Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni strong-armed his countrymen into “re-electing” him in Thursday’s election. That means that he gets more opportunities to trample all over his opposition and pour fuel into the brutal conflict with the LRA in Northern Uganda.

While the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is terrorizing the Acholi people, the government seems to be determined to pursue the strategy to defeat the LRA militarily. This strategy has not solved the problem in many years, and the only reason to pursue it is to keep receiving military aid from the United States.

However, most of the “fighters” of the LRA are the 30,000 children abducted from the Acholi people and forced through unspeakable cruelty into committing more unspeakable cruelty. This is essentially a large-scale hostage situation; the LRA is a cultish organization that holds an entire people hostage. This is not a scenario that lend itself to conventional military intervention, yet Museveni insists on fighting fire with fire – all on the backs of the Acholi people.

More info on this conflict on the Uganda-CAN website.

Well maybe that’s finally going to put these idiots at AOL out of business. AOL announced in January that they started giving preference to email senders who subscribe to the pay-per-email Goodmail service. So if you pay up, you can spam the hell out of AOL users.

As part of its e-mail security practices, AOL blocks the display of images and hyperlinks on most high-volume messages, except if senders are on the AOL Enhanced whitelist and maintain very low complaint rates. Beginning today, AOL will also allow senders who have undergone accreditation through Goodmail to display images and hyperlinks by default. Goodmail charges accredited companies a fraction of a cent per message sent.
AOL to Implement E-mail Certification Program. ClickZ News, January 30, 2006

Brilliant. That’ll just increase the incentive for people who want control over their inbox to sign up with a hosting provider, where you can get your own email server for something like $10/year with unlimited accounts. You don’t get a Gig of space with that, but if you get your own domain you also get a lot less spam and don’t need that much space.

The EEF is up in arms over this and they make a very good point:

Email being basically free isn’t a bug. It’s a feature that has driven the digital revolution. It allows groups to scale up from a dozen friends to a hundred people who love knitting to half-a-million concerned citizens without a major bankroll.

Email readers and senders will both lose, because the incentives for Yahoo, AOL, and Goodmail are all wrong. Their service is only valuable if it “saves” you from their spam filters. In turn, they have an incentive to treat more of your email as spam, thereby encouraging people to sign up.
AOL, Yahoo and Goodmail: Taxing Your Email for Fun and Profit, Deep Links, EEF, February 08, 2006

Now MoveOn has started a campaign to get AOL to back down. I say let’s see if this is not going to just put AOL out of business, because people are going to see all this AOL-sanctioned spam in their inbox. If that’s not going to make people think about finding a different email service, what will?

The infamous Holocaust denier David Irwing might have to do hard time in Austria. It was, and is, perfectly illegal in Austria to publicly state that the Holocaust was only a figment of the imagination of six million Jews, three million Soviet POWs, and millions of Poles, Roma, French, Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gays, handicapped people, and some brave Germans who resisted the Nazis. According to the likes of Irving, the Jews made it all up, and the gas chambers were just recreational facilities.

As stupid and offensive as these opinions are, locking Irving up for three years for uttering such nonsense may seem harsh, even to people otherwise thoroughly offended by his views. One might think in a “free marketplace of ideas,” such nonsense will easily fall by the wayside, when faced with the overwhelming, gruesome evidence of what really happened in the Nazi death camps. Even Irving eventually had to acknowledge “I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.” Ooops! Now he’s oh-so-sorry that he insulted the intelligence of half the world, soiled the memory of millions of innocent victims and trampled on the honor of the Jewish people. I think he’s getting off way too easy.

In Austria and in Germany Holocaust denial is not just a free-speech issue, or an academic debate. After World War II, when Austria and Germany rose from the rubble of the former Axis-powers, much of the identity of both states was founded on the shame and humiliation of having been perpetrators of some of the worst crimes against humanity in Europe’s history. In Britain, the question whether the gas chambers were used for de-lousing or mass-murder may be an academic argument. In Austria and in Germany it rips open still-fresh wounds. Neither Austria nor Germany are in a moral position to give Holocaust deniers a stage or an audience. Not only are these symbols and opinions too painful to be tolerated, but sadly the ground is still also way too fertile in Germany and Austria for the blame-the-Jews message.

Never again! Never forget!

