Brokekid.net

(via news.bbc.co.uk)

The United States has said that virtually all its troops, except some training personnel, are to be pulled out of Saudi Arabia. The decision was announced as US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arrived in the Gulf kingdom for talks with senior Saudi officials. A top US military official said the decision was taken by a “very mutual agreement” with the Saudi Government and that the withdrawal would be completed by the end of the summer. Ever since the 1991 Gulf war, the US has had about 5,000 troops stationed in Saudi Arabia – a figure that rose to 10,000 during the recent conflict in Iraq. The BBC’s Middle East analyst Roger Hardy says this is a strategic shift of great political as well as military significance. (BBC News)

(via nytimes.com)

A growing number of medical experts are concerned that Americans are overdoing their vitamin consumption. As many as 70 percent of the population is taking supplements, mostly vitamins, convinced that the pills will make them healthier.

But researchers say that vitamin supplements cannot correct for a poor diet, that multivitamins have not been shown to prevent any disease and that it is easy to reach high enough doses of certain vitamins and minerals to actually increase the risk of disease.

No longer, the experts say, are they concerned about vitamin deficits. Those are almost unheard of today, even with the population eating less than ideal diets and skimping on fruits and vegetables. Instead, the concern is with the dangers of vitamin excess.

“There has been a transition from focusing on minimum needs to the reality that today our problem is excess calories and, yes, excesses of vitamins and minerals as well,” said Dr. Benjamin Caballero, a member of the Food and Nutrition Board at the National Academy of Sciences and the director of the Center for Human Nutrition at Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Caballero said that for some supplements, including vitamin A, the difference between the recommended dose and a dose that could lead to bad outcomes like osteoporosis was not large. Popular multivitamins, he added, often contain what could be risky doses. (The New York Times)

Hillary For President

Senator John Kerry spent the weekend in the Hamptons but never got to the beach. There is no time for sand and sea when you are gathering money for a presidential campaign.

The man from Massachusetts had a pretty good couple of days. Several dozen New Yorkers (mostly) paid $500 each to hear him at a brunch in Southampton, where he was introduced as the candidate with: “The war record of John Kennedy; the brains of Bill Clinton; the toughness of Lyndon Johnson, and the hair of Ronald Reagan.”

A good time was had by all, even if you heard the occasional grumble of, “What the hell is she doing out here? What is she raising money for?”

“She” is Hillary. The Senator from New York was down the road in Easthampton, getting ready to do her own gathering at a $250-a-head cocktail party. Pretty good for a freshman senator. But Kerry, who has served 19 years in that august company, is not concerned about Hillary the senator. He is worried about Hillary for President — and well he should be.

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 has changed totally in the past few weeks. At the beginning of the summer, Hillary could comfortably deny having national presidential ambitions, because the comfortable conventional wisdom was that it didn’t really matter who the Democratic candidate would be, because President Bush had a lock on re-election. (I’m sure that the thought has never crossed her mind that it would be better for her if Bush won in 2004, leaving her a clear field in 2008)

But now!…with Bush looking more vulnerable because there are not enough jobs at home and not enough peace abroad, Senator Clinton has to check some numbers. If a Democrat, say Kerry, defeats Bush next November and then runs for re-election in 2008, then her next chance to run would probably be in 2012, when she will be 65 years old. And who knows what the world will look like then? (RichardReeves.com)

From RSS to Radio with iSpeak It

iSpeak It is an OS X app that grabs a text file, performs a text-to-speech operation to turn it into a read-aloud audio file, then converts it to an MP3 and synchs it to your iPod. Pretty cool — you could use a script to grab a bunch of news from your RSS reader, suck it into iSpeak It, turn it into an MP3, and put it on your iPod to listen to on your morning commute. (BoingBoing.net)

Growing Opposition to Bush Re-election

For the first time, more Americans say they would oppose President George Bush’s re-election in 2004 than support a second term, according to a poll published yesterday that showed mounting pessimism over the US military presence in Iraq.
As attacks on coalition forces continue to inflict casualties, a Newsweek poll found that the human and economic costs of occupation were eroding the president’s support at an accelerating rate.

Sixty-nine per cent of those asked were concerned that the US would be bogged down for many years in Iraq with little to show for it in improved security for Americans; 49% said they were very concerned.

At the same time Mr Bush’s approval rating dropped to 53%, down 18% since April, and his lowest rating since before the September 11 attacks turned him from the victor of a disputed election presiding over a worsening economy into a wartime leader.

But the most jarring statistic for the White House looked forward to the 2004 election. Some 49% of Americans questioned in yesterday’s poll said they did not want him re-elected, against only 44% prepared to give him a second term. The corresponding figures in April were 52% backing re-election with 38% opposed.

