The second film in Oliver Stone's presedential biographical trilogy, The Day Reagan Was Shot recounts how the most powerful nation on earth was reduced to a headless chicken by the actions of one nutter.
A Competent Democracy (newfuturemedia.net) examines the purported shortcomings of politics-based democracy and endorses a more technical approach.
While this short film feels like an abbreviated Venus Project documentary I am always happy to watch something that is more about solutions than problems.
I am reminded of Voltaire's preference for enlightened despotism:
Democracy seems suitable only to a very little country, and further it must be happily situated. Small though it be, it will make many mistakes, because it will be composed of men.
Unfortunately, being "enlightened" is dangerous as it justifies any action in the mind of the despot. Utopians feel justified in imposing their vision because they feel their vision is, by defninition, perfect. This enevitably results in - at best - trampling on the visions of others.
Wall Street Journal contributor Clint Boulton gaffed in a blog entry Monday titled "CIOs Beware: New Macbook Pro Will Be a Bandwidth Hog."
Clint argues that larger screens take up more bandwidth, apparently forgetting that there is a difference between screen resolution and the actual resolution content is delivered in:
...Better quality displays require more network bandwidth, which allows users to increase data consumption. Consider that experts told CIO Journalearlier this year that the new iPad, which includes a Retina display of 2048-by-1536 resolution with 3.1 million pixels, would slow enterprise networks to a crawl and increase data costs from carriers. Now imagine how a Macbook with 5.1 million pixels — two million more than the new iPad — will increase data traffic in office networks.
CIOs would do well to monitor network usage and make sure their employees aren’t watching too much high-definition content on YouTube and other data-hungry websites. CIOs whose policies for content consumption are lax must be prepared to increase bandwidth. Another option might be for CIOs to require workers who want to bring their own high-powered devices to the office to bring their own bandwidth as well. At the very least, CIOs might want to follow the lead of companies such as Google, which give employees a monthly “bill” for the IT services that they consume, and make the usage a matter of record throughout the company.
Apparently Clint is doing everything he can to meet his publishing quota, this bollocks is a continuation of his March 22 article, "The New iPad Could Create High-Speed Headaches for CIOs"
The rotten "experts" (with an s) in all this seem to be Amtel CEO P.J. Gupta who "sells software that sets alerts and notifications on bandwidth consumption."
One wonders how this technically challenged sap managed to get a gig writing articles for Chief Information Officers when he can't tell the difference between a sales pitch and objective analysis. I can see the HR people at WSJ are top notch.
This episode of the Al Jazeera-produced People & Power series examines Iran's nuclear program.
At about 14:30 the argument is made that due to the short half-life of medical isotopes allegedly to be produced by a certain reactor its location doesn't match the official story since the materials are likely to "decay before you even get them to where you want."
I'd just like to point out that Canada - a country over 6 times larger than Iran - drew over 80% of its medical isotopes from the NRU reactor at Chalk River. Since that reactor's decomission, much of the supply has been shipped in from Europe and even as far away as South Africa.
I find this argument rather impotent when we are talking about a country which can be crossed by land in daylight.
Despite the 9/11 Truth-y YouTube description which asserts that 9/11 was an inside job, this documentary mostly concerns itself with how the events of 9/11 have been used as a pretext for American imperialist expansion. Other interesting topics touched on include the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir and the use of Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions.
Although I consider this to be a more or less valid documentary, it is interesting to note that producers NuoViso Productions are selling DVDs about crop circles at the same time. Paranoid conspiracy theorists or patent "9/11 truth" discreditors? I'll let the armchair nutters decide this one!