Month: February 2011

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

[Ghonim] repeatedly hammered home a simple message: “This is your country; a government official is your employee who gets his salary from your tax money, and you have your rights.”

It’s nice to know that the World Economic Forum is finally catching up with the World Social Forum in using Drupal. Maybe they’ll catch up in other ways too.

Some American friends of Israel argue gamely that Israel is a strategic asset to the superpower, a doughty democracy that provides intelligence, high technology, storage for American weapons and so forth. But that was an easier argument to make during the cold war. More recently, the benefits have been eclipsed by the costs. These range from the billions American taxpayers give Israel and Egypt to underwrite the 1979 peace, to all the resentment America’s Muslim allies harbour towards the superpower for being soft on the oppressor of the Palestinians. Its help to Israel may not be al-Qaeda’s main grievance against America, but in the war on terror this past decade Israel has surely been more of a liability than an asset in the contest for hearts and minds.

In the world of mobile, there is no anonymity,” says Michael Becker of the Mobile Marketing Association, an industry trade group. A cellphone is “always with us. It’s always on.