October 31, 2005
Blog: The Apologist
~Original illustrations!
>for example...
Orgasmatron
http://theapologist.blogspot.com/
~Deliteful, refreshing, apt.
Call for Papers: TERROR / WAR PAPERS:
INTERROGATING THE PARADIGM
"This book aims to interrogate a paradigm of contemporary reality summed up in the terms 'terror war' and 'war on terror'. Over the past few years, this paradigm has roped together the terms 'terror' and 'war' into a new globalised conglomerate of economy, bureaucracy, military, law, media, conflict, penality, and deceit. It has changed governments, generated new agencies and laws, captured media attention (whilst undermining its independence), incarcerated thousands, and killed tens of thousands (minimum) across the world. It delivers a reality so predominant, that it has been described as a potentially "endless war". Without denying the reality of victims of terrorism and war, this collection aims to open up a space for interrogating the paradigm. By intervening in the popularised relation of these terms - terror/war - this collection will question their dominance over alternative means of understanding contemporary realities and risks."
http://www.ccs.mq.edu.au/staff_dstaines.php
| Dr. Deborah Staines thanks Diederik
>related via Google Image Search "war on terror":
[one of 2,000 .mil war+on+terror photographs)
ENGAGING THE ENEMY — Marines of 4th Battalion, 14th Marines Mike Battery, Gun 4, receive the command to engage enemy targets with a M-198 155mm Howitzer at Camp Fallujah, Iraq, Nov. 11, 2004. The command was called in by fellow Marines in the city of Fallujah during Operation Al Fajar (New Dawn).
~Five years ago would we have imagined that a howitzer 'engaging enemy targets' in a city was a way to stop terrorism, if we thought about terrorism at all? Monty Pythons' Mosquito Hunters sketch might've come to mind.
I only now noticed that I could've used the word "terror" instead of terrorism and most of you would've understood. That's new too.
October 30, 2005
Mapping Your Next Home
HomePages...combines real estate listings, local data, and aerial imagery
blog entry | Search Engine Watch
Top Earning Dead Celebrities 2005
story | Forbes
~There's no such thing as a "Lowest-Earning Living Celebrities" list?
Nuclear Power Plants Operating in the US 2003
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_glance/reactors/states.html
[illus of a Bulgarian power plant via google]
Overheard at Starbucks
"Any of your friends go to a private college or university?"
--"Does night-school or graduate fellowships count?"
"No."
--"My bosses have."
October 29, 2005
Photographs: Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant
Part of the Series: Incendiary Iconography
>for example...
Statement [excerpt]
"I attempt to elaborate the weft of bureaucratic reasoning revealed in these rationalized utilitarian spaces, and the weave of local populations and their personal experiences of making a "normal" life in the shadow of them. A confluence of forces shaped both the physical quality of these places and the worldview that required them, mirroring both the ingenuity and the excess of American society in the twentieth century. Their functions, history, organization, and legacies should be of concern to all citizens in order to safeguard the quality of life in our democratic society.
photographs by A.W. Thompson
~I love backstage photos.
I not only want to know how "the sausage" is made, I want to see how they do it.
"Ignore the man behind the curtain!"
An e-mail friend remarked: "I like how they are so boring. just looks like a factory, a labratory. Some stuff in the desert.
Never seems that way in the movies or the propoganda films. I always wonder how many guys who signed up for the navy after Top Gun came out ended up painting the sides of ships.
October 28, 2005
Cartoon Includes Names of 2,000 U.S. Troops Killed in Iraq
Mike Luckovich marked the tragic milestone of 2,000 American servicemen and women killed in Iraq by hand-writing the name of each one in his Wednesday editorial cartoon. Together, their names spell out the question: WHY?
story | E&P
thanks Conscientious
Advertisement: NY Dominatrix
Mistress Livia
[excerpt] Additional Delights:
-Caning
-Light Bondage and other restraints
-Leather and Latex Fetishists.
-Foot, Leg worship -Footstools
-Trampling
-Balloon fetishists
-Vintage stockings/slip/vintage lingerie fetishists
-Hair fetishists
-Ball busting/kicking
-Face spitting/slapping
-CBT
-Goddess adulation
-Sensory deprivation, candle wax
-Mind games
-Slut training
-Mummification
-Verbal humiliation and debasement
-Nipple Play/nipple torture
-Light Medical
-Domestic servitude
-Golden showers
-Public Scenes at clubs and clothing stores
-Exploring and pushing limits
-Establishing long-lasting relationships that evolve and grow with time
FETISH, FANTASY AND ROLE PLAY ONLY. NO SEX OF ANY KIND
http://www.eros-ny.com/files/ny-livia3-livia1.htm
~And she's from New York! Not New Jersey, not Connecticut, not Philadelphia. Don't be fooled. (unless that's what you're into.)
Big cities are bad and the biggest cities are the baddest? Do the varieties of sexual behavior correspond to geography? Has anyone observed, measured a human sexual response to infrastructure or population density?
Is there a perpetual orgy incorporating every sexual act known to humankind in the center of every city? The larger the city the more participants? And as one travels away from the center does the sexual behavior of the residents become less and less inventive until one reaches for example counties in Kansas and Nebraska where lovers know only to come together for procreation in the missionary position?
Art: Central Mosaic
2003 computer, projector, video camera, video capture card, retroreflective screen, custom software
Central Mosaic, part of the mosaic series, records the shadows of people as they walk in front of a projection screen and then replays them in silhouette. The recordings move out towards the edges and become smaller as new recordings take their place. The structure of the work is like a fractal, with detail being pushed out towards the leaves in a self-similar form. The work "ticks" like a clock, with older material first proceeding clockwise around the central large recording, and then filtering out to the edges in a strictly ordered logical progression.
http://www.snibbe.com/scott/mosaics/central/ by Scott Snibbe
via Net Art News
Paper: Evolving Ideals of Male Body Image
as Seen Through Action Toys
by Harrison G. Pope, Jr., Roberto Olivardia, Amanda Gruber, and John Borowiecki
[Excerpt] Abstract: Objective: We hypothesized that the physiques of male action toys — small plastic figures used by children in play — would provide some index of evolving American cultural ideals of male body image....Our observations appear to represent a “male analog” of earlier studies examining female dolls, such as Barbie. Together, these studies of children’s toys suggest that cultural expectations may contribute to body image disorders in both sexes.
Key words: male body image; male action toys; body image disorders
A growing body of literature has described disorders of body image among men. For example, such disturbances are frequently documented in men with eating disorders. In one study, college men with eating disorders reported a degree of body dissatisfaction closely approaching that of women with eating disorders, and strikingly greater than comparison men.. Other studies of men with eating disorders have produced similar findings. Even in studies of male students without eating disorders, the prevalence of body dissatisfaction is often striking...Body image disturbances may be particularly prominent in American culture...
via Growing Up Sexually Listserv
[illus Hulk Slot Machine\ not from the paper or commercial]
~Lately one of the cable tv channels has been promoting The Incredible Hulk movie. In the commercial as an announcer speaks we see a man turn into a green monster; there's a cut or two or four and we see the man this time haltingly explain how something comes over him ..."I turn into this monster... "I LIKE IT!", as again we see him turn into the Hulk.
I forgot the exact wording or if he mentions rage or anger.
Fun in the Great Outdoors
~And to think little more than a century ago there were painters striving their whole lives to achieve the effects a $280. digital camera wielded on a whim by a semi-conscious philistine takes by accident. Then again $280. was a lot of money in those days and taking is not the same as creating.
Poem: 'Twas The Night Before Fitzmas
[excerpt)
Oh, Cheney, oh, Cheney!
You image of Nixon!
Karl Rove and Scooter,
fake news for war fixin'
It was all but a lie!
