habe mal so etwas in der art gehört. Natürlich nicht alle, aber viele. Wenn ja, warum. Freu mich schon auf antworten. lg

die mögen alles was sich fotografieren lässt

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beste antwort die man hätte finden können :D)

das die Japaner uns mögen liegt an den "deutschen" Tugenden: Fleiß,Pünktlichkeit und Genauigkeit,alles Tugenden die wir heute nicht mehr haben.

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Vor deiner Zeit.

sie mögen das deutsche bier und das oktoberfest

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dann also nicht die deutschen, sondern die Bayern.

Louis Gargour

Italian yields, which hit euro-era highs above 6 percent this week on fears of contagion from Greece, could touch those levels again in the next two weeks if a European deal on a second Greek bailout doesn't solve the problem.

A lot of people are focusing on Italy and unless ... the European governments do something very decisive today we're going to see Italy go a lot wider before the situation improves.

We believe peripheral sovereigns will exhibit further volatility, particularly Italy and Spain. I recommend a prudent approach with continued underweights and shorts in the peripheral countries.

We began by looking at Italian banks, and when we looked more closely we realised the absorption of losses across peripheral European banks could be a problem.

Subordinated debt is where we believe the impact of the peripheral sovereign write-downs will have the best risk reward for investors wishing to be short.

Investors should focus on relative value bets, where a fund is long one bond or sector and short another, rather than on market direction, as Europe's debt crisis rages.

Investors should be market neutral -- and should seek dispersion and convergence trades.

With a long-short approach we have the opportunity to look at volatility as an opportunity to make money.

There will be companies with decent balance sheets and pan-European operations that have cheapened substantially as a result of the sovereign situation. These are unique opportunities to invest in investment grade companies at high yield returns.

Roubini Global Economics

Nouriel Roubini

Europe is fully occupied for the moment with saving the eurozone. Japan is likewise tied down with complex political and economic problems at home. None of these powers’ governments has the time, resources, or domestic political capital needed for a new bout of international heavy lifting. Meanwhile, there are no credible answers to transnational challenges without the direct involvement of emerging powers such as Brazil, China, and India. Yet these countries are far too focused on domestic development to welcome the burdens that come with new responsibilities abroad.

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We are now living in a G-Zero world, one in which no single country or bloc of countries has the political and economic leverage—or the will—to drive a truly international agenda. The result will be intensified conflict on the international stage over vitally important issues, such as international macroeconomic coordination, financial regulatory reform, trade policy, and climate change. This new order has far-reaching implications for the global economy, as companies around the world sit on enormous stockpiles of cash, waiting for the current era of political and economic uncertainty to pass. Many of them can expect an extended wait.

杨斌

2011年6月，美国著名经济学家鲁比尼认为，当前美国、欧洲和日本的三大经济同时陷入低迷状态，中国经济又面临着房地产泡沫濒临破裂的形势，这意味着全球经济很可能被拖入具有强烈震撼力的“完美风暴”之中。中国许多人一直担忧房地产市场崩盘可能带来的冲击，这引发了国内外舆论关于中国经济面临“硬着陆”危险的热议。美国纽约大学教授鲁比尼曾准确地预见到将会爆发次贷危机，他最近还指出马克思关于资本主义有自我毁灭倾向的预言是正确的，他是西方为数不多的具有深远洞察力和真知灼见的经济学家，他再次发出的全球经济面临重大风险的预警值得引起高度重视。当前美国和欧洲陷入了严重主权债务危机，中国经济因控制通货膨胀和房地产泡沫而趋于减速，日本经济长期低迷后因地震、核灾难陷入经济衰退，这些不利因素确实可能汇聚起来并发生相互共振，带来远远超过单一不利因素的更为强烈的经济冲击。

瀬戸内寂聴

「もうこりた」という伝教大師・最澄のお言葉についてお話しいたしましょうか。私がこのお言葉を口にしますと、たいていの人は「もう懲りごり」の意味の「もう懲りた」という字に早合点するようです。実は「忘己利他」と書きます。

伝教大師・最澄は私が僧籍を置く日本天台宗の開祖です。その最澄が、いまから約1200年ほど前に、小乗仏教の戒律を捨て、大乗仏教の戒律だけをとることを決意したときに、その理論づけとして『山家学生式』を書きあらわしました。"山家"とは、日本では比叡山に住まわれた最澄を山家大師とも呼び、その法系に連なる修行僧たちをさします。

ですから『山家学生式』は山の規則とでもいうべきもの。最澄はその中で、忘己利他　慈悲之摂 と書いておられます。...己れを忘れ他を利するは慈悲の極みなり、と読みます。

その前に「好事を他に与え、悪事を己れに向え」とあります。いいことは人にあげ、悪いことはみんな自分に引き受け、自分の幸せは忘れ、人の幸福のためこ尽くすのが慈悲の最高のものだというのです。

雑宝蔵経

1. 眼施 (がんせ)、慈眼施。常によいまなざしで見て、険しい目で見ない。慈しみに満ちた優しいまなざしですべてに接すること。温かい心は自らの目を通して相手に伝わる。
2. 和顔施 (わげんせ)、和顔悦色施。悪い感情をあらわにして険しい表情をしない。いつもなごやかで穏やかな顔つきで人や物に接すること。喜びを素直に表情にあらわす。
3. 愛語施 (あいごせ)、言辞施（ごんじせ）。柔らかい言葉を出し、粗暴な言葉を使わない。文字通り優しい言葉、思いやりのある態度で言葉を交わすこと。
4. 身施 (しんせ)、捨身施。起ち迎えて礼拝す。自分の身体で奉仕をすること。身体で示すことをさし自ら進んで他のために尽くす。
5. 心施 (しんせ)、心慮施。心に思いやりがあれば、深く供養を生ずる。他のために心をくばり、心底から共に喜び、共に悲しむ。他の痛みや苦しみを自らのものとして感じ取る。
6. 牀座施 (しょうざせ)。席を作って座らせる、あるいは自分がすでに座っている席を譲って、座っていただく。競争相手にさえも自分の地位を譲って悔いなく過ごす。
7. 房舎施 (ぼうしゃせ)。家の中に迎えて過ごしてもらう。風や雨露をしのぐ所を与えること。自分が半身濡れながらも、相手に雨がかからないように傘を差し掛ける。

Buddha

仲間の中におれば、休むにも、立つにも、行くにも旅するにも、常に人に呼びかけられる。他人に従属しない独立自由を目指して、犀の角のようにただ一人歩め。

Among many companions;whether one rests, stand, sit, or walk; there are endless requests from others ...; having respect for and appreciation of Freeing Independence ...; which is not liked by any other; one should wander solitary as a rhinoceros horn.

Lucid Imagination

Thousands of organizations around the world have turned to the power of Apache Solr/Lucene open source technology to drive their cutting-edge search applications. As the world’s leading source of expertise in open source search technology and the commercial company for Apache Solr/Lucene, Lucid Imagination offers a range of software for cost-effective development and production deployment of cutting edge search applications that lower your cost of growth.

Michael Coles, Hillary Cotter

Recall measures the quantity of results returned by a search and precision is the measure of the quality of the results returned. Recall is the ratio of relevant results returned divided by all relevant results. Precision is the number of relevant results returned divided by the total number of results returned.

The diagram represents a low-precision, low-recall search. The red and green dots represent the total population of potential search results for a given search. Red dots represent irrelevant results, and green dots represent relevant results. Relevancy is indicated by the proximity of search results to the center of the inner circle. Of all possible results shown, those that were actually returned by the search are shown on a light-blue background. In the example only one relevant result of three possible relevant results was returned, so the recall is a very low ratio of 1/3. The precision for the example is a very low 1/4, since only one of the four results returned was relevant.

Jimmy Lin

With the growing availability of full-text articles online, scientists and other consumers of the life sciences literature now have the ability to go beyond searching bibliographic records (title, abstract, metadata) to directly access full-text content. Motivated by this emerging trend, I posed the following question: is searching full text more effective than searching abstracts? This question is answered by comparing text retrieval algorithms on MEDLINE® abstracts, full-text articles, and spans (paragraphs) within full-text articles using data from the TREC 2007 genomics track evaluation. Two retrieval models are examined: bm25 and the ranking algorithm implemented in the open-source Lucene search engine.

