The seven soldiers read the papers and mail
But the news, it doesn't change.
Swinging about through creepers,
Parachutes caught on steeples
Heroes are born, but heroes die.
Just a few days, a little practice and some holiday pay,
We're all sure you'll make the grade.
Mother of God, if you care,
We're on a train to nowhere
Please put a cross upon our eyes.
Take me - I'm nearly ready, you can take me
To the raincoat in the sky.
Take me - my little pastry mother take me
There's a pie shop in the sky.
Mother Whale Eyeless Brian Eno
best viewed not with IE, though I'm not sure why.
formerly "fifteen foot italian shoe" and "keoha pint."
How many years threaded through a needle of blood?
Hail of crystal skulls shattered the greenhouse to slivers in the winter moon...
...exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of will, drinkers of Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent amber of dreams.
He waits the slow striptease of erosion with fossil loins.
-- William S. Burroughs (random lines from Naked Lunch)
At noon, when he arrived at Charlotte's apartment, a second guest was already present, a
television producer named Richard Wilder. A thick-set, pugnacious man who had once been a professional
rugby-league player, Wilder lived with his wife and two sons on the 2nd floor of the building. The
noisy parties he held with his friends on the lower levels -- airline pilots and hostesses sharing
apartments -- had already put him at the center of various disputes. To some extent the irregular
hours of the tenants on the lower levels had cut them off from their neighbours above. In an
unguarded moment Laing's sister had whispered to him that there was a brothel operating somewhere in
the high-rise. The mysterious movements of the air-hostesses as they pursued their busy social
lives, particularly on the floors above their own, clearly unsettled Alice, as if they in some
way interfered with the natural social order of the building, its system of precedences entirely
based on floor height. Laing had noticed that he and his fellow tenants were far more tolerant
of any noise or nuisance from the floors above than they were from those below them. However, he
liked Wilder, with his loud voice and rugby-scrum manners. He let a needed dimension of the unfamiliar
into the apartment block. His relationship with Charlotte Melville was hard to gauge -- his
powerful sexual aggression was overlaid by a tremendous restlessness. No wonder his wife, a pale
young woman with a postgraduate degree who reviewed children's books for the literary weeklies,
seemed permanently exhausted.
As Laing stood on the balcony, accepting a drink from Charlotte, the noise of the party came down
from the bright air, as if the sky itself had been wired for sound. Charlotte pointed to a fragment
of glass on Laing's balcony that had escaped his brush.
'Are you under attack? I heard something fall.' She called to Wilder, who was lounging back in
the centre of her sofa, examining his heavy legs. 'It's those people on the 31st floor.'
'Which people?' Laing asked. He assumed that she was referring to a specific group, a clique of
over-aggressive flim actors or tax consultants, or perhaps a freak aggregation of dipsomaniacs.
But Charlotte shrugged vaguely, as if it was unnecessary to be more specific. Clearly some kind
of demarcation had taken place in her mind, like his own facile identification of people by the
floors on which they lived.
The mathematical models the IMF uses are frequently flawed or out-of-date. Critics accuse the institution of taking a cookie-cutter approach to economics, and they're right. Country teams have been known to compose draft reports before visiting. I heard stories of one unfortunate incident when team members copied large parts of the text for one country's report and transferred them wholesale to another. They might have gotten away with it, except the "search and replace" function on the word processor didn't work properly, leaving the original country's name in a few places. Oops.
It's not fair to say that IMF economists don't care about the citizens of developing nations. But the older men who staff the fund--and they are overwhelmingly older men--act as if they are shouldering Rudyard Kipling's white man's burden. IMF experts believe they are brighter, more educated, and less politically motivated than the economists in the countries they visit. In fact, the economic leaders from those countries are pretty good--in many cases brighter or better-educated than the IMF staff, which frequently consists of third-rank students from first-rate universities.
Bottom line:
Indeed, the difficulties of tracking down suspects and amassing sufficient evidence to convict them leads some experts to wonder whether it is worth it. "Is terrorism a crime or is it war?" asks Stephen Gale, a counterterrorism expert who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. "If you think someone is going to take out your electrical grid, in a criminal investigation you arrest him. In a war you shoot first and ask questions later," he points out.
You can't have it both ways, and the shrub administration will look less and less effective and lose more and more of its mandate if it tries. And spend a lot of taxpayers' money in the process.