Last night I watched “Team America” and laughed my butt off. They make fun of Osama BinLaden, Kim Il Sung, Hollywood and America. They depict Michael Moore as a suicide bomber who blows up Team America’s headquarters. They don’t depict, or poke fun at, the Prophet Mohammad (pbuh). Maybe that’s because Islam’s holy prophet is not very funny. Especially not as funny as Michael Moore. Or North Korea’s weird, pathetic, scary leader. Or America’s obsession with bombing the Middle East into freedom. The movie is done entirely with marionettes and it features elaborate backgrounds and really awful music. It’s quite artful and has great production value. But the movie is offensive in many ways: it’s violent, crude, tasteless, oh-so-politically-incorrect. But it’s very, very funny.

In Europe and America the right to say whatever the fuck is on your mind is widely cherished, if under appreciated. Freedom of speech means the government cannot tell you to shut up just because it does not like what you say. I can say about our so-called president whatever the hell I want. But I cannot go around falsely accusing ANYONE of anything. And, of course, I have the RIGHT to wear a “Harleys suck” T-shirt to that biker bar down the road. But some of those upstanding, flag-wearing patrons there are going to see it as their patriotic duty to shove my first amendment rights up my … constipation avenue.

So, should a Danish newspaper have the RIGHT to piss off roughly a Billion Muslims? Sure. Should they act surprised when the Muslims protest? Hell, no! Should the Danes be surprised that radical Arab nationalists exploit this incident and incite major turmoil? Well, not really. Do the Arab radicals care that they look like fools to the Danes when they burn Danish embassies over a cartoon? Does the First Amendment guarantee my right to endlessly ask stupid questions only to answer them myself? Oh, whatever …

All I am saying is this: if you exercise your Freedom of Speech to sow hatred, hatred and violence you’ll reap. The well-camouflaged point of this rant is that the whole brouhaha over the Mohammad cartoons is NOT about freedom versus religion. It’s really about the culture war between the reasonable, liberal people on this planet and the few idiots, in Denmark, Pakistan or wherever, who think they can force their way-of-life down other people’s throats. Freedom is not the right to bite your thumb at anyone who crosses your path. Freedom is an ideal that requires great care and respect, especially for your brother who has a different point of view than you do. That does not mean you cannot criticize Islam or poke fun at religion. But it means you have to be very conscious of the social context of what you say and understand the potential consequences.

Humor is an important part of free speech, because a good joke can be so much more powerful than a sermon or a lecture. But you better know what your talking about, or that punchline is going to blow up in your face. In Europe, jokes about Muslims generally are about as funny as a baseball bat bearing down on a dark-skinned face. So, those who chose to use their freedom to make racist jokes and poke fun at things they don’t understand, or care about, are squandering a precious privilege. These fools don’t see that the freedom to speak also sometimes requires the wisdom to shut up. Freedom is wasted on the hypocrites. And they are not funny, either.

One year after Togo’s dictator Gnassingbé Eyadema died, his clan is again firmly in charge of this embattled sliver of a country on the Gulf of Benin. In charge, that is, with the blessing and military aid of France, Togo’s former colonial master. For February 20, talks between the opposition and the ruling RPT are scheduled in Ouagadougou, the capital of Togo’s northern neighbor Burkina Faso. But just like the rigged elections last year were merely a sham to legitimize the military coup that put Eyadema’s son in power, these talks are just another attempt to legitimize the status quo: the Gnassingbé clan is in charge of running Togo for the French corporations that exploit the country.

In a Feb 11 editorial (French) for Le Togolais, Comi M. Toulabor argues that the Togolese opposition ought to refuse to continue to “play nice” and participate in so-called reconciliation talks. The ruling clan is weakened enough by internal conflicts and several scandals, that the opposition ought to seize the moment, boycott the talks in Ouagadougou and go on the offensive. In the past, these talks have served nothing more than to placate the EU observers that the RPT “means well” and and supports democracy. As far as I have seen, all attempts of the opposition to engage the RPT constructively have failed in the past, mainly because there is no actual interest among the RPT cronies for progress or any change in the status quo in Togo. There is only interest in faking reconciliation to the degree that it placates the international community into lifting sanctions.

