Recently a lot of people have been praising and sharing Norm Stamper's article from the Nation, Paramilitary Policing From Seattle to Occupy Wall Street. Stamper was chief of the Seattle Police Department during the WTO protests of 1999, and has since argued that the police actions at that time were inappropriate.

While what stamper writes in the article is not wrong, I argue that it fails to get to the heart of the problem, and thus fails even to suggest any real solutions.

A number of different people have asked me about my negative views on "Occupy Wall Street", so it seemed a good thing to try to set them down in some more or less coherent form.

There has been a considerable amount of discussion on the net recently about the attacks in Noway and the rush to judge them as the work of "(Islamic) terrorists", much of it thoughtful, if perhaps not particularly "new". I suggest that it is not "new" because it has been obvious at least since the 1980s that "one man's 'terrorist' is another man's 'freedom fighter'" (though I don't recall where I first read that). What is new is the way that 'terrorist' has become linked to 'Islam' in the Anglo-American media in this century, as Glenn Greenwald illustrates in his The omnipotence of Al Qaeda and meaninglessness of "Terrorism".

That said, in a generally well-considered article, Greenwald, like some others goes too far in seeming to equate Breivik's attacks in Norway with the attacks of organizations. This goes too far because there really is a difference between an individual and an organization.

This is a response to Don Berg's Do you believe in time and mind?.

Stanley Fish recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on "Religion and the Liberal State - Once Again".While he may make some interesting points, there seems to me to be a serious problem in his understanding of what a liberal state requires, and therefore also its relation to religious belief.

Over at ComputerWorldUK, Glyn Moody argues that Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory...Ain't. This is an instance of a somewhat common theme among, supporters of the GPL, in essence, that it is somehow 'unfair' for software to be licenced in a way that is incompatible with the GPL.

I submit that is is not just incorrect, but indeed the very opposite of correct.

I was taken aback recently by some comments by Stephen Hawking as quoted in the Times:

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach."

A friend of mine recently called my attention to Chris Hedges Calling All Rebels. It is a very strange article, being a combination of existentialism with a call to action, that ultimately ties itself up into a hopeless muddle. I submit that this is not an issue of lack of clarity about the course of action, as at least some commenters suggest, but something much deeper; that is: confusion over what is the supposed point of any action.

Like many people working with computers, I've been paying a small amount of attention to the release of the new Apple 'iPad'. Though I don't work much in the Apple ecosystem these days, I still have a certain "nostalgia" for Apple and Mac, given that my very first computer was a Mac+. Unfortunately, after reading around a bit, I am forced to the concludion that the 'iPad' is likely to be a 'miss', rather than a 'hit'.

Over at Angry Bear, there is a quote that relates to an issue that I find interesting, and where I added the comment that follows.

[Robert Haines, senior insurance analyst at CreditSights] said. "The counterparties on most of the book are (European) banks that would be hammered if the U.S. walked away."

I've seen comments like this a few times now -- often attached to complaints about bailing out foreign banks -- and there is something about this particular meme that I don't quite follow. Of course, I'm no economist, so it may be just my own ignorance, and I would very much like to hear an explanation of how my own understanding is faulty.