Seeking those involved in the Sept. 11 events is especially hard, says Professor Levi, because reconstituting a terrorist network post facto is nearly impossible if members used ephemeral means such as the Internet to communicate. "This is not like a normal, organized crime case, where you round up the suspects after surveillance," Levi explains. "The people involved in this were not suspected before, so they weren't being watched, and much of the evidence will have disappeared."
Convicting members of Al Qaeda-style networks in order to preempt further attacks is hardly easier, even when they are under surveillance, suggests Michael Clarke, head of the Centre for Defence Studies at London University.
"Terrorism poses a fundamental challenge to the legal system," Professor Clarke argues. "Terrorists often do nothing indictable till they commit the act. Ninety percent of the time sleepers are absolutely legal, so you can't do anything about them even if you know who they are.
"Terrorism challenges our categories of what is legal and what is illegal," Clarke adds.
There's no easy answer, because neither militarization nor traditional criminal investigation will do the job.
Another promising-looking new book: Gould's Book of Fish: A Book in 12 Fish by Aussie Richard Flanagan, author of Death of a River Guide, which I didn't connect with.
With the Commandant, Flanagan dives into the waters of Swift and Conrad and causes a wake of allegorical satire that washes through history, racism, politics, and technology. The Commandant is a character as absurd as he is frightening, a man wholly unhinged by isolation, hubris, and syphilis. Determined to re-create the wonders of Europe on his 1-mile-square island, he whispers orders to his minions behind a gold mask, selling off everything they need to survive in order to finance his fantasies. Even his most ridiculous schemes such as building a lavish railroad station to attract trains from the mainland shimmer with ominous terror.
Each "fish" (chapter) is in a different ink color.
JN: Yeah, the first time was one "Ooh La La!" on a single called "The Seven Deadly Finns". Somewhere in the vaults at Island, there is an early seventies video of me and Polly Eltes performing my guitar Kama Sutra (cheesy moves from arena rock), edited to the typewriter sound on "Taking Tiger Mountain" , then played back on a pyramid of old TV sets with Eno in a beret standing in front siJN: Yeah, the first time was one "Ooh La La!" on a single called "The Seven Deadly Finns". Somewhere in the vaults at Island, there is an early seventies video of me and Polly Eltes performing my guitar Kama Sutra (cheesy moves from arena rock), edited to the typewriter sound on "Taking Tiger Mountain" , then played back on a pyramid of old TV sets with Eno in a beret standing in front singing his vocal. This was pre-MTV. I would love to see it again; it must be hilarious. The anecdote about the inciting incident [the harp record] that started Eno's Discreet Music series has been told with several slight variations on the sleeve, in interviews and a number of books over almost 30 years and even translated out of English. According to what I remember, it was inaccurately told, even on the first record sleeve. There were two people in the room, him and me. I could recreate it as if it were written by Robbe-Grillet, but not one interviewer or author has ever asked me my version to this day. It would take a truly modern artist to say, "This is what I remember but you might also ask Judy".
3AM: So…
JN: So it was pouring rain in Leicester Square, I bought the harp music from a guy in a booth behind the tube station with my last few quid because we communicated in ideas, not flowers and chocolate, and I didn't want to show up empty-handed. Neither of us was into harp music. But, I grew up in America with ambient music. If I was upset as a kid I was allowed to fall asleep listening to a Martin Denny album…I think it was called "Quiet Village". The jungle sounds, played very softly made the room's darkness caressing instead of empty as a void. Pain was more tolerable. Brian had just come out of hospital, his lung was collapsed and he lay immobile on pillows on the floor with a bank of windows looking out at soft rain in the park on Grantully Road, on his right and his sound system on his left. I put the harp music on and balanced it as best as I could from where I stood; he caught on immediately to what I was doing and helped me balance the softness of the rain patter with the faint string sound for where he lay in the room. There was no "ambience by mistake". Neither of us invented ambient music; that he could convince EG Music to finance his putting out a line of very soft sound recordings is something quite different. We both listened to the early seventies German wave and were influenced by them too.
But some fine stuff came out of that anyhow, eh?
And now I want to get her album Pal Judy, which seems to be available on tape from ROIR -- though it sounds like Judy won't see any of the proceeds. Her take on Napster:
3AM: Anything you'd like to address regarding the issue of "free" music where others have licensed your work and "residuals and royalties" is the name of a hit comedy … mp3 anyone?
