Spitting Image

Tsunami Deaths Could Have Been Prevented

Although the local governments had no real warning, the U.S. government did, and it failed to pass along the information. Within minutes of the massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Indonesia, U.S. scientists working with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) suspected that a deadly wave was spreading through the Indian Ocean. They did not call anyone in the governments in the area. Jeff LaDouce, an official in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said that they e-mailed Indonesian officials, but said that he wasn’t aware what happened after they sent the e-mails.

In this day of instant communications, controlled in a large part by the U.S., it is possible to communicate within minutes to every part of the globe. It is beyond belief that the officials at the NOAA could not find any method to directly and immediately contact civilian authorities in the area. Their decision not to do so may have cost thousands of lives.

Even a few minutes warning would have given the inhabitants a chance to seek higher ground. The NOAA had several hours notice before the first waves hit shore. Tim Walsh, geologic-hazards program manager for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, said, "Fifty feet of elevation would be enough to escape the worst of the waves. In most places, 25 feet would be sufficient. If you go uphill or inland, the effect of the tsunami will be diminished." But the inhabitants of the area weren't given the warning - as a result, television and radio alerts were not issued in Thailand until nearly an hour after the waves had hit and thousands were already dead.

link

~It's not as if someone at NOAA is paid to warn the world of tsunamis, is it? They'ld need a much bigger budget and protection from all sorts of liability.
What would be the job title? How much could they earn? What would the job be like? Watching a bunch of computer screens? Like a security guard...for the earth?
I'm guessing within a year Congress will find a way to award a politically connected 'satellite provider' exclusive access to certain relevant NOAA tsunami/earthquake information. Which information when applicable will in turn be sold to the hotels, resorts, municipalities and governments that can afford the prices this new private earth-quake alert industry will set.

Head Scarves Now a Protective Accessory In Iraq

As the months have passed since the U.S.-led invasion, fewer women are daring to venture out without wearing a traditional Muslim head scarf, called a hejab in Arabic. In Baghdad, moderate Muslim women used to feel they had a choice whether to wear the scarf, even as religious oppression under Saddam Hussein grew over the past decade. Now, in many neighborhoods, it is hard to find a woman outdoors without a head scarf.

story

~The contortions whole populations go through when faced with overwhelming power and lawlessness.
How do individuals negotiate on one side the rules of engagement enforced by the missiles, tanks and snipers of an invading army and on the other side the criminal opportunists and the hatred of fellow citizens that army displaced, arrested, and maimed?

yahoo photos

Hand's-Off Care for Kids

New research reveals the 'ludicrous ways' in which childcare professionals now avoid touching the young children they look after.

...we are in a 'crazy situation - many people are behaving in completely ludicrous ways'. What is now cast into doubt is the process of 'normal nurturing and caring; the way adults are with children'. Comforting a child when they're upset, putting a plaster on them, wiping their bottom - all these everyday ways in which adults care for young children are now seen as suspect. To be a responsible adult, it seems, is to see yourself as a potential abuser, and to avoid touches that might get out of hand or be taken the wrong way.
This isn't a rational strategy for combating child abuse. Instead, it reinforces a generalised sense of mistrust, with adults looking suspiciously at other adults' - and their own - interactions with children...

An apparent paradox is that this 'no touch' policy has gone along with an explosion in 'touch professionals'. The academics (in Europe)report an increase in massage in schools and nurseries - with some schools sending 'difficult' children for massage in an attempt to calm them down, and other schools bringing in massage for whole classes...

article by Josie Appleton via gus

BBC's Sexwise Guide

informative link
with audio 'confessions' from around the world via gus

~A hunt, sport, an itch, business, a crime, baseball, food and 'what we two do together' all come to mind as ways I've described sex...but never 'a journey' like at the BBC.

The narrow passage, the hidden treasure

Real tenderness can't be exchanged with anything,
and it is subdued. (Anna Achmatova)

by Carla DellaBeffa. Artist

SkyscraperCity Forums

Members Galleries

~There's something liberating about being able to go downtown, to big cities, with your camera and take photos of the buildings. However it may not be as liberating as having the free time, the means, the inclination, to freely travel with your camera and take pictures of everything but skyscrapers.
Perhaps 'liberating' is not the right word.
There's something exciting about taking pictures of big buildings.

Veiled Conceit

"A glimpse into that haven of superficial, pretentious, pseudo-aristocratic vanity: The NY Times' Wedding & Celebration Announcements."

link

Igloo White

It began (in 1967) as “the McNamara Line” across Vietnam. It led to the seeding of the Ho Chi Minh Trail by air with 20,000 sensors.

Igloo White consisted of three parts: the sensors, the orbiting aircraft to relay the signal, and the Infiltration Surveillance Center at Nakhon Phanom Air Base in Thailand.

An airman gets ready to hurl a seismic sensor from an HH-3 helicopter over Vietnam to form part of the electronic infiltration barrier...

The sensors...were planted mostly by Navy and Air Force airplanes, although some of them were placed by special operations ground forces. They were dropped in strings of five or six to be sure that at least three sensors in each string would survive and be activated. The sensors operated on batteries, which ran down after a few weeks, so replacement sensors had to be dropped.
Most of the sensors were either acoustic or seismic. There were two kinds of acoustic sensors, both derived from the Navy’s Sonobuoy, to which microphones and batteries were added. These sensors could hear both vehicles and voices.

article

From Public Radio

"Observers describe North Korean cities completely bereft of advertising..." --Jerome McDonnell, Worldview WBEZ

A political billboard in Pyongyang @

link (re-broadcast on 12/29/04)

~Cities without advertising?! I knew it was too good to be true. Somebody always has something to sell. (Humans can be divided into two groups: sellers and buyers. Leaders are sellers and their followers are buyers.)

~I learned today that North Korea was created during America's first post WWII attempt at regime change. Irreparable mistakes were made at the onset there too. Also contrary to more than 50 years of US State Dept. reports, North Korea is not now nor has ever been on the brink of collapse.

When help is needed but... what can I do?

The destruction the earthquakes and tsunamis caused all around the Indian Ocean cannot be compared with anything caused by the hands of men, though I'm pretty sure some governments would love to develop a weapon with such a destructive power as this tsunamis. A friend's sister who lives in Tanzania just told me that the big waves already got to the Tanzanian coast killing a dozen of people. Nothing compared to the thousands of victims in Indonesia or Thailand but the distance between the South Eastern Asia and Tanzania can give us an idea of the power of the quake.

As always, these catastrofic events also take the best from ourselves. Several emergency crews and firemen rescue teams that left their homes worldwide a few hours after the quake to provide some help. Pedro and Mikel are two firemen friends that headed to Sri Lanka (I wish you the best of the lucks as that woill mean that you help has been useful). The international communit has bega to send humanitarian shipments and funds for the local authorities to buy first need goods in their home markets

If you want more information about the desaster or want to help and don't know how, take a look at the SEA-EAT blog and here you have a compilation of some NGOs that are currently helping and need support.

Clean Water & Sanitation Weapons Needed

@

A masked man moves to spray the dead bodies to kill the bad smell and disinfect a temple where some 600 bodies are piled up in Khao Lak, north of the devastated Thai tourist resort island of Phuket. Cholera, malaria and typhoid are the worst diseases stalking the survivors of Asias tsunami calamity and the weapons against them are clean water and sanitation, relief agencies say.(AFP/Saeed Khan)

~Were we always at war with nature, with human and animal by-products?

Disease Could Double Tsunami Death Toll to Over 100,000

"The immediate terror associated with the tsunamis and the earthquake itself may be dwarfed by the longer term suffering of the affected communities," said David Nabarro, the top official at the World Health Organisation dealing with humanitarian crises.
"There is a chance that we could have at least as many dying from communicable diseases as we had dying from the tsunami,"

...the tragedy struck not only the poor eking out a living on Asia's coasts, but the rich holidaying on tropical islands once considered paradise and now doomed to be known as paradise lost.

story

~What an earthquake did to human life in a manner of minutes took George Bush and the US Military almost a full year. Imagine if our charismatic leaders had power like that? Would "Operation Iraqi Freedom" be supported then?

