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Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Top Stories from the last 24 hours


Hi David,

These are the top stories from The Next Web over the last 24 hours.

See you at The Next Web Conference (April 26-27) in Amsterdam? We're taking it to the next level!

The Next Web

P.S. Want to be the first of your friends and followers to spread our breaking news stories? Now you can, with Spread.us.






The Onion Weekly Dispatch - April 18, 2012

The Onion

Obama Launches More Realistic 'I Have Big Ideas But We'll See How It Goes' Campaign Slogan 04.18.12

CHICAGO—After coming to terms with the limited scope of what he can realistically expect to accomplish as president, Barack Obama announced Wednesday a new, more practical campaign slogan that will serve as the cornerstone for his 2012 reelection bi...

Human Civilization Brings Out Worst In Area Man

News in Brief »

Christie 2016 Comes From Nowhere To Win Republican Nomination

Gingrich Urges Romney To Drop Out So He Can Focus On General Election

Sweeping New Labor Reforms Allow Foxconn Employees To Work In Inhumane Conditions From Home

American Voices »

Retail Sales Rise

"0.8 percent? America's back, baby!"

Space Shuttle Discovery Moves To D.C.

video »

Report: Every Potential 2040 President Already Unelectable Due To Facebook

A troubling report finds that by 2040 every presidential candidate will be unelectable to political office due to their embarrassing Facebook posts.

opinion »

Healthy, Nutritious Food Would Have Saved The Titanic

by Michelle Obama

By Michelle Obama

Radio News »

Archaeologists Report Recently Uncovered Tomb Sure Smells Like Mummies

featured section: »

Horoscope »

Aries Mar 21 - Apr 19

Your feeling of impending doom shall come to nothing again this week as the world continues to turn and your life goes on as normal. Perhaps you should consider feeling useless and stupid instead.

Most Popular »
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The Onion Weekly Dispatch - April 18, 2012

The Onion

Obama Launches More Realistic 'I Have Big Ideas But We'll See How It Goes' Campaign Slogan 04.18.12

CHICAGO—After coming to terms with the limited scope of what he can realistically expect to accomplish as president, Barack Obama announced Wednesday a new, more practical campaign slogan that will serve as the cornerstone for his 2012 reelection bi...

Human Civilization Brings Out Worst In Area Man

News in Brief »

Christie 2016 Comes From Nowhere To Win Republican Nomination

Gingrich Urges Romney To Drop Out So He Can Focus On General Election

Sweeping New Labor Reforms Allow Foxconn Employees To Work In Inhumane Conditions From Home

American Voices »

Warren Buffett Being Treated For Cancer

"Sheesh, with all that money, you’d think he’d just have his head grafted onto the body of some poor kid with a shiny new prostate."

Retail Sales Rise

video »

Four American Troops Tragically Killed Along With 23 Afghanis

Autistic reporter Michael Falk reports it is bad that four U.S. soldiers died but it is good that nearly two dozen Taliban soldiers died.

opinion »

Healthy, Nutritious Food Would Have Saved The Titanic

by Michelle Obama

By Michelle Obama

Radio News »

Archaeologists Report Recently Uncovered Tomb Sure Smells Like Mummies

featured section: »

Letters To The Editor »
Dear The Onion,
I totally got what you guys were saying about each of us having to buck up and be responsible. Thanks.

— Dave Turner, Provo, ID

Most Popular »
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'Hunger Games' Sequel 'Catching Fire' Narrows Director Search


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Romney and Bibi: Middle East Policy By Two Best Buds Walkie-Talkiing After Bedtime

April 18th, 2012Top Story

Romney and Bibi: Middle East Policy By Two Best Buds Walkie-Talkiing After Bedtime

By Mobutu Sese Seko

Romney and Bibi: Middle East Policy By Two Best Buds Walkie-Talkiing After BedtimeTwo Sundays ago, the New York Times ran an article about Mitt Romney and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two have known each other for about 35 years. They went through Boston Consulting Group's "boot camp" together. They "can almost speak in shorthand." They finish each other's sentences and once accidentally ate from opposite ends of the same long strand of spaghetti. Their lives are an endless geopolitical meet-cute: Romney wants to run the nuclear big-box store of the United States, but he has enough love in his heart that he'd never crush the beautiful Middle Eastern shop around the corner.