Reconcilliation in Togo has to happen at the grassroots level, I believe. The only way to undermine the RPTs entrenched cadres across Togo, and their grip on their communities, is to undermine the strategy of ethnic division and strife. This is a long-term strategy that will not yield immediate results. But the strategy of attacking the RPT directly has not made much progress in the last 20 years, either. If the opposition can unite and develop a leadership that is associated with ethnic reconcilliation between Ewe and Kabyé, and the many other groups in Togo, I think the RPT’s support among the Kabyé in particular will wane. Such a strategy will expose the insidious “divide-and-rule” strategy of the RPT, and thus undermine their power inside Togo, and perhaps undermine their support from abroad, too.

However, the biggest obstacle to a free and democratic Togo is not even the Gnassingbé clan. It’s their French puppet masters. The former colonial power in most of West Africa, the French government still very much regards the region as a strategic sphere of influence and for many French corporations, exploiting West Africa is highly profitable. The Gnassingbé clan has played a vital role in this racket in the past 40 years, which has been rewarded with ample military aid from Paris. As long as the French government sees the Gnassingbé clan as essential to their strategic posture in West Africa, it will be VERY difficult for the opposition to get rid of them, as the RPT henchmen are not at all squeamish about using those French guns on their fellow Togolese.

I doubt that there is much hope in pleading with the French to stop supporting the RPT. It’s worked to well for them for 40 years, so they have no incentive in changing the status quo in Togo. There may be more hope in trying to build support for the cause of democracy in Togo in the international community, but barely. The world is preoccupied with Iraq, racist cartoons and a possible bird-flu pandemic (not to talk about the Worldcup and Grammy Awards). Few outside Togo care about what happens (or doesn’t) between Lomé and Dapaong. So it’ll be up to the Togolese to find ways to force the French to drop the RPT. I think it can be done, but it won’t be easy. It’ll take an opposition that has a clear vision for Togo, that is united behind that vision, and that manages to build strong support at the grassroots level across all communities in Togo.

The first step, however, has to be to stop collaborating with the RPT, boycott the Ouaga IV talks, and make a clear, unequivocal statement to the Togolese people that the opposition stands for reconciliation among all Togolese, but not with the RPT.

A politician winning an award for speaking? About himself? That’s pretty impressive …

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) won a Grammy award Wednesday evening in a category rarely made for a politician: the best spoken word.

As the awards were announced at the ceremony in downtown Los Angeles, Obama was finishing his work day in Washington. He accepted the honor with humility and humor.

“While it is rare for a politician to speak for hours on end and be given an actual award, it is very flattering to win a Grammy,” Obama said in a statement. “But, I can assure you I’m not thinking about quitting my day job.”

Obama painstakingly recorded his autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” over a combined stretch of about 15 hours in the sound booth.
Sen. Obama wins Grammy for words, Chicago Tribune, February 8, 2006

Barack Obama is a rising star in the Democratic party, and with his oratory talent he made a name for himself during 2004 election. His campaign for one of Illinois’ Senate seats beat first Jack Ryan and then Ryan’s replacement Alan Keyes easily, and Obama received 70 percent of the votes.

This report in the news raises hope for a comprehensive AIDS cure – in a decade, or so:

A chemical has been identified which could halt the progress of HIV, US scientists say.

Lab tests of the chemical – CSA-54 – at Vanderbilt University show it disables the virus’s ability to infect cells.

It was shown to attack HIV in a new way – targeting the membrane of the virus to stop it locking on to cells.

UK experts said the research was interesting – but warned a great deal more research was needed before its true value could be known.
Chemical ‘blocks HIV infection’, BBC News, 9 February 2006.

I really hope they can make this work.

The three little Danish newspaper pigs published cartoons poking fun at the Prophet Muhammad (Peace and Humor Be Upon Him) and now the Muslims are going to “huff and puff” and burn the Danish flags and boycott Danishes, and all those other goods the Danes export to the rest of the world. Well, congrats to the three little Danish pigs, and all the other “brave freedom fighters” at other European publications for taking such a bold and well-thought-out position on the Christian-Muslim cross-cultural dialog! Muhammad with bomb-turban??!! Gotta love that freedom of speech thing. Let’s go ahead and piss off a few more Muslims, let’s throw some more fuel on the fire. Not enough that Paris was burning recently, what European city will be next? Copenhagen?