Supermodel Survives Tsunami

A supermodel who was vacationing at a resort in Thailand this past weekend is recovering in a hospital.
Her boyfriend's agent said 25-year-old Petra Nemcova is recovering from a shattered hip and internal injuries. The British tabloid The Sun reported that she clung to a tree for eight hours to keep from washing away in a massive tsunami.
But the fate of her boyfriend, photographer Simon Atlee, is unknown. He is listed as missing, according to his agent.
The agent said the couple was vacationing in the Thai resort of Phuket when the waves swept over them Sunday.
Nemcova has appeared in magazines including Sports Illustrated, Marie Claire and Vogue. She has also modeled for Victoria's Secret.
story

~This news-item was posted on the web-site of an NBC affiiliated news channel in the USAs third largest media market. Yes Virginia, publicists write news stories which tv news outlets are not at all shy about using.

See also:

Susan Sontag R.I.P.

AP obit

Regarding the Torture of Others May 2004

Rumsfeld Says 9/11 Plane Shot-Down in Pennsylvania

© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON – Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, there have been questions about Flight 93, the ill-fated plane that crashed in the rural fields of Pennsylvania.

The official story has been that passengers on the United Airlines flight rushed the hijackers in an effort to prevent them from crashing the plane into a strategic target – possibly the U.S. Capitol.

During his surprise Christmas Eve trip to Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld referred to the flight being shot down – long a suspicion because of the danger the flight posed to Washington landmarks and population centers.

Was it a slip of the tongue? Was it an error? Or was it the truth, finally being dropped on the public more than three years after the tragedy of the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000?

Here's what Rumsfeld said Friday: "I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten – indeed the word 'terrorized' is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be."

Several eyewitnesses to the crash claim they saw a "military-type" plane flying around United Airlines Flight 93 when the hijacked passenger jet crashed – prompting the once-unthinkable question of whether the U.S. military shot down the plane.

Although the onboard struggle between hijackers and passengers – immortalized by the courageous "Let's roll" call to action by Todd Beamer – became one of the enduring memories of that disastrous day, the actual cause of Flight 93's crash, of the four hijacked airliners, remains the most unclear.

Several residents in and around Shanksville, Pa., describing the crash as they saw it, claim to have seen a second plane – an unmarked military-style jet.

Well-founded uncertainty as to just what happened to Flight 93 is nothing new. Just three days after the worst terrorist attack in American history, on Sept. 14, 2001, The (Bergen County, N.J.) Record newspaper reported that five eyewitnesses reported seeing a second plane at the Flight 93 crash site.

That same day, reported the Record, FBI Special Agent William Crowley said investigators could not rule out that a second plane was nearby during the crash. He later said he had misspoken, dismissing rumors that a U.S. military jet had intercepted the plane before it could strike a target in Washington, D.C.

Although government officials insist there was never any pursuit of Flight 93, they were informed the flight was suspected of having been hijacked at 9:16 am, fully 50 minutes before the plane came down.

On the Sept. 16, 2001, edition of NBC's "Meet the Press," Vice President Dick Cheney, while not addressing Flight 93 specifically, spoke clearly to the administration's clear policy regarding shooting down hijacked jets.

Vice President Cheney: "Well, the – I suppose the toughest decision was this question of whether or not we would intercept incoming commercial aircraft."

NBC's Tim Russert: "And you decided?"

Cheney: "We decided to do it. We'd, in effect, put a flying combat air patrol up over the city; F-16s with an AWACS, which is an airborne radar system, and tanker support so they could stay up a long time ...

"It doesn't do any good to put up a combat air patrol if you don't give them instructions to act, if, in fact, they feel it's appropriate."

Russert: "So if the United States government became aware that a hijacked commercial airline[r] was destined for the White House or the Capitol, we would take the plane down?"

Cheney: "Yes. The president made the decision ... that if the plane would not divert ... as a last resort, our pilots were authorized to take them out. Now, people say, you know, that's a horrendous decision to make. Well, it is. You've got an airplane full of American citizens, civilians, captured by ... terrorists, headed and are you going to, in fact, shoot it down, obviously, and kill all those Americans on board?

"... It's a presidential-level decision, and the president made, I think, exactly the right call in this case, to say, I wished we'd had combat air patrol up over New York.'"

link

~Does this mean I have to throw-out my "Let's Roll" ball-cap and tee-shirt? Duuude?!

TV Network Critical of U.S. Policy Banned in America by State Dept.

story w/comments

~From the comments:
"Have you ever heard of Al-Manar? Neither have we. Wouldn't you think, if it's a network that's been available to American TV viewers, and it was airing "hatred and incitement through the television airwaves" until now, the hatred and incitement might have been newsworthy, and you might have heard something about it?"

C.I.A. Resists Requests for Abuse Data

WASHINGTON -- The CIA is refusing to disclose any information about abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, invoking a legal precedent that involved a secret project by billionaire Howard Hughes to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine in the 1970s.
The CIA allegedly oversaw interrogations of top-level detainees, and some investigators think the agency's tactics are at the heart of the question of whether the Bush administration has authorized torture. But nearly all the disclosures concerning abuses have come from other agencies, including the Pentagon and the FBI.

The CIA traditionally has invoked special protections aimed at shielding its intelligence-gathering operations, but the American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing to obtain the records, and some independent observers think the agency's insistence on secrecy is inappropriate in this instance.

Among the records sought in the ongoing Freedom of Information Act case pursued by the ACLU are a Justice Department legal opinion about interrogation techniques and pictures of John Walker Lindh, an American who was detained with Taliban forces in Afghanistan.
In the same suit, the FBI chose to turn over troves of e-mails regarding accusations of prisoner abuse that were made public last week.
"CIA . . . asserts that it is not able to confirm or deny whether it has any records relating to its purported involvement in these specific activities related to the treatment, death, or rendition of detainees in US custody because to do so would tend to reveal classified information and intelligence sources and methods that are protected from disclosure," the agency said in a court filing Oct. 15.

In seeking to keep its role in the detainee-abuse scandal from public view, the CIA has invoked the so-called "Glomar response," named for the Glomar Explorer, the deep-sea mining ship built by a Hughes-owned company for the CIA. The operation was exposed in 1975, leading to a Freedom of Information Act suit that established the precedent.

story

~Howard Hughes lives!

Overheard at Starbucks

"If there's such a thing as 'gaydar', shouldn't there be 'sade-dar', 'paed-dar', 'necro-dar' and 'asphyxia-dar' among others, too?"

USA & Britain Holding 10,000 Prisoners in Iraq

Over 350 foreigners are among about 10,000 detainees being held in U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, Iraq's Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin Over says.
"U.S. forces told us on December 23 that they are holding 353 foreign terrorists," Mr Amin said.

U.S. military detainee operations spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnston refused to comment on the figures.
"I will not confirm numbers of specific nationalities held among foreign fighters," Lt Col Johnston said.
"As a matter of policy, we only share those numbers with government officials."
Both the Iraqi and U.S. governments blame foreigners mainly from Syria and Iran for much of the violence in the country.

story

~Living in a large ethnically diverse city I've learned to look at the human bodies I encounter in my daily environment as neutral, interesting, attractive or threatening. This story tells me that governments and their police/armed forces might not share my perceptions of the other. Governments are required(?) to look on human bodies (human populations) as useful, neutral or objects to be neutralized? Imagine making plans for the containment/ neutralization of thousands of living bodies, of whole populations? The necessity of viewing half of the world as a potential source of terrorism?

C.I.A. Torture Flights Authorized by Executive Order

As the outlines of the rendition system have been revealed, criticism of the practice has grown. Human rights groups are working on legal challenges to renditions, said Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA, because one of their purposes is to transfer captives to countries that use harsh interrogation methods outlawed in the United States. That, he said, is prohibited by the U.N. Convention on Torture.
The C.I.A. has the authority to carry out renditions under a presidential directive dating to the Clinton administration, which the Bush administration has reviewed and renewed. The C.I.A. declined to comment for this article.

article

~Doesn't this news put you in awe of both Clinton and Bush? To have the ability and to know the rightness, the triviality, in secretly sending human beings half-way around the world beyond the protection of all laws, for interrogations, for torture. What power. What majesty. Weaker men might not share that vision that insouciance.