It was the sort of Times article that readers consume in growing frustration. It screams at greater speeds toward a hard, on-the-ground reality; then someone pulls the Objective Journalism ripcord, and it floats harmlessly back upward. The story is that Romney's Middle Eastern policy would probably be indivisible from Israel's. But the big, important implication is that Netanyahu has every incentive to campaign indirectly for Romney, too. Meanwhile, the B-17 all this truth dropped out of, The Well, Duh, flies harmlessly away, with a painting of a hot, exasperated lady on its side.

It's not clear whether any of this matters.

Consider: back before the American empire piloted a Rascal bearing its own bloat off into a terminal sunset, we believed that politics ceased at our shores, that whatever domestic gamesmanship we might pursue, our foreign policy interests would not be prey to them. Laborers could still afford to go to baseball games, and Ayn Rand books were only shelved in the fiction section.

The modern story that dispelled that nonpartisan wishful thinking is somewhat predictably Vietnam, though not in the way you think. In 1968, with the expectation of a plum position in the Nixon administration, Henry Kissinger persuaded the south Vietnamese to spike the Paris peace talks with unreasonable demands, promising a better deal under a GOP administration. About a half decade and 20,000 dead Americans later, Kissinger brokered an accord like the one he'd scuppered illegally. But it had already served its purpose: Kissinger destroyed Hubert Humphrey's peace strategy and a huge 1968 campaign plank. Lyndon Johnson refused to publicly condemn Nixon and Kissinger for doing something incredibly fucking illegal (under the Logan Act), lest he be seen to use the office of the president to aggressively campaign for a successor or divulge the shady means with which his evidence had been gathered.

And if that example feels too quaintly historical or insufficiently Middle Easty, there are always the more recent depredations against truth and policy, like announcing Mission Accomplished 40 days after a war's commencement and eight-and-half years before its end—but only one year before an election. We have an established tradition of poisoning overseas affairs to distort DC shadow-puppet theater, so it's hardly unreasonable to read something like this—

In a telling exchange during a debate in December, Mr. Romney criticized Mr. Gingrich for making a disparaging remark about Palestinians, declaring: "Before I made a statement of that nature, I'd get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say: 'Would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do?'"

—and conclude that Mitt Romney isn't the slightest bit hesitant to subcontract American Middle Eastern affairs to a foreign leader, just to grab some votes.

And why should he be? For one thing, the Republican party has been desperate to break the hammerlock the Democrats maintain on Jewish voters. For another, he can only shore up support among those evangelicals who believe a whole Israel is necessary to complete the dispensationalist fantasia of rapture, murder and Churchill Downs raining from the skies. But most importantly, it's not certain whether those two conditions matter, because Romney couldn't even one-up Eric Cantor.

In November, 2010, Cantor, the House GOP Whip, spoke to Netanyahu before his meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He pledged that the GOP-controlled U.S. House of Representatives could be relied upon to serve as a check against the Obama presidency. Cantor told Bibi that congress would protect the interests of a foreign power and act as a block against the branch of government actually intended to handle diplomacy. In Eric Cantor's high school civics class, evidently government was divided into executive, judicial, and Israel.

And even then, God knows if that matters, since Bibi has basically been campaigning against Obama since 2009 anyway. In April, 2009, former intifada prison MP and current Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg sock-puppeted Bibi's pronouncement that either the U.S. or Israel would eliminate Iran's nuclear development. It was a clear ultimatum that admitted neither discussion of Iran's ambitions vis-a-vis nuclear energy nor the means of response. Three years later, nothing has changed. This story never changes.

In case you're feeling any more exercised by the above, ask, too, if it matters. Because one of the strongest thrusts of Netanyahu's three-year public relations campaign against the Obama administration has been against the latter's predictably polite, impotent tutting about illegal Israeli settlements. (For all the whining about Democrats, the last American president to tell Israel to go stuff it was George H.W. Bush. Bill Clinton's Middle East envoy, Dennis Ross, was a former AIPAC official, and the negotiating group he led was celebrated by Israeli newspaper Maariv as "The Mission of Four Jews.")

