Mahler's Prodigal Son

More than sound advice from Technorati for anyone - and isn't that everybody? - who uses a mobile phone: Cell phone monitoring is a big issue, and scandals like News of the World and CarrierIQ reveal how pervasive the issue is, and how easily it is for people and companies to monitor cell phones. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange warned cell phone users of this problem earlier this month when he released details of companies that are selling information they obtain through cell phone monitoring. According to Assange, more than 150 companies around the world have the ability to use cell phones as tracking devices to intercept messages and to listen to calls. Don’t think it’s true and that Assange is just a nutcase? Then consider that Verizon Wireless, the largest cellular carrier in the U.S., is already monitoring cell phones and selling the information. In October, Verizon enrolled its entire customer base into its program to track customer usage and location, as well as bro...

This piece on The Nation rightly reminds us that come 11 January, Gitmo will have been in existence for 10 years. A scourge on every conceivable ground. As David Cole, the writer of The Nation article rightly points out, one cannot continue to blame George Bush for the continuation of Guantanamo Bay. Obama, the so-called liberal and lawyer to boot, stands condemned for not shutting down Gitmo - and meanwhile, continuing to curb civil liberties in the US. On January 11 it will have been a decade since the first of the men we once called “the worst of the worst” were brought to Guantánamo Bay, a location handpicked by the Bush administration so that it could detain and interrogate terror suspects far from the prying eyes of the law. In the intervening years much has improved at this remote US-controlled enclave in Cuba. Allegations of ongoing torture have ceased; the detainees have access to lawyers and court review; and more than 600 of the 779 men once held there have been r...

2012 has rolled in and we will almost to a man and woman continue be hooked to our mobile devices and computers - to keep in touch, or whatever! Do we really have to be "attached" and "captive" to our mobile devices and computers 24/7? It's an issue - including a health-related one - and question raised by Roger Cohen in his latest op-ed piece for The New York Times . I’ve just returned to work after a few days with my 90-year-old father in Scotland. He lives without any access to e-mail or hand-held devices. It was interesting observing the effects of this vacuum on my teenage children, suddenly unable to center their lives around their laptops (and the screen-lowering gesture that seems to accompany the entry of an adult). They started to read voraciously. They were communicative. They got up earlier. To be fair, they also had a Dad with them who was not device distracted. It’s the start of a new year, a time for resolutions. To each his own, but I know th...

The revelation that reading books is positively healthy for you should give heart to parents and more so authors battling the scourge of ebooks. The The Sydney Morning Herald explains. Why should we bother reading a book? All children say this occasionally. Many of the 12 million adults in Britain with reading difficulties repeat it to themselves daily. But for the first time in the 500 years since Johannes Gutenberg democratised reading, many among our educated classes are also asking why, in a world of accelerating technology, increasing time poverty and diminishing attention spans, should they invest precious time sinking into a good book? The beginnings of an answer lie in the same technology that has posed the question. Psychologists from Washington University used brain scans to see what happens inside our heads when we read stories. They found that ''readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative''. The brain weaves these situation...

That the invasion - for it was nothing else - of Iraq was a devastating disaster for all concerned, not least of all the Iraqis, is beyond question. The number of Iraqis killed, as reported in this piece on CommonDreams ought to make the politicians who unleashed the war more than guilt-ridden. It won't happen though. They all seem more than content in and with the lives they lead having passed on from the political arena. What is "interesting" to whether they might eventually be brought to account as war-criminals. After the U.S. formally declared an end to the Iraq war in December, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who led the 1st Armored Division in 2003, said the U.S. needed to know the outcome was worth the cost. "We've paid a great price here, and it's a price worth paying," he said. Iraq Body Count (IBC), however, shows that great price has been paid in Iraqi civilian deaths. . IBC's newest analysis c...

From Stephen Walt's blog on FP : Twenty years ago this week, the Soviet Union was dissolved. Two years before, Moscow had dropped its geopolitical ambitions, allowing the Berlin Wall to fall peacefully. The United States had won the Cold War. Since then, U.S. military power is unmatched. Because enemy airplanes rarely come close to U.S. jets, no active American pilot has achieved the five kills necessary for the honorific title of "ace". Likewise, the U.S. Navy is larger than all the other seventeen high-seas fleets combined. The two most effective non-U.S. land forces (the British and French armies) are roughly the size of the smallest branch of the U.S. military machine, its Marine Corps. Has this unparalleled power allowed the United States to enjoy the much-touted peace dividend it earned by winning the Cold War? Is the United States better able to impose its will peacefully today than when Stalin blocked Berlin or Khrushchev placed nuclear missiles in Cuba? Ma...

The cost to the US of military returning from the war in Iraq will never ever be truly known. One thing is for sure. America will be faced with a huge bill to treat all these "wounded" personnel - physically and mentally - for years to come. All too sadly these people are being forgotten or over-looked by American society. Reports about the end of the war in Iraq routinely describe the toll on the U.S. military the way the Pentagon does: 4,487 dead, and 32,226 wounded. The death count is accurate. But the wounded figure wildly understates the number of American service members who have come back from Iraq less than whole. The true number of military personnel injured over the course of our nine-year-long fiasco in Iraq is in the hundreds of thousands -- maybe even more than half a million -- if you take into account all the men and women who returned from their deployments with traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress, depression, hearing loss, breathing diso...