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How Iraqi Oil Is Changing the World - By Stephen Glain | Foreign Policy - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...raqi_oil_is_changing_the_world oil OPEC diplomacy Iran Iraq KSA
shared by Ed Webb on 17 Mar 10 - Cached
  • For decades, Saudi Arabia has served as the world's central banker of oil supplies. In unstable times, most famously in the wake of Iraqi's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, it has drawn from its spare production capacity of some 1 million barrels to bring prices to heel.
  • Iraq's revival as a prominent oil exporter is bound to reshuffle a careful power balance in the energy-rich Arab world, particularly between bitter rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saddam Hussein's 2003 toppling created a vacuum that both sides rushed to fill, for example deploying proxy forces at the height of Iraq's sectarian civil war. OPEC is another battlefield for the Saudi-Iran rivalry, and the Saudi kingdom is in no hurry to lose its uncontested status as No. 1. Now, as Iraq stabilizes politically and slowly rebuilds its oil-production capacity, both sides will have to accommodate a more assertive Baghdad. Even if oil production doesn't reach the Iraqis' goal, it will likely be higher than the approximately 1.7 million barrels per day that Iraq was producing just prior to the U.S. invasion.
  • quota smashers like Iran and Venezuela, who routinely oversell to pay for their costly entitlement programs
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Death metal rockers raise eyebrows in sedate Bahrain - CNN.com - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...bahrain.metal.music death metal Bahrain middleeast music censorship socialnetworking
shared by Ed Webb on 17 Mar 10 - Cached
  • "People don't accept the fact of metal being music and having fun. It's always in conflict with religion,"
  • In Bahrain, metal bands and their followers are often branded as Satan worshippers. Gigs are regularly shut down, and the movement largely stays underground to avoid public attention. Many groups rely on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook to stay connected.
  • the rock and metal movement, which is mostly an expression of freedom
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A melting pot of different cultures, Bahrain boasts a diverse cultural scene. But partly because of small size of the country, it is often overlooked, said Al Shafei. "Noone looks at Bahrain as a place where talented musicians are emerging," she said. In fact, overall there's been little attention placed on the underground musical scene in the Middle East, which is one of the reasons why she's launching Web site Mideast Tunes.
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Who is Running Egypt While President Mubarak Recovers? | The Middle East Channel - 0 views

mideast.foreignpolicy.com/...whos_running_egypt Egypt succession analysis opinion el-baradei Ikhwan Mubarak
shared by Ed Webb on 16 Mar 10 - Cached
  • As Mubarak has aged, however, his visible involvement in Egyptian politics has decreased, leading Egyptians to swap rumors about who is really running the country. Is it the security apparatus? His son? High members of the National Democratic Party? What is the role of his wife, a visible figure in Egyptian public life? Most important of all, who will follow him? Mubarak's illness has catapulted these questions from the rumor mill to the headlines. But it has not answered them.
  • Opposition parties are allowed to operate -- as long as they are weak, fractious, and stay off the streets and in the salons where they belong. Real opposition movements are contained and sometimes harshly suppressed. Wildcat strikers and demonstrators can be treated roughly indeed. And the Muslim Brotherhood -- essentially a middle-class religious reform movement with an ability to mobilize thousands of followers throughout the country -- has provoked a prolonged security campaign ever since it won one-fifth of the seats in the 2005 parliamentary elections. The Brotherhood was not so foolish as to try to win those elections -- its leaders say that under current circumstances, they would never seek more than one-third of the seats and they generally compete for far less. But the movement's strong showing in 2005 reached too far.
  • a stultifying political environment
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  • the more bashful Brotherhood will actually be useful to the regime -- it does not threaten but it does serve as a bogeyman to scare liberals and Western governments.
  • only a regime without much credibility or legitimacy could be spooked by an international civil servant long absent from the country.
  • Its current system does not inspire respect or affection, but it does quite effectively present itself as inevitable. It is as legitimate as gravity.
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The danger of majority tyranny | openDemocracy - 1 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...danger-of-majority-tyranny Switzerland democracy politics opinion analysis ban minarets Islam
shared by Ed Webb on 03 Mar 10 - Cached
  • The “yes”’ to banning minarets has brought these limits to mind, causing a real shock and deep disappointment for many people. I cannot remember any referendum that has divided our country both politically and ethically in a similar manner.
  • Democratically reached decisions reflect the will of the people in a given moment, though, not necessarily a superior wisdom or power. Democratic decisions can be wrong, unjust and impractical, violate the country’s constitution and even violate basic human rights. They can even relate to issues for which the democratic system is quite simply inadequate.
  • The debate about the limits of popular sovereignty will surely go on in Switzerland for some time to come. We need to make sure that the discussion is characterized by clarity of analysis, precision in drawing these borders and public education. An absolutized concept of democracy can threaten freedom and is susceptible to misuse. An enlightened people recognizes and acknowledges the limits of its sovereignty and knows that these limitations are what strengthen democracy and freedom.
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Op-Ed Columnist - Iraq's Known Unknowns, Still Unknown - NYTimes.com - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...24friedman.html NYT opinion USA Iraq friedman tribal tribes sects authoritarianism culture
shared by Ed Webb on 24 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 24 Feb 10
     