Read the signs on the wall!
Now go to jail! Go to jail!
Go to jail all!"
read the poem by Joerg Colberg
~The author requests that we keep in mind the original "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas" by Clement Clarke Moore
(Which is good because how many of us even knew that the author of "The Night Before Christmas" (sic) was Clement Clarke Moore? Give the poet his props.)
[DVD capture @ (Futurama?)\ not Colberg]
October 27, 2005
Photographer: Elena Dorfman
"...latest photo project is called Still Lovers, and it portrays the owners of "Real Dolls" - life size dolls, custom-made to be used as sex toys - and their dolls..."
blog entry w/links to online gallery/article/etc. | Conscientious
The Kabuki Version of the Night Before Fitzmas
In a sense, this whole Plamegate affair looks like what you would happen is you created a mix between Kabuki theater, The Night Before Christmas, and the movie Groundhog Day, with the country waking up every morning (like Bill Murray's character in the movie) to find the same headlines over and over again (something along the lines that Santa Claus will surely deliver indictments today...
blog entry w/links | Conscientious
~I'm miffed there's no photos that capture the essence of Plamegate. No snapshots. I can almost follow the story line(s) but I can't picture it.
What will Judith Miller put on her book's cover?
[image yahoo\ not with above]
Book Review: Ivory Tower Intrigues
The pseudo-meritocracy of the Ivy League
The selection process at elite universities is widely understood as the outward symbol, and in many ways the foundation, of our society's distribution of opportunities and rewards. It thus "legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability and hard work over the prerogatives of birth." But the truth, Karabel argues, is very nearly the opposite: Social mobility is diminishing, privilege is increasingly reproducing itself, and the system of higher education has become the chief means whereby well-situated parents pass on the "cultural capital" indispensable to success. "Merit" is always a political tool, always "bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger society." When merit was defined according to character attributes associated with the upper class, that imprint was plain for all to see, and to attack, but now that elite universities reward academic skills theoretically attainable by all, but in practice concentrated among the children of the well-to-do and the well-educated, the mark of power is, like the admissions process itself, "veiled." And it is precisely this appearance of equal opportunity that makes current-day admissions systems so effective a legitimating device.
thanks Conscientious
~Lets talk about class baby.
Tumblelogs
article | The Guardian
~I don't get it. They look different, more stuff in a smaller space. Is that it? Or is the difference in the code, in the ease of handling, not so much the content?
Is Del.icio.us example here composed of tumblelogs? Tumblelogs can have pictures.
Fewer pixels per link!
Nukes in the News: Bush Administration Drops ‘Bunker Buster’ Plan
Plan will now focus on a similar device using nonnuclear technology
story | AP
>maybe related on Spitting Image:
NOTW item & link to article on Nanometal Explosives
~With earth imaging e.g. ground penetrating radar, gps-guided smarter bombs and nanometal explosives, America may never need to build another nuclear weapon. Begging the question, will the Bushies allow the thousands of nuclear weapons from the Cold War years that now need refurbishing to simply be carted to the Yucca Mountain 'landfill'?
Or will they need their nukes and their smartest bombs too?
[illus via @\ not AP]
October 26, 2005
Passports to Get RFID Chip Implants
All U.S. passports will be implanted with remotely readable computer chips starting in October 2006, the Bush administration has announced.
The chipped passports "will not permit 'tracking' of individuals," the department said. "It will only permit governmental authorities to know that an individual has arrived at a port of entry--which governmental authorities already know from presentation of non-electronic passports--with greater assurance that the person who presents the passport is the legitimate holder of the passport."
To address Americans' concerns about ID theft, the Bush administration said the new passports will be outfitted with "antiskimming material" in the front cover to "mitigate" the threat of the information being surreptitiously scanned from afar. It's not clear, though, how well the technique will work against high-powered readers that have been demonstrated to read RFID chips from about 160 feet away.
article | Politech
~From passport photos to dots on a screen; blips when we're moving? (From playing pac-man to being pac-man.)
From video surveillance, with humans or machines looking at pictures of other human beings, to humans or machines tracking a few colored pixels.
Can our flesh and form be given any less significance and still be found to exist?
[photo cieciel\ not from above]
Dracula Blogged
Bram Stoker's vampire novel, published by its own calendar
~Of course novels exist in time, if only the time it takes to read them. How about photographs, sculptures and paintings that approximate real-time changes? (Besides movies.)
[photo via ftheworld]
Phantom Withdrawals
How ATM fraud nearly brought down British banking
~At least four novels will soon be published using variations of this story; if they're not already in print. (I would make the junior barrister character a woman and add a few mysterious murders.)
.jpg)
[photo from @\ not above]
October 25, 2005
Convicted for Child Cartoon Porn
Gordon Tshun Chin, 26, pleaded guilty yesterday in provincial court [Edmonton] to importing child porn and was given a one-year conditional sentence to be served in the community.
Judge David Tilley told the slight, bespectacled young man he would have put him behind bars, but for the fact the images were drawn and therefore did not involve the actual exploitation of real children.
Tilley was shown an exhibit containing some of the disturbing images and he ordered it forfeited to the Crown.
"Certainly this is the kind of filth which should not be available to the public," said Tilley.
Interestingly, sexually explicit comic books, even those containing child porn, are legally sold in both Japan and the United States.
Crown prosecutor Steven Bilodeau said it is the first such case in Canada he knows of and added that although so-called anime containing child porn is not very prevalent here, Canadians need to know it is illegal.
Bilodeau also said new laws, effective Nov. 1, provide for mandatory jail sentences for importing child porn.
The prosecutor told court that animated child porn has a "noxious" side despite not depicting living victims, because it can dangerously "inflame viewers" and can appear to "normalize" the exploitative sex crime.
Bilodeau said the animated child porn images seized from Chin were very disturbing.
"These images are very disgusting and very violent. There are pictures of babies in diapers being raped," he said.
Court heard city police were alerted after customs agents discovered a mail package addressed to Chin consisting of 15 anime magazines containing child porn on Jan. 31.
On Feb. 10, cops arranged a "controlled delivery" of the package to Chin's south-side home and arrested him.
A search was done and officers found 63 similar magazines.
Court heard police also found hundreds of pages of anime child porn downloaded from the Internet.
Defence lawyer Darcy Depoe said Chin did not know what he was doing was illegal and it was his first offence.
"This 26-year-old man is probably best described as naive," said Depoe.
Tilley placed Chin under house arrest for the first six months of the conditional sentence, fined him $150 and ordered him to perform 100 hours of community service.
Chin will also be on probation for 18 months following the sentence and must take counselling as directed.
He is also forbidden from using a computer and accessing the Internet.
The judge also ordered him to provide a sample of his DNA for the national DNA data bank in Ottawa and placed him on the sex offender registry for five years.
story via Harper's Weekly
~One might think there were human proclivities the courts wouldn't care to examine?
By the way Canada's Provincial Judges are appointed not elected.
News of the Weird
+In a September rape trial in New York City, witness Roberto
Suarez testified that he saw two men in the room with a waitress
just before she told him that she had been raped, and then when
asked by the prosecutor to identify the two men, Suarez looked
past the defendants and pointed to, respectively, Juror Number 8
and Alternate Juror Number 3. The New York Daily News
reported that some jurors laughed so hard that they cried. [New
York Daily News, 9-21-05]
+Transsexual convicted prostitute Monica Renee Champion,
37, was finally picked up by police in Richmond, Va., in August;
there had been arrest warrants for indecent exposure against her in
the city's South Side as a male and in the city's North Side as a
female.