Let's play a historical game. Here's a quote with the identifying details removed. You guess when it's from and who it's referring to:

The U.S. administration... was condemning the growth of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, asking why... Israelis were now living in the occupied territories in... "unofficial" colonies when the Israeli prime minister... supposedly wanted to make peace.... [The U.S. President] was appealing for Israeli "restraint" in expanding settlements because they were "inconsistent with international law and an obstacle to peace."

The period in question was 1978-9, and the president was Jimmy Carter. (For more, see Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation, page 426.) This has been the great asshole move on Obama's part: reiterating a complaint as old as the 35-year Romney-Netanyahu circlejerk by appealing to international agreements to which Israel has been voluntary signatory.

None of this would much matter if Israel were merely the hobby horse of a bunch of intolerant Christian bozos or the sentimental/defensive/religious/ethnic cause of former immigrants and their families rightfully nurturing their dread of racial intolerance. But, even according to the extremely pro-Israeli Bush Department of Defense, our uncritical support of that nation is the primary radicalizing factor among Muslims, outside of our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. (General David Petraeus testified to this and was criticized for his troubles.) Far from the GOP rhetoric of its being our first line of defense against the fires of Muslim terrorism, it is, by GOP admission, our gasoline.

So maybe the above litany doesn't matter, but try reading it through in reverse. A man who routinely demonizes the Obama administration for suggesting that his nation be bound to international agreements over 35 years old also has a nearly 35-year-old relationship with the GOP presidential candidate—who publicly defers to his judgment—and has enjoyed a pledge of fealty from the GOP's top House ideologue. He's also issued an ultimatum to the United States and a Middle East nation about preemptive war.

Maybe those things are important; maybe outsourcing American foreign policy or wedding it to private or legislative interests directly at odds to America's elected diplomatic branch yields poor results. Just don't expect that from a New York Times article. This is not a story about international politics and policy. This is a story about rich people being buddies, about chummy-chum-chums. You wouldn't want to bury that lede in a bunch of geopolitics.

When rhetorical brinksmanship can lead us all to an apocalyptic race war, you should partner up with someone. It's like going to the museum on a field trip in elementary school. When you might start killing millions of brown people, for God's sake: remember the buddy system.

Image by Jim Cooke.

"Mobutu Sese Seko" is founder of the blog Et tu, Mr. Destructo?

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Use Springpad as Your New Personal Assistant: Get Organized, Save Money, and Have Fun Being Productive

April 18th, 2012Top Story

Use Springpad as Your New Personal Assistant: Get Organized, Save Money, and Have Fun Being Productive

By Alan Henry

Use Springpad as Your New Personal Assistant: Get Organized, Save Money, and Have Fun Being Productive Few people actually love organizing their calendars and projects—there's nothing terribly exciting or sexy about most productivity tools once you actually sit down and start using them. Except for the new Springpad, that is! It's a fantastic, easy-to-use webapp that helps you organize your life, your ideas, and your projects, and once you get started, it's also a lot of fun to use. Unlike most tools of its ilk, Springpad thinks for you, working like a personal assistant to cut down on the time you spend on the less enjoyable aspects of organizing information—meaning you'll spend less time organizing things and more time doing them.

Use Springpad as Your New Personal Assistant: Get Organized, Save Money, and Have Fun Being Productive

Getting Started with Springpad

The new Springpad is a little like Pinterest—if Pinterest were insanely useful! Here's how it works:

Sign up for a free Springpad account, and the service starts you off with a few notebooks. Notebooks are like categories; you can create notebooks for specific projects or for broad sweeping ideas. Your notebooks are where you'll store lists, notes, bookmarks, or anything else you want to keep for future reference.