JN: Maybe this is a good mid-step to clear the music world of bottom-feeders. I'm guessing that I lost maybe 30% of my royalties. I've never even gotten a royalty statement from Bomp, Cherry Red, Fetish, Connoisseur Editions, Demon, or Lightning…and ROIR will claim to sell "old stock" until half a dozen artists chip in and pay for an audit. I don't mind losing money to the public while cultivating a much more inclusive music history. I am also "the public" and my interest in electronica has only increased from using Napster. I 'd much rather buy directly from the artist. [My emphasis]
Geoff Lee, 51, repeatedly hit the exhibit, The Organ Donor, which shows a man holding a liver, after seeing a father showing his five-year-old daughter around the Body Worlds show at the Atlantis Gallery in East London. . .I was enraged that he (Professor von Hagen) was capable of inflicting that horrific exhibition on an innocent child.
As the article on dark kidlit below states, kids are often less squeamish about the horrible than adults. But the issue of protecting innocence is at the core of this, I guess. And dealing with our own shadows in order to be comfortable enough to teach children about them.
I do love the bit about human bodies and commercial objects though. Obviously it's OK when they're alive. . . [via bb]
The report on what collapsed the towers. Very hot fire and disabled fire suppression systems, apparently. The question of why the city shipped all that steel off to foreign scrapyards remains.
Even the clatter and roar of American helicopters and transport planes - part of the daily base traffic that usually turns heads - couldn't compete with Khan on Thursday, who invited spectators to hear the rattle of stones in his belly as he prodded his swollen paunch.
"When I started stone-eating, people couldn't believe it. They told me that this was magic," said Khan, who developed the habit three years ago because - in his words - he was hungry. "This is the one quality I have. Wherever I go, people watch me and gather around."
Part of Khan's mystery is that he's not out to make money from his talent, though he'll take digestible food if it's offered. He's happy to sit cross-legged on the ground and talk.
And because he occasionally pops a stone into his mouth, people listen - even though he admits to being out of touch.
"I don't know what's happening," Khan said of the successful American bombing campaign that helped oust the Taliban, and the hunt for al-Qaida holdouts in Afghanistan's remote mountains. "The Russians came and left after fighting, and then the Arabs came and they left. Now the Americans are here, and I don't know when they are leaving," Khan said.
OK, I guess the perennial deprivation, despair and hunger of the Afghans is the point. Strangely listless piece though -- or maybe it's just my mood.
Thursday, March 28, 2002
Under a new law designed to protect minors, local police departments will now be required to inform residents any time a known Roman Catholic church moves into their neighborhood.
The law also mandates that Catholic churches register with authorities, wear electronic monitoring devices, and be prohibited from moving to within a half-mile radius of a school.
[...]
"In the Catholic Church, after 2,000 years, Mary is still a Virgin," she said. "So clearly, they're not interested in girls."
That statement, however, angered Vatican spokesman Edgar Palowski, who said it propagated a common misconception about the church. "This doesn't get reported enough," he said, "but it's a fact that our priests abuse just as many girls as boys."
Wilder was also noted as one of Hollywood's best wits. He once remarked of postwar France: "It's a country where you can't tear the toilet paper but the currency crumbles in your hands." William Holden said Wilder had "a mind full of razor blades."
[...]
"Making movies is a little like walking into a dark room," he once mused. "Some people stumble across furniture, others break their legs, but some of us see better in the dark than others. The ultimate trick is to convince, persuade. Every single person out there is an idiot, but collectively they're a genius."
(That was a fast three.)
I'll have to try and catch Greg the Bunny before it's cancelled.
Greg the Bunny is so beautifully executed that it doesn't seem anywhere near as weird as it should. Living, master-less puppets are simply a part of everyday society the show doesn't waste any time trying to explain, it's just accepted that the felted race exists sans manipulating human hands shoved up their plush backsides. Well, except for those puppets working in network news and boy bands, but that's true in our world, too.
"There are 3.2 million puppets currently residing in the United States," Greg (played by, as Fox points out in promo materials, newcomer puppet actor Greg the Bunny) says in the pilot's opening scene. "And, despite our many accomplishments, most people would still rather chamois their cars with us than have us date their daughters."
[...]
