Sims 2 hacks: The “No Jealousy” patch lets them keep multiple lovers without getting slapped all the time. Another hack allows teenagers in the Sims 2 to get pregnant. As the game is sold, they can’t even have sex.

Christmas Tsunami 2004: largest sea-quake in known history. Over 200,000 casualties, and still counting.

Previous largest known sea-quake: Lisbon, Portugal, 1755 over 100,000 casualties.

Largest natural disaster: Bhola Cyclone in Bangladesh, 13 november 1970, 250,000 – 500,000 casualties, depending on which estimate you believe..

Black Death, 1348: about 50 million casualties.

Spanish Flu, 1918: 25 to 40 million casualties.

AIDS: 23 million casualties since 1981, and counting.

World War II: 55 million casualties.

Mao Zedong: estimated 30 million casualties, Stalin: many millions.

Hunger: 25,000 people. Daily.

There’s a lot of work to be done. Let’s make this world a better place.

[Quote:]

De afgelopen feestdagen gaven weer veel stof tot reflectie. De tendens van de tijd wordt duidelijker als je wat afstand neemt.

Het grote thema van de politiek is het in het algemeen belang bijsturen van de gevolgen van globalisering en massamigratie. We leven nog steeds met de gevolgen van de val van de Berlijne Muur in 1989; h�t symbool van vastgeroeste grenzen en beperkingen.

De Britse premier Margaret Thatcher zei indertijd naast vreugde ook zorgen te voelen over de “dooi” van de Koude Oorlog. Ze waarschuwde voor het kruiende ijs dat wel eens gevaarlijker zou kunnen zijn dan de toestand van bevroren verhoudingen.

Gelukkig hebben de mensen zich over het algemeen goed aangepast aan de nieuwe ontwikkelingen. Uitvindingen als het Internet hebben van de grenzenloze wereld ook een nieuwe en welvarender communicatieve wereld gemaakt. China zorgt voor een toevloed aan goedkope consumptieartikelen die de inflatie drukt, ondanks de hoge energieprijzen.

Echter, de democratie is de klap van het kruiende ijs nog niet te boven. De politiek worstelt met de neergang van de natiestaat. In Nederland komt daar het einde van de verzuiling bij. Onze elites zijn niet in staat tot ingrijpende hervormingen van het partijdemocratische stelsel dat bestaat sinds de Pacificatie van 1917.

De grootste zorg is niet het kruiende ijs – de dooi – maar de overstromingen in de lente van een nieuwe eeuw. De politiek staat vrijwel machteloos tegenover de krachten van de dynamische wereldmarkt en de ontwrichting door de immigratie van met name niet-Westerse arbeidskrachten.

In deze tijd worstelt niet alleen het Westen met het sociale, politieke en dus ook morele verval. Het onbehagen in de Islam is zo mogelijk nog groter als het onbehagen met de Islam. Helaas heeft de radicalisering die daarvan het gevolg is zich vermengd met de vervreemding van migrantenkinderen in onze democratie en geleid tot een gevaarlijk extremisme, waabij de belangen en zelfs het leven van ongelovige medeburgers niet meer tellen.

Het lijkt alsof de democratie als politiek systeem weerloos is tegenover terreur en ontbinding. Men blijft gefixeerd op de corporatistische consensus en vergeet dat politici ook zelf maatschappelijke krachten kunnen aansturen. De boel bijelkaar houden is het minimalistische programma van veel progressieve bestuurders; niet een grootse visie op een nieuwe, open samenleving die weerbaar is in een wereld in beweging.

Het grootste conflict van deze tijd is het besef van de onvermijdelijke overgang van oud naar nieuw en de orthodoxe reflexen van de gevestigden om alles “bij het oude” te laten. Dat dit proces van verzet “tegen de keer” leidt tot veel lijden, is afgelopen jaar wel bewezen.

De oude vormen gaan nu echt verdwijnen, alle achterhoedegevechten ten spijt. Ik heb echter nog geen idee wat het nieuwe zal worden. Wie wel? De intellectuele en spirituele leiding ontbreken volledig.

Het is deze toestand van decadente verwarring die de seculiere democratie het meest bedreigt. Veranderingen vinden mensen nooit prettig. Een politiek die de onzekerheden aanwakkert in plaats van omzet in nieuwe opbouwende krachten is vooral bezig met het behouden van de eigen macht en instituties.

Vernieuwing en hervorming zijn de leidraden van deze tijd. Een sociale democratie die gegrondvest is op bestaanszekerheden zal het daar nog heel moeilijk mee krijgen. Laffe politiek en behoudzucht zijn echter geen opties.

CALENDARIO ROMANO PERPETUO

[Quote:]

The coastline of south Asia has been radically altered, but the political landscape in Washington remains familiar. Behind the stentorian rhetoric about the battle between good and evil lies the neoconservative struggle to remove human rights sanctions against the Indonesian military, which is waging a vicious war against the popular separatist movement on Banda Aceh, the province hardest hit by the tsunami.

The war between the Indonesian military and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) has raged for more than two decades. A ceasefire negotiated in 2002, with the involvement of former general Anthony Zinni as US representative, was brutally broken by the military in May 2003. The Indonesian military is a virtual state within a state and is unaccountable for its human rights violations and criminal activities. After its war of ethnic cleansing against East Timor concluded with independence following diplomatic intervention, the military was determined not to lose Banda Aceh.