+In July, police in Lawrence, Kan., gave Ezekiel Rubottom's foot
back to him, convinced that, contrary to a neighbor's inquiry, it
wasn't evidence of a crime. Rubottom, 21, had tried to explain that
he'd had his clubbed left foot amputated and merely wanted to
keep it as a memento in a bucket of formaldehyde on his front
porch. A spokesman for Lawrence Memorial Hospital told the
Journal-World newspaper that there have been "women that want
their uterus . . . people take [home] tonsils . . . they take [home]
appendixes." Rubottom added a porcelain horse and a can of beer
to his bucket to make it what he called "a collage of myself."
[Lawrence Journal-World, 7-26-05]
+Wailing loudly and apparently incredulous at being ordered to jail, a scantily-dressed Natalia McLennan. 25, was taken directly to a lockup from a New York City courtroom in September, after being charged with prostitution; McLennan had recently posed for the cover of New York magazine, proclaiming herself to be the city's top-grossing "escort" and acknowledging that she provided sex for clients.
[Reuters, 6-22-05] [Reuters, 9-29-05]
~The wonder! (Not 'the horror', the wonder.) My whole existence pales in comparison. What could I ever say, do, or create that would be as memorable, as pure, as just one of these moments of incongruity and stupidity? It's disrespectful of me, perhaps blasphemous to the forces of order and chaos alike, to attempt to occupy your attention with my found studied contrivances. I don't know if I can go on, if I should go on.
[More excerpts on Spitting Image from past News of the Weird.]
"Behold," said she, "I am that which must ever surpass itself."
[image google: not NOTW\ caption @]
October 24, 2005
Law Enforcement Group Issues Taser Guide
HOUSTON - A national law enforcement organization recommended Wednesday that police use Taser stun guns only on people who actively resist officers and for only five seconds at a time.
The recommendations suggest that only one officer use a Taser on a suspect at any one time and that only a five-second charge be used before police re-evaluate the situation.
The stun gun‘s manufacturer, Arizona-based Taser International Inc., maintains that no deaths have been directly caused by the device alone.
Wexler said police departments should use Tasers in "the most surgical and strategic way possible" until more is known, but to ban the weapons would be a mistake.
About 6,000 of the nation‘s 18,000 law enforcement agencies use Tasers, including the Houston Police Department.
When Hurtt came to Houston in 2004, he ordered 3,700 Tasers.
-"Now that torture is OK abroad and at home, we apparently need guidelines to manage it.." (story/comment from Unknown News)
~Note that "no deaths have been directly caused by the device alone": is not the same as saying no one has died after or while being tasered. It's interesting that this newspaper and the national law enforcement organization both choose not to acknowledge the deaths indirectly caused by tasers. Tasers are cost effective. Police-officers no longer need to routinely wrestle, beat or shoot most individuals resisting arrest. Saving them from (delaying the onset of) career-ending injuries and their departments from budget-busting police brutality/shooting lawsuits.
Still I imagine Taser International Inc. press releases will soon need a further addendum: "no deaths have been directly caused by the device alone...when used following manufacturer's instructions". With so many tasers being out there, people who have the means to hire lawyers are bound to be affected.
>related Spitting Image posts
Defense Intelligence Agency Military Art Collection
for example from "The Threat in the 1980's (Series I)"
SOVIET GROUND-BASED LASER
by Edward L. Cooper, 1986
The Soviet Strategic Defense Program involved extensive research on advanced technologies in the 1980s. The USSR already had ground-based lasers, conceptually illustrated here, capable of interfering with some US satellites.
~The DIA commissioned this illustration of 1980's Soviet ground-based laser weaponry. The DIA is the Pentagon's intelligence agency. Art IS more a product (or process) of the imagination rather than perception, wouldn't you agree?
Adding Another Lock...
...to Our Closet of Tortured Skeletons
Using the Bush administration's tried-and-true excuse of needing "greater latitude" in fighting the war on terror, the Senate Intelligence Committee approved granting the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) authority to covertly recruit and train "U.S. persons" as informants. As if that weren't enough "latitude", the Committee decided the DIA should also be able to withhold any information about its activities from the public. Can't have a government that's accountable to the governed after all.
Interestingly, the Senate was forced to withdraw a virtually identical amendment from last year's intelligence authorization bill in response to public concerns about domestic spying. Late this past September, at the Pentagon's behest, the amendment was slipped into this year's intelligence authorization bill, without public hearings or debate.
...many of the documents that have been obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union pertaining to prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq, were obtained from the DIA. Under the amendment approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the DIA would have the same impunity currently enjoyed by the CIA.
article by Ken Sanders
October 23, 2005
Iran Photographer: Shadi Ghadirian
"I am a woman and I live in Iran. I am a photographer and this is the only thing I know how to do. I began work after completing my studies. Quite by accident, the subjects of my first two series were "women". However, since then, every time I think about a new series, in a way it is related to women.
It does not make a difference to me what place the Iranian woman has in the world because I am sure no one knows much about it."
http://www.zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/ghadirian/index.html
via Consumptive
The Cost of War at Walter Reed
[excerpt]
The Rules of War
In America's shock and horror at Walter Reed there are rules. I will give you the four that I believe are most important.
Rule 1: talk to the person and not to the wound. This can be difficult in the beginning since ugly wounds tend to overwhelm. But the bearer of ugly wounds remains much more than a wounded person, and this you need to respect. You can ask about the wound, but you cannot talk to only the wound.
Rule 2: allow wounded soldiers to do what they can do themselves. Give them the space and the opportunity to have control over their lives, even when severely dependent upon other people.
When I was in Bethesda Naval hospital in the late 1960s, leg amputated and bed ridden, frustrated with my constant dependence on others, a visitor asked me for a cigarette - in those days you could smoke right in the hospital - and I was ecstatic to hand him one. It felt great to do something on my own, in this case hand another human being an simple item.
Rule 3: forget your moral questions about the war. Morality is for those who support the war and for those who oppose the war, not for those in the war. Those seriously wounded are still fighting the war so clam up about the immorality of this stupid war.
A corollary to this rule is never protest against a war in front of a military facility, especially a military hospital. That is a no-brainer. You demonstrate against those who made the policy to go to war, not against those who are sworn to carry out the order to go to war.
Rule 4: don't assume this is a sad time for these recuperating men. For most their physical pain is receding or is being managed by drugs, and the true mental anguish has yet to sink in. They are focused on their future which after a close call with death looks darn rosy.
article By Stewart Nusbaumer | Intervention Magazine via Truthout
Life Begins
a chronological 2 hour animation of sky photos. one photo of the sky was taken each day for one year from my 40th birthday to my 41st birthday.
download a 2 minute video extract *here (8mb mpeg - one third
screen size)
© 1996-2005 *kevin j pocock
Celebrations Planned as Spy Plane Turns 50
The U-2 was created by Lockheed Corp. in secret to photograph the Soviet Union's nuclear missile sites and bomber bases during the Cold War. It made its first flight in August 1955 from a hidden dry lake bed in the Nevada atomic testing grounds.
Enlarged and upgraded over the years, equipped with new sensors and communication gear to beam data around the world, 28 U-2s and five trainers are still on duty with the U.S. Air Force.
In Palmdale, nearly 600 Lockheed Martin workers are busy overhauling and modernizing the Air Force's remaining U-2s.
The (Blackbird) airpark's U-2 was built in 1956 at Lockheed Corp.'s Burbank plant. U-2 56-6721 did flight-test work for 24 years, including programs in which it tested at high altitude devices designed to be fitted to orbiting satellites.
The devices included an infrared sensor for detecting the
exhaust plume of Soviet nuclear missiles, cameras for weather satellites and dummy capsules ejected at high altitude to give Air Force crews practice at catching parachuting spy satellite payload capsules.