Experiments show that treating an entire article as an indexing unit does not consistently yield higher effectiveness compared to abstract-only search. However, retrieval based on spans, or paragraphs-sized segments of full-text articles, consistently outperforms abstract-only search. Results suggest that highest overall effectiveness may be achieved by combining evidence from spans and full articles.

Users searching full text are more likely to find relevant articles than searching only abstracts. This finding affirms the value of full text collections for text retrieval and provides a starting point for future work in exploring algorithms that take advantage of rapidly-growing digital archives. Experimental results also highlight the need to develop distributed text retrieval algorithms, since full-text articles are significantly longer than abstracts and may require the computational resources of multiple machines in a cluster. The MapReduce programming model provides a convenient framework for organizing such computations.

David Hawking, Justin Zobel

It has been claimed that topic metadata can be used to improve the accuracy of text searches. Here, we test this claim by examining the contribution of metadata to effective searching within Web sites published by a university with a strong commitment to and substantial investment in metadata. The authors use four sets of queries, a total of 463, extracted from the university's official query logs and from the university's site map. The results are clear: The available metadata is of little value in ranking answers to those queries. A follow-up experiment with the Web sites published in a particular government jurisdiction confirms that this conclusion is not specific to the particular university. Examination of the metadata present at the university reveals that, in addition to implementation deficiencies, there are inherent problems in trying to use subject and description metadata to enhance the searchability of Web sites. Our experiments show that link anchor text, which can be regarded as metadata created by others, is much more effective in identifying best answers to queries than other textual evidence. Furthermore, query-independent evidence such as link counts and uniform resource locator (URL) length, unlike subject and description metadata, can substantially improve baseline performance.

Bradley M. Hemminger, Billy Saelim, Patrick F. Sullivan, Todd J. Vision

Researchers have traditionally used bibliographic databases to search out information. Today, the full-text of resources is increasingly available for searching, and more researchers are performing full-text searches. This study compares differences in the number of articles discovered between metadata and full-text searches of the same literature cohort when searching for gene names in two biomedical literature domains. Three reviewers additionally ranked 100 articles in each domain. Significantly more articles were discovered via full-text searching; however, the precision of full-text searching also is significantly lower than that of metadata searching. Certain features of articles correlated with higher relevance ratings. A significant feature measured was the number of matches of the search term in the full-text of the article, with a larger number of matches having a statistically significant higher usefulness (i.e., relevance) rating. By using the number of hits of the search term in the full-text to rank the importance of the article, performance of full-text searching was improved so that both recall and precision were as good as or better than that for metadata searching. This suggests that full-text searching alone may be sufficient, and that metadata searching as a surrogate is not necessary.

Andre Vellino

I agree that ontologies (as in “library classification systems”) can’t save us, but if you approve of Everything is Miscellaneous, you should also approve of Folksonomies.

If people can decide their own categories or define their own labels, you at least are freed from someone else’s rigid and perhaps outdated knowledge classification scheme.

In some circumstances, it might even work better than ML methods for term extraction from full-text. Consider the case where terminology changes over time (e.g. “AI” -> “Agents”). Folksonomic tagging might allow you to identify an ’80s paper on (what used to be known as) “knowledge representation” as relevant to a “Mobile Agent” application, whereas term-extraction alone might not give you that information.

Jeremy Pickens

Back in 1997, when I took my first grad-level Information Retrieval course, I remember Bruce Croft saying that there had been experiments done through the 80s and 90s, about the relative value of full-text indexing vs. abstract-only vs. metadata/keyword only.

Full-text won every time.

Can’t remember any specific citations, though. I suppose I could ask Bruce.

Daniel Lemire

Stop generating metadata and access the full content!

Many researchers advocate the use of metadata to help find or recommend content automatically. Metadata is certainly useful when aggregating content for human beings: I first read the titles of research papers before reading them. However, machines do better when they access at least some of content (Lin, 2009). Moreover, metadata is of little value in ranking answers (Hawking and Zobel, 2007).

I think that researchers cling to metadata because that is how we have indexed books for so long. When I was a kid, full text searches in a library was unthinkable. Yet, there is no escape: everything is miscellaneous. Folksonomies and ontologies will not save the day. When working with machines, let go of metadata and embrace the full content.

I am particularly puzzled by a common research approach. Take an object. Extract metadata. Then compare objects between themselves using the metadata, or use the metadata for retrieval. I understand that this may constitute a useful form of dimensionality reduction. Yet, researchers frequently omit to check whether it is necessary to extract metadata at all.

共同通信

異性の交際相手がいない１８～３４歳の未婚者が男性で６１・４％、女性で４９・５％に上り、いずれも過去最高となったことが２５日、国立社会保障・人口問題研究所の「出生動向基本調査（独身者調査）」で分かった。

２００５年の前回調査から急増、男性で９・２ポイント、女性で４・８ポイント増えた。このうち半数近くは男女とも「特に異性との交際を望んでいない」と答えた。

独身でいる理由（複数回答）を尋ねると「異性とうまく付き合えない」と答えたのは、２５～３４歳では男性１３・５％、女性１１・６％。１８～２４歳では男性１１・９％、女性７・０％で、いずれも過去最高だった。

Bruce Nussbaum

I’ve been talking to European and US innovation and design consultancies working in Shanghai and the rest of China and most are hiring Western and Korean designers because Chinese designers are not up to global standards. They say that, wth a number of exceptions, the tens of thousands of graduates of Chinese design schools yearly are not precise and exacting enough in their design skills. Reflecting Chinese manufacturing culture, the young designers want to get things done quickly, without much regard for getting it just right. It’s a quick-quick attitude. As for innovating, reframing problems and seeing products and services with fresh eyes, Chinese designers are not nearly there. They are not there in terms of the skills and approaches in anthropology and sociology that allow designers to understand consumer cultures around the world. And Chinese designers are way behind in knowing how to do brand strategy and build new brands.

Kejun Xu, Hendry Lee

China is a country with five thousand years of civilization. It is a multi-national entity extending over a large area of East Asia. China’s cultural influence extends across the continent, with customs and writing systems adopted by neighboring countries including Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

China has gone through numerous ups and downs and twists and turns, from wealthy and prosperous (as during the Tang Dynasty back in 618–907 AD) to powerless and colonized (as during the Qing Dynasty, just around 100 years ago). Now China is reopening its door to the world again, embracing the latest trends, concepts and technologies, the World Wide Web being one of them.

In our interviews with six well-known designers in China, each of whom wears different hats, the recurring theme was that China’s Web design industry is rising like a spiral from imitation to innovation and user-centered design.

The Web in China is young, and Chinese designers are playing catch-up. Despite the challenges, we see even more opportunities: smart people, a big market, increasing demand, flexibility and innovative and user-centered design thinking.

On many Chinese websites, we’ve already seen the “upward-spiral trend from imitation to innovation and user-centered design”. Innovation in China is a constant goal. It is being pushed in President Hu Jingtao’s State speech all the way down to classroom curricula.

天津高端设计公司

From imitation to innovation

(从模仿到创新)

in web design

天津高端设计公司

Say NO – UNiTE

Please help us make the world a safer place for women and girls by sending a donation today. The United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, managed by UN Women, supports initiatives around the world to bring about real change in the lives of women, girls and their communities. ...

Grantees of the UN Trust Fund work to address various forms of violence against women and girls, ensure access to safety and services for survivors, and empower women and girls especially at risk of violence, including adolescent girls, minority and indigenous women. Much has been achieved, but much more needs to be done, and demand far outstrips the funding available: in 2011, the Fund received grant requests totaling USD 1.2 billion, but could offer only USD 17.1 million in grants to 22 initiatives in 34 countries. ...

Every gift counts. In Africa and Asia, $10 can help 6 women survivors of violence reeceive counseling! Donate online or if you are in the United States text UNITE to 27722 from your cell phone to give $10.^*

Nicole Kidman

We all know in our heads and our hearts that every woman is entitled to a life free of violence. Let’s make that a reality. Please give as generously as you can to the United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, managed by UN Women. Show that ending violence against women is possible by contributing to Trust Fund-supported projects around the world that break the silence, promote accountability and provide critical services to women and girls. Please get involved. We need your support.

Екатерина Пetpehko

В России все более широкое распространение получает новый вид наркотиков - дезоморфин, известный также под названием "крокодил". Пока Россия - единственная страна, где употребление этого наркотика приняло масштабы эпидемии. Tолько по официальным оценкам, в 2010 г. "крокодил" принимали от нескольких сотен тысяч до 1 миллиона человек в стране.