In its war there, the military has mimicked the language of the war on terrorism and the Iraq war, calling its operation “shock and awe”, targeting the population as terrorist supporters, and expelling all international observers, including the UN, from the region. Human Rights Watch documented extensive torture and abuse.

Bush administration policy has been conflicted, confused and negligent. The leading neoconservative at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, has tried to overthrow US restrictions on aid to, and relations with, the Indonesian military. The neoconservative thrust is undeterred by the military’s obstruction of the FBI investigation into the murder of two US businessmen in 2002, killings that appear to implicate the military. When the state department issued a human rights report on Indonesia’s abysmal record, its spokesman replied: “The US government does not have the moral authority to assess or act as a judge of other countries, including Indonesia, on human rights, especially after the abuse scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.”

On his tour of Banda Aceh, Powell made no determined effort to restore the cease-fire. Meanwhile, GAM reports that the Indonesia military is using the catastrophe to launch a new offensive. “The Indonesians get the message when you have no high-level condemnation of what they’re doing,” Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch told me. A renewed effort by Wolfowitz against sanctions is expected soon.

In the name of the war on terrorism, neoconservatives attempt to bolster the repressive military, which flings the Bush administration’s sins back in its face. In the “march of freedom”, human rights are cast aside. The absence of moral clarity is matched by the absence of strategic clarity.

[Quote:]

A 120-year-old giant tortoise living in a Kenyan sanctuary has become inseparable from a baby hippo rescued by game wardens, officials said on Thursday.

The year-old hippo calf christened Owen was rescued last month, suffering from dehydration after being separated from his herd in a river that drains into the Indian Ocean.

“When we released Owen into the enclosure, he lumbered to the tortoise which has a dark gray color similar to grown up hippos,” Sabine Baer, rehabilitation and ecosystems manager at the park, told Reuters.

She said the hippo’s chances of survival in another herd were very slim, predicting that a dominant male would have killed him.

However, Owen’s relationship with the Aldabran tortoise named Mzee, Swahili for old man, may end soon. The sanctuary plans to place Owen with Cleo, a lonely female hippo.

Makgatho Mandela carries a fruit basket before boarding the ferry to be taken where his father spent much of his 27 year incarceration in Robben Island Prison, in this July 18, 1989 file picture
[Quote:]

South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, one of Africa’s most committed campaigners in the battle against AIDS, announced that his only surviving son had succumbed to the disease on Thursday.

Makgatho Mandela, 54, died in a Johannesburg clinic where he had been receiving treatment for more than a month. His wife Zondi died in 2003 from pneumonia.

“I announce that my son has died of AIDS,” the 86-year-old Nobel Peace laureate told a news conference, urging a redoubled fight against the disease.

“Let us give publicity to HIV/AIDS and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like a normal illness like TB, like cancer, is always to come out and to say somebody has died because of HIV/AIDS. And people will stop regarding it as something extraordinary,” said a frail-looking Mandela, surrounded by his grandchildren and other family members.

Electronics manufacturer Hitachi unveiled a sub one inch hard drive with a capacity of 8 to 10 gigabytes during the official press event at the 2005 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas January 4, 2005.

[Quote:]

In recent years, there’s been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, “We’ve got to look at patents, we’ve got to look at copyrights.” What’s driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?
No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist.

And this debate will always be there. I’d be the first to say that the patent system can always be tuned–including the U.S. patent system. There are some goals to cap some reform elements. But the idea that the United States has led in creating companies, creating jobs, because we’ve had the best intellectual-property system–there’s no doubt about that in my mind, and when people say they want to be the most competitive economy, they’ve got to have the incentive system. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future.

I refuse to believe that Bill Gates thinks intellectual property is a requirement for innovation – I refuse to believe Bill Gates thinks Open Source developers are communists. As propaganda goes, this quote is a very bad one, but I admire the way he links “pirating” music and movies to patents. He slipped that in very nicely.

[Quote:]

Despite suffering technical glitches that prompted jokes and guffaws, Bill Gates promised Wednesday that Microsoft Corp. would help millions of consumers stay seamlessly plugged into a world of digital music, movies, video games and television shows.

In his seventh annual keynote speech at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft’s chairman explained that the proliferation of broadband Internet access and the falling price of data storage are compelling people to put music, photos, movies and other aspects of their life into a digital format.

“We predicted at the beginning of this decade that this would be a decade where the digital approach would be taken for granted,” Gates told hundreds of technologists who gathered for his kickoff to the world’s largest electronics show. “It’s going even faster than we expected.”

But while promoting what he calls the “digital lifestyle,” Gates showed how vulnerable all consumers — even the world’s richest man — are to hardware and software bugs.

During a demonstration of digital photography with a soon-to-be-released Nikon camera, a Windows Media Center PC froze and wouldn’t respond to Gates’ pushing of the remote control.

Later in the 90-minute presentation, a product manager demonstrated the ostensible user-friendliness of a video game expected to hit retail stores in April, Forza Motor Sport. But instead of configuring a custom-designed race car, the computer monitor displayed the dreaded “blue screen of death” and warned, “out of system memory.”