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February 7, 2006

Giant rabbit; retired CIA agent's world view; Buddha photo project; GMail chat

Herman the giant rabbit. BBC.

Spook blames you and me: Seeing Only Evil: An Interview with Retired CIA Agent Robert Baer: At Chronogram. Baer is the author of See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War Against Terrorism.

...we're dumping billions and billions of dollars every time we go to the gas pump into a jihad against us in Iraq that's killing American soldiers. I've read, "One kid is dying in Iraq so the father of the kid next door can drive his Hummer." And what's more, the money's coming from Japan and China, and in a certain sense from the Middle East, and then it's filtering back. Blackwater, SAIC, Custer Battle—all these companies just basically got the 20 billion dollars that was supposed to go into construction. Construction was never going to happen.

LT: Why?

RB: You can't dump 20 million dollars in a country in the Middle East and have even a tiny fraction going into real projects. That's not the way the place works. So when Congress voted for that money, it was out of stupidity. It was either going to go into the hands of the American contractors or into the hands of Iraqi crooks. Iraq is a corrupt system. The only way you can really get around this is simply line the contractors up and shoot them if they stole the money, which of course is not acceptable to Americans. It goes back to Ottoman corruption, corruption under Saddam, where his family was stealing vast amounts of money, taking the oil profits. For us to go in and turn this around overnight was insanity, to think we could do it—nationbuilding....

Collect 'em all: The Buddha Project at Lens Culture:

The Buddha Project encourages people worldwide to participate by submitting photos of found Buddha, sacred Buddha, ancient Buddha, kitschy Buddha, handmade Buddha.

An archive of hundreds of Buddha images may well generate good karma for everyone involved, viewers and contributors, alike....

Please participate by contributing your images of Buddha. Notice Buddha in your surroundings and share your discoveries with others. It will make you feel good. Guaranteed.

This Buddha was photographed in a shop window.

No Buddhists are rioting because of this collection.

Live mail: Google merges Gmail with chat: CNet.

Google on Monday was set to launch Gmail Chat, which will let users send instant messages with one click from their e-mail account, see when contacts are online and save the chat history like an e-mail message....

Gmail Chat is available on Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher and Firefox 1.0 and higher and in the U.S. English interface only.

While the chat functions of Google Talk are integrated into Gmail, users must download the Google Talk client application to make voice calls.

Here's the screenshot.

Food in unexpected places: The latest Photoshop contest at Worth 100. Yum, chocolate keyboard.

First Providence Geek Dinner set for Wednesday: Providence Geeks -- "Digital Innovators in the City-State -- is a new blog and a good idea.

The first of what its founders, Brian Jepson, Tom Hoffman and Jack Templin, hope will be many Providence Geek Dinners is set for AS220, 115 Empire St., Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. More details and a place to RSVP in the comments at this link.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 9:50 AM | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: steve cox on February 7, 2006 11:08 AM

Posted by: Sheila on February 7, 2006 11:44 AM