...it's the unflinchingly natural ease in which the humans interact with the puppets that makes Greg the Bunny work, not the other way around. Of course, a smartly written sitcom satirizing the entertainment biz and racism starring a fuzzy bunny is already doomed on network TV without me declaring it one of the absolute funniest shows I've ever seen, so let's not toss it to my pick-hit graveyard. Just watch/tape Greg the Bunny while you can, file it alongside Action, The Tick, The Family Guy, Undeclared and the rest that failed to catch on with the mouth-breathing masses, and we'll file an anti-puppetism suit against Fox if/when they pull the plug.
Only Family Guy from that list sparked my continued interest -- though Action was pretty good. But I'll add The Oblongs, Maximum Bob, Daria and MTV's Downtown to the list.
Good piece for people who somehow missed the fact that children's lit has always had a dark side, and that it isn't a big deal. I mean Grimm's Fairy Tales, right? This didn't start with Harry Potter.
Obviously, J. K. Rowling--with her emotion- packed tales of Dementors and Death Eaters, werewolves and nearly headless ghosts, three- headed dogs and clandestine drinkers of unicorn blood--cannot be said to have invented the dark children's book: Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie, and the Brothers Grimm are contenders for that particular honor. Philip Pullman's masterful young-adult novel The Golden Compass, a nightmarish depiction of kidnapped children, marauding bears, and surgical experiments, actually predated Harry Potter by two years. And Judy Blume, the reigning queen of nonfantasy young-adult fiction, has watched for years as her award- winning books--honest depictions of teenagers wrestling with their adolescence--have been banned by school districts for their challenging content.
But while critical attacks on children's books are nothing new, one can argue that until the Harry Potter books materialized in 1997 (was it only five years ago?), it was far less commonplace for writers and critics to remark on the supposed rise in literary darkness. Clearly, it is time to ask the question once again: Are kids' books becoming too dark for kids?
"It's an age-old question," says McDonald. "Honestly, I think adults are more scared of the dark parts in children's books than the children are. Think about Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. Kids love that book, and parents are always wondering if it's too scary." She lists other examples, ranging from the darkness-lite domestic problems of the Beverly Cleary books to the controversial pessimism of The Chocolate War, the much beloved young-adult classic by the late Robert Cormier.
The New Cruelty: This Supreme Court ruling is so fucked up.
In a unanimous ruling yesterday, the nation's highest court upheld a provision of federal law that permits public-housing authorities to evict longtime tenants for the drug-related activity of family members or guests even when the tenants didn't know about it.
Though the event this year drew fewer people, about 450 versus 1,000 in 2001 -- attributed to the aftereffect of 9/11 -- the information was fascinating and, if believed, potentially explosive. It went beyond merely trying to prove that UFOs have extraterrestrial connections -- that's old hat. The effort now is to get the United States government -- or, more precisely, a "shadow government" that speakers say not even George Dubya has access to -- to release the super-advanced technologies back- engineered from downed spacecraft. These include anti-gravitational propulsion engines, pollution-free and virtually perpetual energy machines and medicines to extend life hundreds of years.
To the believers, this science could mean the difference between a world destroying itself and a virtual utopia.
Non-believers will always consider it just another way for the weak-minded, the gullible and the idealistic to fantasize about such utopias, and aliens and flying saucers are merely the modern-day equivalents of gnomes, faeries, leprechauns and gods.
Of course, they didn't attend the 11th Annual International Congress. If they had, they might have come away believing those ancient peoples deserved a little more credit.
Then again, they also might have come away believing the world is crazier than they first thought.
Book it now. Ride the rail cars into Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Spend an afternoon at the proposed nuclear waste storage site. Get two or three days in Vegas. Travel, hotel, meals paid for by the Nuclear Energy Institute.
No this isn't a joke. 168 congressional aides and 7 House members have taken the trip.
"We went to a show. I'm not sure who paid," one aide said. "Liquor was free in the casino," another added. A third congressional worker said he spent an afternoon in the hotel wave pool, while a fourth recalled an industry-paid dinner at a spectacular revolving restaurant with a view of Vegas. Aides were reluctant to say how much they gambled.
Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, visited Yucca Mountain at the industry's expense last year. He spent one night in Las Vegas and defended those who stay longer.
"Our staffs are not the highest paid government people in the world. If they get a chance to learn on the issue and to spend a few days (in Vegas), I have never seen that as a problem," he said. "Staffers who have gone found it educational and enjoyable."