[above illus from Edwards AF Spy Planes]
>*see also U-2 Pages
~An oeuvre of fifty years and counting.
October 22, 2005
Nano News: New Toxicity Framework
A new report..When it comes to providing recommendations to companies, "I think this report represents an excellent beginning framework," ...this framework "could help work towards global harmonization of approaches..
The strategy has three key elements...In the past, when scientists tested how toxic compounds were, properties such as the size or shape that material came in were often not considered important. Research now shows the toxic properties of a material can vary dramatically on how these other properties change...The report notes that until scientists have a better understanding of how these characteristics may render a nanomaterial more or less hazardous, they should consider all such properties potentially significant and measure them as best possible.
The strategy's other elements involve testing how toxic a nanomaterial is against cells or tissues grown in labs (in vitro studies) and how toxic it is against live animals (in vivo studies). While in vitro studies are cheaper, (David Warheit, a staff toxicologist at DuPont's Haskell Laboratory in Delaware) noted in vitro studies could get directly opposite effects from in vivo studies. Until the accuracy of in vitro studies in nanomaterial toxicology are validated, "in my opinion, they're not they're yet" as useful screens, he said.
A major consideration researchers should have when it comes to nanomaterial toxicology is how inhaled nanomaterials could move from the lungs into the blood and lymph and then distant organs to a greater extent than bulk materials such as fibers would. "A screening strategy should look at the impact of particles on other organs," Warheit said.
~Too many 'coulds' and 'shoulds' being recommended for this dangerous technology. How many tons of nano-particles are being manufactured every year?
"Measure them as best possible"?? There's nothing as scary or as infuriating as scientists equivocating.
[nanotech illus via google\ not above]
~This image doesn't fit how I imagine nanotech should look. I don't know how it should look. I put this illustration here like a letter in a word I don't know yet, but it'll come to me in time?
October 21, 2005
Bad Girls Hotel.com
for example...
~I don't get it: not so tongue-in-cheek (and elsewhere?) photo parodies? Men have done worse things to get themselves laid; to get sum strange. This post should bring a few more visitors to Spitting Image for the next couple of days...the almost obligatory weekly (almost) porn link.
October 20, 2005
Project for a New American Century
A Complete List of PNAC Signatories and Contributing Writers
Overheard at Starbucks
"I woke up this morning in pain; lying there
aware of the burden my body had become."
--"Are you ok?"
"Then my cat came in to have her back scratched,
reminding me what a pleasure flesh can be."
--"Animal wisdom."
"As long as I leave the door open."
Art of Secrecy
"Among the more peculiar artifacts of the culture of secrecy are the wall posters produced and distributed by government agencies in order to instill security awareness and promote compliance with security requirements.
Many of these wall posters are simple-minded to an extreme, based on weak puns or failed attempts at humor and combined with mediocre production values. Occasionally, they achieve such a intense concentration of stupidity that the viewer is helplessly transported to another plane of existence.
A representative sample of security posters was collected and introduced by Dan Dupont of InsideDefense.com who was guest-blogging on DefenseTech.org here:
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001862.html
Google Print Search
> for example
try it yourself http://print.google.com/print?hl=en
~If capitalists are cutting down trees and bleaching rivers and lakes to make books about it, it must mean something. Then again I also got results for bondage pumpkin.
Third World Traveler
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/
>related: Katrina & the Good Americans
October 19, 2005
The Amorality of Web 2.0
...at its best, the mainstream media is able to do things that are different from - and, yes, more important than - what bloggers can do. Those despised "people in a back room" can fund in-depth reporting and research. They can underwrite projects that can take months or years to reach fruition - or that may fail altogether. They can hire and pay talented people who would not be able to survive as sole proprietors on the Internet. They can employ editors and proofreaders and other unsung protectors of quality work. They can place, with equal weight, opposing ideologies on the same page.
article by Nicholas C. Carr
thanks Joerg
~Let's hear it for the experts! Corporations and junta's alike rely on them but on the internet their opinions and ideas are being pushed to extinction by the proliferation of Machine mediated nonsense churned out by bloggers. (Like this here?) You mean college degrees are worth more than the paper they're printed on?
>related The Age of Exploitation
~Here's links to two poems
For Dorothy Day--The Water Strider and At the River's Edge
to further confound you.
[photo @\ not with article]
beyond memory
Sergei Borisov, untitled, 1980's
Photography and Photo-related Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union
Work It
This month, all month, is all Missy. Missy Elliot (born Melissa Arnette Elliott on July 1, 1971 in Portsmouth, Virginia) — formerly known as Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott. She is one of my role models.
Not afraid of anything. Not afraid of wearing a ridiculous balloon costume in a music video. Not afraid of her own or Timbaland's radical beats. Not afraid of singing backwards (“Work It”). Not afraid of not being model skinny.
Rumor has it that she works 3 instant message accounts simultaneously — one for friends, one for business, and one for porn. - D.B.
turn it on and leave it on - Radio David Byrne
20 acts in 60 minutes
from the radio show This American Life: Yeah, yeah, yeah, each week we choose a theme, and bring you three or four stories on that theme. Or one big epic story on that theme. That's our show. Except for this one. We throw all that away and bring you twenty stories, yes twenty, in sixty minutes. Featuring works by Jonathan Goldstein, Etgar Keret, Chuck Klosterman, David Lipsky, Jay Allison and Atlantic Public Media, and David Sedaris. One story – made by a teenager locked up in juvenile detention – came from Blunt Radio. Inspiration for this week's show came from the Neo-Futurists, whose long-running Chicago show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind promises 30 plays in 60 minutes every single weekend.
direct link to real audio
Bush Regime Card Deck
>for example
the full deck from August 2003
| Voltairenet (click on cards for larger image)
>*related The Iraq War Runs Through It
~These are the Republican Party's Bush Administration domestic, foreign and international policy experts. They've changed the world and they're resting on their laurels now?
Rand Corporation Experts List
Public Policy Experts; Foreign, Domestic, International
http://rand.org/news/experts/expert_list.html
~Is there such a thing as a private policy research amateur?
[illustration from the Rand review (No Joke)]
US Considers Rapid Home HIV Test
story thanks Diederik
~Of course? If you make it people will buy it. For Valentines Day!
How could the pharmaceutical companies protect themselves from the lawsuits resulting from the inevitable false-positives & false negatives?
What will it do to the condom industry? (A boon for every other STD?)
I'll be waiting until Rapid Home HIV Test Parties become all the rage, the next big thing, what the kul-kids do, phat, whatever.. .before I have mine done. Or until symptoms appear.
Keys for Understanding Nanotechnology Risks
Or Can Asbestos Help Us Understand Nanotoxicity?
~This is where the health sciences are today in their efforts to protect the public and the environment from nano-pollution.
Toxicity of particles may be related to surface area more than mass.
Toxicity is affected by many characteristics.
Test substances need to be adequately characterized.
Realistic dose levels and appropriate routes of exposure must be evaluated.
Actual risks will depend on specific exposure and type of nanomaterial.
Studies of chronic health effects should be undertaken.
Information from related fields and materials might be useful for assessment of nanomaterials.
article about a paper by Fionna Mowat, Ph.D., managing scientist for the Health Sciences Practice of Menlo Park, Calif.-based Exponent
Slashdot readers offer their comments here.
~As of today there's no standards for characterizing the various nano-substances that might be tested for toxicity; realistic dose levels and routes of exposure have yet to codified and no one's doing studies on the chronic health effects of nano-pollution.
People will have to die before some (most?) of these suggestions get funded for research. Lawyers representing the families of the dead and dying will come to the rescue! Some ten to fifteen years from now. (Unless tort reform laws discourage them?)