Эффект от этого наркотика похож на героиновый, но стоит "крокодил" в несколько раз дешевле, и его легко приготовить даже в домашних условиях. Его активным компонентом является кодеин - болеутоляющее, которое можно купить в аптеке без рецепта врача.

John Rawls

The bad man desires arbitrary power. What moves the evil man is the love of injustice.

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The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.

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In constant pursuit of money to finance campaigns, the political system is simply unable to function. Its deliberative powers are paralyzed.

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Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the form of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case.

Michael J. Sandel

Times of trouble prompt us to recall the ideals by which we live. But in America today, this is not an easy thing to do. At a time when democratic ideals seem ascendant abroad, there is reason to wonder whether we have lost possession of them at home. Our public life is rife with discontent. Americans do not believe they have much say in how they are governed and do not trust government to do the right thing. Despite the achievements of American life in the last half-century – victory in World War II, unprecedented affluence, greater social justice for women and minorities, the end of the Cold War – our politics is beset with anxiety and frustration.

The political parties, meanwhile, are unable to make sense of our condition. They main topics of national debateextent of rights and entitlements, the proper degree of government regulationthe proper scope of the welfare state, the extent of rights and entitlements, the proper degree of government regulation - take their shape from the arguments of an earlier day. They are not unimportant topics; but they do not reach the two concerns that lie at the heart of democracy’s discontent. One is the fear that, individually and collectively, we are losing control of the forces that govern our lives. The other is the sense that, from family to neighborhood to nation, the moral fabric of community is unraveling around us. These two fears – for the loss of self-government and erosion of community – together define the anxiety of the age. It is an anxiety that the prevailing political agenda has failed to answer or even address.

Alison Edgle

... Chomsky is not inconsistent ... when he claims to be both a libertarian and a socialist. His socialism poses no particular problems: it is about the need for and the way in which humans organise and live together collectively as individuals. The values of freedom and equality are not mutually exclusive. Chomsky's views on human nature lend his particular position on libertarian socialism greater authority. Liberty and equality are not only interdependent and progressive values, since, in Chomsky's view, they are also necessary to or preferable for the healthy development of the human condition. Chomsky's evidence for such a necessity is far from concrete, as he admits. However, his work in linguistics is certainly suggestive of such a claim. Further it has been argued that for Chomsky freedom and equality are not absolute concepts but are not absolute concepts but are always relative to objective reality. As such Chomsky cannot be accused of teleologucal thinking. By this view then, there is no 'end' to history. But there can nevertheless be progress.

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The liberal individual is autonomous, rational, self-interested and self-determining. These characteristics are a priori given, and as such are not influenced by the nature and character of the society in which individuals co-exist.

Noam Chomsky

Pascal raised the question: How do you know whether God exists? He said, if I assume that he exists and he does, I’ll make out OK. If he doesn’t, I won’t lose anything. If he does exist and I assume he doesn’t I may be in trouble. That’s basically the logic. On this issue of human freedom, if you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, etc., there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. That’s your choice.

philosophy dot lander dot edu

Pascal does not think that the atheist or the believer would be convinced by his argument. Instead, he directs the Wager to the curious and unconvinced.

I have a choice: either first I believe God exists or second I do not believe God exists.
First, if I believe God exists, and God in fact does exist, then I will gain infinite happiness. However, if I believe God exists, and God in fact does not exist, then I will have no payoff.
Second, if I do not believe God exists, and God in fact does exist, then I will gain infinite pain. However, if I believe God does not exist, and God in fact does not exist, then I will have no payoff.

Thus, I have everything to gain and nothing to lose by believing in God, and I have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not believing in God. On these grounds, one would be foolish not to believe.

Two main objections are often raised to Pascal's Wager.
(1) To believe in God simply for the payoff is the wrong motive for belief. Such self-seeking individuals would not properly serve the Deity.
(2) In order to be sure of a payoff, an individual would not know which God or gods to believe in to cover the conditions of the wager. Would the Wager also hold for Zeus, Odin, or Mithra? One would have to believe in all gods to be sure, but if there were only one God in fact, then this strategy would defeat itself.

Pascal

If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is....

..."God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.

Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. "No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all."

Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

"That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much." Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.

OccupyWallStreet

On July 13, 2011, "Culture Jammers HQ" at Adbusters issued a call to action: Occupy Wall Street! The goal stated is to gather 20,000 people to Wall Street, in New York, NY on September 17, 2011, beginning a popular occupation of that space for two months and more. Inspired by the popular assemblies of Egypt, Spain, Oaxaca and worldwide, those gathered will work to find a common voice in one clear, unified demand.

This is why we've created OccupyWallSt.org. Technology has made it easier than ever before for the people to stay in close contact and assist one another in acheiving a collective goal. Our aim is to make these tools available so our users--the true organizers of this event--can make an occuptation of Wall St. successful. We may not be able to teach a person to fish, or do it on their behalf, but we can build a damn good fishing pole.

But it isn't enough to simply make these tools freely available, they must also belong to the people. So we've taken the time to release our work as an open source project. This way others may use and build upon our work freely without any dependence on our leadership.

The sovereign people of any nation have the power, the right, and the duty, of guiding the destiny of their nation. Most just do not realize this. An organizer brings the process of realization.

Why occupy Wall Street? Because it belongs to us! Because we can!

Adbusters

ニコニコニュース

学生の就職活動、いわゆる「就活」のシステムに異議を唱える「就活ぶっこわせデモ」が2011年11月23日（勤労感謝の日）、東京・新宿で行われた。デモには学生ら100人超（記者調べ）が参加し、「大学は就活予備校じゃない」「学生に勉強する時間を」「ゆとり（世代）にゆとりを」などと訴えた。

このデモは、首都圏の大学生が中心となった実行委員会が企画したもので、政治団体など団体での参加を認めず、デモ行進時に掲げるプラカードも基本的には手作りのものに限られる。23日、JR新宿駅前に集まった学生らは記者の調べで100人超。新宿の繁華街を練り歩き、「学生に勉強する時間を」「『人間力』ってなんだ」「"就活メイク"ってなんだ。"就活に強いボールペン"ってなんだ」「リクナビつぶれろ、マイナビつぶれろ」「早期化反対」「ゆとりにゆとりを」「大学は就活予備校じゃない」などとシュプレヒコールをあげた。

参加者のひとりで、契約社員として働く男性（20歳）は、「ニコニコニュースを見てこのデモを知った。自分自身も就活を経験しており、理不尽な面については以前から問題意識としてあった」と参加の動機を語った。また別の社会人男性（27歳）は、「学生たちが手作りでやっているという感じがよい」と、参加しての感想を述べた。

デモは、祝日でにぎわう新宿で道行く人々の注目を集めたが、なかには「就職できなかった連中がわめいても仕方がない」（20代・男性）「何を訴えているのかよくわからなかった。就職できない人たちっぽいよねと妻と話していた」（40代・会社員）と厳しい声もあった。

読売新聞

山形県警村山署は２２日、いずれも無職で、東根市六田、青木貞美（５３）と同居する長男の章太（２３）の両容疑者を詐欺（無銭飲食）の疑いで現行犯逮捕した。

発表によると、両容疑者は２１日午後９時４０分～２２日午前０時３５分頃、東根市のファミリーレストランで、ステーキやギョーザなどの代金計２９８５円を支払わなかった疑い。

両容疑者が店員に、「お金がないから警察を呼んで下さい」と申し出た。調べに対し、「１週間、みそと水でしのいでいたが、空腹で限界だった」などと供述しているという。逮捕時の所持金は、２人合わせて１００円弱だった。

헤럴드생생뉴스

초코파이의 인기가 북한에서도 하늘 높은 줄 모르게 치솟고 있다. 이 여파로 개성공단 북측 근로자들이 간식으로 먹는 초코파이가 북한에서는 ‘현금화’ 수단으로 통용되고 있다는 소식도 나오고 있다.

맛이 좋아서 먹기도 하지만 지급받은 초코파이를 외부 시장에 고가로 팔 수 있어 수입으로 짭짤한 재미를 보고 있는 것이다. 소식통에 따르면 초코파이를 전문적으로 매입하는 상점까지 생겨나 거래가 이뤄지고 있다고 한다.

