February 28, 2005
Japanese Balloon Bombs
article / also here at 'Pieces of Paper'/ and 'Origami Warfare' found by James
How Far is Too Far?
The Line Between "Offensive" and "Indecent" Speech
To facilitate discussion and make this article more readable, brief excerpts of the material that led to each complaint are provided. More extensive excerpts are provided in footnotes. The dismissed complaints are divided into three categories: (A) expletives or vulgar words; (B) descriptions of sexual or excretory activities or organs; and (C) double entendre.
~Wonderful vulgar descriptions, expletives and double entendres enhanced by the scholarly tone of the article. Reminding me of Maledicta Press
Hunters:: As Acquired from Around the Internets
tusks
"i've always been interested in that fatal point in the hunter's story that everything else leads up to, that part just before they make the killshot when they inevitably say, "... and then this beautiful magnificent buck was standing right there in front of me." - for the longest time that's confused me.
i remember, ten years old with my best friend scott in a cabin in coeur d'alane with his uncle and the uncle's friend for a night of spotlight hunting. all together we sat up on the balcony in sleeping bags, a saltblock and sweet grain placed in the field below. the men had rifles, scott the light, and my job was to hold the wires against the car battery. the idea being to freeze the deer just long enough to get off some clear shots.
right there, and it's beautiful.
i wonder how much all of us hunt: to want, to desire, to take and
control. consume.
what do we mean when we say that something is beautiful." --James Luckett
more hunters: http://consumptive.org/hunters/hunters.html
Overheard at Starbucks
"In America...in the world?...your income determines if your more concerned with disease than crime."
-"In America...if you're lucky."
"In a few neighborhoods and towns drunkenness, domestic abuse, drug addiction and child abuse are 'diseases'."
-"In most parts of the city those things are crimes."
--"Jailable offenses."
"In most of the world those aren't crimes or diseases."
No Secrets: Eyes on the C.I.A.
Aviation obsessives with cameras and Internet connections have become a threat to cover stories established by the CIA to mask its undercover operations and personnel overseas. U.S. intel sources complain that "plane spotters" - hobbyists who photograph airplanes landing or departing local airports and post the pix on the Internet - made it possible for CIA critics recently to assemble details of a clandestine transport system the agency set up to secretly move cargo and people - including terrorist suspects - around the world.
Google searches revealed that plane spotters Web-posted numerous photos of two private aircraft - one a small Gulfstream jet and the other a midsize Boeing 737 - registered to obscure companies suspected of CIA connections.
story/ more archived at Daily Kos/ or the memory blog
~I can't find the photos of the planes referred to above on google. Many images using 'inurl:gulfstream' or 'inurl:boeing' 737 but nothing specific to CIA or prisoners.
(Now these photos would be something to post...)
Witnesses described seeing the prisoners handed to US agents whose faces were masked by hoods. The clothes of the handcuffed prisoners were cut off and they were dressed in nappies covered by orange overalls before being forcibly given sedatives by suppository. --Sunday Times Nov. 14, 2004
February 27, 2005
Saliva Testing Hits the Mainstream
New discoveries in proteomics -- the study of proteins found in saliva and elsewhere throughout the body -- is bringing saliva testing within spitting distance of other much-used screens, such as blood or urine testing...
..saliva testing for illicit drug use is already becoming more common in the workplace...
The Joy of Sexology
Does it matter that Alfred Kinsey enjoyed his work more than he let on?
...to conservative critics, Kinsey was a pervert lusting after approval for his own fetishes by exaggerating the extent which others shared his predilections.
Kinsey was a part of the generation that Arthur Schlesinger, writing in the Partisan Review in 1949, dubbed the age of the “Statistical Soldier,” when Americans' appetite for approaching social questions by accumulating massive case histories reached its zenith. In the 1940s, George Gallup gained icon status for pioneering political polls; GM sales managers plastered their walls with giant weekly maps of counties coded for color preference of cars; and economist Gunnar Myrdal exposed the systematic effects of racism on African Americans with a multi-volume encyclopedia, An American Dilemma.
Shortly after the first book's release, an influential review in The New York Times called for revising state sodomy laws in accordance with Kinsey's data that such acts were not altogether uncommon. Kinsey had documented that a plurality of younger American men were guilty of at least one act then illegal in some or all states, including premarital sex, homosexual sex, extramarital sex, oral sex with a spouse, anal sex with a fiancée, among others. Within a few years, the American Law Institute recommended decriminalizing consensual acts between adults, and many states subsequently revised their penal codes. His data, and that of subsequent researchers who followed in his wake, armed the lawyers who revised penal codes, educators who created sex-education curricula, and gay rights activists who lobbied for social acceptance and against discriminatory hiring policies that institutionalized their treatment as a deviant underclass. They cited his books, though rarely the man himself. Not everyone saw this as progress...
article by Christine Larson
AARP Gets the 'Swift Boat' Treatment
"... the campaign for item No. 1 on (the GOP) agenda, Social Security privatization, is getting a whole lot nastier. Groups left and right are launching the kind of attack ads normally reserved for election campaigns. The conservative group USA Next, which is attacking the AARP for its anti-privatization stance, has retained consultants who helped orchestrate the Swift Boat Vets attack on John Kerry." @
"...an ad from USA Next, a loony right group that thinks of itself as the conservative alternative to AARP. Apparently "the real AARP agenda" is to endorse gay marriage and disband the military."
~On the other hand: AARP Prepares to Punch Back on Social Security
~AARP sold out it's membership not so long ago publically applauding and promoting Bush's worthless drug plan for seniors; it'll be interesting to see if and when they cave on this too. AARP's probably endowed until the next century anyway.
February 26, 2005
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2004
The year's most egregious price gougers, polluters, union-busters, dictator-coddlers, fraudsters, poisoners, deceivers and general miscreants.
list
~I'm always surprised how many of these corporations I've 'done business with'.
Will a tv program like 'Cops' ever go after these bad boys? Wouldn't you like see people in suits chased down by the law, spread-eagled on the ground or asphalt under drawn guns, searched and cuffed? "Whatta ya got in that Prada briefcase?" (Perp-walks down the red-carpet?)
Pointless StarWars Won't Save Vulnerable Airlines
President George W. Bush is betting billions of dollars – well over $10 billion in FY 05 – that at some point a missile will attack the continental United States. This has not happened yet, nor will the most threatening countries be capable of an attack like this for the better part of a decade. Still, the money and the rhetoric keep pouring in.
However, one very real and pressing missile threat has been largely ignored: shoulder-launched missiles menacing commercial aircraft. Over 700,000 of these missiles, also known as man-portable air defense systems (or MANPADS), litter the globe and are particularly ubiquitous in current or former war zones. These missiles can range up to 15,000 feet in altitude and, as their name implies, can be carried and launched by a single person.
~Everytime I'm ready to think that Republicans in Washington are by and large fiscally responsible, truly favor small government, and are genuinely concerned with security issues, I read something like this.
[rpg photo via google]
February 25, 2005
U.S. to Test Bird Flu Vaccine as Warnings Spread
Government stockpiling antiviral drugs in case of epidemic.
WASHINGTON - Amid dire warnings of an Asian pandemic, the government is preparing to test an experimental bird flu vaccine and is increasing disease surveillance in hopes of reducing the toll from any eventual American outbreak.
~A microbiologist inspired by the above story commented: "This avian flu crap is being overhyped by the media big-time! It's really shitty journalism and these guys should be sued for calling "wolf!"
I watched CSPAN as the director of the CDC desperately tried to cool down the media by stating that avian flu is of no threat to humans and that there's no danger at present time of something killing Americans. Unfortunately, in the same series of comments, the director stated: (paraphrased) However, we are keeping watch in SE Asia in order to identify whether there has been, or will be, species cross over from birds to humans. And this article is bleeding this misinformation to dead and is just more of the same overblown stuff..."
~If the CDC can't periodically help major drug manufacturers scare up superfluous funding, what good are they?
