Here’s the first.

And here’s the second.

This must be what it feels like waiting for the end.

At least that was what I was thinking the other night. My mother and the rest of the family and staff are gone. After the mukhabarat came, they left for Beirut. They’re hardly the only ones who’ve disappeared the last few days. Many of those who can afford to have slipped away and are in Lebanon or further afield. Many who can’t afford to have left as well … and from what I’ve heard, it’s worse in some other cities. Maybe Dera’a is the last, maybe it is the first, maybe a revolution comes soon, maybe a civil war.

I can’t blame anyone for leaving. I probably would leave too if it were just me. But my dad is staying. So I’ll stay and be the dutiful daughter…

You can find the whole perspective from inside a country on the brink of civil war here.

By the way, shahid means martyr and witness. It’s a term used to describe those who died fulfilling a religious commandment or fighting to protect their country or family. I had to look that up.

Econstories.tv does it again!

• Pixar’s technical papers library, open for download

 

• SETI to shut down operation of Allen telescope array

 

• Lasers getting set to replace spark plugs in combustion enginesA

 

• Underground pumped-water energy storage system beginning tests in Santa Barbara

 

• A new low: educational chemistry set advertises “60 Fun Activities With No Chemicals”

 

Hartford, May 24/89

To Walt Whitman:

Mark Twain

From Letters of Note

.

As in, “Evan and I have been running a side project that’s gotten so popular, we’ll be building 2.8 kilotrebuchets.”

Oh yeah, and there’s only 8 hours left to the fundraising period.

That is all.

—– —– —– —–

Thanks to Mark for the tip about the London Post Office railway!

…In summary, several Chinese language, but overseas based, websites have been blogging on the creation of a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China. This has been motivated, of course, by events in MENA, and the timing has been significant because it has coincided with two important political conferences in Beijing, but it appears to have no real-world substance whatsoever, to have begun as a hoax at best, and to exist only in cyberspace, and cyberspace outside China at that. But the interesting bit is the real world effect it is having inside China, and the momentum it is generating.

The blogs and websites themselves are largely invisible to ordinary Chinese as the Great Firewall keeps them out, but they can be seen by the security agencies, who have been swift to react. The organizers, whoever and wherever they are, have repeatedly called on people to gather in a range of popular and public areas in the centre of major cities across China – shopping malls and university campuses – and go for a stroll every Sunday afternoon to call for minor political change. These public areas are, at that time of day, normally filled with young people and out-of-town domestic tourists, all now potential ‘protesters’. Now, because of the number of competing and overlapping security agencies, there is a lot of pressure on the local commanders to make some arrests and to show some success, but there are no genuine protesters, just some bemused local tourists and a lot of foreign journalists. So some young tourists get beaten up and taken away, and some journalists get smacked around. This then acquires a predictable, and well understood, dynamic of its own. At the same time, the organisers have used a wide range of popular and politically ‘safe’ words to use as code words – the characters for ‘Two Conferences’ being one, which is also the political conference that occurred in Beijing at the same time. Last weekend it was the ‘Three Represents’, which was Jiang Zemin’s political thought legacy, and so on. These keywords get picked up by the censors, and all web and SMS traffic using them gets shut down or blocked – Jasmine itself is of course popular in Chinese culture and widely used in branding, but sites using ‘Jasmine’ in their copy, however innocuous, are blocked – with real-world social, political and economic consequences.

Wasn’t this a plotline in a Neal Stephenson novel somewhere? Seriously, truth and fiction are harder to tell apart every day.