The Nuclear Energy Institute has been paying for trips to Yucca since the early 1990s. The tab for each trip varies with the airfare and number of days, but the cost for a staff member is usually between $1,000 and $2,000. The industry didn't provide money for gambling or shows. [link]
Like most small Southern towns, the place I was born and grew up in had its share of drunks. Lots of folks drank, some heavily, but of them all -- those who agelessly, perpetually stumbled and raged along the streets (dirt for many years, then gravel, eventually blacktopped); others in clothes just as threadbare though aggressively clean, who were themselves pie-eyed most weekends and evenings -- of them all there was one that everybody talked about. Almost as though this were an elected, honorary position, or somethng like the African griots, mavericks central to their culture yet reviled. Griots in Senegambian society sang the praises of their social leaders, committed to memory epic genealogies which became the oral history of their culture, sang and played in groups to set rhythms for farmers and others at their work. Yet when the griot died he could not be buried among his society's respectable folk. His body, instead, was left to rot in a hollow tree.
Though filed under "Mysteries," this first of the Lew Griffin series is more like an epic prose poem with the effect of a long slow blues, Ben Webster with Billie Holiday in the 50s. Quite melancholy, earthy and austere at the same time. You can tell the author's a poet.
I think I'll enjoy moseying through the series.
Wednesday, March 27, 2002
In case you're wondering about the veracity of the claims that the media is biased toward "liberals," here's an item: Geoffrey Nunberg did a search and found that liberal lawmakers are 30% more likely to be labelled than "conservatives." This was in response to Bernard Goldberg's assertion in Bias that the reverse is the case.
Real "panic rooms" are all the rage apparently, especially since You Know What.
Rigdon says his clients have paid between $50,000 to $500,000 for a room that somehow speaks to their individual fears. He built one room that was wired to a sensor affixed to a small, decorative pendant around the homeowner's neck. Once the home's external security system was breached, the door to the panic room would remain on alert for the sensor to pass over its threshold. With the sensor-wearing resident safely over the threshold, the heavy door automatically pulled shut behind him or her. .
"He was responsible for the television set in your home today," [publicist Warren] Cowan said. "He put television on the map."
"Uncle Miltie" was the king of Tuesday nights, and store owners put up signs: "Closed tonight to watch Milton Berle." The program's popularity spurred sales of television sets and helped make the new technology a medium for the masses.
In subsequent remarks made to the Evening Post newspaper Wednesday, Lange said he never felt intimidated by Quayle's alleged threat.
"He wasn't taken seriously by his own folk, that was the tragedy," the paper quotes him as saying.
"I didn't feel at risk from the U.S. Navy because they didn't come here anyway, and I certainly wouldn't be at risk from a chap who couldn't spell tomato," he added.
A September 1999 study by the Cato Institute documented the federally-funded militarization of state and local police forces. Titled Warrior Cops: The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in American Police Departments, the study found, "Over the past 20 years Congress has encouraged the U.S. military to supply intelligence, equipment and training to civilian police. That encouragement has spawned a culture of paramilitarism in American law enforcement." According to the study, between 1995 and 1997 alone, the Department of Defense gave over one million pieces of military equipment to police forces across the country. The newest items included grenade launchers, armored personnel carriers, M-16 rifles, automatic weapons with laser sights, laser surveillance equipment, wireless electric stun projectiles, pyrotechnic devices such as flash-bang and smoke grenades, and kevlar body armor.
Bernard Goldberg and Michael Moore have very little and very much in common.
Both claim to have opinions the public wants to hear, but not the media elite. Goldberg, an ex-CBS News Correspondent and author of "Bias," says the TV networks favor the left; Moore, a longtime agitator and author of "Stupid White Men," thinks they favor the rich.
Neither is likely to appear on the evening news, but both have reached the masses in a big way. This Sunday, "Stupid White Men" will be No. 1 on The New York Times nonfiction best seller list. "Bias," which has topped the list before, will be No. 2.
"We're the same polarized country we were in November 2000, when there was a 500-vote difference for president," says Moore, whose book has nearly 280,000 copies in print in its first month of publication.
Radiance, Carter Scholz's new novel about a nuclear weapons lab (and its director) on the decline sounds pretty good.
Once an independent and creative physicist, Philip Quine has sold his talents for funding, first to run the experiments to confirm his doctoral work, but then as a scientific dogsbody in the hierarchy of the Lab. Quine's work on Superbright, a near-imaginary missile-defense project born of faked tests and political deals, shows him the Lab's foundation of bad faith. Superbright, as the Lab's chief project, represents the alchemy that turns science into politics, and its failure extends symbolically through the book, contaminating the Lab's subsequent aims and Quine's ethics, and his romance with an anti-nuclear activist.