[photo not w/story]
Sensor Telemetry Re-Evolution
Accenture believes that sensor telemetry will extend the Internet's reach to cover nearly every physical object on earth-in real time.
[For example] The chemicals industry is currently investing in the development of fuel cells, but how can they price a product that might have a working life of, say, 10 years? Sensors offer the capability to measure a chemical reaction or the number of energy units consumed, enabling the supplier to charge by consumption, rather than a single initial payment.
A key part of any new technology-driven evolution is managing the challenges along the way.
Information flood...
Data ownership:
One of the burning questions will be: who owns or manages the data? Many sensor telemetry systems will create value chains with a number of potential stakeholders who will want to use the data. Across these chains, ownership, access, usage and revenue creation from the data must be agreed upon between parties. What roles should the product manufacturers, wireless companies or application service providers play?
~Gadszooks, imagine paying not only for the water your toilet uses but also everytime you sit on it or pull it's lever? How about being charged everytime your furnace or air-conditioner kicks on? Wireless toll charges for every bridge, on every highway? "Roaming charges" for all automobiles, out-of-state rates?
Sensors will "turn increasingly commoditized products (and publically funded infrastructures) into services". This will be the new "service economy" where the use of appliances and "public space" become billable.
The free market will be able to do away with public, open (free) space.
Some very large corporations, phone, cable and wireless internet providers, along with the law-makers and politicians who grant them licenses and affordances are going to make lots and lots of money.
See also ~comments here for a utopian version of sensor 'evolution'.
Movie: HBOs 'Dirty War'
This HBO Films thriller shows how a "dirty bomb" attack might be planned and executed in London, despite the best efforts of police and intelligence forces - as well as how devastating the consequences of such an attack could be.
more HBO movie blurb w/ a link to USAs CDC! (Center for Disease Control)
~I"m half-way through this movie (this week on Public TV) and I'm surprised by my initial reactions. 1) How easily I accept the premise that what happens in Britain with cops, terrorists, spies, foreigners and crowds isn't fundamentally different from what might happen in any large American city. If the movie was in another language and dubbed or subtitled, it would more difficult to identify with?
2) How readlily I accept the inevitability of a 'dirty bomb' attack on an American city. Let alone a city in Europe.
3) Along with this fatalism, for some inexplicable reason, is the belief that American intelligence agents have already stopped a number of potentially catastrophic terrorist attacks but can't or won't inform the public.
I'm surprised at how easily I identify with Britain and how willing I am to accept the dirty bomb mcguffin in this movie and in real life.
Most disturbing is my fantasy about the already successful guardians in the unseen, unknowable, unproven American intelligence agencies. Where do these imaginings come from? They ain't art, can't pay the bills, get me laid or elevate my pulse and they certainly aren't all that profound or unique. They're in some ways as satisfying as a good meal but of no real substance or importance.
What a luxury to have the time to muse over such trivialities.
I owe someone for this. Thank you whoever ya'll are.
For Imam Hussein (We Don't Do That Here)
An Iraqi Muslim Shiite boy flagellates himself outside Imam Mussa al-Kazem shrine in central Baghdad at the peak of Ashura, which marks the death of Imam Hussein, grandson of Prophet Mohammed. (AFP/Karim Sahib) @
~The brave American men in women occupying Iraq for the US Military are coincidentally shining the light of reason on superstitious religious practices like the above.
A photo to fuel or justify America's imperialistic evangelicalism. Save the children! See also Reuters Caption Correction for another way such photos might be used. No he's not celebrating his party's success at the Iraqi polls.
NYC: Pre-Paid Porn Cards
Porn sting X-poses vendors
The so-called PPP cards cost $5 to $50, and work similar to prepaid telephone cards.
story / via & archived (next month) at politech*
*"First we saw prepaid calling cards, prepaid cell phones, and prepaid Visa cards for immigrants, those with poor credit ratings, or folks concerned about anonymity. Now the forces of the free market have given us prepaid porn cards too..." --Declan McCullagh
~Have you had your free-market porn today?
February 24, 2005
Reuters: Caption Corrections
The caption on Feb. 14 for a picture by Reuters with the continuation of an article about the Iraqi elections misstated the reason Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a Shiite cleric, was weeping. He was participating in a mourning ritual as part of Ashura, a holy Shiite festival - not reacting to results showing that his political alliance had won a slim majority of seats. second caption for a Reuters photo misstated the reason a Shiite was shown flagellating himself in a Baghdad procession. He was taking part in the same mourning ritual, not celebrating the election outcome.
yahoo/reuters/ NYT's For the Record via slate
Germany Welcomes President Bush!
Charm offensive
The NYT notices a somewhat limited audience [register/sign-in: unknown/unknown] for Bush's good will tour: "The president was entirely sealed off from Germans—other than Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the German journalists at a news conference, and even a town-meeting-type encounter with Mainz residents was scrubbed out of worry the mood would be hostile."
An analysis inside by the Post by Glenn Kessler says the White House's "charm offensive" is obscuring the basic trend [ibid/ibid]: "European leaders are increasingly united against U.S. positions and feel emboldened to go their own way."
photo thanks joerg/ links via Slate's Today's Papers
~A different reading on those two words 'charm offensive', eh?
Any Old Actress
Mariel's Favorite Actresses
(for example)
Catherine Keener @
~Another true fan. Mariel treats us to concise loving reviews of many contemporary movie actresses. Few photos but sufficient links to more movie info and other fan sites.
Nuclear Test Watch
so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth
in the sight of men.. Revelation Chapter 13:13
graphic via Mark Them
~So it is written.
Hypnox Photographs
amanada
~The young women in these photographs have brought me a new insight into the world of fashion. Putting on clothes can be as stimulating for some as gawking at bodies in clothes is for others. I can't be reminded of that simple fact too often. Thanx grrls.
Maybe if I went clubbing more, it (the pleasures of dress-up, costume, performance, narcissism, whatever) would be sooo obvious and prove tiresome?
(A-ma-nada...that slays me.)
UK: Dog Cameras
Northumbria police
press release via aberrant news
~The idea of ambulatory beings in a given area willy-nilly transmitting video images and sound seems kinda cool. Imagine every adult, child, pet, squirrel, bird, raccoon, etc. putting 'ambient' images & sound out there 24/7? You could stream their video wirelessly & somewhat anonymously through the internet. People could access & watch in much the same way they view web-sites. Would tv and radio distributors allow that much public access to their 'airwaves'?
How about celebrities and athletes fitted with wireless video? Certain high-risk jobs? Jet pilots and high-rise window washers? 10,000,000 channels and nothing on?
John Zoller: Alphamega Series
[link to larger photo/ detail]
"These photographs capture the zenith moment in a physical process utilizing primordial destructive elements (fire, heat, light) and technology.
This process mirrors the intention of the work: an exploration of the
themes of birth and death, beginning and ending, transcendence, and
the transference of energy."
http://www.johnzoller.com/alphamega/alphamega.htm
~Micro-cosmic. (No photoshop tricks.)
February 23, 2005
Overheard at Starbucks
"Valentine's Day's for couples; Halloween's for kids..."
--"and freaks!"
..do pedophiles have their own secret holidays?"
Like 'President's Day' when schools are closed and most parents have to work?"
--"Thanksgiving Day's for masochists."
ShillPages
~extensive Dr. Who archives; cool actress' photos, etc. a true fan.
Photo-caption Non Sequitur
(i.e. how I sometimes...not so often anymore...am able to picture an imaginary woman behind a nearby door...no I am not an animal.)
the purse is optional
February 17, 2005
Administration Prepares to Resume Nuclear Testing
Energy Secretary Pushes to Ramp Up U.S. Ability to Test Nuke Bombs
Washington - Although scientists continue work on simulating nuclear bomb tests by computer, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Tuesday that the Nevada Test Site's ability to resume actual underground warhead detonations must be enhanced.
