Thesaur's Ramblings

The editors of the Dalles Morning News made a brave and historic decision: No longer will they refer to the terrorists in Iraq as "insurgents". Let's hope this becomes a trend.

Here an exerpt from the Friday, July 15 editorial entitled Call Them What They Are: Those who murder Iraqi civilians are terrorists:

Today, this editorial board resolves to sacrifice another word – "insurgent" – on the altar of precise language. No longer will we refer to suicide bombers or anyone else in Iraq who targets and kills children and other innocent civilians as "insurgents."

The notion that these murderers in any way are nobly rising up against a sitting government in a principled fight for freedom has become, on its face, absurd. If they ever held a moral high ground, they sacrificed it weeks ago, when they turned their focus from U.S. troops to Iraqi men, women and now children going about their daily lives.

Read it all.

In reply, I sent the following letter to the editor:

As an American abroad, I applaud your decision to relegate the word "insurgent" to the dustbin. We live in a time when we can truly be proud to be Americans – when the brave men and women of our Armed Forces are the ones spreading freedom throughout the world. Those who kill the innocent to prevent the march of freedom cannot be called insurgents or militants. Whether in Iraq, Israel, the UK or elsewhere, they must be recognized for who they are.

Hat tip: LGF.

UPDATE July 19:
The letter was chosen for publication with the headline "Our military spreads freedom". It is available on the Dalles Morning News site (probably only available for one week, registration unfortunately required).

Yesterday I received a call for papers that was distributed on the Corpus Linguistics email list.

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) will hold a symposium on blogs at Stanford University next spring (March 27-29). The title is "Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs" and will cover everything from symantic processing to political science:

[01] AI methods for ethnographic analysis through blogs.
[02] Blogosphere vs. mediasphere; measuring the influence of blogs on the media.
[03] Centrality/influence of bloggers/blogs; ranking/relevance of blogs; web pages ranking based on blogs.
[04] Crawling/spidering and indexing.
[05] Human Computer Interaction; blogging tools; navigation.
[06] Multimedia; audio/visual blogs processing; aggregating information from different modalities.
[07] Semantic analysis; cross-blog name tracking; named relations and fact extraction; discourse analysis; summarization.
[08] Semantic Web; semantic blogging; unstructured knowledge management.
[09] Sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction.
[10] Social Network Analysis; communities identification; expertise discovery; collaborative filtering.
[11] Text categorization; gender/age identification; spam filtering.
[12] Time Series Forecasting; measuring predictability of phenomena based on blogs.
[13] Trend identification/tracking.

If NZ Bear would like to submit a paper on relationships between blogs and all that, I'm sure he would do very well

I might see about submitting a paper on one of the above topics, though I've not decided if I find time.

As some of you may know, I run a forum for alumni of the PHC Teencamps. There is a very fun game we play there: Forum mafia. It's got rules and all, and of course, it takes much longer than a regular mafia game.

In the current round, my veracity has been questioned. I'm stating here to all the world that if I am indeed a member of the mafia (and not a police officer), I will give each person who votes to kill my opponent a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate (or alternatively cash). In addition, if the doctor decides to save me, and I turn out to be mafia, the doctor will get an additional $25 Amazon.com gift certificate. If I am indeed mafia, and I don't pay out, I promise not to delete any comments on this post regarding this matter that will malign my character. As indeed I'd not be worth a plug nickle if I didn't pay up.

So there, guys, you have it. A real-life promise of real-life money if I am lying. Welcome to hard-ball forum mafia

Over at the German-language version (Medienkritik Online) of Davids Medienkritik, Paul13 (of nobloodforsauerkraut) posted recently on
third-world development and referenced the Live-8 concert. Specifically, he echoed the concerns of Kenyan economist James Shikwati that economic aid to African countries ends up in the hands of officials. Surprisingly, he for once believes a Spiegel-Online interview.

As Capitain Ed liveblogged a conference call with Sir Bob Geldorf, I think this should allay some fears that Paul had, especially in regard to the money getting into the wrong hands. Of course, it seems logical that the money goes to pay for the beaurocracies and corrupt officials in poor countries when we speak of normal aid, but if it would be possible to ensure a proper distribution, I think we could see some real progress. Whether anyone under Geldorf actually gets the point (read the paragraph about Dr. Chavis) is a whole 'nother issue.

Now, here's a possible sinister twist to the whole thing. Germany and the Eurozone are quickly running out of funds. Is it possible that Kanzler Schröder and his cronies want to cut foreign aid in favor of spending the money nationally? In this case, the interview in Spiegel may make more sense. The left is preparing the people for Schröders latest attempt to save the economy (and win reelection). It would make it that much harder for his opponent (Angela Merkel of the CDU) to win votes in the upcoming election. Since Schröder called the election early, opposition parties and candidates don't have as much time to talk to the people. We'll see how things work out, but I fear we're doomed to another term of SPD/Greens/PDS. With the dollar gaining strength, it will once again kill the Eurozone. Perhaps the only thing that can save it will be a return to capitalism (instead of socialism/very controlled capitalism), conservative politics (in the American sense), a decline in political apathy and the destruction of the welfare state.