Today there's 180 google web search results for nanopollution
There are no google news search results for nanopollution.
October 18, 2005
High-Threat Chemical Agents:
Characteristics, Effects, and Policy Implications
"High-threat chemical agents, which include chemical weapons and
some toxic industrial chemicals, are normally organized by military planners into four groups: nerve agents, blister agents, choking agents, and blood agents. While the relative military threat posed by the various chemical types has varied over time, use of these chemicals against civilian targets is viewed as a low probability, high consequence event.
>for example...
Nerve Agents
Chemical weapons affecting the nervous system are called nerve agents. Nerve agents do not occur naturally. Rather, they are manmade compounds that require manufacture and isolation for high toxicity and purity. Most nerve agents belong to a group of chemicals called organophosphates. Organophosphates have a wide range of toxicity, and some are commercially employed as insecticides, though these are significantly less toxic than those developed as chemical weapons.3 Nerve agents are mainly liquids.
Production. The first nerve agent developed for military use, called Tabun or GA, was made in Germany in the 1930s.4 Following this discovery, a series of nerve agents similar to Tabun were developed. This series, known as the G-series, include the weapons Sarin (GB) and Soman (GD). In the late 1940s, another series of nerve agents, the V-series, was invented in England. Both the British and the United States chemical weapons programs investigated these compounds. The United States manufactured and stockpiled VX.5 A related compound, V-gas, was manufactured and stockpiled by the Soviet Union. Military use of nerve agents has been rare...
National chemical weapons programs have produced nerve agents for decades. The technological barriers for a terrorist group to synthesize these agents might be overcome by using commercially available equipment, though there would be appreciable danger to the manufacturer due to the extreme toxicity of these compounds. Nerve agent production requires the use of toxic chemicals during synthesis and specialized equipment to contain the nerve agent produced. Of the nerve agents, VX has been identified as the most difficult to manufacture.7
Effects. Nerve agents are extremely dangerous and can enter the body through the lungs or by skin contact, though for the G-series nerve agents, the inhalation toxicity is significantly greater than the dermal toxicity. Of the nerve agents, VX is the most deadly and Tabun is the least deadly, though all are exceedingly toxic.
Nerve agents interfere with the nervous system, causing overstimulation of muscles. Victims may suffer nausea and weakness and possibly convulsions and spasms. At high concentration, loss of muscle control, nervous system irregularities, and death may occur. The action of nerve agents can be irreversible if victims are not quickly treated."
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/terror/RL31861.pdf (28 pages)
| Congressional Research Service ˜ CRS Report for Congress
via Secrecy News
~This is the stuff that mass hysteria, novels, propaganda, schizophrenic delusions and government policies are (sic) made of. But too ethereal (or too scary) for tv's soap-operas and recurring urban legends?
[photo via google\ not CRS]
Photo-Caption Non Sequitur
"Life meant convincing another
that you knew what it meant to be alive."
[photo: Cieciel\ caption from Richard Powers; "Galatea 2.2"]
Call for Papers: Teaching in a Time of War
Questions your essays might consider include the following: ...the history of teaching about war in the U.S.A, most recently from Vietnam to Iraq; issues of gender, race, and class and their connections to how wars are fought and who fights them; ...war and media studies; handling emotional issues in the classroom when teaching about war and/or in time of war; teaching from the perspective of the "other" (however "other" might be defined) in time of war; ...What kinds of institutional constraints do teachers face in teaching about war/in time of war? ...what are our goals as teachers in such times—what are the dangers and what are the gains?"
http://www.radicalteacher.org/calls.asp#war thanks Diederik
Be Patriotic Poster (1917-18)
[poster via Designs...\ not Radical Teacher]
Nabokovilia
"Nabokovilia is a haphazard collection of quotes by writers who have snuck references to Nabokov and things Nabokovian into their work. Please e-mail any contributions to me*; it'll be duly acknowledged and greatly appreciated."
>for example...
"Why do humans write so much? Why do they write at all?"
I read her one of the great moments in contemporary American fiction. "Only it's not by an American, it's no longer contemporary, and it doesn't even take place inside the fictional frame." This was Nabokov's postlude to Lolita, where he relates the book's genesis. He describes hearing of an ape who produced the first known work of animal art, a rough sketch of the bars of the beast's cage. I told Helen that, inside such a cage as ours, a book bursts like someone else's cell specifications. And the difference between the two cages completes an inductive proof of thought's infinitude. (p 291)
from Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers
more from THE AUTHORS
| created & maintained by *Juan Martinez
['Nabokov' corset via Delicious Corsets\ not Nabokovilia]
~I thought this photo of the model with the corset was more evocative than (2 pages) of other nabokov google image search results. It's her glasses that sold me.
October 17, 2005
80 Plates
representing 37 provinces and islands: album of philippine types
Condaleeza Rice and Jordy (Levar Burton)
"Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto" is Peter Caine's ambitious spectacle of rude, crude and patently offensive animatronic portraits. *be sure to watch the movies
Sex Runs Wild in US Military
Elaine Donnelly, president of The Center for Military Readiness, told NewsMax...
"I think it is the policy makers who should be held to account. I don’t blame individual men or women. The policy makers believe that men and women are interchangeable.”
She called the assignment of women troops to units designated as "all male” a "national security issue.”
~Virile (sic) marketing?
[photo defense link\ not with story]
Saudi Arabia Blocks Access to Blogger, Flickr, LiveJournal
The Saudi Arabian government uses a filtering service provided by the United States-owned company Secure Computing. In September, the popular comedy website The Best Page in the Universe was added to the filter. Similar blocking services have been implemented in other countries, such as The People's Republic of China.
n the past, the ISU had, on and off, blocked access to BlogSpot.com's free hosting service. However, according to activist organization Reporters Without Borders, "blog services [applications] had not until now been affected by the ISU's filters. The complete blocking of blogger.com, which is one of the biggest blog tools on the market, is extremely worrying. Only China had so far used such an extreme measure to censor the Internet."
On Thursday, access to Blogger.com was restored, but Flickr and LiveJournal remained inaccessible.
story via Unknown News
~So the blocking of Blogger was a test? See what phone numbers get used when blogs are disabled? And Flickr remains a threat because of it's feature that allows users to e-mail photos onto their Flickr sites? A boon for smart-mobs and demonstrators? (I don't know!)
I'll have to register at LiveJournal to see what sorts of salacious, pornographic lies about royal families are permitted on that site.
October 16, 2005
Tracking Cell-Phones for Real-Time Traffic Data
In what would be the largest project of its kind, the Missouri Department of Transportation is finalizing a contract to monitor thousands of cell phones, using their movements to map real-time traffic conditions statewide on all 5,500 miles of major roads.
Privacy experts worry that the traffic monitoring could later evolve into other uses -- perhaps to catch speeders or fugitives.
That's because each cell phone has a unique serial number, in addition to its call number and a code that indicates its service provider. A cell phone company must always be able to track the location of its phones in order to know where to
~Forget aborting black babies as a Swiftian way to cut crime; why not listen in with an echelon-type program on the phone conversations of a few thousand individuals (depending upon the size of the city or town) chosen at random? Within a few weeks you can narrow that list down to the probable and sure criminals and then track those people via their cell phones to the next crime in progress or to their ill-gotten goods or services.
Every few months you can add new random phone numbers to the pool and do it all again.
One of the H's at Unknown News notes: "The data identifying individual users can be tracked and analyzed, so it will be. Period. It's nutty and naïve to pretend that it won't be."