The Department of Energy's 2006 budget request includes $4 million this year and $14 million next year to resurrect research on a potential "bunker buster" variation of an existing warhead to destroy buried enemy targets. Congress killed the so-called Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator.
story
When terrorists fight themselves ... we all win
Some weeks ago I was going to write a post about the cease of fire proposal ETA was going to send to the Spanish government, I even began a draft about it, but I received a phone call from a former friend telling me that it was not going to be a real proposal as there was an internal fight where some wanted to begin a peace process, and who had already met government emissaries to set the bases of the surrender, and others who wanted to continue the fight, and who had already ordered inminent bombings that would include at least one assasination.
He also told me that some members were even considering to denounce the plans that include bloody crimes.
I knew this gossip came from a good source, so I decided not to post anything until I could confirm the information and it seems the time has come. Three minor bombings (1, 2, 3) and one frustrated sniper murder quite confirm it.
Though it might seem strange, there's a light of hope in this situation as it shows how weak they are right now.
Facts, Fallacies & Urban Myths re Censorship
~Looks like a fairly comprehensive collection of links to "studies on the supposed effects of extreme entertainment on the human psyche". (From down under)
Virtual Museum of Political Art
george bush killing freedom by werner horvath
A private collection by MMag. Dr. Patrick Horvath, M.A.I.S., and Dr.Werner Horvath
February 16, 2005
Posing Threats on the Battlefield
'...The struggle for ad placement in public space in China is not unlike a battlefield strewn with casualties after a pitched battle for power. Today one brand wins. The next day, its competitor will replace it with better positioning on public spaces. Every day, new ads go up, and old ones fall down, scattered in pieces, and discarded on the ground under newly erected billboard advertisements.
In my "Posing Threats" work, I've constructed a huge wall, that stands about 14 meters high and 40 meters across, and I fixed over 600 pieces of paper (110x90cm each) on which I wrote in traditional Chinese ink brush style in some instances and in felt tip pen and magic marker in others, a random selection of slogans and phrases from the advertisements that bombard us here every day... Everything is advertised, from items as big as airplanes (BOEING) or as small as vinegar and condoms. On my gigantic wall, I make the fight for advertising as fierce as a struggle for military power, with inevitable casualties on the battlefield. I have also included some of the famous brands that proliferate in China, such as Shell, McDonald's, Durex, Starbuck's, along with a few of the anecdotes behind them and the misunderstandings that arise in translating these for a foreign audience. Altogether, I've used around 3000 varieties of products and services on my wall to show off the allure of this mass advertising campaign that surrounds us.
link thanks conscientious joerg
~Monumental. It's quaint to see how people new to freedom react to the unstoppable flow of market-driven information. i.e. advertising.
Overheard at Starbucks
"If cops & hookers usually enjoy a relationship somewhat different then cops & robbers, where do the sociologists and psychologists, the doctors, fit in?"
-"They don't go there."
"Never before in history are there so many adults who haven't been abused in childhood. There are people in this town right now who've never once been struck by a caregiver, let alone that stuff that makes the newspapers."
-"And some of those people are sociologists and psychologists."
"--But fewer are hookers...and cops, right?"
"So where DO the non-abused, educated, professional experts in human behavior fit in the "hooker-cop" mutual exploitation paradigm?"
--"See no evil?"
"Professional courtesy?"
-"Wear your jimmies?!"
Explicit Photos Fan UN Sex Scandal
The French staffer they implicate says that the Congo mission harbors a pedophile network.
UNITED NATIONS — A scandal about the sexual abuse of Congolese women and children by U.N. officials and peacekeepers intensified Friday with the broadcast of explicit pictures of a French U.N. worker and Congolese girls and his claim that there was a network of pedophiles at the U.N. mission in Congo.
~Is this a demonstration of a free market sex-economy principle: if you put men with some money (vehicles & radios) in foreign places where there's no money and little food, this is what's happens?
The limited number of people found responsible... a pundit at The Telegraph wrote there's been "systemic UN child sex in at least 50 per cent of their missions"....and the speed in which the "we-will-never-allow-this-to-happen-again" stories have appeared....got me thinking about that Belgian pedophile ring of not so long ago and the few people arrested there too.
It's noteworthy that European papers report on the possible existence of "sex-rings", even though the prosecutions don't yet (dare?) go there. Here in the States our journalists rarely wonder about home-grown (off the internet) criminal sex networks or pedophile rings. Like our assassins America's sex-criminals are all lone gunmen?
Poem: The Pope's Penis
It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat -- and at night
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.
By Sharon Olds [link to more poems]
+++
photo yahoo
Families Sue Blackwater Over Deaths in Fallujah
The families contend in the state civil lawsuit that the workers were sent into Fallujah, Iraq, without proper equipment and personnel to defend the supply convoy they were guarding.
"The fact that these four Americans found themselves located in the high-risk, war-torn city of Fallujah without armored vehicles, automatic weapons and fewer than the minimum number of team members was no accident," the lawsuit said. "Instead, this team was sent out without the required equipment and personnel by those in charge at Blackwater."
~How soon we Homelanders forget. As of Feb 15, this is pretty much a non-story. GoogleNews has only one link to it. Considering what the US Military recently did to the city of Fallujah you might think this news would generate a little more interest. Don't bad-mouth the private armies? Iraq is so last year?
An Iraqi cheers in front of one of the burning cars.
The crowd chants anti-American slogans as the charred corpses of the victims hang from a bridge over the Euphrates River.
CNN's April 1, 2004 story
WalMart to Settle Child Labor Charges
The 24 (federal child labor) violations, which occurred at stores in Arkansas, Connecticut and New Hampshire, had to do with teenage workers who used hazardous equipment such as a chain saw, paper balers and fork lifts.
Wal-Mart denied the allegations but agreed to pay the penalty..
[~As part of the settlement!?]
Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., was critical of the provision that gives Wal-Mart 15 days notice before the Labor Department investigates wage and hour accusations. He said it could give Wal-Mart the chance to sweep violations under the rug.
~We don' need no stinkin' unions.
(On my homefront: I've payed the fines (not admitting to any wrongdoing) and agreed to stop burning trash in my yard but the cops have to give me a few days notice if they plan on responding to any of my neighbors' future complaints. That's the law.)
ChoicePoint Data Sold to Imposters
Criminals posing as legitimate businesses have accessed critical personal data stored by ChoicePoint Inc., a firm that maintains databases of background information on virtually every U.S. citizen. The incident involves a wide swath of consumer data, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, credit reports and other information. ChoicePoint notified between 30,000 and 35,000 consumers in California that their personal data may have been accessed by "unauthorized third parties."
~"Ineptness to the point of being evil?"
(Have you had your fill of corporate-created irony today?)
February 15, 2005
We Don't Do That Here
After thinking about it for 2+ solid years, (cyclist Nicole Freedman) decided to get a full-facial tattoo that combined the markings of several species of tropical saltwater fish: the mahogany snapper, the queen angelfish, and the queen triggerfish.
"Tropical saltwater fish are beautiful creatures and they roam underwater in complete tranquility - they are at one with their oceanic environment," said Freedman, further noting that, "racing a criterium is a lot like swimming around a saltwater reef waiting for a great white shark to attack...and then at the last second swimming out of the way quickly so one of your teammates can be swallowed up instead."
scroll down for story via News of the Weird Pro
The Hostile Takeover Of Childhood
[Book(s)]
'Kids can recognize logos by 18 months, and before their second birthday, they're asking for products by brand names. By three or three-and-a-half, experts say, children start to believe that brands communicate their personal qualities; for example, that they're cool, or strong, or smart... Upon arrival at the schoolhouse steps, the typical first-grader can evoke 200 brands.'
The media reform movement that has gained currency in recent years would do well to see the protection of children as a way to build broad support for reforms that ultimately will protect everyone. Economic life in our society is built around the market's quest to achieve the highest rate of profit possible. Because corporate control of childhood is an inherent impulse in this system, organizations need to build that awareness into their organizing.
~Selling to kids teaches them to be informed consumers.
it takes a free market to raise a child
[link, image & caption via the happy tutor]
February 14, 2005
Give the Gift of Virginity
Grammy Award winning Christian singer/songwriter REBECCA ST. JAMES says, “Give the gift of virginity to your future spouse.”