Tatarsky suddenly had the impression that Azadovsky's shadow on the screen wasn't real, but just an element of a video recording, a black silhouette like the ones you get in pirate copies of films shot from the cinema screen. For Tatarsky these black shadows on their way out of the cinema, known to the owners of underground video libraries as 'runners', served as a special kind of quality indicator: the influence of the displacing wow-factor drove more people out of a good film than a bad one, so he usually asked for 'films with runners' to be kept for him; but now he felt almost afraid at the thought that if a man who'd just been sitting beside you could turn out to be a runner, it could mean you were just another runner yourself. The feeling was complex, profound and new, but Tatarsky had no time to analyse it: humming a vague tango, Azadovsky wandered over to the edge of the screen and disappeared.
The next video began in a more traditional manner. A family -- father, mother, daughter with a pussy cat and granny with a half-knitted stocking -- were sitting round a fire in a hearth set in a strange mirror-surface wall. As they gazed into the flames blazing behind the grate, they made rapid, almost caricatured movements: the granny knitted, the mother gnawed on the edge of a piece of pizza, the daughter stroked the pussycat and the father sipped beer. The camera moved around them and passed through the mirror-wall. From the other side the wall was transparent: when the camera completed its movement, the family was overlaid by the flames in the hearth and the bars of the grate. An organ rumbled threateningly; the camera pulled back and the transparent wall was transformed into the flat screen of a television with stereo speakers at each side and the coy inscription 'Tofetissimo' on its black body. The image on the television showed flames in which four black figures were jerking in rapid movements behind metal bars. The organ fell silent and an insidious announcer's voice took over.
'Did you think there was a vacuum behind the absolutely flat Black Trinitron's screen? No! there's a flame blazing there that will warm your heart! The Sony Tofetissimo. It's a Sin.'
[...]
'What was that?' [Tatarsky] asked, when the lights came on. 'It wasn't much like an advertisement.'
Morkovin smiled smugly.
'It's not; that's the whole point,' he said. 'In scientific terms, it's a new advertising technology reflecting the reaction of market mechanisms to the increasing human revulsion at market mechanisms. To cut it short, the viewer is supposed gradually to develop the idea that somewhere in the world -- say, in sunny California -- there is a final oasis of freedom unconstrained by the thought of money, where they make advertisements like this one. It's profoundly anti-market in form, so it promises to be highly market-effective in content.'
Someday in the future, a book will be written chronicling the remarkably chuckheaded ways American officials figured they were "protecting us from terrorism" after 9/11. Here's one for the book:
SHUTTLE LAUNCH SECRECY CRITIQUED
To enhance the security of the space shuttle, NASA will not announce the precise time of future shuttle launches until 24 hours prior to launch, the space agency announced recently. Up until that time, NASA will only announce a four hour launch window for a particular launch.
Critics say the new policy makes no sense because the time of launch is determined by objective factors that are not themselves secret.
The new policy takes effect with the next shuttle launch, STS-110, which is scheduled for April 4 "during a launch period that extends from 2 to 6 PM."
[...]
"I trust everyone realizes that this is staggeringly stupid," said Allen Thomson, a former CIA analyst and space policy expert.
"The shuttle is mostly used to support the international space station [ISS], and in order to rendezvous with ISS, it has to launch when the Cape is in or near the orbital plane of the station," Thomson noted. "That can be determined days and weeks in advance to within a couple of minutes from the ISS orbital elements, which are freely available at any number of Web sites."
Likewise, satellite watcher Ted Molczan dismissed the NASA move as "pretend security." The launch of a shuttle mission to the space station is constrained "to a single ten minute window on any given day," he said. [link]
Agents say that by introducing their clients to the right people, referring them to lawyers to negotiate compensation packages, setting up speaking engagements, conducting independent salary reviews and hiring research assistants, they are giving executive careers an extra push. "There are stars and rising stars in the business world - much like in Hollywood and professional sports," said Bonnie Wan, chief executive of Juice Talent, another agency.
A modest proposal.
Look at the law in each of the fifty U.S. states.
All have a provision similar to that of Maine's section 716: "The directors and officers of a corporation shall exercise their powers and discharge their duties with a view to the interest of the corporation and of the shareholders."
These laws make it the legal duty of corporate directors and executives to maximize profits for shareholders.