And boo-hoo to the oh-so-enraged Muslim world. C’mon, let’s have a little sense of humor here!! I mean, who was it who insulted your Holy Prophet (pbuh)? The DANES! Europe’s humor-central! Or should I say “the joke(ers) of Europe? I mean, these guys didn’t even make decent colonialists!! When The French, the British, the Italians, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Germans, the Dutch, the Belgians divided up the world among each other, and extracted the wealth out of India, Arabia, Africa and the Amazon, the Danes colonized … Greenland. And Iceland. Yeah – nice glaciers you guys! Great skiing! But of course those troublemakers were just JOKING! Because they are a FUNNY people!

So now they have done it again. The sharpest minds of the Danish humor elite have come up with this brilliant idea: let’s publishing dumb, offensive and racist “jokes” to incite outrage across the Muslim world in order to expose the absurdity of human existence. Brilliant! Yet more of this entertaining footage of those “humorless” Arabs burning flags and chanting scary-sounding slogans on CNN. Maybe Rasmussen is going to declare a “Humorless Axis” and next year Denmark is going use “joke and awe” to invade Syria, to restore a sense of humor to the Arab world?

Seriously: this story shows how easy it is for the radicals in this crazy world to hijack the discourse and turn it into the tired, old “us and them” bullshit. “Those Arabs can’t take a joke” versus “those Europeans are always picking on us.” It would be funny, if it wasn’t so painful to watch.

In his State of the Union address yesterday, President Bush spent a measly two minutes and 15 seconds on the lack of energy independence of this country. Literally, he spoke of this country’s “addiction” to imported oil, and he pledged to reduce that dependence in the next 15 years. He said this:”Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.” Literally. Most people assumed that meant he wants to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025 with other energy sources. Yet, it turns out his pronouncement has been taken too literally:

WASHINGTON – One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn’t mean it literally.

What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.

Administration backs off Bush’s vow to reduce Mideast oil imports, Wed, Feb. 01, 2006, by Kevin G. Hall, Knight Ridder Newspapers

Maybe, when the White House gives the text of Bush’s speeches to reporters, they should mark the parts that are to be taken literally, so the they don’t confuse everyone.

Last night I stayed up until 2:00 AM tinkering with my SLUG server – a modified Linksys NSLU2 device. V1 ran off of an old, noisy hard drive attached to it via the USB port. Last week I got a 1GB flash drive and I formatted it with an ext3 partition. The plan was to get rid of the hard drive and run the SLUG off of the flash drive.

After several failed attempts to save the configuration and re-unsling to the flash drive, I just went ahead and re-flashed the SLUG with unslung 5.5, using the Windows SerComm Upgrade tool to upload the firmware. After I unslung to the flash drive, the machine booted just fine to the rootfs on the drive. I proceeded to install an FTP server, CUPS (for the attached printer), Apache 2 (incl PHP module) and a small browser.

Now my SLUGsite lives at yovo.dyndns.info and I plan to use it to supplement my regular website with the extra space. Also, running CUPS on that little box, I can now print to a color ink jet printer attached to the device and turn off one of the desktop computers in the basement that used to run just to make the printers available on the network.

Last week I finally got to watch this strange movie “Grizzly Man” about Tim Treadwell, the ultimate bear nut. Treadwell spent 13 summers in Katmai National Park in Alaska literally among huge grizzly bears. In October 2003 Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie were killed and eaten in their camp in the park by one of the grizzly bears.

In the last five summers with the bears he took cameras along and filmed the bears, foxes and himself in the rough, beautiful Alaskan wilderness. The bears were so habituated to him that he got truly amazing footage standing just feet away from the grizzly bears. Werner Herzog, the famous German movie director, got access to the more than one hundred hours of Treadwell’s footage. He decided to use this material to create a documentary, as “in this material lay dormant a story of astonishing beauty and depth.” Herzog says. He added interviews with people who knew Treadwell, or who were knowledgeable about the bears in Alaska and wove all this into a fascinating tale “of human ecstasies and darkest inner turmoil.”

It is easy to dismiss Treadwell as a nutcase. He was a recovering addict who went native among the bears and increasingly cast the world of the humans as an adversary. He renounced the complexities of the human life for the simplicity and perceived perfection and harmony of the wilderness. Although Treadwell’s naive view of nature and the wilderness he was immersing himself in stands in stark contrast to Herzog’s view of a chaotic and merciless universe, Herzog does not judge Treadwell. “What haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears, and this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a saviour.”