Rolling Stone

We assembled a panel of top guitarists and other experts to rank their favorites and explain what separates the legends from everyone else.

100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time

2. Eric Clapton 3. Jimmy Page 5. Jeff Beck 6. B.B. King

20. Carlos Santana 26. Brian May 31. Ry Cooder 44. Mark Knopfler

50. Ritchie Blackmore 63. Johnny Winter 66. Leslie West 71. Robert Johnson

??. Steve Vai ??. Larry Coryell ??. Alex Lifeson ??. Larry Carlton

David Bosco

Thinking about international governance issues through the lens of hypocrisy seems particularly important at the moment. The emerging powers are with increasing plausibility challenging the double-standard built deep into the UN's structure: that while all states are declared in Article 2(1) to enjoy "sovereign equality," a few have the right (through their Security Council veto power) to ensure that the normal rules don't apply to them. And that's just one of many perceived injustices in the international architecture. The question of why certain states may have nuclear weapons while others may not still rankles, as does the American and European hold on World Bank and IMF leadership.

The hypocrisy surrounding the bedrock principle of sovereign equality is increasingly evident in other ways. From different angles, both the war on terrorism and the campaign for a "responsibility to protect" challenge the notion that states are fundamentally equal.

Zack Beauchamp

First, one could make non-consequentialist arguments justifying intervention based on the particular moral heinousness of mass slaughter as compared to other lethal ills. I'm not compelled by the underlying moral reasoning here, but I could see how one might be.

Second, one could say it's an argument for more aid AND intervention. That'd be fair enough, except for the fact that states do lots of things to save lives other than aid and intervention that draw from the same finite resource/tax base. So that argument might work depending on the resource constraints at play, but it also might not.

Third, an intervention might be politically possible whereas aid increases might not. Again, that might be true in a given case, but it doesn't answer Hynd's more fundamental moral challenge.

There's a fourth, though, that's more compelling: humanitarian intervention is often necessary to create the conditions under which aid can be effective in saving lives.

Steve Hynd

Right to Protect interventionism is essentially a utilitarian argument - that by using violence in reply to violence the greater good of the greater number can be achieved - specifically, that fewer people will die if there is an armed intervention than if the state or non-state actor is allowed to continue killing unopposed by external forces. But it largely ignores a wider utilitarian argument to do so - that the resources required to intervene could be put to better use saving more lives elsewhere.

The war in Libya has cost the US somewhere in the region of $1.2 billion over six months, at a rough guess. That's a drop in the ocean compared with the hundreds of billions so far spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the bloated overall defense budget. But State spends far less on core foreign assistance - including food aid - than is spent on America's wars. That stands at only $32.9 billion in the FY2012 request. DoD will get three and a half times that money for Afghanistan and Iraq alone.

Jayshree Bajoria

The crackdown by Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi on mass anti-regime protests in early 2011 resulted in strong condemnation by the international community. In a historic move, the UN Security Council invoked the principle of "responsibility to protect" and adopted Resolution 1973, endorsing a no-fly zone over Libya and authorizing member states to "take all necessary measures" to protect civilians under attack from Qaddafi's government. As a result, some Western countries, including the United States, began air strikes over Libya, which spurred a debate on whether forced intervention was warranted. Countries like Russia, China, Brazil, and India abstained from voting on the UN resolution, spotlighting the sensitive nature of the issue. Some states in Asia and Africa, especially former colonies, have long seen intervention of any kind as a threat to their sovereignty. This was evident in the divide that followed a devastating cyclone in Myanmar in May 2008. There have been some instances in the recent past where countries have opened up to outside aid in the aftermath of natural disasters, but sovereignty remains a sticking point.

David Rieff

Use any euphemism you wish, but in the end these interventions have to be about regime change if they are to have any chance of accomplishing their stated goal. (That is why they are opposed in many parts of the formerly colonized world even as they are supported in the formerly colonizing West.) After all, how can the people of Darfur ever be safe as long as the same regime that sanctioned their slaughter rules unrepentant in Khartoum? Or, for that matter, how can the Myanmar government be trusted to look after the slow business of reconstruction in the zones hit by the cyclone if it was unconcerned with the fate of Nargis’s survivors from the beginning?

The harsh truth is that it is one thing for people of conscience to call for wrongs to be righted but it is quite another to fathom the consequences of such actions. Good will is not enough; nor is political will. That is because, as Iraq has taught us so painfully, the law of unintended consequences may be one of the few iron laws of international politics. And somewhere, despite all the outcry, leaders know that the same people calling for intervention may repudiate it the moment it goes wrong.

International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty

“Humanitarian intervention” has been controversial both when it happens, and when it has failed to happen.

• Rwanda in 1994 laid bare the full horror of inaction.
• Kosovo in 1999 raised major questions about the legitimacy of military intervention in a sovereign state.
• Bosnia in 1995 is another which has had a major impact on the contemporary policy debate about intervention for human protection purposes.
• Another was the failure and ultimate withdrawal of the UN peace operations in Somalia in 1992–93.

For some, the international community is not intervening enough; for others it is intervening much too often. For some, the only real issue is in ensuring that coercive interventions are effective; for others, questions about legality, process and the possible misuse of precedent loom much larger. For some, the new interventions herald a new world in which human rights trumps state sovereignty; for others, it ushers in a world in which big powers ride roughshod over the smaller ones, manipulating the rhetoric of humanitarianism and human rights. The controversy has laid bare basic divisions within the international community. In the interest of all those victims who suffer and die when leadership and institutions fail, it is crucial that these divisions be resolved.

Kofi Annan

... if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica – to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?

The genocide in Rwanda showed us how terrible the consequences of inaction can be in the face of mass murder. But the conflict in Kosovo raised equally important questions about the consequences of action without international consensus and clear legal authority. On the one hand, is it legitimate for a regional organization to use force without a UN mandate? On the other, is it permissible to let gross and systematic violations of human rights, with grave humanitarian consequences continue unchecked?

David Carradine

Harry S. Truman

One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion. This was a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan. Our victory was won over countries which sought to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other nations.
To ensure the peaceful development of nations, free from coercion, the United States has taken a leading part in establishing the United Nations, The United Nations is designed to make possible lasting freedom and independence for all its members. We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes. This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.

East Site Inc.

Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology. This process has effects on the environment, on culture, on political systems, on economic development and prosperity, and on human physical well-being in societies around the world.

As merchants and other travellers traversed Silk Road, they also carried culture, art, philosophies and beliefs with them. Buddhism came to China on The Silk Road and Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Confucianism all had their itinerant proselytiser. Goods and ideas were exchanged in cities with exotic names like Antioch, Babylon, Erzerum, Hamadn, Bukhara, Samarkand, Khiva, Kashgar and Xian, as well as in dozens of others whose names are now lost in time. However, many remain and travellers again have the chance to visit these sites, relive the legends and capture some of the magic.

大平一枝

私はブランドものが全盛の時代に育ち、百円ショップやファストファッション全盛の今という時代もめいっぱい享受している。

その反面、捨てるススメは世の中に氾濫し、もはや持っていること自体が恥ずかしいくらいのムードさえ漂い始めている

なんでもかんでもシンプルがいいとは思わないが（心を潤すその人だけの贅沢な時間はあっていい）、少なくとも、もう足りないものを数えてほしがるのだけはよしておこうと思う。そんなことをしても眠れなくなるだけだし、小さな素敵を毎日かみしめながら生きるほうが気持ちも体もラクそうだ。

私は、あとひと部屋欲しいと思って越したことを後悔はしていないが、欲しい欲しい病の末に手に入れたこのかりそめの住まいを、もので埋め尽くすことだけはすまいと自分に誓っている。

春から夏にかけて節電で世の中が少し暗くなった分、キャンドルのようなほのかな明かりの心地よさや、別の効用に気づく人が増えた。「駅も町もそれほど明るくなくてもいいとわかった」｢なるべく一つの部屋で過ごすようにしていたので、家族が仲良くなった。団欒が生まれた」という投書や街頭インタビューを幾度も目にした。

