Inside View from Ireland

Essential iPod

AMAZON -- Based on customer purchases, the 20 GB Apple iPod is the #7 item among early adopters of computing technology. If you look at all iPods available on Amazon, the iPod's different models comprise four of the top 10 electronics items ordered by Amazon shoppers.

They took away my country

BERKELEY -- Seymour Hersh could have been speaking as my grandfather. "My parents were immigrants," Hersh told a group at UC Berkeley. "They came here because America meant something…the Statue of Liberty and all that stuff, because America always was this bastion of morality and integrity and a place for a fresh start. And it's right in front of us, not hidden, that they've taken this away from us."

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Bonnie Azeb Powell -- "Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh spills the secrets of the Iraq quagmire and the war on terror" with Webcast/
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Hard Work

SIM SADLER -- For those who missed the tussling in the American Presidential debate series, there is a mash-up that takes one minute to review the rhetoric of President George Bush.

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Sim Sadler -- "Hard-working George" is a 6 MB MOV licensed under a Creative Commons License and is Copyrighted © 2004 by Sim Sadler.
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Google Desktop Search Review

Noah and the Grand Canyon

ONE OF THE things I want to do before I die is to ride downstream in Arizona white water. It's all the more compelling now that the Bush Administration has decided that it will stand by its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces. Fact is, you can take a creationist view about nature and wrap yourself in the same knowledge as those who wrote the creationist book that is for sale at Grand Canyon museums and bookstores. The National Park Service spokesperson Elaine Sevy is quoted in the Baptist Press News as saying, “Now that the book has become quite popular, we don’t want to remove it.” And why should they? With a little more publicity, this American national treasure could become as iconic as the WTC towers and attract explosions and made-for-television panoramic shots that create a Wild West backdrop to the War on Terror. That seems to be an appropriate response to the rhetoric used by exceptionalistic President Bush.

From Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER):

Death of Rommel

SIXTY YEARS AGO, Germans marked time to observe Erwin Rommel's funeral. For a time, Erwin Rommel was Hitler's favorite general. Gaining prominence in 1940 as a commander of a panzer division that smashed the French defenses, Rommel went on to command the Afrika Korps where his tactical genius, ability to inspire his troops and make the best of limited resources, prompted Hitler to elevate him to the rank of Field Marshall. In 1943, Hitler placed Rommel in charge of fortifyng the "Atlantic Wall" along the coast of France--defenses intended to repel the inevitable invasion of Europe by the Allies.

By the beginning of 1943, Rommel's faith in Germany's ability to win the war was crumbling, as was his estimation of Hitler. Touring Germany, Rommel was appalled at the devastation of the Allied bombing raids and the erosion of the peoples' morale. He also learned for the first time of the death camps, slave labor, the extermination of the Jews and the other atrocities of the Nazi regime. Rommel became convinced that victory for Germany was a lost cause and that prolonging the war would lead only to his homeland's devastation. He came in contact with members of a growing conspiracy dedicated to ousting Hitler and establishing a separate peace with the western allies.

On July 17, 1944, British aircraft strafed Rommel's staff car, severely wounding the Field Marshall. He was taken to a hospital and then to his home in Germany to convalesce. Three days later, an assassin's bomb nearly killed Hitler during a strategy meeting at his headquarters in East Prussia. In the gory reprisals that followed, some suspects implicated Rommel in the plot. Although he may not been aware of the attempt on Hitler's life, his "defeatist" attitude was enough to warrant Hitler's wrath. The problem for Hitler was how to eliminate Germany's most popular general without revealing to the German people that he had ordered his death. The solution was to force Rommel to commit suicide and announce that his death was due to his wounds.

Motorola's Blended Vision

USA TODAY -- Conversations and posters inside the Motorola canteen in the Mahan Industrial Park (County Cork, Ireland) portend the next-generation world network. This network transcends the internet. It will be detached from personal computers and will blend several types of technology.

Motorola chief executive Ed Zander explains, "The big change is going to be when the internet follows you, not you trying to follow the internet. It's just there. Your life is just affected the way it's affected today by the lights in a room." Motorola sees a future of "seamless mobility" that will allow information to follow you anywhere switching between wired, Wi-Fi and cell networks without you having to do anything.

Visible Visions

KCAT -- One of the most heart-warming collections of contemporary visual art in Ireland comes from the Kilkenny Collective for Arts Talent, a group partially funded through the EU HORIZON initiative. The 143 page glossy paperback contains 112 high resolution images. The paintings, charcoal sketches, sculpture and mixed media--all done by students working around their disabilities--demonstrate a passion for artwork at the highest level, with great attention to quality. The work evolves on the strength of enthusiastic collaboration between the artists and their mentors.

Sometimes you cannot bare your soul

QUEEN OF SKY -- As Ellen "Queen of Sky" has discovered from the HR Department at Delta Airlines, sometimes you cannot flaunt your opinions (or bare your cleavage) on company time or in company attire.

Indymedia Ripped Offline

POLITECHBOT -- Evidence is beginning to mount that the authorities of at least four countries (Switzerland, Italy, U.K and U.S.A.) are involved in last week's seizure of two of Indymedia's servers that brought down more than 20 of the Indymedia network's web sites and several internet radio streams. Indymedia has yet to receive any official statement or information about what the order entailed or why it was issued.

An FBI spokesperson, Joe Parris confirmed to Agence France-Presse that the FBI issued a subpoena to the provider who hosted the Indymedia servers in the U.K., but that it was "on behalf of a third country." [1] Cyberspace used to be "where you are when you're on the phone." Now it appears to be "where your data is when it gets handed over to the FBI". It appears that the prosecutor was merely requesting information, and the FBI got the wrong end of the big, globalised stick.