Not the one in Iraq.  I swear to God I’ll have my blog done in a bit.  I apologize for the wait here, I just haven’t gotten to my lunch break at work yet, and that’s when I’ll be writing it.

August 7th, the day before the Olympics started, a conflict started between Georgia and Russia.  Georgia, who gained their independence from the former USSR in 1991 attacked the capital of the separatist region of South Ossetia, hoping to over take it and bring it back into the fold of Georgia as a more unified nation.  In response, Russia began an air strike, naval, and cyber campaign against Georgia on behalf of the region.  Since then Russia has launched an invasion force from Abkhazia, another separatist region along Georgia’s norther border.  Much violence has ensued, and it’s left more than 200,000 people homeless.  Countries around the world have called for a cease fire, and Georgia signed a cease-fire treaty for the EU, one that Russia discarded claiming that Georgia had ignored the cease fire by using helicopters in a bombing campaign.  Russia has announced that it will support a cease-fire on the conditions that Georgia disarms and withdraws forces from Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

I just want to say a few things about this conflict while it’s still going on.  What we have here is a country that managed to become independent from the Soviet Union during their break up in the early 90’s.  Later, around ‘95, we had these two areas that had major separatist movements that resulted in the ethnic cleansing of roughly 250,000 ethnic Georgians who were citizens in the area.  Through the use of violence they managed to gain a kind of de facto independence from Georgia, however they are still technically a part of the nation.  Now, we have Russia north of these two regions (both regions are pro-Russia) who has launched a full on offensive in Georgia when Georgia tried to bring a separatist region back into the fold.  We have Russia saying that the lack of Western nations denouncing the move “raises very serious questions about sincerity and their attitude towards our country”.  Our country, they said.  Russia then moves a full invasion force into Georgia from the northeast region of Abkhazia, a force that we are supposed to assume was amassed over the course of a couple of days.  These actions are the ones that have been denounced by Western nations, and Georgia is saying that Russia is attempting an ethnic cleanse of the region, attempting to over power the small country and bring it back into the fold that is Russia, and was the Soviet Union.  Russia’s actions here look a little suspicious to me.

As a friend of mine said, it’s hard to be on either side of a conflict where people are shooting at each other, but I can’t help but feel for Georgia in this case.  While it could be said that they started the conflict by moving into South Ossetia, it is not Russia’s place to defend the separatist region that is part of Georgia, and even less they’re place to refer to South Ossetia as “our country”.  I have a hard time believing that the level of action we’ve seen in this conflict wasn’t to some level planned by Russia, especially considering the cyber-attacks that we’re seeing on the countries government sites.  This had to have more prepared for than the quick response that occurred over the weekend.  This appears to be a direct military action by Russia, possibly to try to reincorporate the entire country of Georgia.

Posted by Wes Mueller on 08/11 at 12:58 PM  •   •  permalink

I am starting to wonder about John McCain’s campaign, and exactly what they’re trying to accomplish with all these negative ads.  McCain recently released two new ads: a new celebrity ad, this time sans the celebrities, to paint Obama as a celebrity who is out of touch with what Americans are suffering, and an ad that seems to be directly taken from one of Obama’s main planks.  Now, it’s easy to see why McCain would want to attack Obama for having achieved celebrity status.  McCain has been on capital hill for more than two decades and is yet to achieve the level of popularity Obama has gathered over the course of a couple of years.  It’s very easy to see why McCain might be bitter about this.  After all, in his two decades he’s clearly the underdog maverick right?  It’s not like he married some woman with a huge amount of money, or had a military background to back him up, or years of working on Capitol Hill building his reputation.  He’s the underdog!  Unlike Obama, who’s new on the national political scene, black, no military experience, and hasn’t had long to really build the national connections that are so important.  Not an underdog at all…

What I think is great about McCain’s new ad, the one that isn’t an attack on Obama’s celebrity status, is that it seems be a plagiarism of one of Obama’s biggest stances.  The stance that Washington is broken, and that we need to take action now to fix it.  Unfortunately for McCain, Obama has an advantage in that he hasn’t been sitting in the moral swamp that is Capital Hill for more than four years, and therefore hasn’t really shown that he’s part of the old political machine.  McCain, who now claims that he’s the one to fix a broken Washington, has been sitting in this ethical quagmire for twenty-six years now, and hasn’t fixed anything.  Even when he was working towards “ending” the influence of lobbyists, he was involved in an ethics scandal know as the Keating Five.  While cleared of corruption charges, it certainly shows that even from early on McCain had gotten his feet wet with old politics, the exact thing he claims he will be fixing if he’s elected.  One must wonder why McCain is only now realizing that Washington has become a haven for corrupt, partisan dealings and needs to be fixed, and why he hasn’t taken this stance for the past twenty or so years.