Aura of Hope Over NASA Pollution Probe

NASA has launched a 24-hour global pollution monitoring service that will eventually allow scientists to give daily "chemical forecasts" from space.

The $US785million five-year mission will see a NASA spacecraft carrying British-built technology to measure ozone levels and man-made pollutants, and analyse how they interact with global weather patterns.
...there was no political agenda linked to the Aura project...

"What people do with the information is not something we can get involved in," Dr Reinhard Beer, a NASA scientist said.

press release

~Besides ozone & carbon dioxide what are some of the other man-made pollutants being monitored? Pesticides? Herbicides? Sulfur dioxide? How precise of an instrument is AURA? Can it identify emissions from a weapons factory? (An 'infant formula' factory?) A meth 'lab' in the woods?

Bush Qualifies for Death Penalty for War Crimes Under US Law

...what was dramatic about Fallujah was that it was not kept secret. So you could see on the front page of the New York Times, a big picture of the first major…step in the offensive, namely the capture of the Fallujah general hospital. And there’s a picture of people lying on the ground, soldier guarding them, and then there’s a story that tells that patients and doctors were taken from -- patients were taken from their beds, patients and doctors were forced to lie on the floor and manacled, under guard, and the picture described it.
The president of the United States is subject to death penalty under US law for that crime -- alone. I mean that’s a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, Geneva Conventions say explicitly and unambiguously that hospitals must be protected, hospitals and medical staff and patients must be protected by all combatants in any conflict. You couldn’t have a more grave breach of the Geneva Conventions than that.

There’s a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn’t mean the soldier that committed them, that means the commanders. They weren’t thinking about the United States of course, but take it literally, that’s what it means. ...

Civilization Versus Barbarism? An Interview with Noam Chomsky via unknown news
~Looks like future ex-President Bush will be avoiding the World's Court jurisdiction afterall.

Overheard at Starbucks

"In the past members of the Incest Club were initiated years, even decades, before they realized they were members."
"Yeah and nowadays it's almost a requirement for government jobs."

Thousands Die in SE Asia; 3 Americans Among the Dead*

~But there's stories of courage, determination and dumb luck too.

U.S. Honeymooners Survive Tsunami on Thai Island

PHUKET, Thailand (Reuters) - William Robins vowed Monday to change his life forever after the professional golfer from California and his new bride, Amanda, narrowly escaped death in the grip of a tsunami.
The newlyweds were honeymooning on Phi Phi island -- made famous by the film "The Beach" starring Leonardo DiCaprio -- when a giant tsunami wave slammed into it Sunday.
"I honestly thought this is the worst way to die. I thought I'm not meant to die like this," Robins, 26, told Reuters as he lay in a hospital bed in Phuket, his collar bone broken and most of his right ear torn off.
Robins and Amanda, who lay next to him with a fractured pelvis, were among hundreds of tourists stranded on Phi Phi after the massive wave washed onto the island.
The couple were strolling near the beach Sunday when they heard people screaming and saw tourists jumping off boats.
"We thought it was a terrorist bomb, so we jumped over a hotel fence and hid in a storage room," Robins said.
"We held hands and crouched in the corner. Then we heard a rumbling explosion that didn't end."
Moments later, their hiding place collapsed around them, Amanda said.
"We were pushed through two layers of concrete and forced to let go of each other's hands," said the 27-year-old teacher.
They were pulled underwater and swept 150 yards out to sea.
"There were broken pieces of wood and bits of metal everywhere. It smelled of gasoline," Robins said.
Suddenly, they saw a hotel employee in a boat searching for lost family members.
"We were screaming. We said if we don't get on this boat, we're dead," Robins said.
The man tossed them a line and pulled them into the boat. By nightfall, they were in hospital on Phuket.
We both came within 0.1 seconds of not seeing each other. There are going to be changes in our life from now on. We're going to take a lot of the bulls--- out," Robins said.
More than 22,000 people are now believed to have died on Sunday after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off Indonesia's Sumatra island sparked tsunami waves that crashed into shorelines around the Bay of Bengal. In Thailand, the toll stood at 839 on Monday evening.
link

~James living in Toyko (tsunami is a Japanese word) sent this story and wrote: "it seems so American to me. like the audience for article is America, and then the moral is some how Americanesque. a minor celebrity, his new wife, their personal tragedy and how it changes them. plus fear of terrorism. i particularly like the arrogance of the line "i'm not meant to die like this." whatever it might be, it struck me as a very weird article, out of touch with reality a bit."

~*This is how local tv news introduces the story to their Chicago area viewers. See also Bloomberg's "Americans, Italians, Among Dead in Asian Tsunami" to get a similar perspective.

Un Vie De Poulet

photos by Olivier Culmann. thanks, consumptive

~"Vogel friss oder stirb"?

Fun With Photoshop

the neighbor's lights

View image

Who Would Want the Day of the Lord?*

Disney Presents...

The Littlest Geisha

My Boyfriend Came Back From the War

by Olia Lialina

blog/ original/ blog remixes

via rhizome

Fun With Photoshop

the neighbor's lights

View image/ View image/ View image

Peace on Earth

(photo yahoo)

~According to Billy Graham:
...the Bible does not promise that we will ever have complete peace on this earth -- not until Christ comes again to establish His perfect kingdom of righteousness and justice. In fact, the Bible even indicates that as Christ's coming draws near, we will see even worse conflicts. Jesus said, "You will hear of wars and rumors of wars. ... Such things must happen, but the end is still to come" (Matthew 24:6). item

~Who are we to question the reasons for war and terrorism? To look on the killing and destruction with sorrow and anger?
Can true believers believe in peace on earth?
Can true believers be true believers and see war and terrorism as evil and not part of god's plan for his chosen people?
It's in the Bible.
Non-believers and heathens defy god's will when they work for peace?
Here's search results from the King James Bible (Old & New Testament) for peace on earth.

Billy Graham's writing an advice column for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer? See this rant.

Exercises in Suitable Captioning,

Where "Suitable" Means "Tasteless", Which in Turn Means, "What the Fuck Were They Thinking?"

@

This is an undated photo showing Lisa M. Montgomery, a resident of Melvern, Kan. Montgomery was arrested late Friday, Dec. 17, 2004, and charged with kidnapping resulting in death in a case of a woman being murdered and her 8-month-old fetus cut out of her womb. The baby of Bobbie Jo Stinnett was recovered and was reported in good condition on Saturday. (AP Photo/Maryville Daily Forum)

link/photo/comments/everything via: lowculture

Israeli Airport Security Questioning

item by Bruce Schneier

~And then? And then?
(Just like the Chinese drive-through in "Dude, Where's My Car?"?)

Fun with Photoshop

the neighbors lights

view image

Museum of Computer Art

link

~A variety of artists, many different manipulations and effects: "computer art" seems both too generic and too specific a term for these images. (Photoshop makes computer art?)

The Neighbor's Lights

view image

One More Shopping Day...

to reinforce our society's primary social bond by purchasing an array of products while inducing consumption anxiety, the feeling of being judged by your taste in consumption, before Christmas!

Stealth Satellites, a Cover Story?

The Spy Satellite So Stealthy that the Senate Couldn't Kill It

United States Patent 5,345,238 Eldridge , et al. September 6, 1994
Satellite signature suppression shield
An inflatable shield for suppressing the characteristic radiation signature of a satellite is described...

...a technique that could suppress the laser, radar, visible, and infrared signatures of a satellite. Providing a satellite with such stealth capabilities would "make it difficult or impossible for hostile enemy forces to damage or destroy satellites in orbit" -

article/etc. from the National Security Archives

Google Search results for stealth satellite

~There are hundreds of news-stories that mention the defensive capabilities of America's new top-secret 'stealth spy satellite' program and then there's this one story...

What is America's top-secret spy program?
Experts think Democrats objected to satellite weapon

By Robert Windrem, Investigative Producer NBC News
Updated: 6:22 p.m. ET Dec. 9, 2004

NEW YORK - What is the hush-hush intelligence project that apparently costs a fortune and has angered key Democratic senators?