Real Core
"Realcore is an ongoing research on digital pornography, the one that came about when digital still and video cameras became widespread, and people became familiar with the internet publishing tools like the Usenet newsgroups, Yahoo! clubs, Msn and the such. These technologies created a brand new set in which to explore the vast ocean of pictorial sexuality, and propelled a revolution in what we call pornography."
http://www.daridire.net/realcore/ by Sergio Messina
via Aberrant News
[photo google\ not from above]
Fun With Photoshop
Sloppy Mandala
Originally uploaded by Cieciel.
sloppy mandala 2
Overheard at Starbucks
"What're you complaining about?"
--"Shouldn't I've known before I got married and had kids that I was raised by porcupines?"
"No musk-rat love for you then?
...Only trust-fund kids can afford guardian angels who'ld whisper that kind of information in their ears. Recent noctural-visit lawsuit settlements bankrupted whole orders of cherubims and seraphims."
--"The rising cost of insight is making mental health a luxury for most Americans."
"Why do you think Americans are flocking to churches? Faith- based realities, buying clubs, republican party phone-trees and moral indignation are marketable if not sustainable substitutes for self knowledge."
--"Are there porcupines and muskrats in the Bible?"
"One of the 10 commandments is just for parents and children... Camels, donkeys and sacrificial sheep get mentioned a few times."
--"And sparrows."
"Yes, sparrows."
Billboard
thanks Diederik
~I guess if you can sell beer with billboards, why not.
If this is a requirement for church membership, I qualify.
If Jesus doesn't come soon are we off the hook?
Is the sin of adultery more exciting than adultery without guilt?
Are there many men attending services in these churches?
Would a billboard with "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and a picture of an armed soldier be a message worth illustrating?
Is our adultery bad or good for Jesus? Does Jesus like to watch?
(15 minutes passed before I got the joke.)
October 15, 2005
Pregnant Heimlich
"Pregnant soldier? choking? You know what to do."
thanks Diederik
~Who else but the military would conceive of and illustrate this particular emergency? (OK maybe a few birthing centres.)
I like the way the military attempts to attend to every possible accident or disaster-scenario. I like that about them. And with easy to read pictures!
This illustration also makes me wonder if the author/artist/compiler was motivated by a personal experience.
Photo-caption Non Sequitur
"What if my future happiness revolves around someone I've yet to meet? What if it all depends on this one person?
What if there's no certainty that we will ever meet?"
October 14, 2005
Lawyers Defend Police In Videotaped Arrest
"I see an incident of a man trying to be brought under control who doesn't want to be brought under control," (Attorney) DeSalvo said.
Police union officials described Davis as so intoxicated that he staggered down the street, stumbled into a police horse and became belligerent when officers intervened.
DeSalvo said police union officials had "broken the thing down frame by frame" and saw officers trying to bring under control an angry man. "He brought it on by his actions," DeSalvo said.
No tests for intoxication were administered following the arrest. In such cases, judges typically rely on officers' observations, said police spokesman Marlon Defillo.
He clearly was not hit in the face," DeSalvo said.
DeSalvo also disputed Davis' lawyer's contention that Davis suffered fractures to his cheek and eye socket. DeSalvo said the injuries were scrapes caused when he was placed face down on the pavement
~"Broken the thing down frame by frame" is not the best way to describe how a tape of police bringing someone under control was scrutinized.
Isn't it interesting that even in cases where people are injured during arrests for public intoxication, no tests are administered? I'm sure it saves the city money. This is New Orleans the public drinking capital of the world, yet one might wonder how come enterprising lawyers haven't yet found a way to enrich themselves and their sometimes bloodied clients by means of this unique law enforcement short-cut.
Nukes in the News: Livermore Resumes Weapons-Grade Plutonium Research
With a nod from federal overseers, scientists are resuming plutonium experiments and small-scale manufacturing at Lawrence Livermore lab's Superblock, one of the nation's two secret, fortress-like labs for handling weapons-grade plutonium.
Plutonium metal can spontaneously ignite in air, and an earthquake, terrorist attack or accident poses a risk of releasing cancer-causing plutonium into neighborhoods nearby. That classifies Superblock as a "high-hazard" facility, and all of its safety systems work together to prevent such a release.
In the last decade, workers have performed millions of dollars in repairs to the 1960s-vintage building and installed new safety features...
(Engineers) ...tested the fire suppression system to ensure enough pressure reaches the farthest sprinklers in the building. They've rewritten many of the rules for day-to-day handling of plutonium and other radioactive materials.
press release | San Mateo County Times
>related from Sept/Oct 2004:
"If you want to maintain the current arsenal, you do need some plutonium capacity, but what exists at Los Alamos is far in excess of what's needed. But if you're hell-bent on new weapons, what's planned for Livermore is exactly what you'd do."
Another dangerous proposal in the Livermore plan is to triple the at-risk limit for how much plutonium can be in a single room at one time. The amount requested is not arbitrary but linked to specific projects such as developing prototype plutonium bomb cores and new processes for separating plutonium with lasers."
article 'No Plans for New Nukes Here!' | TheBulletin.org
>also:
Plutonium And The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory...
| Tri-valley CARES
~New nukes for me and you!
Pinter's Poem: God Bless America
Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.
The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.
The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America's God.
© Harold Pinter, January 2003
Wednesday :: January 22, 2003
On Pinter's Poem About War in Iraq
Today in The Guardian, playwright Harold Pinter published a poem about America's intended military confrontation with Iraq....
link to more info./ Pinter Forum | Talk Left
>related:
http://www.haroldpinter.org/poetry/index.shtml
~What strange flowers some people choose to throw at the media parade. Here's another one. Pinter's a socialist don't you know.
Nukes in the News: Depleted Uranium, George Bush & Tony Blair
While U.S. and British military personnel continue using uranium munitions- America's and England's own "dirty bombs" U.S. Army, U.S. Department of Energy, and U.S. Department of Defense officials continue to deny that there are any adverse health and environmental effects as a consequence of the manufacture, testing, and/or use of uranium munitions to avoid liability for the willful and illegal dispersal of a radioactive toxic material - depleted uranium.
Opinion by Dr. Doug Rokke Ph.D. | Scoop
>related: What Does "Mildly Radioactive" Mean, Anyway?
~Love the war and the warrior; hate the poisons! Isn't it strange how THAT message will never be articulated? The pro-war majority is limited on how it can voice support for the troops. But their silence about the health effects of depleted uranium doesn't aid the enemy like anti-war rallies do. The pro-war majority can never be called disloyal, or accused of treason. Still...
7 blogs (for the roll)
k-punk
oblivio
beautiful stuff
the pinocchio theory
tapei, or the ambiguities
spurious
franz kafka
October 13, 2005
Abuse-a-Tron
http://www.upstartx.com/abuse/index.cfm
>related: Maledicta Press
[Edward Said via google\ not with above]
GOP Stands Up for US Right to Torture
"According to the Bushies, if the United States is holding a prisoner on foreign soil, our soldiers can still subject him or her to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment - the very forms of torture used by the soldiers who were later prosecuted for their conduct at Abu Ghraib.
The House Republicans, which have no shame, will try to weaken McCain's amendment...(which passed the Senate 90 to nine)...They need to hear from decent Republicans all over this country. Don't leave this hideous stain on your party's name. This is NOT what America stands for. We've had more loathsome and more dangerous enemies than Al-Qaida and managed to defeat them without resorting to torture."
article by Molly Ivins
[abu ghraib photo via google\ not above]
October 12, 2005
are we there yet?
fascism in america by Stew Albert
51 of the largest 100 entities are companies
george bush as presidential simulacrum
on message by Lewis H. Lapham
Overheard at Starbucks
"If homeland security requires secrecy in order to be effective, doesn't it follow that individuals adept at keeping secrets will find a home there and assume control? Alcohol, drug, wife, sibling and child abusers? Closet-cases of every sexual persuasion? People from the dishonest, lying and/or shame-ridden, self-loathing end of humanity's self-esteem spectrum?"