To add something to Springpad, just click the plus sign at the top of the page in your Springpad account. You can paste a URL of something you want to come back to, search for an item in the Springpad database, use the Springpad bookmarklet to "spring" an item or bookmark into your notebooks when you're elsewhere on the web, or use one of the Quick-add tools in the drop-down menu to let Springpad do the thinking for you. We'll go into more detail on adding and organizing items a little later, but the point is that adding items is so easy you won't need a lengthy tutorial or a bunch of third-party add-ons to help you get started.

Springpad is most often compared to poular snipping and capture tool Evernote, and while that's fair, the one that's best—or at least best for your use case—will depend heavily on how you like to keep track of your ideas and projects. Choosing one over the other is ultimately a matter of taste. Evernote's fine if you're really into it, but Springpad is, in this writer's opinion, a much better tool, and a slick way to visually organize your thoughts, projects, and shopping lists. Plus, Springpad's smart sorting and social features put it over the top.

Use Springpad as Your New Personal Assistant: Get Organized, Save Money, and Have Fun Being Productive

Don't Think Organizer; Think "Personal Assistant"

Collecting data is easy; any service can do that. Springpad's secret sauce lies in how it organizes your data once you save it to your account. Springpad's smart sorting means you don't have to manually create notebooks for movies, music, recipes, bookmarks, or anything else you would normally want automatically organized (although you can!). Springpad tags it all for you, and lets you filter based on those tags across multiple notebooks, or drop the same item in more than one place.

For example, say you have a gadget you want to research or buy. Click the plus-sign to quick-add that item to your Springpad account. You can paste a URL, or just start typing the name of the product, and Springpad will auto-complete the entry for you. Then it'll add links to buy the product at Amazon, check other prices elsewhere, and even look up reviews and other information on the product so you can make an educated decision, all without you spending time looking it up yourself. If you decide to sleep on it, Springpad will even send you an alert if the price on your item drops to warn you that now might be a good time to buy. The same applies for music, movies, and books—Springpad automatically organizes them for you and pulls in relevant information so you don't have to. We noted this a while ago, but perhaps the biggest joy of using Springpad is that you don't have to have a half-dozen tools and utilities that do similar-but-just-slightly-different things (web clipping, public sharing, private collaboration, to-do and task management, etc) when Springpad does them all well enough that you can spend more time doing instead of planning and organizing.

Use Springpad as Your New Personal Assistant: Get Organized, Save Money, and Have Fun Being Productive

Organize Your Life with Springpad

Each notebook in your account can represent a category that you want to organize items into, like "Recipes to Try" or "Parts for My Next Computer Build," or a whole project where you can to collect ideas and to-dos instead of projects, like "Basement Renovation" or "Garden Planning." Once created, you can start filling up your notebooks with snippets from the web, to-dos, products, and more. Here's how:

  • Web clippings are simple: you can either copy/paste URLs into the webapp, or you can use the Springpad bookmarklet to instantly add a web page, article, or anything else you see on the web to a notebook.
  • Products are just as easy. Springpad has a dozen or so quick-add items organized into groups like productivity and media, all of which will mine the Springpad database for matching items to autocomplete your entry while you type. Select "Wine," for example, and start typing "2009 Russian River-" and you'll see all of the wines that Springpad already knows. If you see the right one, select it to add it to your list, pre-tagged and organized. CDs, movies, books, and other products all work the same way.
  • Checklists, text-notes, events, and to-do lists are also in the quick-add list. You can use checklists for grocery lists, to-do lists, recipes you want to try, and more. You can always tag them, move them between notebooks, and leave comments and notes on the checklist later, or invite others to comment on them.

Your notebooks can be public, private, or only available to a select group of people. If you and your significant other are planning to redecorate the living room, for example, the two of you can share a notebook where you both post design or furniture ideas for the other to see. You can connect your Springpad account with your Google account to pull in events from Google Calendar. If you have a friend who's into music, you can create a notebook for new albums, and invite them to comment on your tastes and suggest new bands without exposing the world to your music tastes. If you prefer being public, you can just as easily share your notebook with all of your friends on Twitter or Facebook so they know what you're into. It's flexible, and the way you use the notebooks is entirely up to you.