Intelligence experts speculate that the highly classified endeavor is a top-secret satellite that would, or perhaps already can, intercept and shut down other countries' spy satellites.

The debate over the project leaked into the open on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, when Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, publicly complained that an unnamed spy project was "totally unjustified and very, very wasteful and dangerous to the national security." He called the program "stunningly expensive."

Rockefeller and three other Democratic senators — Richard Durbin of Illinois, Carl Levin of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon — refused to sign a congressional compromise negotiated by others in the House and Senate that provides for future U.S. intelligence activities. But Rockefeller declined to discuss the precise nature of the project, saying that would have to wait until the Senate could go into closed session.

After a frenzied round of press inquiries on Thursday, Rockefeller's office released a statement saying, "Any assertion about classified intelligence programs based on Senator Rockefeller's statement is wholly speculative."

The statement, which was characterized as a clarification of Rockefeller's remarks on the Senate floor, implied that he considered the project dangerous only because it was so costly.

"Senator Rockefeller's reference to this program, which was fully vetted and approved by security officials, makes the point that continuing to fund an enormously expensive, unjustified, and wasteful program is dangerous to our national security," the statement read. "He believes these funds should be spent on other far more critical intelligence programs."

Mum's the word
Other members of the committee and spokesmen at the nation's intelligence agencies declined to comment on the controversy.

“We have no comment on classified intelligence matters,” Paul Gimigliano, the CIA’s acting director of public affairs, told NBC News.

“Since Senator Rockefeller did not specify which program was involved or even identify which agency, we are not commenting,” said Rick Oborn, director of public affairs at the National Reconnaissance Office, which manages America’s spy satellites.

But that didn't stop the speculation. Even though much of the technology is highly classified, enough of it is out in the open that intelligence experts can comment on it, usually on condition of anonymity.

"It almost has to be a spy satellite," said Jeffrey T. Richelson, an intelligence historian who has written nearly a dozen books on spy technology. "The cost element Rockefeller talks about would indicate that."

Subtler technologies
Back in the 1990s, President Clinton helped kill earlier anti-satellite programs, also known as "asats." In those programs, U.S. satellites would take out foreign satellites using "space mines" or lasers.

But the current technology, according to intelligence experts, may be much more subtle. There have been various programs based on the technology, some unclassified and dressed up as U.S. defensive measures, others highly classified. One unclassified program, called the Counter Surveillance and Reconnaissance System (CSRS, pronounced "Scissors") was recently held up by Congress, according to Defense Daily.

The program was aimed at blocking an adversary's access to commercial or government space resources. It was one of a few concepts on the table for offensive counterspace operations, where the United States actively works to counter an adversary's access to space, said the paper.

"That program is stopped," Defense Daily quoted the Air Force Space Command's chief, Gen. Lance Lord, as saying. "The idea to look at that mission area is still open."

'Prowler' at work
The United States has long been interested in such offensive programs, launching an experimental and highly classified satellite called "Prowler" on the space shuttle Atlantis November 1990.

Prowler stealthily maneuvered close to Russian and presumably other nations’ communications satellites in high Earth orbit, 24,000 miles (38,400 kilometers) up. These satellites are ideal targets. They are at much higher altitudes, and thus difficult to track visually. Most of the key military satellites are in this orbit — relay satellites that transmit imagery uplinked from spy satellites, military communications satellites and electronic eavesdropping satellites that target terrestrial microwave communications.

Prowler gathered all manner of data on the high-Earth-orbit satellites: their size, measurements, radar signature, mass and the frequencies on which they relay their data. Now experts suggest that the United States may be trying to use, or has already succeeded in using, that stealth technology to "negate" an adversary's satellite communications.

A satellite using such technology would not have to jam the other satellite's signals, strictly speaking. Knowing how its communications systems were configured, the satellite could simply step in front of it and block its signals. In fact, one expert said Prowler did just that in tests using U.S. communications satellites, without being detected.

How close can such a U.S. satellite get to another satellite? Within about a foot (30 centimeters), the expert said. The Prowler technology could even allow the satellite to maneuver close to the target without receiving data from Earth. Once it came within a certain range of the target, it resorted to an internal computer program.

Is it war?
Many in the arms control community have long worried about such an anti-satellite program, saying that, particularly in time of crisis, such an operation could be construed as a hostile act and the first phase of a space war.

"The best asat is not a weapon that detonates next to an enemy satellite," said William E. Burrows of New York University, author of "Deep Black," a book on spy satellites. "Instead, it would be a signal that would tell the satellite to take the rest of the afternoon off."

Sending even defensive satellite weapons into orbit could start an arms race in space, warned John Pike, a defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, who has studied anti-satellite weapons for more than three decades. Pike said other countries would inevitably demand proof that any weapons were only defensive.

"It would present just absolutely insurmountable verification problems, because we are not going to let anybody look at our spy satellites," Pike said. "It is just not going to happen."

Robert Windrem is an investigative producer for NBC News.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6687654/?GT1=5936

~Shhh.

Never Loved Milk

photo-blog of Chas Bowie from America's Great Northwest

~Notice that the documentary photos are all but indistinguishable from the journal-entry-type photos. Here's a guy who loves his job/life. Try this at home.

The Diebold Variations

(c)2004 Rand Careaga/salamander.eps

link 18 'ads' in all. thanks, joerg

2 More Shopping Days Until Christmas!

yahoo photos

Maybe he didn't hear about lipodissolve

According to an interview Robbie Williams made to BBC online he's leaving drugs and alcohol because he was gainig some weight using them.

At least he recognises that drug risks can be much greater than simply putting on a bit of weight.

Morocco torture victims on TV

In the same line as Chile did a few days ago, Morocco is holding the hearings of 200 victims of institutional tortures during the rule of Hassan II. They are going to be aired live.

I wonder if any of these or these will ever have their opportunity to have the abuses they suffered recognized.

Full report: Morocco Times

Christophobia

~Last night while commercials ran during House I checked out what was on the other channels and was unpleasantly surprised by men in suits talking authoritatively about Jesus on a couple of news-interview programs.
Is it simply the season or has Bush's election given them license to appear on these shows and talk about Christianity as if it was an important and as acceptable a topic for public discourse as war, the environment, education, social security, etc.? I hated seeing them sitting in the expert seat.
Now I understand how some conservatives feel about certain 'cultural' issues (and how my parents felt about certain rock stars). It doesn't matter what they were talking about, (it wasn't history, archaeology or art), how dare Fox/Paramount/Sony/Disney etc. give them time, give a platform for that bullshit.
Now I'm afraid when I see a talking head on the news mention that particular diety, a sense of being personally wronged, a growing revulsion will come over me.
I'm becoming Christophobic.

1.801.800.000 euros (or 2,406,844,533.1531 dollars)

That's the reason why almost every Spanish will keep an ear on the radio while they are at work today. Everybody spends some money in the Spanish Christmas Lottery (around 63 euros per Spanish), a special lottery that takes place each December 22nd and that's 193 years old.

Good luck to every player.

World's Tiniest Baby Doing Well

The baby, named Rumaisa, weighed 8.6 ounces - less than a can of soda...

Madeline Mann, the previous record holder (at 9.9 ounces) as smallest known surviving preemie, returned to Loyola (University Medical Center) Hospital earlier this year for a celebration. Now 15, she was described as a lively honor student, though small for her age, at 4-feet-7.
According to the hospital, more than 1,700 newborns weighing less than 2 pounds have been cared for there in the past 20 years.
Stephen Davidow, a hospital spokesman, said a routine delivery costs about $6,000, while caring for a premature baby costs about $5,000 a day. Rumaisa, who has been in the hospital 90 days, is covered by Medicaid, hospital officials said.

story

~If they can get them all this small child-birth would be less of an imposition, less of a health risk for women.

Christmas wishes?

I bet most of the US troops that are fighting foreign wars want to come back home, specially in this days.

The image was taken from this flash that, although very propagandistic, has a several great images of US soldiers in Iraq/Afganishtan. I advise that the flash includes sound.