Rebecca is a 26-year-old virgin who practices what she preaches and sings about in her hit song, “Wait for Me” and book by the same name, about holding off on having sex before marriage, the topic called by USA TODAY…“the biggest hot button issue in America since abortion.”
press release thanks diederick.
~For some reason I'm picturing a shredded wedding gown and a sacrificial altar. And shouldn't droit du seigneur figure in here somewhere?
One of the H's at Unknown News mused: "I wonder if some hot babe who actually had a sex life would be allowed to talk about it on the radio. Perhaps they could debate, the know-nothing girl and the been-there-done-that girl ..."
(photo not from article)
Poem: Sex Without Love
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies...
read the poem by Sharon Olds
Valentines from Ancient Rome: Sex, Death and Lust
The ancient Romans -- the erotic love poets like Catullus, Propertius and Ovid in first-century BC Rome -- had...a different take on love. Love for them was interesting, both to live and to write about, because it was painful, like a disease.
article w/links by Barbara K. Gold
Valentine's Gallery
(card detail scanned by cieciel/
not from above gallery)
Video Vigilante Arrested for Pandering
story thanks Consumer James
~Everybody's making porn ('cept for me and my monkey)?
The Utopian Fantasy of "Deep Throat"
"Pornography's numerous critics tend to take the genre very literally, as if porn aspired to be social realism. But a better comparison is science fiction, another genre that takes a "what if" approach to bodies and societies. Like sci-fi, porn replaces existing realities with wild alternative universes (against which to measure the lackluster, repressive world we've inherited). At its most inventive, pornography too has an allegorical distance from the real, as with the deeply absurdist Deep Throat—an utterly invented erotic world in which male and female bodies and desires correspond with one another far better than they do back here on terra firma.
The premise may be dopey, but the fantasy of male-female instant sexual synchrony is sort of a poignant one: It imagines a universe where men and women get pleasure from all the same things. And what an interesting prospect to contemplate: If sexual pleasure were as sure a thing for women as for men, what vast social and personal transformations would follow?..."
article by Laura Kipnis. Her last book was Against Love: A Polemic. Her previous book was Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America.
(photo by mapplethorpe; not from above)
February 13, 2005
Overheard at Starbucks
"He learned too late not to laugh at the men intoxicated by greed and cruelty. He was doomed before he was 30 years old."
Arthur Miller: "Why I Wrote 'The Crucible'"
Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.
The 5th Annual Men's Nite Out or Fascist Picture Time
Screenshots and comments from a church sponsored military recruitment drive.
~Why won't anyone sit down and explain to these men there's more good in life than risking their (albeit pathetic) asses for the most holy/patriotic opportunity of blowing dark-skinned people to kingdom-come?
For the hell of it imagine the very same program in a mausoleum or cemetery. Support the troops!
Howard Zinn asks:
"What does it take to bring a turnaround in social consciousness - from being a racist to being in favor of racial equality, from being in favor of Bush's tax program to being against it, from being in favor of the war in Iraq to being against it? We desperately want an answer, because we know that the future of the human race depends on a radical change in social consciousness."
~Today I say screw'em. Better those bible-humping true-believers in the god-damned military then anyone in my family, my friends. (Where's your Jesus now?)
change your mind, please?
February 12, 2005
School Halts "Adopt-a-Sniper" Fund
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A U.S. university in Wisconsin has blocked an attempt by Republican students to raise money for a group called "Adopt a Sniper" that raises money for U.S. sharp-shooters in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The students were selling bracelets bearing the motto "1 Shot 1 Kill No Remorse I Decide."
"Clearly the rhetoric of that organization raised some questions and we had some strong objections as a Jesuit university," Marquette University school spokeswoman Brigid O'Brien said on Thursday.
The students, representing a group called College Republicans, originally got permission to set up a table at the student union to raise money for U.S. troops in Iraq.
But they chose to promote a group called Adopt a Sniper, which says on its Web site it supports snipers deployed by the United States armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The group says it "helps real snipers get the real gear they need to help keep us safe."
The brainchild of a Texas police SWAT officer Adopt a Sniper (http://www.adoptasniper.org) has raised thousands of dollars in cash and gear to supplement the kit of sharp shooters in U.S. combat platoons.
Among products sold on the site is a $15 coin with the imprinted phrase "Assistance From A Distance."
yahoo
~Is there anything more heroic or brave then what the American snipers are doing in Iraq?
(Here's some irony for ya'll: only the truly psychotic will remain unbothered. The most human of them will eventually suffer. Sweet dreams.)
Overheard at Starbucks
"While he was being dosed with female hormones which made him weepy and withdrawn, she was recruited by militant swingers who showed her how 'personal power' could be found on the end of a strangers dick."
Pyongyang Metro
A close-up of the mural “The Great Leader Kim Il Sung Among Workers.”
February 11, 2005
Eyes of Laura
"'Laura,' an artist working as guard at the Vancouver Art Gallery, makes art out of allowing visitors to her website to take charge of the museum's cameras and see what she sees. 'Sometimes I wonder whether more happens because I'm watching or whether events line themselves up for my benefit or something,' she reflects in her first diary entry on the site, dated September 1, 2004. Every few days, something new is posted, including video clips from the day's observations. These have slowly coalesced into a mystery of sorts, as the narrator obsesses over the interactions of the milieu's recurring characters--a detective, a skateboarder, an odd woman. True to that initial entry's promise, as you watch the narrator piece together the clues, you can never be sure whether something is 'really' going on, or whether it's in her head."
via Ben Davis at Rhizome's Net Art News / IMDB's Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)
~Its a wonder her employers haven't yet realized Laura's job been made redundant.
Lincoln's Patent
Abraham Lincoln "is the only American President to have held a patent on an invention of his own design."
The Amppics Collector's Site
This page contains pictures, showing amputated women... site
[not a photo from above]
How Is It that Neocons Make So Many Mistakes...
How is it that the neocons make so many mistakes, yet never seem to lose their confidence to continue to make more mistakes? The next disasters will follow from Iraq as if Iraq never happened. How can they be simultaneously so violent and yet so self-righteous?
~The Right Man.
How To Talk When You Can't Speak
Communicating with unconscious minds.
When neuroscientists scanned the patients' brains as they played audiotapes of loved ones, the activity was strikingly normal. The visual cortex of one of the men even lit up in a way that suggested he was visualizing the stories that his relatives told. One of the researchers told the New York Times that they've repeated the experiment on seven more patients and found the same results.
If the study holds water, we may need to rethink how we treat the estimated 300,000 Americans who are regarded as unreachable...
~How difficult would it be to create a set-up that would permit the family and friends of unreachables to rudimentarily but rountinely "communcate" (i.e. visualize real-time changes in the brain to assorted stimuli) with them? Skin sensors applied to the skull won't do it? The patient's head has to be sticking in a MRI with dye coursing through their brains in order to visualize the changes mentioned above?
Too bad so many of our tax dollars goes into weaponry, these kinds of prosthetics and communication devices need lots of funding, with very little chance of quick or large profits even if successful. Too bad.
I wonder if they'ld have their own favorite songs, movies, tv-shows and videos or would the music and images they might respond to depend upon their unique histories and/or when they were injured?
The Unreachables Top 40.
How Dirty Harry Turned Commie
It's a standard tactic for these holier-than-thou bullies to cite movies they don't like as proof that, in Mr. Medved's formulation, "the entertainment industry" is "not in touch with the general public." The industry's profits prove exactly the reverse, but never mind. Even in this case, were Mr. Eastwood's film actually an endorsement of assisted suicide, the public would still be on his side, not his critics'. The latest Gallup poll on the subject, taken last year, shows that 53 percent of Americans find assisted suicide "morally acceptable" as opposed to the 41 percent who find it "morally wrong." (The figures for Catholics are identical).