This is the tension that carries this film. It’s a compelling story of the desperate search of a human for a connection to life, nature through wilderness, through bears. Treadwell’s search for this connection is deeply human. To varying degrees, we all have this desire for this connection, I know I do. Did Treadwell take this desire and turn it into a quest that gave his life meaning? Or maybe it was just another escape from reality, just another self-destructive addiction, that eventualy killed him in an overdose, of sorts?

Lately I have found myself staring at this. It’s mesmerizing and it makes me wonder about the quality we call “random” (as opposed to the mathematical concept). I think our brain is just really wired to try very hard to extract meaning out of visual stimuli and it is very hard to get it not to try, even when you turn off the ominous soundtrack:

Flickeur (pronounced like Voyeur) randomly retrieves images from Flickr.com and creates an infinite film with a style that can vary between stream-of-consciousness, documentary or video clip. All the blends, motions, zooms or timeleaps are completely random. Flickeur works like a looped magnetic tape where incoming images will merge with older materials and be influenced by the older recordings’ magnetic memory.

Careful with the Flickeur. You might just find yourself staring at it for hours … until it eats up all your computer’s memory and the poor thing goes belly-up.

After the panel discussion about biodiesel on Friday, I returned to CCCC in Pittsboro on Saturday morning for girl Mark’s biodiesel 101 class. The class was packed and Mark commented on how great the interest in biodiesel is in NC compared to other parts of the country. In the class we had a good cross-section of biodieselers from around the state: truckers, farm workers, students and engineer-types. Some were just biodiesel hobbyists who want to make a little biodiesel for their VW or Mercedes and some were business owners, who want to reduce operation cost for their diesel equipment by making their own fuel.

The class was great. Mark quickly established her authority in all things biodiesel and diesel technology by covering all the biodiesel basics and answering many very specific questions on Saturday morning. The class was a regular crash course in biodiesel making – no-frills and all nuts-and-bolts, mono-and-diglycerides, dewatering-and-titration. We spent some time in the classroom, more time in the lab, and on Sunday we took a field trip to the Piedmont Biofuels farm. We got to see their setup – the 500 gallon, double-jacketed, water heated mothership. Finally we spent several hours in the auto shop at CCCC and put together four appleseed reactors.
Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend was fun. Friday after work, I drove down to Pittsboro in Chatham County for a 2-hour discussion forum on biodiesel. And Saturday and Sunday the program was all-biodiesel, all-day, at girl Mark’s workshop at Chatham County Community College.

Both events were organized by the tireless folks at Piedmont Biofuels Coop. Friday’s discussion brought together a crowd of 75 – from curious biodiesel novices to seasoned brewers and activists from all over North Carolina. Biodiesel coops and biofuels-related organizations from all over the state were represented: Burlington Biodiesel, Blue Ridge Biofuels out of Asheboro, Cape Fear Biofuels from Wilmington, Appstate Biodiesel Boone, Bull City Biodiesel (yours truly :)) and Carolina Biodiesel (Mark’s new baby – still under the wings of the Forest Foundation) as well as the folks from Pritchard’s Mountain, from the Human Kindness Foundation and from Guilford Tech. Last, and most importantly, Piedmont Biofuels, the organizers of the event were well-represented.

The discussion covered a lot of ground, from from production issues to pricing and economics, to organizational questions. One suggestion that seemed to get some traction was the idea of forming a state-wide biodiesel council the coops could join. That would allow each member coop to honor memberships reciprocity. A brief discussion touched on the question of a tax holiday for biofuels in North Carolina. On Sunday in a smaller group, Lyle elaborated on some of his experiences, and frustrations, lobbying in Raleigh for this issue of a tax holiday for biofuels.
Read the rest of this entry »

The SLUG’s alive! Friday I bought another Linksys NSLU2 and spent most of the weekend hacking it. I re-flashed it with the uNSLUng v5.5 beta firmware, configured a thttpd web server, a CUPS print server and a set up an automated torrent downloader.

The little Linksys box is sold as a home-network NAS device for external USB drives. It does that quite well: the first one I bought runs on the OEM firmware and reliably makes my 300GB main storage drive available on our little home network. When I read more about this clever $90-device, it became clear that I could replace two of the full-size PCs that normally run 24/7 in our basement to make printers available and run other processes.