Gay Lincoln

A new book, published next month, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln by C.A. Tripp produces evidence that one of America's greatest Presidents had a long-term relationship with a youthful friend, Joshua Speed, and shared his bed with David Derickson, captain of his bodyguards.

Tripp, a former researcher for sex scientist Alfred Kinsey and an influential gay writer includes asides by many of Lincoln's close friends...

[Tripp unearthed a poem by the young Lincoln that includes the lines:

Billy has married a boy/The girlies he tried on every side/but none could he get to agree/All was in vain he went home again/and since that is married to Natty. (The Sunday Times)]

press release thanks diederik

~So far (Dec. 21) newspapers and tv in Illinois the Land of Lincoln, as it says on every license-plate, have chosen to ignore this news item.
For a red-blooded, heterosexual like me there's "nothing more (fascinating as my sex-lfe or more) boring then another man's sex life", even the "Great Emancipators". "Emancipator" sounds kinda fey now, doesn't it?
Since the media not so long ago subjected us for months with the details of one President's blow-jobs, one might wonder how much will the outing of President Lincoln occupy their time?

Heterosex = sinful perhaps, but newsworthy/ Gay-sex = an abomination unto the Lord.

Expect to see lots of Lincoln's this summer at Gay Pride parades.

Wouldn't it be something if this book about Lincoln got press coverage similar to the Paris Hilton tapes or Britney's binges? Could the Enquirer-reading, Entertainment-tonight-watching public satisfy their gossip needs with the less than detailed gay sex-life of a dead President?

(I wonder if Mr. Tripp cites Lincoln's novel use of a rolling pin?)

A Cartoon by Mr. Fish

link

Gang Signs

link

~kewl

F.B.I. E-Mail Refers to Presidential Order Authorizing Inhumane Interrogation Techniques

NEW YORK - A document released for the first time today by the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that President Bush issued an Executive Order authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods against detainees in Iraq. Also released by the ACLU today are a slew of other records including a December 2003 FBI e-mail that characterizes methods used by the Defense Department as "torture" and a June 2004 "Urgent Report" to the Director of the FBI that raises concerns that abuse of detainees is being covered up.

story American Civil Liberties Union

~The F.B.I., that incorruptible bastion of civil-rights and ethnic diversity, saw what the President had authorized the military to do in the prisons of Iraq was torture? The F.B.I.?
Should President Bush be wary of the World Court? Will future ex-president Mr. Bush?

GYWO

~WWJD?

3 More Shopping Days Until Christmas!

(Yahoo photo)

Century Old Stilt-Running Record Broken

New York health food store manager has broken one of the longest standing world records in history by running nearly five miles on stilts in under 40 minutes. Ashrita Furman on Friday broke the record that has stood since 1892.

Furman has been on a record-breaking binge.
The 50-year old has broken 87 records in the past 25 years and still holds 22 records in the Guinness Book of World Records.
His records include the most sit-ups in one hour and the fastest time for pushing an orange with his nose for one mile.

detail

item w/slideshow

~"Prosthetics, Benjamin prosthetics".
This goofy news item has opened my eyes to how much individual bodies can appropriate the world 'prosthetically'. Forget "Poetics of Space" what about "Prosthetics of Space"?
If you include things like vehicles, robots, snow-boards, wet suits, rock-climbing shoes/gloves, parachutes, bungy cords, etc. and all manner of digital or otherwise viewing devices? The world is smaller while simultaneously more remote. (Nudity is more than simply shedding one's clothes.)

Charity Begins Online

Tapping into the eBay craze, school groups from pre-kindergarten to college are moving their fund-raising auctions online..

story

The Homeland Security Collection

peonie security

link to photos / intro.
by "Activist artist/photographer/filmmaker/animator John Douglas"

via consumptive

The New Military Life: Heading Back to the War

Nearly a third of the 950,000 people from all branches of the armed forces who have been sent to Iraq or Afghanistan since those conflicts began have already been sent a second time. Part-time soldiers - Army national guardsmen and reservists - who often have handled support roles, not frontline combat roles, are slightly more likely to have served more than one deployment to the conflict zones than regular Army members.

story

Also:

Father Apologizes to Marines Who Told Him Son Was Dead

Arredondo was celebrating his 44th birthday and had his phone in his pocket expecting his son, Lance Cpl. Alexander Arredondo, 20, to call with best wishes.

But the elder man went berserk Aug. 25 when the three Marines said his son died in combat in Najaf, Iraq.

"Arredondo grabbed a propane torch and a gasoline can from his garage, yelled at the Marines to leave, smashed their van window with a hammer and climbed inside.
Arredondo's mother grabbed his left hand to pull him out, and he said he mistakenly turned on the torch trying to brace himself. An explosion blew him out of the van.
The Marines put out the flames on his body. Jackson Memorial Hospital has given him an extended payment plan to pay his $43,000 bill for burns that covered 26 percent of his body.

The family has put together more than 10 scrapbooks about his son's life and death, including a Purple Heart certificate, pictures of his 21-gun salute and childhood drawings. Arredondo said that looking at his son's mementoes is his therapy.

The younger Arredondo, a 2002 graduate of Blue Hills, was on his second tour of duty in Iraq when he died.

story

Four More Shopping Days Till Christmas!

Cubism in Medieval French Planning and Zoning?

via ET's "Graphic of the Day" March 28, 2002

Black Helicopters

N505WT amongst the Blackhawks at Gettysburg

[link to large photo]

source/caption

~"Yes Virginia there are black helicopters and Santa uses them."
Proof of black helicopters has nothing to do with the many stories about them, but "never let facts get in the way of a good story"?

Photo-Caption Non Sequitur

[Pope John Paul II delivers his address (Dec. 15) in front of a Christmas tree during a weekly general audience...]

Pope: "Gay Marriage Destroys the Fabric of Society"

(Vatican City) Pope John Paul launched a new assault on same-sex marriage on Saturday (Dec 18) accusing gays of an "aggressive attempt to legally undermine the family."
In his strongest words on the subject yet the 84-year old pontiff's pre-Christmas message called on Catholics around the world to step up their opposition to gay marriage.
story

~Merry Christmas Gay Catholics and their families.
There are experts who say that child abuse is most destructive to society, but the Pope didn't choose to remind the world's Catholics of that.
Do many people mistake demagoguery for sanctity?
(I should thank my nazi mother or was it my absent father for showing me that salvation lies elsewhere?)

Russians Harness Cold War Missiles for Space

...the event should mark an amazing conversion of Cold War swords into plowshares.

Military launches from actual operational silos are rare. The most recent Soviet launch of this type was in 1988.

A small Russian-Ukrainian company named Kosmotras has sold and launched four of the converted Satan rockets over the past several years, under the name Dnepr. They carried small science satellites for international clients, including Americans...

press release By James Oberg NBC News space analyst

5 More Shopping Days Till Christmas!

@

People walk past a Christmas tree made of bottles of Heineken beer in Shanghai, in east China. The bottle tree is 6.5-meter (about 21.33-foot) in hight, 4.5-meter (14.76-foot) in diameter and about 5.5 tons of weight. Chinese beer sales are growing by more than 5 percent a year - a fast clip compared to stagnant U.S. and European markets. And the potential for growth seems huge - the average Chinese drinks just 38 pints a year, compared with 176.4 pints for Americans, according to industry estimates. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

News of the Weird

Creme de la Weird

In a June lawsuit in Albany, N.Y., Mark Hogarth, 45, asked a
court to protect his constitutional right to privacy by exempting
him from child-pornography laws so that he can reclaim 269 lewd
photos of himself, taken when he was a kid, but which his now-
deceased father had hidden away in another country. In his
petition, he said that his father approved of, but did not participate
in, the photo sessions (some of which featured other children) and
that Hogarth would like to keep the pictures as, basically,
mementoes of his childhood. [Times Union (Albany), 10-22-04]

Pro-edition 880

~What doesn't kill us makes us. (Not necessarily stronger.)
There must be thousands of individuals in every class and country who've survived similar childhood experiences with ambivalent memories.
Their silence and our ignorance is society's way of keeping evil simple. (And keeping their secrets, their ways of coping, the exclusive domain of doctors and clergy.)