But the most unintentionally revealing attacks on "Million Dollar Baby" have less to do with the "right to die" anyway than with the film's advertising campaign. It's "the 'million-dollar' lie," wrote one conservative commentator, Debbie Schlussel, saying that the film's promotion promises " 'Rocky' in a sports bra" while delivering a "left-wing diatribe" indistinguishable from the message sent by the Nazis when they "murdered the handicapped and infirm." Mr. Medved concurs. "They can't sell this thing honestly," he has said, so "it's being marketed as a movie all about the triumph of a plucky female boxer." The only problem with this charge is that it, too, is false. As Mr. Eastwood notes, the film's dark, even grim poster is "somewhat noiresque" and there's "nobody laughing and smiling and being real plucky" in a trailer that shows "triumph and struggles" alike.
What really makes these critics hate "Million Dollar Baby" is not its supposedly radical politics - which are nonexistent - but its lack of sentimentality. It is, indeed, no "Rocky," and in our America that departure from the norm is itself a form of cultural radicalism. Always a sentimental country, we're now living fulltime in the bathosphere. Our 24/7 news culture sees even a human disaster like the tsunami in Asia as a chance for inspirational uplift, for "incredible stories of lives saved in near-miraculous fashion," to quote NBC's Brian Williams. (The nonmiraculous stories are already forgotten, now that the media carnival has moved on.) Our political culture offers such phony tableaus as a bipartisan kiss between the president and Joe Lieberman at the State of the Union, not to mention the promise that a long-term war can be fought without having to endure any shared sacrifice or even too many graphic reminders of its human cost.
article by Frank Rich; to sign in use: unknown/unknown
~Will pr firms soon learn to induce or mimic red-tinged-media-fueled hysteria like the above? At first I couldn't think why such a minor movie would create this sort of buzz, downer movies have a way of disappearing quickly, unless Limbaugh, Medved, et.al. were doing Eastwood and Co. a favor. There's no such thing as bad publicity?
However since "Million Dollar Baby" received a few Oscar nominations, (who knew?) I guess these right-wing bully-boys felt a moral compunction to foist their sadistic 'right-to-life' views whether approrpriate or not. Eastwood's film's nomination is doing them the favor. Frank Rich is our canary in the media-bullshit mines.
Skinny women so can hit.
mrqe's link to reviews of Million Dollar Baby
Bush's Alzheimers?
post w/links
~Given the neocons insistence on their special relationship with the creator: is there any doubt that God has a sense of humor?
Abstract Sex
"(Lynn) Margulis’ work on microbial sex suggests that unprecedented reorganisations of life occur through symbiotic trade, a non-cumulative mixing giving rise to new compositions that do not resemble the parts from which they were generated. In endosymbiosis, novelty does not imply the enrichment of matter. The rule of symbiotic life is chance encounter, unforeseeable responses to unknowable conditions.
... There are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis, generating an ecosystem of micro-mutations which intersect at different speeds. This symbiosis, catalysed by chance encounters between molecular bodies, maps a dynamics of evolution that resonates with the metaphysics of Deleuze and Guattari and Spinoza.
For them, nature is machinic, an engineering process of paths never becoming a whole. Life forms do not result from a forced or spontaneous cooperation between individuated bodies struggling to reach a shared goal or to survive in a hostile environment. They are defined neither by a harmonious nor a conflictual state of nature driven by group collaboration or by individual competition. Altruism and egoism are both rooted in a humanisation of evolution that is undermined by symbiotic trade.
Instead, symbiotic assemblages make use of chance encounters that include reverse abductions, viral transmission, nuclearisation and multiparasitism. These processes of becoming are machinic involutions on a nature-culture continuum. Unknowable mutations are entailed in all of the parts caught up in their composition. I call these mutations abstract sex.
...Abstract sex names neither a progressive nor a regressive state of materiality. Rather, it is a conception of nature defined by continuous mutations across all layers and stratifications. It is a non-deterministic process, a phylum of immanent relations traversing traditional strata in a parallel, anti-genealogical dynamic."
article by Luciana Parisi
~The bible says nothing about parasites. If it was important for us his children to know, God would've written it down.
view large
Who's your Daddies?
February 10, 2005
Overheard at Starbucks
"She wouldn't be sleeping with those men if it wasn't for the devotion of her mother's ghost."
--"She's a bad-girl, alright; she's so popular."
-"You mean 'her devotion TO her mother's ghost'"?
--"Don't forget the boyz in the back room!"
--"See what the boyz in the back room are having!"
Screen Captures
Eyes Wide Shut
EWS' gallery
others via american buddha (links on lower left)
Bluebird:
Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists
Book by Colin A. Ross, M.D.
"By research at the medical school library, ordering out-of-print books, and requests filed through the Freedom of Information Act, I have built up compelling documentation of the fact that the CIA and military intelligence agencies have been creating multiple personality experimentally, and using these subjects in courier and infiltration operations.
more blurbage /ordering info.
ChoicePoint Functions as Spy Agency
"Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow, Jr., has just written an eye-opening article about ChoicePoint, the company at the center of the ongoing discussions on your list in the past few weeks. In the article, O’Harrow demonstrates that ChoicePoint is, in effect, functioning as an intelligence agency. Even ChoicePoint admits to such. Government law enforcement agencies are outsourcing their responsibilities, and thus escaping from the accountability and protections of the law that regulates the intelligence community. Here are a few excerpts from the article:"
Firm Quietly Finds Wealth In Information By Robert O’Harrow, Jr.
Washington Post, Jan. 20, 2005
It began in 1997 as a company that sold credit data to the insurance industry. But over the next seven years, as it acquired dozens of other companies, Alpharetta, Ga.-based ChoicePoint Inc. became an all-purpose commercial source of personal information about Americans, with billions of details about their homes, cars, relatives, criminal records and other aspects of their lives. . . .
Now the little-known information industry giant is transforming itself
into a private intelligence service for national security and law
enforcement tasks. It is snapping up a host of companies, some of them in the Washington area, that produce sophisticated computer tools for analyzing and sharing records in ChoicePoint's immense storehouses. Infinancial papers, the company itself says it provides "actionable intelligence."
"We do act as an intelligence agency, gathering data, applying
analytics," said company vice president James A. Zimbardi.
WPs article / the above archived(?) at politech
See also Politech's earlier ChoicePoint posts
Photo-caption Non Sequitur
Once upon a time, there was a Zen student who quoted an old Buddhist poem to his teacher, which says: The voices of torrents are from one great tongue, the lions of the hills are the pure body of Buddha. 'Isn't that right?' he said to the teacher. 'It is,' said the teacher, 'but it's a pity to say so." @
February 09, 2005
Internet Check-in and the "No-Fly List"
~Because everything's changed since 9/11.
Ward Churchill Interview
"You can gauge the effectiveness—real or potential at least—of any line of activity by the degree of severity of repression visited upon it by the state. It responds harshly to those things it sees as, at least incipiently, destabilizing. So you look where they are visiting repression: that’s exactly what you need to be doing.
People engaged in the activity that is engendering the repression are the first people who need to be supported—not have discussion groups to endlessly consider the masturbatory implications of the efficacy of their actions or whether or not they are pure enough to be worthy of support. They are by definition worthy. Ultimately, the people debating continuously are unworthy. They are apologists for the state structure; [and] in [effect], try to convince people to be ineffectual.
What do you think holds people back?
For all the rhetoric, there is no nonviolent context operating here—not at all. The more you become in any sense effectual, you’re going to be confronted with the violence of the state to maintain order of a sort that perpetuates its functioning. So nonviolence renders one vulnerable to the lethal counter-force of the state. So there’s tangible fear. It’s basically, politically a consecration or concession of physical force to the state by those who purport to oppose the state.
Even if there is a sort of inchoate understanding of a position of privilege in society, coming from an economically affluent background, if you’re not going to face physical violence, ultimately, you are subject to consequences which are not physical: an erosion of your privilege, a making of your life more uncomfortable. Basically, nonviolence as it is practiced, espoused in the U.S., is not Gandhian. Gandhi never articulated anything that precluded personal sacrifice. This is a non-Gandhian appropriation of his principles for the purpose of confirming personal comfort. So it’s a politics of the comfort zone.
more interview
~We Americans can dissolve the heavy metal structures of the most powerful military society in the history of the world with our innately imbued (magically? traumatically?) altered consciousnesses? And the Osama's of the world could through future acts of terrorism do us this favor?