Springpad is primarily a webapp, but you can also manage your notebooks on your iOS or Android device thanks to the Springpad mobile apps. There are also tablet-specific variants for the iPad and for Android tablets, and while we love the webapp, the mobile apps are just as useful, especially for retrieving information on the go, like a shopping list or itinerary. Don't be fooled though—the mobile apps are designed for data entry as well, and you can get some real work done using the Springpad mobile apps, especially on a tablet.

Use Springpad as Your New Personal Assistant: Get Organized, Save Money, and Have Fun Being Productive

Be More Productive with Springpad

Up to this point, we've been discussing Springpad as something of a more elegant and visually attractive way of organizing your life than Evernote, and a more useful way of organizing the things you find on the web than Pinterest. Now let's talk about how you can use Springpad to get some real work done.

The latest springpad update lends itself to topical notebooks with checklists or specific to-dos and events inside each one, all linked to your Google or Yahoo account, and to your mobile devices. This setup is perfect for productivity systems like GTD or Personal Kanban.

If you prefer GTD, you can take the simple approach with a few notebooks like Marcel Chaudron outlines in his walkthrough, or you can go all out and build a rich and deep productivity system like Bobby Travis explains over at 40Tech. Regardless of your approach, here are the basics:

  • Create individual notebooks for each of your projects and tag them accordingly.
  • Create a "Waiting For" notebook and tag/ for all of the to-dos that you're waiting for others to complete, or want to follow up with someone else on.
  • Create a "Next Actions" notebook and tag for the items that are on your plate right now.
  • Create a "Maybe/Someday" notebook and tag for the items that you want to get to eventually.
  • Start tagging items in your project notebooks with the tags above, and add them to multiple bookmarks so you can see them whether you're looking at a specific project notebook, or your GTD activity notebooks.

That's all there is to it, in the simple case. 40Tech explains how to amp this up a bit and take it to a more granular level. If you're reading this and still thinking about how this all compares to Evernote, Daniel E. Gold explains how Springpad stacks up to Evernote from a productivity standpoint for him. He argues—and we agree—that it's Springpad's flexibility that stands out, even if Evernote has it beat in some other areas.

If Personal Kanban is more your style, and you're familiar with tools like previously mentioned Pegby, your initial setup is easier. You'll follow the same steps above, but instead of the GTD-themed notebooks and tags, you'll only create three: "Pending," "In Process," and "Done."

Use Springpad as Your New Personal Assistant: Get Organized, Save Money, and Have Fun Being Productive

Have More Fun with Springpad

All of these tips are designed to keep you organized and help you be more productive, and while you can do them all in public (especially some of the more goal oriented ones—you know how we feel about working towards your goals in public) most of them may be more suited to private notebooks that you only share with the people you're working with, or your family and friends. That said, Springpad's flexibility means that you don't have to just use it as a stodgy productivity tool.

Create some public notebooks for your interests, whether it's movies, music, books, hardware, electronics, anything, and start sharing. You can use Springpad partially as a service to keep those items so you can return to them and enjoy them later, whether they're articles you meant to read or the upgrades you want to buy for your home theater, and you can share them with the world and the Springpad community. Follow other users, like their bookmarks and notebook entries, and invite your friends to join you. Yes, we know this all sounds a little Pinterest-y, and if you're already having a blast with friends at Pinterest, this use case may not resonate with you, but the fact that you can use Springpad for work and for play illustrates its flexibility and saves you the hassle of joining another network if you don't want to.


One of the most compelling things about Springpad is that it's growing and changing faster than most other services like it. That cuts both ways, but I've found that the changes are largely positive, and the features added with each new revision improve its functionality without compromising its core features. Others can (and will) disagree, but Springpad is a service that's gotten better with age and change. It's still under heavy development, and the team behind Springpad are keenly aware to the needs and feedback of its userbase, which is another huge point in its favor.


We hope we've shown you how you can put this great, free tool to use for your personal projects, productivity, and even have a little fun in the process. Are you a Springpad user? Do you have your own custom productivity setup, or find it's best for a specific use case? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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