Ctein's X-mas in Cailifornia

large

galleries / info.etc.

6 More Shopping Days Till Christmas!

Wordplay: John Langdon

For someone who could not seem to get optical illusions, wordplay, and philosophy out of his mind while studying logo design and working at a type shop, ambigrams may have been an inevitable result."

ambigrams / johnlangdon.net

via: bifurcated rivets

Canadian Health Agency Hires IBM to Develop System to Detect Disease, Bioterrorism

IBM Canada Ltd will be paid $887,000 to develop a system that will instantly collect data from hospital emergency rooms, laboratories, pharmacies and other health-related facilities in Winnipeg.
The system would alert health officials to a sudden rise in the number of emergency room visitors who exhibit symptoms of a particular infectious disease.
It would also alert officials to any jump in the sale of particular types of over-the-counter medication that might be used to combat gastrointestinal or other diseases...

Not only can we detect public health events, but we can actually then detect unusual events that may imply that there is an intentional release of something going on in the community."
Because the information would be drawn from hospitals and pharmacies throughout a city, health officials hope it would be able to pinpoint a particular neighbourhood or region affected by an outbreak.

press release

~Will there be any data collected that could be of use to the police, drug or insurance companies?

Magic Kingdom

cast member stories

keepers of the kingdom the true fans

disneyland postcards

attendance center hints and history

trip reports

club 33 the exclusive, private Disneyland

links via consumptive/ photo: yahoo news

Torture Begins at the Top

...the documents show that the impetus for abuse came from above, not below. The use of coercive and violent methods spread from Guantánamo Bay, where alleged Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners are incarcerated, to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The documents also show that officers from the CIA, the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency lodged "heated" objections to the abusive methods of interrogation used by the military, denouncing them in previously secret memoranda as not only unethical but useless and destructive.
In the files released by the government, FBI officials with special expertise in counterterrorism and interrogation techniques recorded their ongoing debate with Army officers about the harsh, coercive techniques authorized by the Pentagon. They were as concerned about the efficacy of those methods - which they believe often produce poor intelligence - as with possible violations of law and regulations. But the commanders overseeing the military interrogations simply dismissed the sharp warnings of the law enforcement and intelligence officers.
The abuses continued, in some cases even after the initial furor over Abu Ghraib. What's more, an internal FBI memo indicates that the directive to discard traditional restraints came from the very highest civilian official in the Pentagon: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

story

~Merry Christmas Donald Rumsfeld.

Google Watch

link

~Search engines have a political bias? (Neo-con algorithms?)

Santarchy

Each December for the last 10 years Cacophonous Santas have been taking to streets in major metropolitan areas and generating a bit of naughty Noël mayhem as part of the annual Santacon events. It all started back in 1994 when several dozen Cheap Suit Santas paid a visit to downtown San Francisco for a night of Kringle Kaos. Things have now reached Critical Xmas and these infamous Santacons are now held in many cities across the world each year.
In 2003 Santarchy spread to Asia for SantaCon Tokyo and Antarctica for Santarctic!

link

~This only increases my affection for people who dress-up as Santas, mascots, furries, fluffies and robots. (But not clowns!)

The Way We Loop "Now": Eddying in the Flows of Media

Time, Debord argued, is not so much something we experience anymore, but something we consume. Watching the same old stories disengages us from historical cause and effect, alienating us from the idea of initiating change in the course of our history or our lives. Time in the mass media age is broken into discrete, enjoyable, abstracted fragments of consumable entertainment. We pay ten dollars to sit in a theater and watch the hero prevail. We pay our monthly cable so that each night we can watch our favorite sports players shoot it out. We tune in weekly, or perhaps daily, to find out what trials our favorite television actors will face. We turn on the Playstation and before we know it, we have been immersed in the world of Doom for hours.
Our lives are now not only measured by seasonal change or daily cycles, but also by the manufacturing of predictable behavior and economic cycles. Through the consumption of “artificially distinct moments,” we have become so used to our experience of media and capitalist time that we have forgotten that other kinds of time (from geological to phenomenological, to nano- time) exist, let alone how to appreciate them and take advantage of them. As other philosophers of media culture have taken up these questions, the phenomenological experience of time has become increasingly important to the discussion. Gilles Deleuze, on occasion hopelessly utopic, on others remarkably practical in his attention to incremental change and the subtle power of even the smallest forces, has proposed, if not solutions to the powerful force of the media flow, than certainly what we could call tactics to exist within it.

article by Jamey Hamilton

~Breakfast-time, travel-time, work-time, lunch-time, travel-time, free-time, sleep-time: I hadn't realized that time could conceivably be an experience as rich and as varied as place.
Are there useful comparisons to be drawn between public places and private spaces on the one hand and meditative/free-time and mediated/market (capitalist)-time?
Would 'meditating' (all meanings of the term) on mediated-time be something like trespassing?

UNOCAL to Settle Rights Claim

The case against Unocal was seen as a key test for human rights activists who want to hold multinationals responsible in U.S. courts for atrocities committed in other countries. About three dozen similar suits have been filed in the last 11 years against other major U.S. corporations, including ChevronTexaco Corp., Ford Motor Co. and IBM Corp.

None has gone to trial, and none has moved as far along in the judicial system as the Unocal suits, filed in 1996. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had been scheduled to hear arguments Monday on whether the case should go to trial.

A settlement would be a breakthrough. "Nobody can treat these cases as a joke anymore," said Elliot Schrage, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who lectures on the litigation trend at Columbia University's business and law schools.

U.S. business groups and the Bush administration have pressed the courts to turn back the tide of litigation from abroad, and other experts said a settlement in such a high-profile case could encourage lawyers to file more and broader human rights abuse suits.

"Major multinationals are terrified," said Susan Aaronson, director of the Kenan Institute's Washington Center for Globalization Studies. "They are absolutely terrified.

In June, in another case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Alien Tort Claims Act, ruling that foreigners could file lawsuits in U.S. courts to address some human rights abuses overseas.

story/ see also earlier links to "Corporations That Kill' and "Gangs of America" for more information. (~Free trade is not free.)

~I imagine any Tort Reform bill Congress passes next year will fix this Alien Torts Claim Act? Retroactively?

Photo-caption Non Sequitur

She danced through the streets with the guns all around her,
all torn like a rag doll, barefoot in the rain.
And she sang like a child, "Too-ra-day, too-ra-daddy!"
Oh how will I ever be simple again?

She sat by the banks of the dirty, grey river
and tried for a fish with a worm on a pin.
There was nothing but fever and ghosts in the water,
Oh how will I ever be simple again?

War was my love and my friend and companion,
ah what did I care for the pretty and plain?
But her smile was so clear and my heart was so troubled,
Oh, how will I ever be simple again?

In a poor burned-out house, as we sat at her table.
The smell of her hair was like cornfields in May.
And I wanted to weep but my eyes ached from trying,
Oh, how will I ever be simple again?

So graceful she moved through the dust and the ruin,
and happy she was in her dances and games.
Oh, teach me to see with your innocent eyes, love.
Oh, how will I ever be simple again?
Oh how will I ever be simple again?

--Richard Thompson

8 Shopping Days 'Till Christmas!

Most Cited Blogs, News Items, News Sources for 2004

at BlogPulse.com

Most popular 2004 AOL search terms
Most popular Lycos search terms

~Should we wonder how AOL & Lycos defined 'popular'?

Sybil Miller; Statesmen

Over the past ten years, I've worked on a series of photographs taken in state capitols titled: Statesmen - Pictures from the Fifty State Capitols, where I photographed and re-interpreted the portraits of former governors from each of the fifty states. With this project, I created a personal Hall of Governors, a collection of salesmen, matinee idols and fools, as well as respected ordinary men. Their faces unaltered, yet transformed, are infused with sadness, silliness, pompousness, and lost power.

link via: conscientious

~Photos that play with the assumed power of portraiture. (What a freaking white-man's club. Melting-pot my ass.)