Allen Ginsberg observed: "Recent history is the record of one vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind."
Consciousness is a living thing while violent trauma has little to do with growth, spiritual or otherize. Trauma most often leads to disease and death.
Forget the movies there were no saints in concentration camps. Look at Israel's treatment of the Palestinians for proof that suffering only creates more suffering.
This interview from April 2004 is almost personally prophetic. His life lately has certainly been made more uncomfortable.
The Ward Chuchill controversy from Metafilter's habitues.
While Xymphora suggests something more sinister: "the current imbroglio over Ward Churchill, which is a repeat of similar nonsense concerning Chomsky, Rall, and Sontag - is just another part of shirking responsibility. Americans edit reality to create a 'Real' Universe where the United States has never done anything wrong, and thus whatever terrorists do must be baseless evil which merits the most violent response possible."
link
~
(ward churchill's ' lee harvey oswald pose')
~Memo to self: Never allow yourself to be photographed holding any automatic or semi-automatic weapons unless you're in official military or police uniforms or standing next to an animal carcass, preferable one you've just shot.
I'm sure that for many people of the world photographs like the above are akin to the ones of yuppie-wannabees with their polished new cars or gangsta rappers with their apple-polishing ho's but in America didn't militia-drag lose all cred when a few of their boys help blow-up those babies in Oklahoma?
Nothing good can come from the 'lone-gunman pose'. It's the male equivalent of a woman flashing her boobs for the camera.
Mammal Collection Database with Specimen Images
EPTESICUS FUSCUS FUSCUS
big brown bat
~The skull and jaw-bones of various Michigan critters. "Browse All Images" for most immediate results.
Why would seeing these structures as more fragile and temporal then stone and bone allow me to better appreciate their beauty, their function?
Plastic Sensor Can be Produced in Printing Press
This dissertation by David Nilsson... describes an electrochemical humidity sensor, produced using purely organic materials. Depending on the humidity of the air, the conducting capacity of the electrolyte changes, as does the response from the transistor. The same concept can be used to gauge acidity (pH) or the content of ions and glucose.
The vision is for the sensor, the battery, and the display to be pressed simultaneously on paper or other flexible surfaces. In that way it would be possible to produce cheap electronic “litmus paper” or reaction strips for blood and glucose testing.
Intelligent image units (pixels) are another interesting application of electrochemical transistors. Varying the current alters the color of the display and thereby the content of the image or text. The technology can be used to develop smart labels and advertising signs.
David Nilsson is a member of Professor Magnus Berggren’s research team in organic electronics. In collaboration with the electronics research institute Acreo, the team has developed printing technology for electronics on paper. Recently the Swedish Research Council provided funding for another printing press under the project Electronic Paper Printing House.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
Dwight D. Eisenhower @
Cops Paid Informants to "Encounter" Hookers
Nashville police have paid confidential informants to engage in sexual behavior with prostitutes as part of a crackdown on adult bookstores, massage parlors and escort services...
The police spent almost $120,000 over three years to foster the encounters, which involve sexual touching and sometimes more, between informants and prostitutes....
District Attorney General Torry Johnson said police are right to go after ''blights'' like prostitution, but he said cases were made in the past without informants and prostitutes having sex.
''Certainly, having video and audiotapes of the transactions is valuable,'' Johnson said.
'But going beyond that once the transaction has been completed is unnecessary from our point of view and is a little contradictory in letting the confidential informant engage in the very act you're trying to stamp out.''
Police are standing by their investigation methods, saying informants trying to infiltrate businesses where prostitution is suspected often have to get nude. Department policy bars officers from taking their clothes off during prostitution investigations.
''What's the greater good?'' asked Capt. Todd Henry, who heads the department's specialized investigations division. ''It may be distasteful to some people, but it's better that we have those places shut down.''
~Everybody's making porn now? Even the Nashville police? (Amateur porn it's not just for Hustler readers anymore? )
An added benefit of these tactics being no 'johns' i.e. respected male members of the Nashville community who avail themselves of these services need fear embarrassment or arrest. The 'greater good' indeed.
Do you get the feeling that a few of these 'informants' might've been lodge-brothers or drinkiin' buddies with the police?
February 08, 2005
Blogs of War
A Review of "Alternative" Sources for Iraq War Information
~Why do I automatically assume anyone who supports the Iraq War/Invasion/Occupation can't possibly be "alternative".
(I'm so 'Nirvana'?) Anyway isn't the war over now that we gave them democratically elected officials?
The U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project
The Trestle Electromagnetic Pulse Simulator
A B-52 bomber sits atop the TRESTLE electromagnetic pulse (EMP) simulator at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico.
page
U.S. Nuclear Weapons Photo Gallery [link]
~Small photos but damn these weapons and systems are what perpetuate America's obeisances to Shiva, Moloch, Chaos, death. They're our pyramids, for gods' sake. The encyclopedic matter-of-fact descriptions add to the "macabare(t)". Big fun.
Hey Kids No Comics!
How the comic book almost disappeared
If you need proof, just take a stroll through your local 7-Eleven. You'd be hard pressed to find any evidence of kids’ comics or the iconic racks they used to call home. That’s because the continent’s largest convenience store chain did away with wire comic racks over the past decade, citing a lack of demand for kids’ comics...
This might not seem like much of a loss to grown-up readers of such comics as Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth or Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, but it’s a matter of grave concern for those within the industry.
Paranoia Grips the US Capitol
The CIA has been sent to the doghouse. Too many CIA veterans criticized or contradicted Bush's and Cheney's phony claims over Iraq and terrorism. So Bush has imposed a new, yes-man director on the agency, slashed its budgets, purged its senior officers, and downgraded CIA to third-class status.
Rumsfeld's new, massively funded SSB will become the Pentagon's CIA, complete with commando units, spies, mercenary forces, intelligence gathering and analysis, and a direct line to the White House. The Pentagon has just effectively taken over the spy business.
The Pentagon's new spy arm will be largely excluded from Congressional oversight or media examination. Its special operations teams will roam the globe, all under cover of "deep black" missions of which no records will be kept, and no questions asked.
Equally worrying, the Pentagon's new special-ops units are headed up by notorious religious fanatic, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who calls the U.S. Army "the house of God" and Islamic insurgents "agents of Satan." He warned Muslims, "my God is bigger than your god, which is an idol."
Boykin's command will now dispatch post-modern Christian crusaders to cleanse the world of Satanic Muslims and other miscreants...
story by Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun
~All military, all the time.
Is it lone-gunman season again? Time for another Oklahoma City-type bombing? Or is this news the culmination of all that?
February 07, 2005
Philosophy Comix
(from The New Yorker (3/6/00) by Weber)
link to more (there's not many from the New Yorker)
Phun with Photoshop
please sir, can I have another!
self portraits/ recovered memories
Photo-caption Non Sequitur
or View image
"In primate, notably human, evolution, the eyes have taken over
from the nose as organs of erotic arousal, but the molecular biology of how this happens in individual development, gay, straight or ambivalent, remains to be ascertained." @
UltraSonics: America's Secret Police
Classified US Government Technology
The United States government now has surveillance technology than can electronically see and hear through walls. Agents of the US government can move into a neighboring house and conduct complete surveillance of you in your home completely without your knowledge. The agents will never have to enter your home and place bugs because all surveillance is done electronically through the walls of your home. All your movements and conversations in your own home can be recorded and analyzed without your knowledge. This technology in effect gives agents of the US government X-ray vision and they can use it to see right into your bedroom.