少し電気を落とし、少しものを減らし、欲望の対岸にあるものに目を懲らせば、隣の壁の蔦や朝日のまぶしさに似たささやかな幸せは案外すぐにみつけられるのかもしれない。

押井守

攻殻が評判になって、海外であれこれたくさん質問されたが、最終的に彼らの聞きたいことは一つ。『ゴースト』って何だ？ということ。ゴーストとは、魂ではない。スピリット（精神）ではない。フィジカル（肉体的・物理的）ではない何か。神が作ったものではなく自然過程として生まれるもの。あなたにも私にも花や犬や猫にもあり、もしかしたら人形にもあるかもしれない。つまりゴーストとは『思い』のこと。使い古した人形にはゴーストが宿る。日本人ならすぐ分かるが、欧米人には全く分からない。彼らの考える『魂』や『スピリット』はそんなあいまいなものではないから。

若者にやさしい映画を作った。やさしい、というのは、励ますとか慰めるのとは違う。『親身になれた』という意味で、それまでは若者のことはどうでもよかったのが目を向けるようになったということ。で、若い人のことを考えれば、本当のこと、残酷なことを言わざるを得ないと思い、ちょうどそのころ中学生や高校生と話す機会がたくさんあったので、こういう話をした。あなたたちは限りなく凡庸で無名で何の個性もないんだ、『一人一人がかけがえのない存在だ』なんて大人のウソを信じるのはやめて、早く幻想を捨てろ、夢を持つな、あなた方の未来にいいことなんて何一つないんだ――というところから始めたらどうでしょうか、と。

Jimmy Wales

Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. We have 400 servers and 95 staff.

Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web and serves 454 million different people every month – with billions of page views.

Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn't belong here. Not in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others.

When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. We’ve worked hard over the years to keep it lean and tight. We fulfill our mission, and leave waste to others.

If everyone reading this donated $20, we would only have to fundraise for one day a year. But not everyone can or will donate. And that's fine. Each year just enough people decide to give.

This year, please consider making a donation of $5, $20, $50 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.

読売新聞

「コタツ」は、意外に外国でも知られているらしい。日本の漫画やアニメの冬のシーンに登場するため、海外ファンの興味を引くのだろう。〈どこで買える？〉〈使い始めたら離れられなくなるよ〉などという英語のやり取りがネット上にあった。

日本の知恵と文化が好評を博すことは無論うれしい。外国の方からその素晴らしさを教えてもらうのは、ちょっと複雑な気持ちではあるが。

Mark Alexander

Islam is different. As well as being a powerful political movement, it is a bona fide religion too. The West has fought long and hard for religious freedom; so it is far more difficult for us to criticize a religion that is not our own. It is even more difficult to stop someone practising his religion. Anyone who were to try to do so would be liable to the charge of discrimination, and Westerners do not like to be accused of that. Add to that, the power of political correctness, and further add to that the reluctance of people to fight for Christianity, and we find that we have boxed ourselves into a corner – a corner that will be difficult for us to get out of. Where are we going to find leaders willing to criticize another religion, d where, even if we found such people, are we going to find the people willing to follow them? As I write, it would appear that this is the start of the end game for the West! Is it to be downhill all the way for Islam now? Have we created the very conditions for Islam to overshadow us – conditions that Muslims could only have dreamed of some decades ago?

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy

The photo is an expression of my being and I see the human body as the best artistic representation of that. I took the photo myself using a timer on my personal camera.

Most Egyptians are secretive about sex because they are brought up thinking sex is something bad and dirty and there is no mention of it in schools.

Many women wear the veil just to escape the harassment and be able to walk the streets.

Alain

La politesse s'apprend comme la danse. Celui qui ne sait pas danser croit que le difficile est de connaître les règles de la danse et d'y conformer ses mouvements ; mais ce n'est que l'extérieur de la chose ; il faut arriver à danser sans raideur, sans trouble, et par conséquent sans peur. De même c'est peu de chose de connaître les règles de la politesse ; et, même si on s'y conforme, on ne se trouve encore qu'au seuil de la politesse. Il faut que les mouvements soient précis, souples, sans raideur ni tremblement ; car le moindre tremble-ment se communique. Et qu'est-ce qu'une politesse qui inquiète ?

UN Radio

The world has entered a “deadly new age,” where extreme weather events are likely to become the norm, according to the head of the United Nations risk reduction agency.

Margareta Wahlström issued the warning following the approval of a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on Friday.

The IPCC report looked at the likely impact of climate change on communities and how to deal with disasters.

彭希哲

未来10年，中国人口出生性别比结构失衡的后果会逐渐凸显，这就是婚姻挤压。我国目前的出生性别比还是118，就是每出生一百个女孩，会出生118个男孩，这种状况已经存在了近30年。中国人一般在20岁到44岁结婚，现在这个年龄段的男性比女性多了1500万，这个比重在未来10年中会持续上升，结果是，也许会有将近3000万男性找不到老婆。
男光棍与剩女是不一样的，剩女的问题大多是个人主动选择的结果，而男光棍常常是被动的，是因为中国人口里少了几千万女性，必然有人不得不打光棍。

Population

China	1,339,724,852
India	1,210,193,422
United States	312,631,000
Indonesia	237,641,326
Brazil	190,755,799
Pakistan	177,852,000
Nigeria	162,471,000
Russia	142,914,136
Bangladesh	142,319,000
Japan	127,720,000
Mexico	112,336,538
Guangdong	104,303,132
Shandong	95,793,065
Henan	94,023,567
Philippines	94,013,200
Vietnam	85,846,997
Ethiopia	82,101,998
Germany	81,729,000
Egypt	81,120,000
Sichuan	80,418,200
Jiangsu	78,659,903
Iran	75,840,000
Turkey	73,722,988
Hebei	71,854,202
Thailand	69,519,000
Congo (DRC)	67,758,000
France	65,821,885
Hunan	65,683,722
United Kingdom	62,300,000
Italy	60,705,991
Anhui	59,500,510
Hubei	57,237,740
Zhejiang	54,426,891
South Africa	50,586,757
Myanmar	48,337,000
South Korea	48,219,000
Colombia	46,255,000
Spain	46,162,024
Guangxi	46,026,629
Yunnan	45,966,239
Ukraine	45,668,028
Jiangxi	44,567,475
Liaoning	43,746,323
Tanzania	43,188,000
Argentina	40,117,096
Kenya	38,610,097
Heilongjiang	38,312,224
Poland	38,092,000
Shaanxi	37,327,378
Fujian	36,894,216
Algeria	36,300,000
Shanxi	35,712,111
Guizhou	34,746,468
Canada	34,482,779
Uganda	32,939,800
Morocco	32,380,600
Afghanistan	32,358,000
Iraq	32,105,000
Sudan	30,894,000
Peru	29,797,694
Venezuela	29,448,000
Chongqing	28,846,170
Malaysia	28,334,135
Uzbekistan	28,000,000
Jilin	27,462,297
Saudi Arabia	27,136,977
Nepal	26,620,809
Gansu	25,575,254
Inner Mongolia	24,706,321
Ghana	24,233,431
North Korea	24,052,231
Yemen	23,833,000
Taiwan	23,197,947
Mozambique	23,049,621
Shanghai	23,019,148
Australia	22,766,632
Xinjiang	21,813,334
Romania	21,436,000
Côte d'Ivoire	21,395,000
Syria	21,318,000
Sri Lanka	20,653,000
Angola	19,618,000
Beijing	19,612,368
Cameroon	19,406,100

Leonard Cohen

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows that the war is over

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That's how it goes

Everybody knows

Caine

Those who value freedom most must sometimes choose to lose it.

Master Kan

The mind, the body and the spirit are one. When the body expresses the desires of the mind and spirit then the body is in tune with nature, the act is pure and there is no shame.

Melissa Grace, Corky Siemaszko

Waiters at some of New York’s swankiest eateries were part of a criminal crew that stole credit card information to create counterfeit cards — and then racked up some $600,000 in purchases, prosecutors revealed Friday.

Led by Luis Damian “DJ” Jacas, the crooks equipped waiters at Smith & Wollensky, The Capital Grille, Wolfgang's Steakhouse and JoJo — and at two restaurants outside the city — with electronic skimmers to steal the info from at least 50 customers, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said.

Then Jacas used a “network of shoppers” to go on shopping sprees at high-end Manhattan stores like Chanel, Neiman Marcus, Cartier, Hermes of Paris, Bloomingdales, Bergdorf Goodman, Waldmann's, London Jewelers, Burberry, Jimmy Choo, Lord & Taylor, prosecutors said.