So, I hooked up an old backup harddrive, and dug into the Linux system of my SLUG. The nslu2-linux.org site is extremely helpful and provides how-tos and documentation. I am not much of a Linux hacker, but this is a great opportunity to figure out some of this stuff. After some RTFM moments I got the web server and print server going. The only thing that bothers me about this setup is the noisy damn harddrive. I’ll see if I’ll get a new, quieter drive, or maybe run this setup off of a flash drive. In any case, I’ll have to redo the whole thing, since the uNSLUng process does move parts of the OS to the USB device and the additional packages are also installed on the USB device.

The reason is that the “quiet computer” aspect of this project is half the fascination. With a flash drive, or two, plugged into the SLUG, this is a quiet, low-power computer, smaller than a CD box-set and more powerful than my old Pentium I laptop. The processor is a 130 MHz ARM on an Intel board, which is apparently what Linksys usually does. The small built-in RAM disk can be supplemented with external storage, and when you add a paging file, this little box can be thoroughly souped up.

Finally, if you really want a “high-performance SLUG” you can overclock the CPU, or rather de-underclock it. The little box comes throttled down, and following the instructions, you can pop off a transistor and restore it to its full 266 MHz glory. That’ll be a project for another three-day weekend …

WOW – deep-fried nerd alert! Are you ready for the grease PC? The guys at Tom’s Hardware posted the report of some Germans who had the – uh – intriguing brainstorm to take a high-performance PC, rip out all the fans and dip the whole thing in 8 gallons of canola oil, to see what would happen:

Common sense dictates that submerging your high-end PC in cooking oil is not a good idea. But, of course, engineering feats and science breakthroughs were made possible by those who dared to explore the realms of the non-conventional. Members of the Munich-based THG lab are only too happy to confirm this fact. And not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn’t short out when we filled the sealed shut PC case with cooking oil–but the non-conductive properties of the liquid coupled created a totally cool and quiet high-end PC, devoid of the noise pollution of fans. The PC case – or should we say tank – also offered a new and novel way to display and show off your PC components.
Strip Out The Fans, Add 8 Gallons of Cooking Oil, by Frank Völkel, Tom’s Hardware, 9 Jan 2006

Oh boy – German engineering, oder was? They should really use recycled fryer oil instead of virgin oil. Makes more environmental sense.

Last night we did our post-solstice ritual and torched our christmas tree. The tree was still way too green – we should have let it dry out more. Still, it was quite a firework ….

Read the rest of this entry »

I am really torn when I ponder the pre-holiday sellout by Germany’s ex-chancellor Schröder to Putin’s little racket Gazprom. Which is the bigger scandal? His cynical, middle-finger-in-your-face exit from the public arena? Or is it even worse that it is apparently perfectly legal to conduct foreign policy for the German people for seven years while netwoking your way into a lucrative job with an international company controlled by the Russian government? And I also want to know what Fischer knew about Schröder’s plans.

Clearly, politicians who retire from the public arena will often sell their experience and contacts to the highest bidder. That’s the reality, and we can probably live with that, as long as we can see clearly that official business is not too blatantly influenced by private economic interests. But the Gazprom job puts Schröder on the same level with Dick Cheney, who lets the U.S. energy industry write its own regulatory framework, and who is clearly in the pocket of companies that profit from the mess in Iraq. And his new job might put Schröder into the same executive suite with Putin, who is exploiting his elected office for his personal enrichment like a banana-republic potentate.

So the $50.000-question is this: when the interests of his employer are in conflict with the national economic interests, or maybe even security interests, of Germany, where will Schröder’s loyalties lie? Will the former chancellor of Germany condone, or even support corporate decisions against German interests? Or will he lobby for German interests at Gazprom? What will it be Herr Bundeskanzler a.D.? Krimsekt und Kaviar oder Riesling und Nordseekrabben?

What a year: Nature terrorized humans with hurricanes, earthquakes and floods. Awareness rose of the threats of a global flu pandemic and global warming. Terrorists killed innocent people around the world. Human rights abuses, government secrecy and spying were uncovered in the U.S., in Europe and in many countries around the world. The new pope is German and the new German Chancellor is a woman. The president of Togo Gnassingbé Eyadema died and his son inherited the “family business.” Togo qualified for the World Cup! The last year saw a lot of hardship and tragedy for many people around he world. And sadly, again, far too little was done to help those in need.

