The New York Times has produced a wonderfully interactive infographic that includes the most commonly used words from each of the US Presidents’ inaugural address. This is a really great way to get a sense of the scope of this country’s history. I came away from this infographic with a better sense of the challenges that faced the nation at different times, and also with a sense of how young this country really is.

The New York Times infographic presents a very intuitive timeline, featuring portraits of the presidents, along with a representation of the text of their inaugural address. The words have been scaled by frequency – more frequently used words appear larger. Words shown in yellow are special, in that they are quite different from the words used by the previous president.

Scroll through this infographic, just paying attention to the yellow words. You can instantly grok the big issue that a certain president is dealing with, and I think that reflects very positively on the value of this infographic. Next, scroll through the timeline, paying attention to the biggest words, and you can get a feeling for how the presidents ideologically approached their term. Great work!

RTFA: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/17/wash…

A look at the language of presidential inaugural addresses. The most-used words in each address appear in the interactive chart below, sized by number of uses. Words highlighted in yellow were used significantly more in this inaugural address than average.

RTFA: http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=78524&ne…

Mar 19 – A new audio message allegedly from Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden appears on the internet.
The Al Qaeda leader threatens the European Union with grave punishment over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad recently re-published in the Danish media. Bin Laden says the cartoons are part of a “crusade” which he’s linked to Pope Benedict.

Fascinating video, apparently produced by Bin Laden. In it, he declares that Islam is the superior law, when compared with … well, I don’t know what he’s comparing it to. See, the situation is complicated… Bin Laden claims that laws governing speech don’t protect any speech that would violate the laws of Islam.

I suppose that in the United States, we have a British-style common law system that aggregates and synthesizes historical precedent. This is combined with federal, state, and local republics, whose representatives are subject to popular vote. Each element in this shared historical catalog legal precedents is traceable, ultimately to its philosophical roots, which may have originated several millennia prior. At first glance, it seems like speech laws originated centuries before Islam.

Of course, that’s not a satisfying reason to dismiss Bin Laden’s remarks. Bin Laden points out a number of moral failures of the political machine that runs the US, UK, EU, and others. By showing that the system contains contradictory elements, he concludes that the system is failed and, by default, is therefore inferior to Islam.

So, we have a political system that simultaneously:

1) condones free speech
2) commits massacres

On the basis of 2 being unquestionably wrong, Bin Laden concludes that the system is also wrong on point 1. From the US perspective, the big difference between 1 and 2 is that the “people” are generally in favor of 1, but the people are generally opposed to 2. I think most people want to change 2, but want to keep 1.

The battle over religious pictures has been fought before. It was called The Great Schism, which had its roots in Iconoclasm. If you don’t recognize the word, iconoclasm means “to ban pictures.” That’s right – a multi-century war was fought between the 8th and 11th centuries inside the Catholic Church, ending with the entire machine splitting in half. It started with pictures, and it started when someone took a hilarious, unnecessarily extreme stance towards those pictures.

On this basis, I conclude that this Bin Laden video is just another TROLL. The authenticity of this video hasn’t been confirmed by anyone I trust, so this might just be another state-sponsored prank. The very notion that images would be a greater problem than massacres is so stupidly extreme, it might as well have been said by Rush Limbaugh.

The video is designed to rile up a bunch of people who seem to care about speech, and who love to flame a troll. Conveniently, someone has been fanning the fires of a particularly viral stand alone complex: Anonymous.

…let me just say:

IT’S A TRAP.

DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS.

HERE BE DRAGONS.

RTFA: http://www.cbldf.org/articles/archives/000026.shtm…

In 1967, Ernesto Che Guevara was executed by a Bolivian soldier after his capture during a failed guerilla uprising. Che was attempting to duplicate the success he, Fidel Castro, Camillo Cienfuegos and the rest of the tiny crew of the Granma had achieved in Cuba start in a remote location, then build support amongst the peasants to create a people’s army that can throw out the fascists and establish a new socialist republic. But the model that worked so well in Cuba was a complete failure in Bolivia, and Che died in the tiny village of Vallegrande. His ideas about socialism and guerilla war, however, didn’t die with him.

In 1968, Argentine comics writer Hector Oesterheld (1919-1977) and artists Alberto Breccia (1919-1993) and Enrique Breccia (Alberto’s son, 1945) produced a biography of Che in comics form. (To find out more about the amazing Breccia family, check out www.mundobreccia.com.) This book, called simply Che, was told in alternating chapters those drawn by Enrique showing the campaign in Bolivia, while Alberto showed Che’s life before the Bolivian expedition, and the forces that shaped his socialist revolutionary ideology.