Moreno-Ocampo

There are allegations of crimes committed by NATO forces, allegations of crimes committed by NTC-related forces, including the alleged detention of civilians suspected to be mercenaries and the alleged killing of detained combatants, as well as allegations of additional crimes committed by pro-Gadhafi forces.

These allegations will be examined impartially and independently by the Office.

In the last weeks of the war, the Gaddafi regime alleged that 85 civilians were killed in a Nato air strike near the front line town of Ziltan. Khaled Hemidi, a regime general, filed a lawsuit before a Belgian civil court in Brussels accusing Nato of killing his wife and three children in an air strike on June 20 near the town of Surman.

Health & Wellness Approach

Kissing is like sea water, the more you drink it the more you get thirsty. Though a small giggly thing yet immensely brings two people close to each other, increases trust and level of security. Ever wonder how just the touching of lips can bind the two souls the way it does?

Two lips melt in a blissful fantasy, when touch each other give birth to a moment of pure joy, the joy of breathing each other, you feel like you have become a part of his breath, or you have absorb a part of his breath inside you. Some women believe kissing is even more intimate then making love, cause it is deprived of satisfaction yet it makes you a part of each other, hence making it more passionate yet unsatisfied, it leaves you craving and craving for more.

Philip Pullella

The Vatican said on Thursday it would take legal action to stop the distribution of a photo montage in an advertisement by the Italian fashion firm Benetton showing Pope Benedict kissing an imam on the mouth.

Dmitry Vrubel

Clay Bennett

Erfun Khelrandish

Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada

The Town of Lunenburg, in Nova Scotia, Canada, was formally established in 1753 as the first British Colonial settlement in Nova Scotia outside of Halifax.
Houses, businesses, churches and public buildings from the late 1700s and particularly early 1800s are still being used today.

郭美美

郭美美

中国红十字会商业总经理

还有人把郭美美与中国红十字会副会长郭长江联系起来。中国红十字会则马上发表声明，强调“中国红十字会没有‘红十字商会’的机构，也未设有‘商业总经理’的职位，更没有‘郭美美’其人”，并保留进一步追责的权利。

Andrew Scott Cooper

The American economy’s chronic addiction to cheap oil is obvious. Less well known is the story of when that addiction began and why the United States became so reliant in particular on Saudi Arabia for its continued goodwill and cooperation. The same is true of America’s toxic relationship with Iran. The two countries have been at each other’s throats for so long now that it seems hard to believe they were ever allies—let alone partners in a secret contingency plan to invade Saudi Arabia and seize its oil wealth. Until these tensions are resolved, and until both countries come to terms with their complicated shared history, it seems inevitable that the tree of American-Iranian relations will bear poisoned fruit for many years to come.

马诺

宁愿坐在宝马车里哭，也不愿坐在自行车后笑

Laval Hunsucker

Most of us will often have encountered discussions of whether librarianship is or is not a profession, which sometimes go on, and on ..., on the question to what acknowledged professions it can then justifiably be compared. Many are adduced, but rarely or never mentioned is the one profession to which I myself believe that librarianship can best be compared -- that of the clergy. I could never see librarians as being in essence very much like physicians, or nurses, or engineers, or lawyers, or pilots, or good teachers, or even architects, though perhaps a little like accountants, but they *are* very much like priests, it seems to me, in very many respects. Fletcher was pretty much on the mark in his inclination to look at library systems and services as a kind of religion. And indeed, if they were already a religion back then, such may well be even more the case now than it was in his time.

William J. Fletcher

... any idea or notion which is held as a matter of belief, and which is based on authority and accepted without reason, or the application to it of that ground principle in all good work - common sense.

... I do not intend to intimate that the ... catalog is a thing to be disbelieved in and rejected, but rather to suggest that it has the character of a superstition in so far as it is accepted and religiously carried out on grounds that are traditional, rather than on any intelligent conviction that it meets present needs and is good for the future needs for which we must make provision.

Colleen

I am a woman guilty of a lifelong love affair with words and books; I love the way words feel rolling around in my mouth, and occasionally have wild dalliances with the ones that spill from my pen. As books and words expect no monogamy, I am left free to have wild flings with the words of writers new and old. This allows me the opportunity to fall in love with poems and stories on a regular basis, and to keep my lovers folded in my wallet for convenient consumption.

Trine Sejthen

Steve Geller

Most of the quotes were collected because I like the messages or lessons they had in them. They each inspired me in some way. I placed the first quote in that position for a reason. If you read the first entry and understand the meaning behind it, you will understand why I collected the quotes. Not everyone will agree with every quote I collected. But the first entry will speak for me. My hope is that other people can find the same lessons and wisdom that I did, and maybe even ones I have not seen. I hope they will be meaningful to others.

Yann Le Guernigou

Nicolas Sarkozy: "I cannot bear Netanyahu, he's a liar."

Barack Obama: "You're fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you."

曽我逸郎

環境汚染。温暖化。資源の放蕩。飽くなき欲望・消費・経済成長。その底に横たわる欠乏感・不満。歪な富の偏在。命にも自分にも尊厳のもてない生活。

こんな状態でいいのだろうか？みんなが自分の欲望を追求すれば、神の見えざる手に導かれて、社会はよくなっていくのか？確かに経済的な効率はどんどん上がっている。しかし、経済効率は、よい社会をつくるのか？確かに、様々な新しい商品・サービスが開発され、生活は便利になっている。しかし、自然の回復力を上回る影響力を我々人類は持ってしまったのではないか。おそらく大自然は、大きなサイクルでバランスを取るのであって、揺らぎながらも平衡を保つだろう。しかし、新たな平衡点が、人間の生存に適さないものだったらどうか？

文明の表層の快適さの底で、大切ななにかが壊されている。伝統的な暮らしがもっていた何か。あるいは、そんなものはもともと幻想で、現代は、その幻想を破壊しただけであり、人間という存在の根底にそもそもある業の深さ、不完全さが、露呈しているに過ぎないのか。

いや、しかし、たとえ人間が本質的に欲望・執着に突き動かされており、倒れるまで執着対象を追い求め自転車操業を続けるものだとしても、だからといって開き直っていいわけではない。開き直れば、余計に苦にまみれ、人も苦しめることになる。

では、どうすればいいのか？何ができるのか？

Nikolaus Geyrhalter

Unser täglich Brot / Our Daily Bread / いのちの食べかた / Хлеб наш насущный

Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze, John-Dylan Haynes

There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively ‘free’ decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.

The impression that we are able to freely choose between different possible courses of action is fundamental to our mental life. However, it has been suggested that this subjective experience of freedom is no more than an illusion and that our actions are initiated by unconscious mental processes long before we become aware of our intention to act.

Peter

The analogy with a digital computer has energised and strongly influenced our thinking about the human mind for at least sixty years, beginning with Turing’s seminal paper of 1950, ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’, and gaining in influence as computers became first real, and then ubiquitous. Whether or not you like the analogy, I think you’d have to concede that it has often set the terms of the discussion over recent decades. Yet we’ve never got it quite clear, and in some respects we’ve almost always got it wrong.

In particular, I’d like to suggest: consciousness is an output, not processing.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden

ネルケ無方

外から見たらどう映るか分かりませんが、やっている本人にとっては坐禅こそが現実なんです。

坐禅をして、何になるか？その答えはハッキリと、坐禅をしても何もならない、ということです。

われわれ人間は絶えず、何かを求めて生きています。それは金であったり、恋人であったり、学校や会社での成功であったりします。最終的には現在の自分に欠けている「しあわせ」を追いつづけているのでしょう。しかし、一生懸命にしあわせになろうとしている自分は今ここ、この自分の本当の有りようを見失って、自分をいつも留守にしているのではないでしょうか。しあわせになろうとしているうちに、しあわせとはいったい何なのかということも、今の自分は実に幸せの中にいるのだという現実も分からなくなってしまいます。

Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm

ハンスは修業を終えて故郷に帰ろうとします。長年まじめに働いたご褒美として、師匠から重い黄金の玉を渡され、出発します。玉を担いだまましばらく歩くと、馬に乗った人に出会います。

「その玉はだいぶ重そうだなぁ。こっちの馬と交換してみないか。乗ったまま古里に帰れるぜ。」

ちょうど汗をかきはじめていたハンスは「願ったりかなったり」と思い、喜んで交換することにしましたが、しばらく進むと、今度は牛を連れた人に会います。

「馬もいいが、牛なら乳を搾れるから、チーズもバターも作れるよ」

ハンスはまた納得し馬を牛と交換します。しばらく進むと今度は豚をつれている百姓に出会います。

「その牛よりも、この豚はたくさん子も生むし、肉はうまいぞ。まぁ、交換してやろう。」

ハンスは再三交換して、そのたびに得した気分になります。最後は大きな砥石を持った男に会います。古里はもうすぐそこです。

「お前、家に帰ったら、これで刃物を研いだら、いい商売になるよ。楽して暮らして行けるよ」

重い砥石を運びながら、道を歩きますと、そこに井戸がありました。砥石をその縁に起き、水を飲もうとしたときです。ハンスは石を井戸の中に落としてしまいます。

しかし、重い石をなくしたハンスはほっとし、軽くなった身で、すぐ近くの親の家に向かって走り出します。とても幸せそうに。

Jason Ditz

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been hyping an impending release of “evidence” of a clandestine nuclear weapons program in Iran for awhile, but now diplomats are leaking parts of the evidence to the media in an effort to get people talking.