Culture of Suspicion

Let me enter your conversation through the track that originally got me thinking about cultures of violence in cities. This was about ten years ago when I was trying to “understand” riots that had taken place in Bombay in 1992-93.

Social and political science theorizing as well as activist and NGO organizing in the city cohered around analyses of larger political ideologies and processes as well as on the economic demographies of neighbourhoods - in a crucial effort to counter the reduction to the inevitable Hindu-Muslim binary. But in conversation with people (all sorts, including the above mentioned analysts) about their experiences, often incredibly harsh and violent, I began to notice sets of fragmentary stories that were proffered as types of “explanation” for butchery, for betrayal by neighbours and friends. Impossibly banal, these were ordinary, trivial observations (of the sort that “they” use different cooking pans than do we) that seemed to hang as the cobwebs that grant an old house both its age and its persistence.

That got me thinking about how so-called common-sense beliefs make sense (as in give meaning but also make sensate) of the non-ordinary and of how this potential to see-saw between the horrific and the habitual might be what allows spaces of continual “terror” to become habitable. A sort of everyday unease.

I thought of this as a “culture of suspicion” - suspicion not as a fiercely held belief about base otherness but as something lurking, just in the shadows, ready to be marshaled when needed. I am reminded of this daily in the New York city subways on which I travel where, as on Bombay commuter locals, a subliminal jigsaw is constantly being assembled with everyone on board in order to position oneself as much for risk or escape as for the possibility of a seat. (This person will get off at Canal St.; that one is definitely on all the way to the Rockaways.) Now that we are bombarded with the announcements about watching out for suspicious packages left unattended, the puzzle solving, no doubt, has other ingredients in it. The making of each of us into policemen. Suspicion as surveillance.

A key element of this absent-minded detection in a time of fear and terror...are practices of telling. That is, everyone is convinced that he/she can tell who the others on the train or the street are (Hindu, Arab, Muslim, whatever) while all too frequently asserting that they themselves are able to “pass”. So the wielding of the various signifiers of identity - cap, beard, head scarf - takes on a range of contrary connotations (those who mean to be visible and derive a sense of self, safety, identity or community from it and those who mean to dissemble) together with a strange amalgam of pleasures derived from the performances, whether of disguise or of hyper-identification.

Radhika Subramaniam
NYC

via: underfire list

The Erotic Museum's: Human Body Project

The Erotic Museum is conducting an ongoing research project intent on recording the full breadth of natural and altered human physiology. By creating a massive image database of everyday people of every race, age and size we hope to provide the public with an enduring image of mankind's actual appearance in all of it's natural and unnatural forms. The project records natural skin coloration patterns, tattoos, body modifications, common body hair distribution and other characteristics seldom represented in the media....

link thanks, diederik

~Not much on-line content but the concepts underlying the project are noteworthy. It's also a hoot to zoom in on the flash graphic here.

Buy Blue

"In today's America there is a more powerful act than voting blue and that's buying blue."

link thanks, devin

Also:

"We believe corporations are as important as politicians in American Politics."

Choose the Blue via unknown news

Animal Show

~Today for some reason I was struck by the absurdity of performing animals. Child actors, dancing girls and other people's pets don't seem as unnecessary in comparison. Granted they all can display the cruelest automatism.

Simple Framing by George Lakoff

[Example]

Responding to "Tort Reform" in Texas

Conservatives have been battering progressives on what they have framed as "tort reform" – legislation to cap awards in tort cases. They have been most aggressive in Texas, where they have used the following language::
Litigation Lottery, Lawsuit Abuse, Lawsuit Abuse Tax, Frivolous Lawsuits, Greedy Trial Lawyers, Out of Control Juries, Runaway Juries, Jackpot Awards
The term reform is defined in the Corruption frame, lottery in the Gambling frame, and so on. Opposites are defined with respect to the frame, but given opposite values, one positive, the other negative. When you say your opponent is frivolous, it is rhetorically implied that you are the opposite, serious; if your opponent is a gambler, then you are fiscally responsible, and so on. That's how Republicans were framing Democrats.
These words evoke frames that, as they are used in context, evoke conservative values:
You alone are responsible for happens to you.
You shouldn't get what you haven't earned.
You should be disciplined, prudent, orderly.

We crafted a response that allowed the trial lawyers to take the moral high ground — in a way that fit what they believe. We took out a copy of Moral Politics and listed progressive values. Then we followed a systematic procedure:
Pick out the relevant core values for this issue.
Write down how your position follows from these values.
Articulate the facts and their consequences within this moral framing.
Define us and them within this moral frame.

Here's how the issue looks from a progressive moral perspective:
Tort law is the public's last defense against irresponsible, if not downright immoral, corporate behavior that harms the public. It is only the threat of huge punitive damages that has any effect on companies that put profit ahead of public health and well-being. Without that threat — with a small cap on awards — irresponsible companies can fold the relatively low cost of potential lawsuits into the cost of doing business and go on selling dangerous products unchecked. Public safety requires keeping the courts open for juries to make awards appropriate not just to the suffering of the victims, but to the threat to the public. It is a matter of protection.
The proposal to cap awards would effectively take the power to punish away from juries, and would make it hard for those harmed to sue, since lawyers would have a financial disincentive to take such a case. This would have the practical effect of closing off the courts to those seeking redress from corporate harm. Justice requires open courts.
The fundamental progressive values are:
We are empathetic; we care about people.
Be responsible
Help, Don't Harm
Protect the powerless

These led to the following language to describe conservative Republicans and the relevant corporations in this case:
The Corporate Immunity Act;
Corporate Raid on Responsibility;
Accountability Crisis;
Closed Courts;
The New Untouchables;
Rewards Greed and Dishonesty;
Protects the guilty, punishes the innocent.

article / more strategic framing
an overview of other issues (on left) at the rockridge institute

The Week in Craig (NYC)

JESUS CHRIST IS IN THE HEEZY, FOR SHEEZY

article by Amy Blair

~I cut and paste so much together I've forgotten what good magazine writing is like.

Nano Needs Research Before Rules

Nancy Monteiro-Riviere, a toxicologist specializing in nanomaterials at North Carolina State University, (suggested) the size of a nanomaterial may have to be considered separately from the raw material itself and the planned application when regulations are drafted for nano-derived products.
"The use of cosmetics and sunscreens has been heavily tested in the past," Monteiro-Riviere said. "Most of the nanomaterials that are in these cosmetics are zinc- or titanium-based. They have been tested using classic toxicity screens. They have been regulated based on their chemical composition, not on their size. I have been talking with some of the FDA people who are reevaluating this at the current time."

...scientists simply do not have enough information yet to know what the risks are in the body or in the environment.

"What is unknown," (Mark Wiesner a researcher at Rice University in Houston), said, "is how these materials will interact with the soup of materials naturally present in water, such as degradation products of leaves, products from bacteria and others. We believe that these materials can drastically change or perhaps dominate the properties of nanomaterials in nature."
In other words, it might be that nanomaterials, once released in nature, take on a natural coat.

My concern," said Monteiro-Riviere, "is that the fish eat (the "soup" described above), and the people eat the fish."

story

~Just a reminder that the industry is dragging its feet over pollution regulations, while tons of untested nano-materials are being produced and discarded nano-materials are treated like ordinary waste. People will get sick.

Imagine future nano-dead-zones; neo-ecosystems of mutated bacteria, plants, insects and animals, toxic to ordinary living things? How about clouds of self-organizing nano-particles blown around the world devastating all life, all materials in their path?

Earlier Spitting Image nano-tech links

How to Respond to Conservatives

Remember, don’t just negate the other person’s claims; reframe. The facts unframed will not set you free. You cannot win just by stating the true facts and showing that they contradict your opponent’s claims. Frames trump facts. His frames will stay and the facts will bounce off. Always reframe.
If you remember nothing else about framing, remember this: Once your frame is accepted into the discourse, everything you say is just common sense.* Why? Because that’s what common sense is: reasoning within a commonplace, accepted frame.

book excerpt

~My aunts taught me never argue with morons; you're bound to be misunderstood.
But there's good info here to help decode the info-babble hourly spewed by the media from their more literate morons.