According to the Wikipedia article on the comic’s author Oesterheld:

In 1976 [Oesterheld] disappeared, and a year later his daughters, Diana (21), Beatriz (19), Estela (25) and Marina (18), were arrested by the Argentine armed forces in La Plata, and were never seen again. His daughters’ husbands were also among those that vanished. One grandson, Martín, was born in captivity and recovered from the government by Oesterheld’s widow, Elsa Sánchez, and raised by her. A second, Fernando, born earlier, was raised by his paternal grandparents. Sanchez also participated in the protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and became of the spokeswomen for the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which advocates for the return of children of the disappeared to their birth families.

When the Italian journalist Alberto Ongaro enquired about Oesterheld’s disappearance in 1979, he received the reply: “We did away with him because he wrote the most beautiful story of Ché Guevara ever done”.[1] Argentine journalist Jacobo Timmerman, in his memoir of his own captivity, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, recalls seeing Oesterheld across the hall in a prison in 1977. In a report to the Argentine National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, which published its findings in 1984 entitled Nunca Más, Eduardo Arias recalls seeing Oesterheld between November 1977 and January 1978 in terrible physical shape at the secret detention center El Vesubio, which they sardonically named “the Sheraton”.

According to this installment of “Comic Book Urban Legends” from Comics Should be Good:

COMIC URBAN LEGEND: A writer was killed by the Argentinian government over his comic book work.

STATUS: Essentially True

It would not be much of an exaggeration, if one at all, to call Héctor Germán Oesterheld the greatest comic book writer Argentina ever saq. Heck, it might not be a stretch to say he was the greatest comic book writer South America ever saw.

In the discussion thread attached to this article, one poster laments:

15.Lynxara said …

Hearing the story of Héctor Germán told like this makes me want to read his work, badly. Unfortunately, it is a bit beyond my means to teach myself Spanish to do so.

Time and again I wonder– when we know so much about the fantastic comics produced in Europe and South America, why are there no scanslation groups translating them into English? Obviously many of these works just aren’t viable properties for commercial publication, but it makes no sense that fans and admirers wouldn’t want to spread knowledge of them among English-speaking readers.

It just baffles me. If groups of barely literate fifteen-year-olds can make Naruto a marketing force by translating new volumes into patchy English weeks after they street in Japan, then why can’t the entire comics community produce scanslations of stuff like the work of Héctor Germán? Or all the wonderful Disney comics only published in Italian? Or the tons of highly literate French comics we hear about all the time? Virtually all of these languages are more widely studied than Japanese, and the material’s a lot more worthy than a lot of manga that see scanslation!

Scanlation, according to Wikipedia, is the process of distributed scanning/translating comics through some medium like IRC.

The original plates of this comic have been destroyed. It appears to be unavailable in English – only Spanish. So, here we have a story about an Argentinian writer, who chronicled the story of Che, a Cuban revolutionary, where Che was killed by the Bolivian government (in Bolivia), and Oesterheld writer was killed during the Argentinian Dirty War.

I have a few questions:

1. Is there any copyright in existence that could possibly apply to Oesterheld/Breccia/Breccia’s “Che”?
2. Is there any barrier, at all, to reproducing the Spanish version of Che?
3. Is the production of an English translation simply a matter of connecting someone in the scanlation community with someone who is willing to scan a copy of Che?
4. In the scheme of things, isn’t an English translation bound to happen sooner or later?
5. Given the history and context of Oesterheld/Breccia/Breccia, isn’t this a work of historical significance, and arguably deserving of translation?

With these questions in mind, I wish to conclude on this note: Internet!

RTFA: http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=24025

After falling steadily in the index for the past three years, the G8 members have recovered a few places. France (31st), for example, has climbed six places in the past year. French journalists were spared the violence that affected them at the end of 2005 in a labour conflict in Corsica and during the demonstrations in the city suburbs. But many concerns remain about repeated censorship, searches of news organisations, and a lack of guarantees for the confidentiality of journalists’ sources.
There were slightly fewer press freedom violations in the United States (48th) and blogger Josh Wolf was freed after 224 days in prison. But the detention of Al-Jazeera’s Sudanese cameraman, Sami Al-Haj, since 13 June 2002 at the military base of Guantanamo and the murder of Chauncey Bailey in Oakland in August mean the United States is still unable to join the lead group.
Italy (35th) has also stopped its fall, even if journalists continue to be under threat from mafia groups that prevent them from working in complete safety. Japan (37th) has seen a letup in attacks on the press by militant nationalists, and this has allowed it to recover 14 places.

RTFA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c76yeqQY2ms

Ron Paul takes a moment to talk about the Internet. I depend on the Internet for day-to-day tasks, and all of my peers do too. I hope that Ron Paul doesn’t oppose any form of net neutrality regulation. It’s possible that collusion needs to be actively prevented – I’m not sure US utilities companies have proven that they can responsibly deliver the best service at the best rates.

On the one hand, I strongly support a separation of Internet and Government. On the other hand, I do think the Internet must be tended and cultivated. The ultimate fear is FCC-style regulations that limit the ability of individuals to publish online.