    Let's discuss this
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Activists aim to punch holes in online shields of authoritarian regimes - SiliconValley... - 1 views

www.siliconvalley.com/...ci_14407148 censorship evasion filters activists Iran China USA
shared by Ed Webb on 20 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Haystack, a program to help Iranians wiggle past government filters as tensions between authorities and the opposition movement surge.
  • virtual slingshots to take on government censorship
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Socialist Project | The Bullet - 0 views

www.socialistproject.ca/...311.php Iran opposition protests elections opinion analysis left
shared by Ed Webb on 12 Feb 10 - Cached
  • he broad-based opposition movement has continued to subvert the Islamic Republic's ideological, political, and religious symbols and occasions through a range of sophisticated and creative means.
  • The false dichotomies of secular versus Islamic, and/or imperialist versus anti-imperialist which at one point may have applied to Iranian political discourse, are not applicable to the current national opposition movement in Iran.
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Our Digitally Undying Memories - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...63747 memory history review Chronicle internet forgetting
shared by Ed Webb on 06 Feb 10 - Cached
  • as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues convincingly in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2009), the costs of such powerful collective memory are often higher than we assume.
  • "Total recall" renders context, time, and distance irrelevant. Something that happened 40 years ago—whether youthful or scholarly indiscretion—still matters and can come back to harm us as if it had happened yesterday.
  • an important "third wave" of work about the digital environment. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we saw books like Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital (Knopf, 1995) and Howard Rhein-gold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1993) and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Perseus, 2002), which idealistically described the transformative powers of digital networks. Then we saw shallow blowback, exemplified by Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008).
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  • For most of human history, forgetting was the default and remembering the challenge.
  • Chants, songs, monasteries, books, libraries, and even universities were established primarily to overcome our propensity to forget over time. The physical and economic limitations of all of those technologies and institutions served us well. Each acted not just as memory aids but also as filters or editors. They helped us remember much by helping us discard even more.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 06 Feb 10
       
      Excellent point, well made.
  • Our use of the proliferating data and rudimentary filters in our lives renders us incapable of judging, discriminating, or engaging in deductive reasoning. And inductive reasoning, which one could argue is entering a golden age with the rise of huge databases and the processing power needed to detect patterns and anomalies, is beyond the reach of lay users of the grand collective database called the Internet.
  • Even 10 years ago, we did not consider that words written for a tiny audience could reach beyond, perhaps to someone unforgiving, uninitiated in a community, or just plain unkind.
  • Remembering to forget, as Elvis argued, is also essential to getting over heartbreak. And, as Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his 1942 (yep, I Googled it to find the date) story "Funes el memorioso," it is just as important to the act of thinking. Funes, the young man in the story afflicted with an inability to forget anything, can't make sense of it. He can't think abstractly. He can't judge facts by relative weight or seriousness. He is lost in the details. Painfully, Funes cannot rest.
  • Just because we have the vessels, we fill them.
  • the default habits of our species: to record, retain, and release as much information as possible
  • Perhaps we just have to learn to manage wisely how we digest, discuss, and publicly assess the huge archive we are building. We must engender cultural habits that ensure perspective, calm deliberation, and wisdom. That's hard work.
  • we choose the nature of technologies. They don't choose us. We just happen to choose unwisely with some frequency
  • surveillance as the chief function of electronic government
  • critical information studies
  • Siva Vaidhyanathan is an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. His next book, The Googlization of Everything, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.
  • Nietzsche's _On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life_
  • Google compresses, if not eliminates, temporal context. This is likely only to exacerbate the existing problem in politics of taking one's statements out of context. A politician whose views on a subject have evolved quite logically over decades in light of changing knowledge and/or circumstances is held up in attack ads as a flip-flopper because consecutive Google entries have him/her saying two opposite things about the same subject -- and never mind that between the two statements, the Berlin Wall may have fallen or the economy crashed harder than at any other time since 1929.
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