--"Don't forget loyalty-junkies and those hard-wired for hierarchy."
"Do we really want to give people damaged in those particular ways carte-blanche over the majority's simple neurotic lives?"
--"Who said anything about 'give'?
And with them watching, what's 'simple'?"
Znose in South Korea
Electronic Sensor Technology Receives Purchase Order
press release | Business Wire
>related zNose search results on Spitting Image
~Not to be the Luddite in the luggage here, but isn't it time for news stories about glitches, false positives, ignored warnings, complete failures etc. in sensor technology to begin appearing? Or will the security applications of this new technology preclude such stories, if any, from becoming public?
redrum
Vice President Dick Cheney and Dr. Condoleezza Rice speak in the Red Room before a press availability by the President of Pakistan Feb. 13, 2002. In contrast to the large East Room, the smaller Red Room has provided a place for quiet conversation over the years.
more glimpses from the white house red room
Some people paint, some people, well, sculpt.
more anecdotal photographs from yosemite
October 11, 2005
Sex Organs Sprout Everywhere
>Mark Dery's post on the Art and Politics of Netporn: "the first major international conference on netporn criticism":
http://www.markdery.com/archives/news/index.html#000048#more
thanks Diederik
Who Isn't Against Torture?
"Let's be clear: Mr. Bush is proposing to use the first veto of his presidency on a defense bill needed to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan so that he can preserve the prerogative to subject detainees to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In effect, he threatens to declare to the world his administration's moral bankruptcy."
article | NY Times via Truthout
[Abu Ghraib photo (via google) depicting treatment of prisoners President Bush doesn't want outlawed.]
U.K.'s MI5 Names Over 360 Groups Seeking Nukes
~So many enemies, so little time.
Wal-Mart Turns in Student’s Anti-Bush Photo, Secret Service Investigates Him
Selena Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class (Currituck County High School North Carolina) “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”
"A student came to me and told me that the Secret Service had taken a poster done for a project" Jarvis says. "I didn't believe him at first. But they had come into my room when I wasn't there and had taken his poster, which was in a stack with all the others."
She says the student was upset."He was nervous, he was scared, and his parents were out of town on business," says Jarvis. "Halfway through my afternoon class, the assistant principal got me out of class and took me to the office conference room," she says. "Two men from the Secret Service were there. They asked me what I knew about the student. I told them he was a great kid, that he was in the homecoming court, and that he'd never been in any trouble."
Then they got down to his poster. "They asked me if I thought it was suspicious," she recalls. "I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!" At the end of the meeting, they told her the incident "would be interpreted by the U.S. attorney, who would decide whether the student could be indicted," she says. "I blame Wal-Mart more than anybody," she says. "I was really disgusted with them. But everyone was using poor judgment, from Wal-Mart up to the Secret Service."
Jacquie Young, a spokesperson for Wal-Mart at company headquarters, did not provide comment within a 24-hour period. Jonathan Scherry, spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington, D.C., said, "We certainly respect artistic freedom, but we also have the responsibility to look into incidents when necessary. In this case, it was brought to our attention from a private citizen, a photo lab employee."
According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to disse
But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.
via Unknown News
~Do you think being questioned by the Secret Service when in highschool or gradeschool will ever be a mark of distinction? Something to proudly add to college applications or job resumes?
bang the keys swiftly
It may be mere accident, but one moment in the history of mechanization in this country makes clear the great hold that death has on writing. That's one reason—unconscious, no doubt—that Christopher Latham Sholes, a Milwaukee businessman and Wisconsin legislator, took his design for a typing machine directly to Philo Remington, the president of E. Remington and Sons and son of the founder, Eliphalet. The convergence between rifles and writing machines proved a natural one for Remington, for the firm could easily utilize its rifle-stamping equipment to make the linking and tripping mechanisms for the new typewriter.1 They signed a contract on the spot on March 1, 1873.
- read more from typewriters and their discontents by Barry Sanders
October 10, 2005
Blog: The Mudville Gazette
The reader will kindly forgive any tendency to rough language or behavior on the part of the site owner.
"Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
http://www.mudvillegazette.com/
~For rough men and their fans who need the state to sanction their readiness to do violence.
[photo yahoo news\ not the Mudville Gazette]
Movie: Beyond Treason
"What causes Gulf War Illness?
(a.k.a. Gulf War Syndrome; Persian Gulf Illness)
Some believe these illnesses are caused by exposure to depleted uranium munitions used on the battlefield. Others believe chemical and biological exposures are the prime suspect. While yet an even larger group argue that experimental vaccines given to our troops, without their knowledge or consent, may have lead to the demise of many of these soldiers.
Is it a combination of overlapping exposures?
Depleted Uranium Exposure
Chemical & Biological Exposures
Experimental Vaccinations
A growing number of scientists and respected experts in their fields have been coming forward to share their research and first-hand knowledge of official betrayal."
>related
"See expert testimony about Depleted Uranium, Illegal Biotech and Vaccine Testing, deployment of germ warfare weaponry supplied by the USA and more. This well done film on DVD provides a plethora of hard data which allows further understanding of the true TREASON by the bush crime family and their cadre of white welfare law enforcement types who wish to replace one welfare state with another.
The most horrifying aspect of Americas tyranny in the middle east are the long term effects. View the actual foetuses of satanic deformation created by the deformers of American ideals and physical health. Hear from actual victims of bush treason what it was like to come back from a false war, and be abandoned by the government who sent them, all the while infecting their ffamily members and friends with what the US government calls a MYSTERY disease. Hear first hand about the 14000 (YES 14 THOUSAND) chemical and biotech sensors which went off during the first bush gulf war which the GI's were told were ALL malfunctioning instruments! You will never be the same after viewing this film.
~Everything's bigger, exaggerated, in the movies? HOPEFULLY.
Crissy Cranks Cars
"The World's Greatest Pedal-Pumping Website"
>for example
main page with membership. videos, forum, cd-roms.
~Comparing Crissy's site to other Spitting Image fetish links I see that fetishes needn't be remarkable or extreme. Which is a real mind-blower.
Crissy herself notes: "As I mentioned, I do not have this fetish, I just run a website from people who do. It's called "pedal pumping" and if you google that, you would be surprised to see how many sites there are about it. Not just that, but it gets very specific...some like stuck tires in the mud or snow, some like brake failure, revving, some like just cranking. The shoes the models are wearing is also very important...some like bare feet, boots, heels, sandals, sneakers, and on and on.
My site mainly features cranking and the models generally wear panty hose. The type of car is also very important. It is truly a fringe fetish. We were featured in a French magazine called LUI all about men with a fetish for women and cars. The best I can understand there is something about the movement of a pretty girl in an ugly car that won't turn over that reminds the viewer of sex. Most had an experience as a pubescent boy witnessing such an event and it triggered something in their mind. I can't say it spins my wheels, but I can understand why it does to many...and not just here in the US...I get emails and letters from the world over. From promoting my site on other fetish websites...this one is more normal than a lot...some are realllllllllly odd. ...you never know who visits your site, and sees our link and has thought they were the ONLY one in the world who felt that way about women and crappy cars!"
My Favorite Abu Ghraib Cutup
"Abughraib tortures bring to the extreme point the American mainstream imaginary."
>Slideshow as was presented to the mentioned A'dam (Netporn) conference.
from Diederik
October 09, 2005
Photo-Lyric Incongruity
I don't have plans and schemes
And I don't have hopes and dreams
I don't have anything
Since I don't have you....
I don't have fond desires
And I don't have happy hours
I don't have anything
Since I don't have you....
