The original pledge was written in 1892 by a Baptist socialist minister, Francis Bellamy, and was first published in a magazine called the Youth's Companion. The magazine's editor had hired Bellamy after the latter had been sacked by his church for delivering controversial socialist statements from the pulpit. Bellamy had even considered including the word "equality" in the pledge but knew that the state superintendents of education would be unwilling to endorse something that hinted at equal rights for women and blacks.

It was more than 60 years later, in 1954, that Congress, at the height of the anticommunist McCarthy period, added the words "under God" following a campaign by a rightwing Catholic organisation, the Knights of Columbus. Bellamy's grand-daughter later said that Bellamy would have resented the words being added, not least because at the end of his life he had become disenchanted with organised religion and had stopped attending church in Florida because of racial bigtory.

This is not the first time Mr Ashcroft's subordinates have realised that this attorney general is unlike ordinary politicians. Each time he has been sworn in to political office, he is anointed with cooking oil (in the manner of King David, as he points out in his memoirs Lessons from a Father to His Son).

When Mr Ashcroft was in the Senate, the duty was performed by his father, a senior minister in a church specialising in speaking in tongues, the Pentecostal Assemblies of God. When he became attorney general, Clarence Thomas, a supreme court justice, did the honours.

[...]

Perhaps the most bizarre wrinkle in the Ashcroft enigma emerged in November when Andrew Tobias, the Democratic Party treasurer and a financial writer, published an article on his website accusing the attorney general of harbouring superstitions about tabby cats.

According to the Tobias article, advance teams for an Ashcroft visit to the US embassy in the Hague asked anxiously if there were tabby cats (or calico cats as they are known in the US) on the premises.

"Their boss, they explained, believes calico cats are signs of the devil," Mr Tobias reported.

A federal judge brushed aside a jury's advisory-only verdict Friday, saying customs inspectors looking for drugs were reasonable in subjecting a traveler to a four-hour strip search.

Last August, jurors recommended that Kathryn Kaniff, 36, of Washington Island, Wis., be awarded $129,750 in damages after finding that she was subjected to "willful and wanton" treatment by O'Hare International Airport customs officers in December 1997.

Inspectors suspected Kaniff, who was returning from Jamaica, was smuggling drugs. They spent four hours questioning her, searching her luggage, strip searching her and X-raying her but found no drugs.

U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer said Friday the search may have been painful but was reasonable. [link]

A flesh-eating bacteria that apparently killed a Flagstaff woman Wednesday is rare, but deadly if not treated in time.

Debbie Berlyn appears to have died of necrotizing fasciitis, a disease that began as a small sore on her neck and ended up turning into a rash covering her entire body. Doctors said it killed her within hours.

Citing patient confidentiality, doctors wouldn't confirm that Berlyn died of the disease, but Barbara Worgess, director of the Coconino County Department of Health, confirmed Thursday night that a patient from Flagstaff Medical Center was diagnosed with the disease this week.

The disease affects about 4 of every 100,000 people in Arizona, according to Ken Komatsu, program manager of infectious diseases at the state Department of Health Services.

"It's gone down from the previous year," he said.

The disease is not contagious and killed about 40 percent of Arizonans who contracted it, he said. [link]

He's been compared to Gogol and Philip K. Dick, which should give you an idea.

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Intriguing photo analysis of Pentagon after alleged plane hit on 9/11. That's right "alleged," because these photos make you wonder where the plane debris is. Implying that it was a truck bomb or something instead.

I was skeptical too. [via boing boing]

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Annalee Newitz on CodeCon and fear of blogs.

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NYC nuke threat hogwash. Not surprising, maybe intentional?

The man who was the source of intelligence that terrorists might be plotting to use a stolen Russian nuclear weapon against New York City is "a fabricator" with "delusions of grandeur," U.S. officials said Wednesday.

The existence of an intelligence report on the source's allegations was first reported in Time magazine.

"The only scandal here is that the Defense Intelligence Agency ever used this guy as a source of anything," said one official.

In "X-Files" one of the characters explains that "FEMA allows the White House to suspend constitutional government upon declaration of a national emergency. It allows creation of a non-elected government. Think about that, Agent Mulder."

The Washington Post's federal column made fun of the claim, and quoted FEMA public affairs guidance about the movie that essentially paints those concerned with the agency's potential role as kooks. Says the FEMA spin-head: "It is not realistic to think that we can convince them otherwise and it is advisable not to enter into debate on the subject." FEMA suggests that officials can "emphatically state that FEMA does not have, never has had, nor will ever seek, the authority to suspend the Constitution."

This is just plain untrue. Not only have there been past plans for FEMA and the military to assume an extra-constitutional role, but a recent presidential directive suggest that it is still a possibility not far from the Clinton administration's thoughts.

Karaoke is good clean fun for the millennial nuclear family, the soundtrack for life and a spectacle we have all become a part of. We have not only bought into the advertisement, we are the advertisement and we are all for sale. Amongst the charred debris and fragments of memory that might once have been called the authentic, a new culture could emerge, but what would it mean? How would it proclaim its independence and right to romance in the pragmatic world? The new generation responsible for this would be both the anachronistic legacy of the past and the protean template for the future. They would be anti - information, they wouldn't travel, they would survive by eating from their next door neighbours garden. They would scream 'Don't buy anything'; maybe they have already begun.

Today our culture can be summed up by these two words - 'authentic ' and 'karaoke.' The Casino of my life consists of fragments, ruins, relics and memories which can be thrown around in any order because today the axes of time space and reality are fast disintegrating. The Casino plays out my life as a game of chance, a map of feelings and so becomes my work of art. My life embodies a chaos and perhaps a worthlessness that yields a flamboyant failure rather than a benign success.