'Directing Sound Like a Spotlight' grafik
~Note: no mention of chemicals or drugs (other than psychiatric) that might also be used by agents on targeted individuals along with this technology. Nor is there any suggestion of the possible uses of "ultrasonics" in providing legitimate security for selected individuals, groups and corporations, thereby making its misuse less disturbing. (Cui bono?) Neither is there a hint how such a technology might transform society itself. For example, requiring it's controllers to pick and choose which kinds of behavior, more precisely what sorts of crimes, to punish, reward or ignore. Otherwise it makes perfect sense to me.
Mitsuo Suzuki
sakura the portrait of fallen leaves
~These almost made me weep.
Pedigree Dogs of War
Some people who engage in foreign conflicts are called terrorists. Others are about to be licensed by the government.
~George Monbiot looks at recent Brit corporate-sponsored nation building. Compare & contrast with America's use of private contractors in its on-going 'exportation of democracy'.
Who's the American Jack Spicer? Vice-President Cheney is the most public figure in the Bush Adminstration benefiting from its war in Iraq but there's no real comparison. America is a much more corporate-state then Britain? Individuals in Britain can exert more influence over corporations (and foreign governments) while in the States corporations have more control over the government?
("Licenses. we don' need no stinking licenses.")
Introducing America's New Attorney General
"The (Washington Post) reports that newly confirmed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will be taking three White House attorneys with him to the Justice Department to be his top aides, despite his assertions during confirmation hearings that he sees a difference between representing the White House and representing the country. Two of the lawyers were in charge of the White House's response to the investigation into the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity. As the Post puts it: "That investigation is being handled by, uh, the Justice Department."
via Slate's today's papers last paragraph
The Propaganda President
George W. Bush does his best Kim Jong-il.
[excerpt]
In the name of national security, Bush has extended the authority to classify information to the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Agriculture, and the EPA.... After Sept. 11, his attorney general issued a new directive making it easier for agencies to reject Freedom of Information Act requests. (Steven) Aftergood (head of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists) also criticizes the secrecy of the Bush administration's task forces on energy, its refusal to comply with congressional requests for information, and its ambiguity on the torture question.
"They've propagated the idea that we're all at risk of violent death at any moment and at any place, and we must all do everything we can to secure our borders, ports, parks, and miniature golf courses," Aftergood says.
article w/links by Jack Shafer w/comments from bloggers
~Ignore the hyperbolic simile, this article gives concrete examples of how the Bush administration avoids accountability and scrutiny from the press and public. The critical comments from bloggers are refreshing if not remarkable for their sympathy with the Bushies.
February 06, 2005
pOSt-oLYMPIAD
traces for races
"pOST-oLYMPIAD" is an exhibition designed in response to the 2004 Olympic Games in Greece, under a theme in relation to sport. This exhibition is conceived to explore sport-related art of today; when the olympic torch works is not organic but artifical, when the olympic spirit is not enough to make wars pause, when the olympic prize is no longer an olive-branch..."
~Isn't it fun watching athletes play, i.e. work? The diversions (sic) of their flesh?
Personally I find sports spectatorship an activity about as appealing as shopping except its easier to drink watching the game then rummaging the aisles of WalMart.
Tolerance Pledge
“To help keep diversity a wellspring of strength and make America a better place for all, I pledge to have respect for people whose abilities, beliefs, culture, race, sexual identity or other characteristics are different from my own.”
pledge via the We are Family Foundation / Devilbob from the article Tolerance Anyone?
Touchdown for the Indecency Police
Let us be grateful that Janet Jackson did not bare both breasts. On the first anniversary of the Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction that shook America, it's clear that just one was enough to wreak havoc. The ensuing indecency crusade in Washington has unleashed a wave of self-censorship on U.S. television unrivaled since the McCarthy era, with everyone from the dying D-Day heroes in "Saving Private Ryan" to cuddly animated animals on daytime television getting the ax. Even NBC's presentation of the Olympics last summer, in which actors donned body suits to simulate "nude" ancient Greek statues, is now under federal investigation.
Public television is so fearful of crossing its government patrons that it is flirting with self-immolation. Having disowned lesbians in the children's show "Postcards From Buster" and stripped suspect language from "Prime Suspect" on "Masterpiece Theater," PBS is editing its Feb. 23 broadcast of "Dirty War," the HBO-BBC film about a terrorist attack, to remove a glimpse of female nudity in a scene depicting nuclear detoxification. Next thing you know they'll be snipping lascivious flesh out of a documentary about Auschwitz.
This repressive cultural environment was officially ratified on Nov. 2, when Jackson's breast pulled off its greatest coup of all: the re-election of President George Bush. Or so it was decreed by the media horde that retroactively declared "moral values" the campaign's decisive issue and the Super Bowl the blue states' Waterloo. The political bosses of "family" organizations have been emboldened ever since. They are spending their political capital like drunken sailors, redoubling their demands that the Bush administration marginalize gay people, stamp out sex education and turn pop culture into a continuous loop of "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm."
With the Super Bowl on Sunday, their crusade has scored a touchdown. MTV has been replaced as halftime producer by Don Mischer, the go-to guy for a guaranteed snoozefest: His credits include the Tony Awards, the Kennedy Center Honors and the 2004 Democratic National Convention at which the balloons failed to drop. (His subsequent cursing was heard on CNN, but escaped government sanction because no Republicans were watching.) Fox Sports Net has changed the title of its signature program "Best Damn Sports Show Period" to "Best Darn Super Bowl Road Show Period." The commercials, too, will "be careful" and in "good taste," according to the head of marketing for Anheuser-Busch.
This might all be laughable were the government not expanding its role as cultural cop. But it is. The departures of Michael Powell, the Savonarola of the Federal Communications Commission, and John Ashcroft, whose parallel right-breast fixation was stimulated by a statue in the Justice Department, are red herrings. "Thank God he's gone, but God help us with what's next," said Howard Stern upon learning of Powell's imminent exit. He's right.
After all, L. Brent Bozell of the Parents Television Council condemned Powell for "four years of failed leadership" in fighting indecency. Bozell, whose council has been second to none in increasing the number of annual indecency complaints from 111 in 2000 to a million-plus last year, is angling for a tougher successor and may well get one.
His wish has in effect been granted even before Powell's chair is filled. The second Bush term began with the installation of a powerful new government censor in another big job, Secretary of Education. Margaret Spellings hadn't even been officially sworn into the cabinet when she took on "Postcards From Buster," threatening PBS with decreased financing because one episode had the show's eponymous animated rabbit hobnobbing with actual lesbian moms while visiting Vermont to learn how maple syrup is made. Though Buster had in previous installments visited Muslims, Mormons, Orthodox Jews and Pentecostal Christians, gay couples (even when not identified as such on camera) are verboten to the new secretary of education.
"Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in this episode," Spellings wrote in her threatening letter to Pat Mitchell, the CEO of PBS. The letter, as it happened, was unnecessary: Public broadcasting says that it had decreed on its own only a few hours earlier that it would not distribute the offending show - the most alarming example yet of just how cowardly it has become. Spellings's threats against PBS are only the latest chapter in a continuing saga at a department that increasingly resembles an authoritarian Ministry of Information.
A month before the U.S. election, The Los Angeles Times reported on its front page that the department had quietly destroyed more than 300,000 copies of "a booklet designed for parents to help their children learn history" after Lynne Cheney, who has no official government role, complained about its contents. The booklet burning occurred under the watch of Rod Paige, the education secretary who fled his post last month. Enter Spellings, a White House aide who by some accounts had been a shadow administrator of the education department during Paige's out-to-lunch tenure.
With all the other troubles in public education, why would she focus on a single episode of a single children's program on her second day in the job? We don't yet know. But her act was nothing if not ideologically synergistic with still another freshly uncovered Bush propaganda effort. Just as Spellings busted Buster, two more syndicated columnists copped to receiving taxpayers' dollars, this time siphoned through the Department of Health and Human Services, to help craft propaganda for a Bush "healthy marriage initiative." (They joined Armstrong Williams, the talking head and columnist, who plugged administration policies on radio and TV for $240,000 in taxpayers' funds.)
That the U.S. government is now both intimidating PBS and awarding public money to pundits to enforce "moral values" agendas demonizing certain families is the ugliest fallout of the campaign against indecency.