I don't have happiness
And I guess I never will again,
When you walked out on me
In walked old misery
And he's been here since then...
I don't have love to share
And I don't have one who cares..
I don't have anything
Since I don't have you...
you..you...you.. you...
Since I Don't Have You; The Skyliners | @
2005 US Army Weapons Systems Handbook
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/wsh/index.html
via/archived Secrecy Newa
Censorship News
>for example
A Knock at the Door
An exhibition about artistic freedom and the new national security state
Our First Amendment rights are no guarantee. In 2001, shortly after the September 11th attacks, polls indicated that 50% of the U.S. population agreed with the statement "The First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees." This dramatic climate change has a huge impact on art, how it is made, exhibited, and discussed. Now, when works by certain artists or of an indefinable political nature are exhibited, we can virtually guarantee the Secret Service will show up.
Since September 11th, the media has reported a number of cases of the Secret Service visiting art exhibitions based on citizens' reports that artworks posed threats to the president and national security. Steve Kurtz, a member of the artist collaborative Critical Art Ensemble, was brought to trial on charges of bioterrorism (now lessened to mail and wire fraud) after he called the police when he woke to find his wife had died of a heart attack.
But often, no legal action is actually taken. Censorship operates effectively at the level of a threat. Artists can feel the threat of prosecution without knowing what they would possibly be prosecuted for.
Now while this is certainly a frightening development, it does afford the possibility of an exhibition that raises public awareness of the current retreat of our most basic rights. A Knock at the Door is this exhibition. Anchored with works and artists already targeted by the Secret Service, the show expands to show how, with no accountability required of the federal government, any cultural activity could come under investigation. A Knock at the Door challenges the assumption that there is a clear line defining so-called "threatening" or "Un-American" art and activity, and that all art is an expression of the most basic foundation of a democratic society - the free expression and exchange of ideas.
For more information see: http://www.lmcc.net/knock/
more news: http://www.ncac.org/index.html
| National Coalition Against Censorship
thanks Diederik
The Man Who Took on George Bush and Won
(the Nobel Peace Prize, that is)
In a dramatic rebuff to President George Bush, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the man who dared to tell the Americans that the main plank of the US argument for waging war on Iraq was based on a lie.
The Nobel committee bestowed the prestigious award for 2005 on Mohamed ElBaradei, the UN official who rose to prominence by exposing the lengths that America would go to in its efforts to build a case for war.
Mr ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which shares the prize, delivered a body blow to the Bush administration on the eve of the Iraq war.
~Isn't it remarkable that all he did was tell the truth while others were lying? For all the good THAT accomplished. True he confronted the most militarized nation on earth as it was mobilzing for an invasion. (I hate prizes.)
>related
"Late last year there were reports the US has tapped ElBaradei's calls with Iranian officials hoping to find information to use against him, and that the US wanted to install Australia's Foreign Minister Alexander Downer as his replacement."
story US congratulates Elbaradei on Nobel Peace Prize | ABC (au)
Coast Guard Integrated Anti-Swimmer System
...in the wake of the terrorist attacks committed on September 11, 2001, emerging threats to the U.S. homeland have prompted an increased Coast Guard focus on protecting domestic ports and the U.S. Maritime Transportation System from terrorist threats.
The IAS consists of five primary components: A land-based sonar, a portable (vessel mounted) sonar, a data processor, a vehicle guidance system, and an underwater loud hailer. Use of the IAS would be limited to existing harbor infrastructure and adjacent waters. The IAS is not designed or intended for use offshore.
The system would be used for specific and finite periods of time to protect specific assets. During these times, the sonar would be operated and monitored continuously. The loud hailer would be used only if an actual threat was identified.
notice | Federal Registry via Cryptome
~ping...ping...ping...
Just because Al Qaeda and Iraq haven't attacked US ports in the four years since 9/11 doesn't mean they won't try it tomorrow or whenever IAS is put into place.
Certainly the American public can't know the specific threats to our ports the Coast Guard & Homeland Security have neutralized since 9/11 and how IAS could have helped.
IAS will be useful protecting America's nuclear assets as they travel through specific ports. America's nuclear weapons stockpile needs to be upgraded within the next decade and there's not a hint from Congress or the Bush Administration that they're going to allow America to lose even one nuclear warhead to obsolescence. I'm guessing here but we may need to import much of the required weapons-grade plutonium to maintain our nuclear-superiority. I don't believe plutonium is shipped by air. That is I don't think the USA would ship plutonium by air.
So now more than ever IAS is needed?
"Integrated Anti-Swimmer System" sounds unnecessarily menacing doesn't it? Which makes me think it's promising more protection than it can deliver.
[photo cieciel\not with above links]
October 08, 2005
Google Image Search: Nanotech
for example...
~Thanks to movies, tv and books I can readily picture...although I've never been there... 'outer space'.
I don't yet have that same sense of familiarity with 'nano-space'. Fantastic Voyage, microscope slides, mostly crappy computer-generated images and animation?
Experts Give Scientists Roadmap on Nanotechnology Research
Little is known so far about whether materials being invented by nanotechnology researchers can be hazardous to humans and if so, under what conditions.
... toxicologists studying such questions now have a broad roadmap from a government-sponsored panel of experts on how to proceed.
“Principles for characterizing the potential human health effects from exposure to nanomaterials: elements of a screening strategy” the 85 page report...was published yesterday on the website of Particle and Fibre Toxicology...
“This is just looking at the human health effects, not how to test the impact on the broader environment,” said Barbara Karn, an environmental scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency, the sponsor of the study. “That’s also very important but eco-toxicity involves different types of tests.”
Nanoscale materials often behave differently than the same materials in larger sizes. That gives them valuable new attributes like unusual strength or electrical characteristics, but it also raises questions about whether new products incorporating them might be unexpectedly hazardous.
The lead author on the toxicology report is Günter Oberdörster, a toxicologist at the University of Rochester whose research has demonstrated that some nanoscale materials can migrate from the nose into the brain....
The report emphasizes the need to characterize the particles in numerous ways, including shape, surface area, electrical characteristics and how likely they are to quickly form clumps that interact with the body differently than separate particles. It also describes a variety of tests for studying the impact of the materials on different organs and to test the different impacts of eating, breathing or touching the particles.
The detail in the report highlights why toxicology research generally moves at a glacial pace compared to new product development. That discrepancy has led some critics of nanotechnology to call for strict government regulation or moratoriums on the introduction of products based on the technology. But advocates for the technology say that the report...is one of many signs that development is moving along with reasonable caution.
The report does not propose any kinds of tests that are not already familiar to toxicologists, according to Ms. Karn. “This is the way to identify health impacts on humans,” she said. “We were not looking for methods that would show why the particles had those effects. You might need nanoscale tests for that.”
press release By BARNABY FEDER | NY Times
~No hurry, Mon. Nobody killed yet. If the industry's happy with an EPA report we can all be certain there's no liability risks to speak of. ('Touching the particles'!!!)
Hundreds of inmigrants left to die in the middle of the Sahara desert
As most of the readers are overseas (from where I live) won't probably heared about the massive tryings of sub-saharan inmigrants to cross the fences that stand as borders of the Spanish' colonies of Ceuta and Melilla using homemade stairs in a XV century-like assault to a fortress.
Those who were arrested by the Moroccan police were inmediately being deported to the near town Oujda, in Algeria, were they found their way to cure their wounds (sometimes as results of the jump over a 6 meters fence with barbedwire and several times inflicted by the always agressive Moroccan police), recover some strength and try again to jump the fences that separate the two Spanish, ergo European, colonies from Morocco.
Things seem to have changed now that Spain and Morocco have signed a treaty that allows the first country to inmed