Stephen Walli is Blogging

Stephen has started a blog (you might remember him from interviews related to Microsoft's open source applications FlexWiki and WiX).

He has posted an interesting essay: When are you going to sue your customers?:

The article contains some histerical examples.

Still in Boston

I was on my route to Seattle, but my planes kept getting cancelled. Am scheduled to leave Boston tomorrow morning and arrive to Seattle at 7pm.

Iraq

An unparalleled collection of pictures from children in Iraq is here. Not the average images on mass media.

This guy has 53 days of daily pictures from Iraq (I took the previous link from here).

Another article from Robert Fisk reporting from Bagdad.

Plutocracy and Ramsey Clark

Former attorney general Ramsey Clark will be defending Hussein, some of his reasons are detailed on a note published today. I found it interesting, and also found this intereview from 1999 where he touches on Vietnam, Iraq and military spending:

If we are to significantly change our culture, we need to recognize that we are held in thrall by two desperately harmful value patterns. One is the glorification of violence. We absolutely, irrationally, insanely glorify violence. We often think that we enjoy watching the good guys kill the bad guys, but the truth is that we enjoy watching the kill itself.

The other value is materialism. We are the most materialistic people who have ever lived. We value things over children. Indeed, the way we show how much we value children is by giving them things, to the point where a mother's self-esteem depends on whether she's the first in her neighborhood to get her child some new toy.

[...]

You began this interview by asking me about U.S. foreign policy, and I said that it's been a failure. Here is the standard by which I would judge any foreign or domestic policy: has it built a healthier, happier, more loving society, both at home and abroad? The answer, in our case, is no on both counts.

[...]

We also have to realize that we're going to be here only one time, and we've got to enjoy life, however hard it is. To miss the opportunity for joy is to miss life. Any fool can be unhappy; in fact, we make whole industries out of being unhappy, because happy people generally make lousy consumers. It's interesting to see how the poor understand all of this better than the rich.