This is a particularly bad time for major “evidence” to come to light, as Israeli and US officials are once again in one of their periods of hyping a possible impending attack on Iran, and it will only fuel that speculation.

But the reality is, the “evidence” leaked so far appears fairly minimal even as it is being touted as particualrly damning. Reports will allege that Iran has conducted some computer simulations of nuclear explosions.

McAfee

We tested this page and blocked content that comes from potentially dangerous or suspicious sites. Allow this content only if you're sure it comes from safe sites.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi

The head of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Yukiya Amano, confirmed recent allegations on WikiLeaks of his intense loyalty to the United States, by traveling to Washington ahead of the much-anticipated release of his new report on Iran.

While the details of Amano's consultation with Washington higher-ups remain confidential, the avalanche of media speculation regarding the content of his upcoming November 9 report, including details of an appendix suggesting Iran's proliferation activity at a military complex in Tehran, leave no doubt that the United Nations' atomic agency is fully in league with the United States and its Western and Israeli allies' intention to ratchet up pressure on Tehran to relent on its current nuclear activities, or face dire consequences.

Kiyoshi Takenaka, Caren Bohan

Japan has denied a White House statement that Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda told U.S. President Barack Obama he would put all goods and services on the negotiating table for trade liberalisation.

The White House stood by its statement, issued on Saturday, despite Japan's denial.

坂井広志

　１２日昼（日本時間１３日朝）にホノルル市内で行われた日米首脳会談の米側の報道発表をめぐり、とんだハプニングが起きた。

　米側の報道発表資料には環太平洋戦略的経済連携協定（ＴＰＰ）について「野田佳彦首相が『すべての物品およびサービスを自由化交渉のテーブルに載せる』と述べた」と書かれていた。

　これに対し、外務省は「そのような発言を首相が行った事実はない」として、米側の報道発表を否定する報道発表をして火消しに躍起となった。外務省によると、首相は「昨年１１月に策定した『包括的経済連携に関する基本方針』に基づいて高いレベルでの経済連携を進める」と述べただけだという。

　外務省が米側に説明を求めたところ、米側は同基本方針に「センシティブ品目（自由化に慎重な品目）について配慮を行いつつ、すべての品目を自由化交渉対象とし…」と書かれていたことを踏まえ、報道発表したと説明。誤解を認めたという。

Peter Vallentyne

Libertarianism, in the strict sense, is the moral view that agents initially fully own themselves and have certain moral powers to acquire property rights in external things. In a looser sense, libertarianism is any view that approximates the strict view. This entry will focus on libertarianism in the strict sense.

Roderick T. Long

For the purposes of this essay, I propose to define as libertarian any political position that advocates a radical redistribution of power from the coercive state to voluntary associations of free individuals. This definition draws the boundaries of libertarianism rather more expansively than is customary, and includes under the libertarian aegis a number of conflicting positions. For example, my definition does not specify whether this redistribution of power is to be total or merely substantial, and so allows both anarchists and nonanarchists to count as libertarians; it also does not specify whether the criteria for "voluntary association" can be met by communal cooperatives, or market exchanges, or both, and so grants the libertarian label indifferently to socialists (of the anti-statist variety) and capitalists (of the anti-statist variety).

Urban Dictionary

Libertarian Socialism: Not an oxymoron. In fact, the term "libertarian" was first used by a French anarcho-communist back in 1857 to describe himself (an anarchist). The modern term libertarianism (economic freedoms) was originally called liberalism. The term "libertarian" describes liberty (thus, the term is also used to describe metaphysical liberty within philosophy and metaphysics), and the term socialism describes a society in which wealth is fairly distributed. Thus, it is neither a literal nor a practical contradiction.

A libertarian socialist would argue that a society based on such huge disparities of wealth is unfree. If you wish to enter into employment, you choose first and take orders later (as with liberal democracy). Libertarian socialists believe in voluntary association and economic democracy. This will allow the individual to reach his/her full potential.

Ulli Diemer

There is only one reason for being a revolutionary - because it is the best way to live.

We don't know if we'll win: history is made by human beings, and where human beings are concerned, nothing is inevitable. But because people do make history, we know that it is possible to build a new world, and we strive to realize that possibility.

Mikhail Bakunin

Nationality is not a universal human principle but an historical, local fact…Every nation, even a small one, has its own character, its own particular way of life and manner of speaking, feeling, thinking, and behaving. These distinctive features are the essence of nationality, the product of a nation’s entire history and conditions of existence. Every nation, like every individual, is of necessity what it is, and has an unquestionable right to be itself. So-called national rights consist precisely of this.

African proverb

If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community.

Janice Y. K. Lee

“You can call me Prudence, though,” she says. Her long arms are draped around his shoulders and her jasmine scent is overwhelming him.

“I think I won’t,” he says.

“I’m terribly strong,” she whispers. “I hope I don’t destroy you.”

He laughs.

“Don’t worry about that,” he says. But later, he wonders.

Nujood Ali, Delphine Minoui

My head is spinning — I’ve never seen so many people in my whole life. In the yard outside the courthouse, a crowd is bustling around in every direction: men in suits and ties with bunches of yellowed files tucked under their arms; other men wearing the zanna, the traditional ankle-length tunic of the villages of northern Yemen; and then all these women, shouting and weeping so loudly that I can’t understand a word.
I’d love to read their lips to find out what they’re saying, but the niqabs that match their long black robes hide everything except their big, round eyes. The women seem furious, as if a tornado had just destroyed their houses. I try to listen closely.
I can catch only a few words — childcare, justice, human rights — and I’m not really sure what they mean. Not far away from me is a broad- shouldered giant wearing his turban jammed down to his eyes; he’s carrying a plastic bag full of documents and telling anyone who will listen that he has come here to try to get back some land that was stolen from him. He’s dashing around like a frantic rabbit, and he almost runs right into me.

Laney Salisbury, Aly Sujo

Tom Franklin

One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.

Salvador Plasencia

Antonio split the spines of books, spilling leaves of Austen and Cervantes, sheets from Leviticus and Judges, all mixing with the pages of The Book of Incandescent Light. Then Antonio unrolled the wrapping paper and construction paper and began to cut at the cardboard and then fold.
She was the first to be created: cardboard legs, cellophane appendix, and paper breasts. Created not from the rib of a man but from paper scraps. There was no all-powerful god who could part the rivers of Pison and Gihon, but instead a twice-retired old man with cuts across his fingers.
Antonio was passed out on the floor, flakes of paper stuck to the sweat of his face and arms, unable to hear the sound of expanding paper as she rose. His hands were bloody, pooling the ink of his body on the floor, staining his pants. She stepped over her creator, spreading his blood across the polished floor, and then walked out of the factory and into the storm. The print of her arms smeared; her soaked feet tattered as they scrapped against wet pavement and turned her toes to pulp.

Geoff Dyer

He* played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to.

*: Thelonious Monk

Владимир Набоков

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

W. R. Wilson

Etruscan men and women were equal.

Women enjoyed high status in Etruria and paintings show them prominently in every aspect of life.

Etruscans are an enigma wrapped in a mystery because unlike other vanished peoples, they do not speak to us through their writings.