Posted by Wes Mueller on 08/08 at 11:07 AM  •   •  permalink

A little respect, that is.  Paris Hilton has decided that she doesn’t like being used by the McCain campaign in a negative comparison with Obama, using her as an airhead celebrity to say that Obama is not ready to lead the country.

In a hilarious move, Paris has made the video that assumes because she was in McCain’s ad, she must be running for president and that McCain’s ad was an endorsement, and she wants America to know that she is ready to lead.  I think that the fact that she’s striking back against a presidential candidate is pretty commendable.  The downside for her though is that if he gets elected he could just reinstate the estate taxes that would make her have to pay taxes on her inheritance.

Posted by Wes Mueller on 08/06 at 08:10 AM  •   •  permalink

In the on going copyright conflict between Viacom and Google/YouTube, we have some new faces on the scene.  It seems that some of Europe’s big channels, Mediaset SpA in Italy and TF1 in France, are jumping on the assholes of the Internet bandwagon by filing similar lawsuits against YouTube in their own countries.  Further, Viacom is now seeking an injunction against YouTube to stop them from any future infringing.

Let’s repeat that.  Viacom is now seeking an injunction against YouTube to stop them from any future infringing.

Are you kidding me Viacom?  Do you even know what the DMCA is?  Do you realize that YouTube itself is infringing, that its users are?  Do you realize that that infringement is specifically prohibitied by YouTube, and that they, because of the sheer number of user submitted content, have no reasonable way to monitor the content?  Asking for an injunction against further infringement has got to be one of the best way I can imagine Viacom saying “I don’t care how the interwebs works, I just want my money!” If it weren’t for the fact that they have the most reliable news source I would even ask people to boycott these jerks.  If only someone would go after Viacom’s attacks on the internet as much as they went after Scientology’s…

Posted by Wes Mueller on 08/04 at 09:47 AM  •   •  permalink

Piracy.  What a scary word if you happen to work for a movie studio or record company (or live in Indonesia).  It means that you created a product that could be replicated digitally at no cost, and people are assuming that means they can have it for free.  Why?  Because the studios and record companies (who will be from here on referenced to as They, Them, or other capitalized pronouns) have been fighting the future, and that future is the death of the hard copy.  Everyone wants digital distribution, and they want it to be cheap.  People are recognizing the price of distribution for what it is and they’re taking advantage of massive file sharing networks that have been landmarks in technological innovation.  Bit torrent is getting more and more popular both for illegal file sharing and the distribution of legal goods, such as patches for video games or downloading other software from the net.  Even though people are being sued by Them, piracy continues to see an upward rise.  Soccer moms and college students everywhere are become less and less afraid of the legal ramifications of file sharing, and understandably so.  With such an upwards trend, who’s going to stop them.  They can sue some of us, but They can’t get us all, right?  Unfortunately, They don’t seem to recognize the facts, and the facts are that file sharing on the internet is not going to go away no matter what you do.  Find us on Kaaza?  We’ll disappear into a torrent.  Hack and destroy our computers?  We’ll release your emails across the web showcasing your illegal actions (I’m looking at you Media Defender).  This is a matter of fact that They need to accept.  The sooner They accept that, the sooner they can move on to plans to make money off of the file sharing.

Wait, what?  But how could They make money off of us illegally sharing their software?  The EFF has a great idea on how, and it’s something that would be fairly easy to implement if They just gave it a moments thought.  Each of the major labels and studios could set up voluntary collective licensing.  These collectives offer unlimited downloading of their content for a monthly subscription, say five to ten dollars.  This would allow for users to still use torrent, Limewire, Soulseek, whatever they wanted to share the files, and it would all be legitimate, legal sharing.  No looming threat of a lawsuit, no squashing of innovation because you can only buy this studios music on iTunes.  Make file sharing legal and legit and most users will choose to pay their five dollars a month for as much content as their bandwidth will allow.  Speaking of bandwidth, another great thing this can cause is a mainstream recognition of file sharing as a legitimate use of bandwidth.  This would help prevent ISPs from throttling the downloads (I’m looking at you Comcast...oh, so is the FCC!).  The ISPs could even subsidize or include the fee for file sharing in their normal cost, so the average user wouldn’t even necessarily see a visible charge for file sharing in their life.

Of course, this is all just wishful thinking.  They will never recognize the beauty of file sharing, and that is just going to keep causing Them profit loss.  Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to live in fear of Sweden changing it’s copyright laws to take down The Pirate Bay.

Posted by Wes Mueller on 08/01 at 09:29 AM  •   •  permalink