The change over four months represents a serious haemorrhage in support, reflecting a combination of long-term but spreading disenchantment with the president’s economic stewardship and new doubts over where he is taking the country in his open-ended “war on terror”. (Guardian)

Microsoft Is Using Linux To Protect Its Own Web Site

Microsoft has made a big deal out of asserting that Linux is not fit for the enterprise. But Microsoft itself is using Linux to help protect its servers against denial-of-service attacks.

According to a post on the Netcraft Web site, Microsoft changed its DNS settings on Friday so that requests for www.microsoft.com no longer resolve to machines on Microsoft’s own network, but instead are handled by the Akamai caching system, which runs Linux.

Akamai runs a service to help boost Web site performance by caching copies of Web sites on many servers in many locations. Akamai can help defend against denial-of-service attacks by spreading the attack among many servers. Just as a distributed denial-of-service attack enlists large numbers of systems to attack a single server, Akamai presents a distributed defense against denial-of-service attacks.

As of this writing, Netcraft reports that www.microsoft.com is still running on Linux, although microsoft.com is reported as running on Windows Server 2003.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company “respects the fact that [its partners and vendors] may have diversified business models and operate in mixed IT environments. Microsoft’s main concern is doing whatever it takes to help ensure customers can get to the Blaster worm patch to protect their computers…. Microsoft is using Akamai’s extensive worldwide network to distrubte the massive traffic that is illegally being directed at Microsoft by hackers.” (InternetWeek)

Music Industry Problems: Maybe The Music Just Sucks

Well, it’s good to see some of the more mainstream press picking up on this idea. CBS Marketwatch is suggesting to the music industry that maybe (just maybe) the music industry’s problems have less to do with all this downloading activity, and more to do with the fact that, well, um, we hate to break it to you, but most of the music coming out these days really (no, really) sucks. The article describes “musical lulls” between great periods of music creation, where most musical acts are more about “McDonald’s rock” – taking a successful manufactured act and copying it over and over again. The article also suggests that the world has fragmenting tastes. That is, not everyone likes the same music, and not everyone wants to be forced to listen to yet another boy band. This, of course, is the perfect situation for the internet, where the music industry could produce much more customized niche acts for all the varied audiences. However, they’ve grown so accustomed to producing for the lowest common denominator that now that this plan has backfired, they’ve turned around and started blaming (and suing) their own customers. (Techdirt)

Interesting Account of Sexual Harassment in Saudi Arabia

Women alone or accompanied by their drivers in Saudi Arabia are almost always harassed wherever they go by men of all ages. The situation has become so pathetic that the term “open season” is an understatement. Even more perplexing is the fact that when women are walking with a Saudi man, no one dares to approach them in any way; the worst that will happen is a quick stolen glance. I admit I like it when one of my brothers agrees to take me somewhere, not because I could not defend myself if I had to, but because Riyadh suddenly becomes a much more peaceful place to walk in, with less savage behavior.

Looking at my brother as he walked next to me in the shopping mall, I wondered what it was about him that was so threatening. He is a regular teenager, tallish but without much muscle; my driver (with whom I’m constantly being harassed) is much taller and has a more threatening build. And that was when it hit me. It was not the physical build but the fact that he was a Saudi man. That is why more and more women require that their drivers wear the traditional thobe and ghoutra/shummagh: In other words, they make their own scarecrows.

The saddest part of all this is the realization that we are a nation with so little self-discipline that we need this and other types of scarecrows to make us behave. Why is that? What made us this way? Was it the way we were educated and raised? Have we been inadvertently taught that punishment is the only reason to be moral? And if there is no chance of being punished, then what? No boundaries?

We have so many scarecrows, and they come in all sizes and shapes. When I first came back from the States, in middle school, I was introduced to my first scarecrow: What is known as a muragbah or observer. This person’s job was literally to watch students and reprimand them for any violations of dress code, attendance, misbehavior in class and so forth. Never once in all my school years here did I hear any civilized dialogue between students and these observers — civilized as in the latter trying to convince the former of the benefits of conforming to the dress codeor the morality of respecting class times and teachers. Instead, it was always punishment without delay. Moreover, the sentences passed were usually immoral and even vindictive in themselves: Young girls with short hair would be asked to wear veils covering their hair until it grew long, those wearing shoes with anything resembling heels would be forced to walk barefoot all day, and those late for class would be asked to stand outside the principal’s room all day long. The educational environment became closer to a prison; no wonder then when an observer was absent the school went wild. (Arab News)