Leo Notenbloom

Welcome to the world of viruses where you can get the blame for someone else's infection.

Wikipedia

The Danakil Desert lies in the Afar Triangle. It extends into the north-east of Ethiopia, the south of Eritrea and into much of Djibouti. It is the homeland of the Afar people. It is known for its extreme heat. The deepest point in the desert lies up to 100 m below sea level in the Danakil Depression. The Danakil Desert's main industry is salt mining, while it is also home to wildlife, including African Wild Asses.

Many volcanoes exist in the region, including Erta Ale and the Dabbahu Volcano. It was named by National Geographic as the "Cruelest Place on Earth".

Ann Wright

I fully support the right of US military personnel who, in acts of conscience, refuse to go to a war of aggression, a war crime.

Brad Fitzpatrick

There are an increasing number of new "social applications" as well as traditional application which either require the "social graph" or that could provide better value to users by utilizing information in the social graph. What I mean by "social graph" is a the global mapping of everybody and how they're related, as Wikipedia describes and I talk about in more detail later. Unfortunately, there doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens.

im addicted

Techcrunch has a pretty strong line on Pinboard. The title of their review gives it away. If you want to know a bit more about Pinboard then take a look at Back To Basics: Ditch Delicious, Use Pinboard.
I’m not sure I agree. The value of social bookmarking sites is heavily rooted in the network effect. Otherwise, they’re not really social bookmarking sites, just online bookmarking. In delicious‘s case they still have a big enough crowd for a popular link to really mean something, and enough of a bookmark base to power a really slick suggestion engine.
Right now Pinboard doesn’t have either of those. That’s not to say it’s worth skipping over.
There’s no spammers (yet). It’s not a juicy enough target (yet), presently pagerank 0. The small entry fee is a deterrent to the people who would usually register dozens of accounts to make hundreds of bookmarks to their network of sites.
Delicious’s advantage of its huge user base powering its tag suggestion engine can be harnessed with a little help of greasemonkey. On the same day I registered I cobbled together a quick script that puts delicious tag suggestions into the pinboard bookmark popup. I’m sure eventually delicious will put a stop to it, but in a couple months I expect it to be moot, Pinboard will have the community necessary to power their tag suggestion engine.
Pinboard is simple and elegant but occasionally I’ll still go back to delicious for their popular page. If a resource makes it onto there it’s generally authorative. For my bookmarks I think I’ll stick to Pinboard for now.

Pinboard

Pinboard is a fast, no-nonsense bookmarking site.

We are obsessive about privacy and forever ad-free.

Delicious

With Delicious you save, stack and share the web. Instantly save your favorite links, collect your discoveries in stacks, share what you find, and dig deeper into your favorite topics.

Paul Butler

Patrick

I have never seen a computer system which handles names properly and doubt one exists, anywhere.

So, as a public service, I’m going to list assumptions your systems probably make about names. All of these assumptions are wrong. Try to make less of them next time you write a system which touches names.

1. People have exactly one canonical full name.

2. People have exactly one full name which they go by.

3. People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name.

4. People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.

5. People have exactly N names, for any value of N.

6. People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.

7. People’s names do not change.

...

40. People have names.

Patrick

Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.” If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired.

Instead, describe yourself by what you have accomplished for previously employers vis-a-vis increasing revenues or reducing costs. If you have not had the opportunity to do this yet, describe things which suggest you have the ability to increase revenue or reduce costs, or ideas to do so.

There are many varieties of well-paid professionals who sling code but do not describe themselves as slinging code for a living. Quants on Wall Street are the first and best-known example: they use computers and math as a lever to make high-consequence decisions better and faster than an unaided human could, and the punchline to those decisions is “our firm make billions of dollars.” Successful quants make more in bonuses in a good year than many equivalently talented engineers will earn in a decade or lifetime.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police

Human Trafficking National Coordination Centre

What is human trafficking? Under the Criminal Code, it’s when someone is being exploited by different means such as force, coercion, threat, fraud, or deception. Victims will often find themselves in prostitution, forced labour or other forms of servitude.

The Centre has five priorities:

1. Develop tools, protocols and guidelines to facilitate Human Trafficking investigations.
2. Coordinate national awareness/training and anti-trafficking initiatives.
3. Identify and maintain lines of communication, identify issues for integrated coordination and provide support
4. Develop and maintain international partnerships and coordinate international initiatives.
5. Coordinate intelligence and facilitate the dissemination of all sources of information/ intelligence.

Made By Survivors Network

Made By Survivors is the core program of Made By Survivors Network, a US based NGO that works internationally with survivors of slavery and human trafficking.

MBSN currently operates programs in six countries, with a concentration of programming in India and Nepal.

We currently sponsor 200 child survivors and children born into brothel communities to attend school for the first time.

Our beautiful fair trade jewelry items, handbags and gifts are made by survivors of slavery at shelters around the world, offering them sustainable income, dignity, and a bright future free of slavery.

David Batstone

I read in a local paper that one of my favorite Indian restaurants in the Bay Area had been trafficking women from India to wash dishes, cook meals and other tasks. The story came out when a young woman, Chianti Pratipatta died of a gas leak in an unventilated apartment owned by the proprietor of the restaurant, who forced Chianti and others into slavery under threat of reporting their illegal presence to the authorities.

This was happening in my country at a restaurant I frequented. My shock turned into a consuming passion that took me around the world to learn more about how slavery flourishes in the shadows.

I also learned about the solutions. I met heroes. Modern-day abolitionists fighting trafficking and slavery on the front lines. And I knew I had to do something. The Not for Sale Campaign combines technology, intellectual capital, abolitionist groups and a growing network of individuals like yourself – joined together to end slavery in our lifetime.

Mark Knopfler

And what have you got at the end of the day?

What have you got to take away?

A bottle of whisky and a new set of lies

Blinds on the window and a pain behind the eyes

International Coffee Organization

Initially, the authorities in Yemen actively encouraged coffee drinking. The first coffeehouses or kaveh kanes opened in Mecca and quickly spread throughout the Arab world, thriving as places where chess was played, gossip was exchanged and singing, dancing and music were enjoyed. Nothing quite like this had existed before: a place where social and business life could be conducted in comfortable surroundings and where - for the price of a cup of coffee - anyone could venture. Perhaps predictably, the Arabian coffeehouse soon became a centre of political activity and was suppressed. Over the next few decades coffee and coffeehouses were banned numerous times but kept reappearing until eventually an acceptable way out was found when a tax was introduced on both.

frelkins

• ... more than 22 million people around the world who produce the second most valuable lawfully traded commodity in the world: coffee.
• ... coffee is grown in 50 countries around the world.
• the market for coffee has always been affected by temporary swings in supply because of changes in weather patterns and the ravages of war, labor strife and other cyclical events.
• ... has increased growth in worldwide production of all types of coffee from 85.7 million bags in 1995/1996 to 117 million bags in 2001/02.
• lower prices, however, have not caused increased demand. ... supply far exceeds demand on a global basis.
• the market, as virtually every knowledgeable authority would agree, remains clearly oversupplied.

Human Rights Committee

Concluding observations of the Human Rights Committee

Japan

7. The Committee stresses that protection of human rights and human rights

standards are not determined by popularity polls. It is concerned by the

repeated use of popularity statistics to justify attitudes of the State party

that may violate its obligations under the Covenant.

Debito Arudou

... why is the government even asking whether non-Japanese deserve equal rights? Are human rights optional, a matter of opinion polls? And if a majority says foreigners deserve fewer rights, does that justify the current policy of resisting introducing laws against racial discrimination? ...
... in Q3, part 2, people who felt they had experienced discrimination were to choose from a conveniently-provided list of scourges: "false rumors, bad-mouthing by neighbors," "insults or defamation," "bad treatment from police," "violence, extortion," "false accusations of crime," "foul odors, noise pollution," "discriminatory treatment by race, creed, gender, and social status," "being excluded by your neighbors," "bad treatment at work," "your domestic utilities, such as gas or water, getting switched off," "bad treatment at public welfare facilities," "invasion of privacy," "sexual harassment," "stalking," "something else," and finally, "not sure, but something (nantonaku)".
And how about "foul odors"? Under this rubric, one could argue a stinky public toilet or a humid fart in an elevator is a violation of human rights! No wonder people have trouble taking human-rights activists seriously, when concepts even utilized by the government are so ill-defined.