Spiegel Anti-Americanism Lite

I had to laugh when I saw this less than subtle image of an evil corporation draped in American flags in an article about those naughty boys at Goldman Sachs at Spiegel Online. Alas, the editors can’t throw out the kind of in-your-face red meat to the legions of Amerika haters among its readers that they used to rake in the coin with a decade ago. Times have changed, people across the pond are watching, and one must keep up at least some threadbare remnant of the appearance of respectability. Don’t worry, though. Its readers get the drift, even if Spiegel now has to leave the blatant hate mongering seen in these images to the lesser rags.

Update: Iran and Twitter

Here’s something from Debka that adds point to my earlier reservations about Twittered revolutions. Some excerpts:

Part of the reason (the Iranian demonstrations petered out) was their organizers’ heavy reliance on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social sites to orchestrate their protest movement. They did not at first appreciate that Iranian intelligence Internet experts, operating from secret headquarters established months ago, were using their communications to shoot them down…

The high-end apparatus, installed in late 2008 by the German Siemens AG and Finnish Nokia Corp. cell phone giant, gave Iranian intelligence the most advanced tools anywhere for controlling, inspecting, censoring and altering Internet and cell phone messaging. Those tools were being used weeks before the poll to identify penetrations by alien spy services, their local agents and dissident activists…

Within a few days of their protest, Mir Hossein Mousavi and the bulk of his supporters, realizing their electronic campaign had been taken over by the regime to hunt them down, disappeared from the streets of Tehran.

Debka is occasionally too quick to credit rumors in its zeal to scoop the mainstream news organizations. I suspect they’re right on the money this time, though. The Internet was never designed to be secure. It can be a great mobilizer in a democracy. In a dictatorship, it’s more likely to be a trap.

Will the Turkey take a Swan Dive?

According to this article in the Washington Post, NASA is planning to “de-orbit” the International Space Station in 2016. As I mentioned in an earlier post, scientists can actually be fallible. I don’t know what they were thinking when they approved this $100 billion white elephant. We could have done a lot of good science with that kind of money. Instead we got a high-flying albatross.

I rather suspect this rather shocking announcement is meant more as a scare tactic than anything else. After all, the people who thought it was such a brilliant idea to put it up there to begin with will want to “protect our investment.” I’ll believe in the swan dive when I see it.