That campaign cannot really banish salaciousness from pop culture, a rank impossibility in a market economy where red and blue customers are united in their infatuation with terrible music and even worse television. But it can create public policy that discriminates against anyone on the hit list of moral values zealots. Inane as it may seem that Spellings is conducting a witch hunt against Buster, there's a method: the cartoon surrogates are deliberately chosen to camouflage the harshness of their assault on nonanimated, flesh-and-blood people.
This, too, has its antecedent in the McCarthy era. In his novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," Michael Chabon was extrapolating from actual history when one of his heroes, a gay comic book artist, is hauled before Congress to testify about pairing up "strapping young fellows in tight trousers" as superheroes.
A Senate committee of the time did investigate the comics. Its guiding force was the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's fear-mongering 1954 tome "Seduction of the Innocent," which posited that Batman and Robin could corrupt children by inducing a "wish dream of two homosexuals living together." The decency cops of that day, exemplified by closeted gay right-wingers like J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, escalated a culture war into one with human costs by conflating homosexuality with the criminality of treason. One big difference between that America and the current one is that the culture industry, public broadcasting not included, has gained much more power since then.
by Frank Rich (New York Times Theater Critic) thanks Joerg
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/02/04/features/rich5.html
February 05, 2005
Your Computer May Be Housing Child Porn
According to RCMP Corporal Jacques Boucher, a member of the Atlantic Tech Crime Unit, criminals are using thousands of infected computers around the world gathered into zombie armies called botnets. They can be used for anything from extortion and hiding the source of massive e-mail spamming operations, to trafficking in child porn.
~Warnings and general advice, no specifics or 'how to find-out-fer-sure' directions.
Given the above information shouldn't we wonder when police use the presence of child porn on someone's computer as a basis for their arrest and prosecution?
(It's a terrific headline, isn't it? I'm surprised spammers aren't using it.)
Grrrls in the Comix
ghost
"I can't help it. Something inside me just wants to crush their throats and watch them fight for air."
~Mostly broken links, but you get the idea.
What happened to these (albeit fantasy) sorts of role models for women? MTV's Britneys make these gals look too angry? (And anger is unattractive?) Internet-porn/ Manga(?) wiped-out their male fan-base? All the kids who would be punks now join the military?
Gonzales Confirmed Attorney General
"It's an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment. Having no one else to rely on, to share confidences with, to seek counsel from, you begin to doubt your judgment and your courage."
The man who said these words was a Navy pilot, LCDR John McCain. For John McCain and all our soldiers serving across the globe, we need to stand against torture because of what it does to us as a country, to those serving now, to the future servicemen of our country, and what it does to us as a nation."
~"Like all the Republicans, Mr. McCain voted to confirm Mr. Gonzales. (source)
Read Alas John MCain @ The Rude Pundit
~Sing along; for John McCain and the others.
You may be an ambassador to England or France,
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance,
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world,
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.
You might be a rock 'n' roll addict prancing on the stage,
You might have drugs at your command, women in a cage,
You may be a business man or some high degree thief,
They may call you Doctor or they may call you Chief
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.
more of the lyric from Bob Dylan
February 04, 2005
US Invokes Secrets Privilege in Torture Lawsuit
~Is this the story that'll help you realize your loyalty no longer belongs to a government which treats human beings and the rule of law with such contempt? Whose side are you on?
3/17/04 gaza / lei gao photographer
Russia Helping Iran Build Spy Satellite
Tehran - Iran has signed a deal with a Russian firm to build a telecommunications satellite...
The Zohreh (Venus) satellite, scheduled to be launched within 30 months, will improve radio and television coverage, assist communications in remote areas of the country and enhance Internet service...
Iran said last year it would launch its own domestically produced Mesbah (Lantern) satellite into space by May 2005, which would be used for weather forecasting and locating natural resources.
Iran, aiming to be the first Islamic country to go into space, has said it was developing its own launch pad for the Mesbah satellite.
item/ context(?) and speculation
~They better hurry?
Related: GE Halts New Business in Iran
The move by the world's largest company by market value comes just days after another conglomerate, Halliburton Co., announced the company will wind down its operations in Iran.
"We're seeing a turnaround by a number of U.S. companies operating in Iran," said Dan Katz, chief counsel to U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J.
"When American companies do business with Iran they are helping the Iranians create revenue that is funneled to terrorists," Lautenberg said.
Under current law, U.S. firms are not allowed to do business with nations deemed by the United States to sponsor terrorism. But the law does not specifically bar foreign subsidiaries from such business.
ConocoPhillips, the nation's third-largest oil company, has already promised to pull out of Syria once a contract expires next year.
Also: Iran Reports Defense Ties With Russia
Iran's ambassador to Russia reported defense and military cooperation between the two countries. It was the first time a senior Iranian official asserted that the two countries were engaged in defense and military projects.
~Who's got Syria in the pool?
Photo Caption Non Sequitur
King Gyanendra of Nepal addresses the nation on Nepalese state TV, in Katmandu, Nepal, Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2005. King Gyanendra dismissed Nepal's government on Tuesday and declared a state of emergency, cutting off his Himalayan nation from the rest of the world. Tuesday's move was the second time in three years that the king has taken control of the tiny South Asian constitutional monarchy, a throwback to the era of absolute power enjoyed by Nepal's monarchs before King Birendra, Gyanendra's elder brother, introduced democracy in 1990. (AP Photo/Nepalese TV)
(Psst! How did the AP writer ignore that peculiar antenna atop his highness' most royal skull?)
Plutonium: the First 50 Years
United States Plutonium Production, Acquisition, and Utilization from 1944 through 1994
WMD: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION [the Movie]
...the film exposes the role played by the media in selling and misreporting the Iraq War. While journalists were embedded in Iraq, focused on the futile (and now-abandoned) search for weapons of mass destruction, Schechter “embedded” himself in front of his television set. He found an uncritical, acquiescent press corps that poses a far graver threat to American democracy than any posed by Saddam Hussein.
The CIA & the Cultural Cold War Revisited
[Book Review]
Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books), £20.
This book provides a detailed account of the ways in which the CIA penetrated and influenced a vast array of cultural organizations, through its front groups and via friendly philanthropic organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The author, Frances Stonor Saunders, details how and why the CIA ran cultural congresses, mounted exhibits, and organized concerts. The CIA also published and translated well-known authors who toed the Washington line...
article by James Petras via: consumptive
~Historical perspective on CIA-sponsored cold-war propaganda, intellectual integrity... and you thought American movies and tv was all the rest of world ever needed to see in order to luv us?
Were ex-CIA people helping the Bushies with their recent (No Child Left Behind)-type disinformation campaigns? Since this book refers to events that happened fifty years ago would that suggest the CIA continues certain "intellectual pursuits"?
Or has publishing and media changed so that intellectuals and experts no longer think twice about taking money and lending their names and reputations to government (and corporate?) programs and policies?
Is it possible that the way the CIA used intellectuals during the Cold War and how the Bushies use experts is now more the norm then the exception? (Perhaps in less media-intensive arenas?)
February 03, 2005
Gonzales Added to War Crimes Complaint in Germany
"..Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee confirms his role as complicit in the torture and abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq.
.
Scott Horton, (the Chair of the International Law Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York) who was asked to consider whether or not the U.S. would conduct a genuine investigation up the chain of command for war crimes, unequivocally states that “…no such criminal investigation or prosecution would occur in the near future in the United States for the reason that the criminal investigative and prosecutorial functions are currently controlled by individuals who are involved in the conspiracy to commit war crimes.” One of the legal issues before the prosecutor is whether the German investigation should be dismissed or deferred so that the U.S. authorities have a chance to conduct their own investigation. The obvious answer from Horton’s affidavit is no. The impossibility of an independent and far-reaching domestic investigation of high-ranking U.S. officials coupled with the United States’ refusal to join the International Criminal Court make the German court a court of last resort.
~Looks like no more Oktober Fests for him and Rummy.