Robert Hinkley would add a simple amendment: "... but not at the expense of the environment, human rights, the public safety, the communities in which the corporation operates, or the dignity of employees."
The provision would be enforced by those who suffer at the hands of corporation wrongdoing. And in the case of intentional wrongdoing, by criminal sanction. [link][last 2 items via Undernews]
The mix of self-pity and self-congratulation that marked the six-month anniversary of the World Trade Center catastrophe was both surrealistic and sick. In the midst of vows to move on to the ''second phase'' of the ''war on terrorism'' and the noisy celebrations of American patriotism (with talk of using nuclear weapons on the ''axis of evil'' sounding in the background), no one said what is self-evidently true: There has been only a marginal decline in the danger of more terrorism.
[...]
The one marginal improvement to safety is the locked cockpit door. It guarantees that no one with a box cutter can take control of a plane and use it as a bomb (as the FBI was warned someone was preparing to do). The Gore report wanted that reform. None of the tragedies of Sept. 11 would have occurred if the airline industry hadn't resisted it. We are at least safe from that particular brand of terrorism. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.
The president told us on the six-month anniversary celebration day that the war on terrorism was entering its second phase. He neglected to say that the first phase did not succeed. Osama bin Laden and most of his top staff are still free (probably hiding under the protection of Pakistanis). The Afghan war has been mostly a failure. Indeed, it eliminated a base for al-Qaida and probably set its plans back, but that too is only a marginal improvement in the safety of Americans.
Bush, who likes being a wartime president, is apparently concentrating his efforts on ''getting'' Saddam Hussein now that he's failed to ''get'' bin Laden. Never mind that Saddam had nothing to do with the World Trade Center destruction and does not seem to be engaged in terrorism at the present.
Paul W. Morris on the "Tribute in Light" memorial.
Originally called "Towers of Light," the title was changed to be more inclusive, to honor the dead as well as the World Trade Center. But one of the groups' names betrays a blatant insensitivity to the loss of life and reveals its true intent: PRISM: Project to Restore Immediately the Skyline of Manhattan.
[...]
Don't be fooled; nothing has been restored. What you see is what you get, a skyline without substance, a tribute that lacks soul. You can find better replicas of the towers from any vendor on the street.
[...]
The ultimate failure of "Tribute in Light" is not in the wasteful discharge of energy, however. Nor is it in the macabre reenactment of the towers' original demise. Rather, as with the regeneration of [Prometheus's] tortured liver, it's in the promise of their shameful resurrection, all for the sake of a ruined skyline. [link]
The Russian mafia has been growing in the US for years. Look for it be a big story soon.
There are now, he says, tens of thousands entering the US every year illegally, many crossing the Mexican border and going to LA. "They include ex-KGB officers, former special forces and government officers. They're very good at computer crime, electronic balance fraud, insurance fraud, pimping, narcotics, loan sharking, racketeering."
They preferred to avoid violent crime, if possible, Mr Colannino said, "but they'll kill you if they have to".
"Unlike the old Italian mob, who would send flowers to your wife after they'd killed you, they'll kill you, your wife, your children, your uncle, your cousins, your neighbours. They're bloody ruthless, they really are." [link]
One of the American Islamic organizations targeted in the recent FBI sweep "was set up to mobilise support for the Republican party," and "has helped to arrange meetings between senior Bush officials and Islamic leaders." [link]
Isn't that odd?
Well, our stamp prices may be going up, and the USPS has its problems. But in the UK they're going to cut 40,000 jobs just so the Postal Service doesn't collapse completely -- or so they claim. There's a plan to open the service up to competition in the next few years, I don't know how this plays into the politics of that, etc.
I wouldn't be surprised to see something similar (shifting it to the private sector) happen here -- the USPS wasn't doing so well before the anthrax scare, what with email and online billpaying and so on.
I had a feeling the "Al Qaeda biolab" story was fabricated, partially to sway the UK public to OK sending troops. Also, just the week before I saw a story that said there was no evidence of Al Qaeda bio- or chem-labs. Saw it in my periscope.org Defense News email, but I can't find it now.
The newspapers reported that the find was one of the main reasons the Government had decided to send the Marines to Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda and Taliban forces. The claim, carried by a number of newspapers yesterday, was denied emphatically last night by Pentagon and State Department sources.
A White House spokesman, drawn into the row, said 'no evidence' had yet been uncovered in Afghanistan that Al Qaeda had succeeded in producing anthrax or other biological or chemical agents.