US Moves to Muzzle Dissident Voices

In an apparent reversal of decades of U.S. practice, recent federal Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations bar American companies from publishing works by dissident writers in countries under sanction unless they first obtain U.S. government approval.

The restriction, condemned by critics as a violation of the First Amendment, means that books and other works banned by some totalitarian regimes cannot be published freely in the United States, a country that prides itself as the international beacon of free expression.

story w/comments

Details of Marines Mistreating Prisoners Are Revealed

WASHINGTON - Marines in Iraq conducted mock executions of juvenile prisoners last year, burned and tortured other detainees with electrical shocks, and warned a Navy corpsman they would kill him if he treated any injured Iraqis, according to military documents made public Tuesday.

The latest revelations of prisoner abuse cases, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union in a lawsuit against the government, involved previously unknown incidents in which 11 Marines were punished for abusing detainees. Military officials indicated that they had investigated 13 other cases, but deemed them unsubstantiated. Four investigations are pending.

The mistreatment occurred as early as May 2003, months before the first allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib were recorded. And the most recent case involving prisoner abuse by the Marines occurred in June, two months after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.

story

~The few, the proud...

US Plans Spy Craft in Near Space Zones

Top US air force officials are working on a strategy to put spy planes in near space - the no man's land above 65,000 feet, but below an outer space orbit.

Air force chief of staff General John Jumper...said the air force was working with the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a stealthy aircraft without metal that could be equipped with special sensors and remain in the air for months at a time.
... such aircraft could carry out radar and imaging missions, carry communications nodes and even potentially relay laser beams from a ground-based source against a wide variety of targets, industry sources said.
That would help meet the demand for persistent surveillance, which is difficult with current satellites which circle the Earth in orbit at altitudes above 300km.

story

~"Persistent surveillance"; now there's a term that could be used to help define a demographic. Do you favor or oppose 'persistent surveillance'? In Iraq? In your town? Downtown? Your neighborhood?
Your house?
Isn't it wonderful (perhaps not the right word) how the technology that watches us allows (again not quite right) us to think about our place in the world in new ways?
I hate the noise that blimps make at sporting events (these should be quieter?) and imagining a blimp hovering overhead everytime I step out the door is just plain creepy but if my neighbors think they're safer under persistent surveillance, wouldn't there be something wrong with me to think otherwise?

AIDS Research Chief Rewrote Safety Report

WASHINGTON -- The government's chief of AIDS research rewrote a safety report on a U.S.-funded drug study to change its conclusions and delete negative information. Later, he ordered the research resumed over the objections of his staff, documents show.

Dr. Edmund Tramont, chief of the National Institutes of Health's AIDS Division, took responsibility for both decisions...

...the National Academy of Sciences continues to investigate whether the Uganda research was valid.

NIH believes it helped save hundreds of thousands of African babies by allowing nevirapine to be used in single doses to block the AIDS virus, (Dr. H. Clifford Lane, the NIH's No. 2 infectious disease specialist and one of Tramont's bosses) said. But he acknowledged the research was imperfect, and NIH now believes nevirapine should no longer be a first choice for newborn protection -- if other options exist -- because of the newly discovered problems about resistance.

Tramont wrote in 2003 e-mails that he reopened the clinics because he didn't want NIH "perceived as bureaucratic but rather thoughtful and reasonable" and that it was important to encourage Africans' fight against AIDS "especially when the president is about to visit them."

Bush visited the continent a few days after Tramont ordered the clinics reopened.

Dr. Betsy Smith's report, finished in January 2003, said the Uganda trial suffered from "incomplete or inadequate safety reporting" and that records on patients were "of poor quality and below expected standards of clinical research."
She strongly urged NIH not to make sweeping conclusions about nevirapine based on the Uganda research. "Safety conclusions from this trial should be very conservative," she wrote.
Behind the scenes, Tramont asked to see Smith's report before it was submitted to medical authorities, including the Food and Drug Administration. "I need to see the primary data -- too much riding on this report," Tramont wrote Jan. 23, 2003.
A few weeks later, the safety report was published and sent to FDA without Smith's concerns and with a new conclusion.
In disbelief, Tramont's staff began inquiring how Smith's report got changed. An answer came back from the top.

"I wrote it," Tramont responded

story/ APs documents

~A snapshot of the Bush Adminstration's humanitarian concerns, adding fuel to AIDS conspiracy theories for years to come.
I shouldn't assume that doing the politically expedient thing, helping create a Presidential pr moment, harmed Ugandan babies. It only looks like craven opportunism. Nevirapine is not (yet?) a worthless AIDS drug.

Spy/Stealth Satellites = Weapons in Space?

What is America's top-secret spy program?
Experts think Democrats objected to satellite weapon

[A highly classified intelligence program that the Senate intelligence committee has tried unsuccessfully to kill... story]

The XSS program is aimed at developing microsatellites that can rendezvous with other satellites and interact with them — sparking debate over whether they have an offensive purpose.

What is the hush-hush intelligence project that apparently costs a fortune and has angered key Democratic senators?

Back in the 1990s, President Clinton helped kill earlier anti-satellite programs, also known as "asats." In those programs, U.S. satellites would take out foreign satellites using "space mines" or lasers.
But the current technology, according to intelligence experts, may be much more subtle. There have been various programs based on the technology, some unclassified and dressed up as U.S. defensive measures, others highly classified. One unclassified program, called the Counter Surveillance and Reconnaissance System (CSRS, pronounced "Scissors") was recently held up by Congress, according to Defense Daily.

The program was aimed at blocking an adversary's access to commercial or government space resources. It was one of a few concepts on the table for offensive counterspace operations, where the United States actively works to counter an adversary's access to space, said the paper.

"That program is stopped," Defense Daily quoted the Air Force Space Command's chief, Gen. Lance Lord, as saying. "The idea to look at that mission area is still open."
'
Prowler' at work
The United States has long been interested in such offensive programs, launching an experimental and highly classified satellite called "Prowler" on the space shuttle Atlantis November 1990.
Prowler stealthily maneuvered close to Russian and presumably other nations’ communications satellites in high Earth orbit, 24,000 miles (38,400 kilometers) up. These satellites are ideal targets. They are at much higher altitudes, and thus difficult to track visually. Most of the key military satellites are in this orbit — relay satellites that transmit imagery uplinked from spy satellites, military communications satellites and electronic eavesdropping satellites that target terrestrial microwave communications.

Prowler gathered all manner of data on the high-Earth-orbit satellites: their size, measurements, radar signature, mass and the frequencies on which they relay their data. Now experts suggest that the United States may be trying to use, or has already succeeded in using, that stealth technology to "negate" an adversary's satellite communications.

A satellite using such technology would not have to jam the other satellite's signals, strictly speaking. Knowing how its communications systems were configured, the satellite could simply step in front of it and block its signals. In fact, one expert said Prowler did just that in tests using U.S. communications satellites, without being detected.

How close can such a U.S. satellite get to another satellite? Within about a foot (30 centimeters), the expert said. The Prowler technology could even allow the satellite to maneuver close to the target without receiving data from Earth. Once it came within a certain range of the target, it resorted to an internal computer program.

Is it war?
Many in the arms control community have long worried about such an anti-satellite program, saying that, particularly in time of crisis, such an operation could be construed as a hostile act and the first phase of a space war.

story By Robert Windrem NBC News

~By developing satellites that 'rendevous and interact' with other satellites; space is officially (but secretly) militarized.

TV Friend

Google to Digitize Millions of Books

link

Oz Grid Computing Project Could Foil Terror Plots

..the projects involve use of a network of sensors, incorporating peer-to-peer software and linked by a wireless network, registering and alerting authorities to atypical patterns of behaviour within a defined area.

...the sensors could detect access by unauthorised individuals to remote parts of large infrastructure such as bridges or train platforms or the falling and subsequent failure to get up quickly of a resident of a nursing home or retirement village.

The grid computing project will allow (Monash University in Melbourne) to simulate very large-scale networks...up to one million nodes (each of which includes a sensor and the second a small device that communicates over a wireless network)...