For our little family, however, 2005 was not a bad year. We have a lot to be grateful for, and we did our best to share what we have with those in need. Most importantly, we’re all healthy and we made it through some pretty significant changes. Yet, we also lost some friends to illness, and last Friday my aunt passed away, after a long struggle with cancer.

In January ’05, Laura started her new job at One World Market and she has just completed her first holiday season at the store. Her first year in retail was very successful, and she really enjoys her work at the store. She has introduced new vendors to the store and new members to the board. And she has discovered a new, intense connection to the community where we live. Her job has vastly expanded our social network and our appreciation for our town. The store was founded by a very active, well-connected church group from Durham, and many of the volunteers and customers are very active in various neighborhoods and in the community.

In July, Jacob got is first taste of “real life” when he began Kindergarten. After the first four years of fun and games, he is now settling into public school and the harsh reality of mass-education. As he is a bit spoiled, and also a bit young (he only turned five after the end of the first quarter) his adjustment was not completely without bumps, but overall he did well. And since he spent a good part of his life in day-care and pre-school, he was socially quite adept and his immune system was up-to-speed. But it is the discipline that got to him. Being quiet, waiting your turn, following the rules and listening to the teacher are the things he struggles with. Yet, none of this is really bringing him down. He is still his happy, unfazed self. He is embracing life with gusto, and he is at this point where his five-year-old world is his oyster.

Julia started third grade, and for her, too, the pace picked up a bit, as this is the first end-of-year testing grade. They spend a huge amount of time on practice tests, cramming spelling words, math problems, reading and comprehension. And occasionally they even learn something, like when she did a report on Minerva, including a costume she made, complete with an owl and a Medusa head on her shield. Last January one of her paintings was selected for an art show at the art museum at the NC Central University, where the best student art of the Durham Public Schools was presented. During the rest of the year she was as creative and prolific a young artist as ever. Using whatever materials she can get, she created sculptures, pictures, games and “fun stuff” throughout the year. I should really scan some or take pictures to make an online gallery … She also got another “Terrific Kid” award and her teachers are generally gushing about how smart and mature a person she is.

Myself, oh well, I got into blogging, made my first few liters of biodiesel, started a biodiesel coop, and read a book. I am still at Duke messing with computers and rooting for Carolina. Right now I am very busy ripping out and re-building several servers at work, since this is a otherwise very quiet time at the office. I need to get working out more again.

As a family, we did some fun stuff this year: we visited Iceland and took a trip to Germany. We also met up with a guy from our family in Togo, who is studying in the US right now. Toward the end of the year, we met several of our neighbors, and our children started playing with some of the neighbor’s kids. That may seem trivial, but most of the properties here are several acres, and we’re right off the highway, so we don’t tend to run into our neighbors, unless we’re traipsing through the woods (or when the firemen are putting out fires).

So now it’s another year, full of excitement, adventures, dirty dishes, unfolded laundry, homework, debating politics, ranting about traffic, laughing about the antics of our chipmunk and moaning about the state of this world. We’ll do our best to keep our little family safe and wish a safe and happy year to you all.

I just watched Robert Greenwald’s new documentary Wal-Mart: The high cost of low price. Greenwald also did Outfoxed a great documentary about Rupert Murdoch’s attack on American journalism. Now Greenwald skewers the world’s largest retailer with a relentless mix of very individual stories of family businesses that were ruined, workers who were intimidated and harassed, and abuses and violations that were covered up by one of the most powerful corporations in the world. He ties those stories together with facts and stats on how this highly profitable company underpays its employees and exploits the government assistance to the tune of billions of dollars every year. He also shows the abhorrent conditions of workers in the sweatshops in China, Bangladesh and Central America that make the cheap stuff that Wal-Mart hawks in its concrete boxes.

This is a great documentary, very focused on the story, very focused on documenting Wal-Mart’s impact on individual families and communities. Greenwald is no Michael Moore – he doesn’t try to corner Lee Scott or any of the Walton billionaires to get them to say something stupid or revealing. He stays behind the camera and lets the people tell the story: community organizers, former employees, judges, folks put out of business by Wal-Mart, and workers at the Wal-Mart sweatshops. And he contrasts their stories with the ads, the corporate PR BS and Lee Scott’s pronouncements. All these facts and stories bring anyone with half a brain to an inescapable conclusion: Wal-Mart is bad for your community and bad for this country. Wal-Mart is bad for you!

Boycott Wal-Mart!