A Pentagon official told The Observer there was no intelligence to support claims from London that al-Qaeda was developing biological weapons in the Shah-e-Kot area. 'I don't know what they're saying in London but we have received no specific intelligence on that kind of development or capability in the Shah-e-Kot valley region - I mean a chemical or biological weapons facility,' said an official in the Army department in Washington.
Sunday, March 24, 2002
Lizardboy is visiting El Salvador to celebrate his father's "setting the stage for peace" in the bloody civil war of the 80s. And yes those are monkeys flying out of his butt.
In election campaign ads, President Bush senior later boasted that he "faced down the death squads in El Salvador".
In reality he met with the high command of the army - whose policies were behind the killings.
The Salvadoreans were given a list of names of army officers the US wanted removed.
President Bush's aide, who personally handed over the list, was Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North - later discredited for selling weapons to Iran to pay for the CIA's secret wars in Central America.
[...]
It was, according to declassified US documents and other witnesses, carried out by Salvadorean police intelligence agents on the orders of Major Roberto D'Aubuisson.
He was at the time running the army's intelligence war and went on to found the right-wing Arena party which is in power in El Salvador today.
No-one was brought to justice and for the next decade, when President Bush's father was heavily involved in Salvador policy, the same police agents would be at the centre of US funded efforts to wipe out left-wing guerrillas.
To defeat the rebels, the US equipped and trained an army which kidnapped and disappeared more than 30,000 people, and carried out large-scale massacres of thousands of old people women and children.
[...]
The war ended largely because Perestroika in the Soviet block forced the guerrillas to change their aims and opt for a dThe war ended largely because Perestroika in the Soviet block forced the guerrillas to change their aims and opt for a democratic platform. [link]
Just the kind of unmitigated gall and Orwellian doublespeak we've come to expect form DynastyBush.
Watch Oliver Stone's Salvador, for a taste of that little piece of hell, and the complicity of the US in the massacres. One of James Woods' best performances too.
Consider, for instance, the fact that our nongun homicide rates exceed total homicide rates in many nations. In 1998, the murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rate in the United States was 6.3 per 100,000 people, and firearms were used in about two-thirds of these killings. Even if we had somehow gotten rid not only of handguns but of all guns, and even if, improbably, none of the killers who used guns would have substituted some other weapon, we still would have been left with 2.1 murders for every 100,000 people - about four times the average annual homicide rate in Japan (0.5 per 100,000) and higher than the homicide rates in Great Britain (1.2) or Sweden (1.4). Obviously, access to guns isn't the only factor.
Consider, too, countries where guns are common and crime is rare. Switzerland boasts a heavily armed population and a thriving gun culture (shooting contests for children are a popular tradition). Yet its homicide rates are comparable to Great Britain's. Israel, where most adults are either on active military duty or in the reserves and almost every home has a weapon, also has a low murder rate, on a par with most of Western Europe.
What's more, more than half of gun deaths in this country (about 55 percent) are not homicides, but suicides. Am I saying that we needn't be concerned if people merely shoot themselves rather than shoot others? No. But in this case, blaming the guns for the deaths is especially dubious. [link via Undernews, like the last one.]
We jes' like killin'. Don't need no gun!
From an excellent Liam Lacey article on the CTV site:
The theme of this year's Oscars will be "old-time Hollywood glamour" according to producer Laura Ziskin. But in retrospect, a lot of that past "glamour" was a jewel-encrusted lid on a snake-bucket of low intentions.
Back in 1926, when Louis B. Mayer conceived of the Oscars -- to ward off the attacks of morality groups and stall the unionization movement of the industry by creating the academy as a kind of company union -- the awards were an afterthought. In the mid-1930s, as breakaway actor, writer and director unions formed, the academy was rightfully regarded as the enemy -- a stooge organization for producers' interests.
Manipulation was constant. There's no doubt awards were determined by block studio voting and horse-trading for prizes. In the Second World War, the timidity and clannishness of the academy also led to one of the most destructive decisions the academy ever made: the failure to give the 25-year-old East Coast theatre wunderkind, Orson Welles, credit for his masterpiece, Citizen Kane, derailing the career of one of the real geniuses of American filmmaking. [link]
So what do you expect?
The SSSCA has become the CBDTPA (Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act), and Senator Fritz (Hollings, D-SC) has officially introduced it.
"Future MP3 players, PCs and handheld computers will no longer let you make all the copies you want."
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