A draft report from the Drug Enforcement Administration - which first characterized the activities as suspicious - said the youths' actions "may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity."

Immigration officials deported them for visa violations; no criminal espionage charges were filed.

The arrests, made in an unspecified number of major U.S. cities from California to Florida, came amid public warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies about suspicious behavior by people posing as Israeli art students and "attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings."

The Israelis were arrested and deported on charges of working in the United States without authorization or overstaying visits on tourist visas, said Russ Bergeron, a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington. He described dozens of arrests since early 2001 but gave no exact figures.

The DEA report said a majority of the students questioned by U.S. investigators acknowledged having served in military intelligence, electronic signals interception or explosive ordnance units in the Israeli military. The DEA said one person questioned was the son of a two-star Israeli general, one had served as the bodyguard to the head of the Israeli Army and another served in a Patriot missile unit.

In retrospect, it becomes clear that the battle's underlying story is of how scant intelligence, poorly chosen allies, and dubious military tactics fumbled a golden opportunity to capture bin Laden as well as many senior Al Qaeda commanders.

Moreover, as the US military conducts new strikes with its Afghan allies in nearby Paktia Province, sends special forces into Southeast and Central Asia - and prepares for a possible military plunge into Iraq - planners will need to learn the lessons of Tora Bora: Know which local leaders to trust. Know when to work with allied forces on the ground. And know when to go it alone. "Maybe the only lesson that is applicable is: whenever you use local forces, they have local agendas," says one senior Western diplomat, now looking at options for invading Iraq. "You had better know what those are so that if it is not a reasonable match - at least it is not a contradiction."

It’s part of an effort to create a national KISS brand in which stations share not just logos and promotional bits but also draw from the same pool of on-air talent. Via a practice called “voice-tracking,” Clear Channel pipes popular out-of-town personalities from bigger markets to smaller ones, customizing their programs to make it sound as if the DJs are actually local residents.

[...]

That’s why Clear Channel is developing multiple identities for a battalion of DJs like the 29-year-old Mr. Alan, who is based at KHTS-FM in San Diego, but also does “local” shows in Boise, Medford, Ore., and Santa Barbara, Calif. Mr. Alan does research to offer up news items and other details unique to each city.

"We've been getting calls from many more people than we can help, especially since Enron," says Stephen Kohn, a Washington-based attorney who works with whistle-blowers.

The National Whistleblower Center in Washington reports that its calls are up tenfold this year. "Since September 11, there has been a tendency toward restricting information and making everything secret. Since Enron, we've seen an opposite effect," says Kris Kolesnik of the center.

Although more than 30 federal laws govern whistle-blowing, recent judicial loopholes mean that most employees have no protection from retaliation.

"cult leaders"+wav
all farmers guest book in massing
+pakistan+holiday+wav
blog biochem montreal
morman,pepsi
foot torture
pictures of nude teens from lake geneva wisconsin
Emily Carr - her most expensive painting
burroughsian apocalypse
gordon+big brother+nude
wav sounds mafia russian
car crash mpegs
canadian queen's jubilee flags
legal and ethical issue to open a shoe business in afghanistan.

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Pretty entertaining snarky review of the Grammys ("last week's Masque of the Red Death extravaganza at the Staples Center"). The blurb on Drudge , where I found the link, said "Dismal quality of America's mass-marketed pop music is esthetic national emergency..." -- which is pretty funny too. Giving a William Bennett moral edge to it. But when has "mass-marketed pop music" been anything good anyway? When has most pop music period been good, there's always been a lot of crap, and some gems. Though I'll admit it's been a while since anything really popular has taken root in my mp3 cache, I'm 46 and no one who's looking to get rich is making music for my demographic, never mind my taste.

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"Not the ovens -" An essay called "Burroughsian Apocalypse".

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Sunday, March 03, 2002


A group at Columbia U. has started Newsblaster, kind of similar to Google's news headlines, but a different format, and more articles over several days. [via CSM]

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A first edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is being scanned in Japan for online access. A copy was recently sold for £4.6mil, or over 6 and a half million bucks. It's already available online in the usual text form.

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In the new Index for Environmental Sustainability -- sponsored partly by the World Economic Forum, believe it or not -- the US is 45th in the world in environmental sustainability. Here is the press release and below are the Top Twenty:

1
Finland
73.9

2
Norway
73.0

3
Sweden
72.6

4
Canada
70.6

5
Switzerland
66.5

6
Uruguay
66.0

7
Austria
64.2

8
Iceland
63.9

9
Costa Rica
63.2

10
Latvia
63.0

11
Hungary
62.7

12
Croatia
62.5

13
Botswana
61.8

14
Slovakia
61.6

15
Argentina
61.5

16
Australia
60.3

17
Panama
60.0

18
Estonia
60.0

19
New Zealand
59.9

20
Brazil
59.6

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Someone came to this site googling for "burroughsian apocalypse" recently. Which got me thinking about the collaboration WSB did with Keith Haring, Apocalypse. I don't think Haring lived to see it (AIDS complications).

This was the last thing I went to NYC for, back in '90. I lived in NJ for 31 years and moved to Boulder in '92. I'd really enjoyed New York during the late 70s and early 80s and saw and heard lots of great stuff. But by '90 I was tired of it, and nothing was really interested me anymore. Time to move on.

Apocalypse clearly showed Keith's mood turning sombre and fragmented, perhaps a la Basquiat, whom he was friends with. Of course Burroughs was an influence here too. I liked the show -- it was the only time I saw Haring's work in a gallery -- yet it had an impacted, thin feel, not the best work of either artist. Now it seems obliquely prophetic: "Pan God of Panic, whips screaming crowds, as millions of faces look up at the torn sky. . . "

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