Looks like its time to upgrade WinMX...which doesn't have the depth AG has had in offbeat material.

*sigh*

It didn't take long for our stomachs to turn....the first speaker (I believe the OSU President) began spouting about how proud they were to have Bush there. He said "We have a long tradition of inviting great men and women to speak at our commencements." I quickly responded "but since we couldn't get one, here's Georgie".

That got the attention of the state trooper in front of us. His eyes were on me the rest of the time.

The speech continued to mention that Chimpy was "a tireless worker in the field of education" and "a man who unified this country after the terrible events of 9/11". It was interesting to note that it took a LONG time for the 9/11 applause to turn into a standing ovation....they held out for that one, not continuing the speech intentionally.

About 10 minutes later, Shrub was introduced to speak. Before he even got to the stage, we did our about-face. I looked over my shoulder to see how many graduates were doing the same. However, everybody was standing at that point, and in pure black robes, it was impossible to see who was facing what direction. Furthermore, over that same shoulder, I saw one of Columbus' Finest heading our way.

We never got to see how many students participated. We were being led out of Ohio Stadium. To the officers' credit, he realized there was a 3-year-old in my arms and was not at all hostile. I asked him if I was under arrest, and he did not answer me. When we reached the exit, I asked the SS man why we had been ejected, and he told me we were being charged with disturbing the peace. If we chose to leave, the charges would be dropped immediately.

Did you feel hurt or hindered in any way? How?
No. I feel energized by this. The pain I feel is for my fellow Ohio State protestors who may have been frightened into facing forward and applauding at things they didn't want to applaud. What happened to me is insignificant. I expected to face resistance, which was why I chose to do it silently. I just never expected the resistance to come so quickly. What IS significant is that adults who spent thousands and thousands of dollars on their education were told they wouldn't be recognized for 4 years of hard work if they didn't surrender their right to peaceful protest.

If you could do it all over again, would you do anything differently?
Yes. I would have left my three-year-old daughter with a babysitter and spent Friday in a Columbus jail cell for what I believe is right. [U]

A new wave of coup threats against President Hugo Chávez is pushing Venezuelans to the edge of hysteria, with many residents of the capital stockpiling food and condo associations preparing an inventory of guns in case of looting.

Clandestine communiqués and videos from alleged military officers vowing to topple the leftist president emerge almost daily. As each rumor peaks and wanes, the country's battered currency fluctuates wildly against the U.S. dollar.

The threats and an accompanying gusher of dire rumors have sparked an unprecedented crisis in this oil-rich nation, virtually paralyzing the country and awakening fears of bloodshed, even civil war. [link via Unknown News]

A relatively new phenomenon that sprung up on both coasts in recent years, Gay Shame is an outgrowth of a younger generation's disgust with over- commercialized pride celebrations that are more about corporate sponsorships, celebrity grand marshals, and consumerism than they are about the radicalism that gave birth to our post-Stonewall gay-liberation movement, and radicalism such as that displayed by the Cockettes.

Every movement undergoes changes in three decades, but pride, especially in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, transformed a street protest into a multi-million dollar extravaganza that has no political through line. How could it, when gay cops march next to Lesbian and Gay Insurgents and gay atheists follow Dignity, the gay Catholic group? Except for the open displays of sex and flesh, pride in a city such as San Francisco is not much different from any other parade. Thousands stand along the sidelines and cheer every corporate contingent that passes despite the fact that many of them, while good on gay rights, have policies and practices that oppress other groups (e.g., running sweatshops in Asia). For progressives, participating in the march requires a kind of political amnesia: ignore the bad politics ahead of you and keep your banners high.

The EPA is now accused of not declaring a health alert and not warning people doing the clean-up of the dangers. "Just like others, the EPA did not want to believe there was any problem and thought the problem might just go away if it was ignored," says Joel Kupferman, an environmental lawyer in New York. Kupferman believes that the directions came from Washington, reflecting the political wish to downplay the effect of the attack.

"There were people working for federal government and the city who wanted to wear masks at work in Manhattan, but they were told not to do it because it would scare others. There was an unwillingness to admit that anything could interfere with the American way of life. And the real estate and insurance business has huge interests in downplaying the health effects," he says.

[...]

The pollution was far worse than in the Gulf war, according to University of California atmosphere researcher Thomas Cahill, who led a team investigating the pollution for the department of energy. "The particles were really weird. They came in great big spikes when the wind blew, then they'd die down, then spike up again. The particles that aren't soluble, like silicon from burning glass, are the ones that can lodge in your lungs, irritate them badly and stay there," he said. "The ruins of the twin towers became a screamingly hot chemical reactor," Cahill told the San Francisco Chronicle. "For weeks, even as the flames eased and the core of the towers cooled below 1,200 degrees, the steel was still glowing red at 800C and clouds of particles were still rising.

"Those particles simply shouldn't have been there, because it rained heavily for six days in September and the coarse particles should have settled down. But they were probably still being generated from the heat in the pile of debris," he said. [link]

Cale played the viola though. I listed a playlist by that name (Theatre of Cruelty) a while back, which I listened to on a particularly depressed evening.

I'll have to post this in the template, but it's best to click on the google "cached pages" link when searching points you to this blog, since the archives aren't hooked up like they should be, beyond the first few weeks. That way the search words are highlighted and the appropriate page shows up, archives or not. In case you didn't know. Here's the cached page result.

Liberals don't worry about the dropping memberships and dramatic aging of groups like Common Cause and Americans for Democratic Action or the irrelevance of archaic liberal journals like the Nation (kept alive in part by charter cruises aimed at those who remember meeting Eleanor Roosevelt). Nor do they concern themselves with the declining viewership of public broadcasting or the chronic ineffectualness of the congressional black and progressive caucuses.

Who needs those concerns when there is yet another target - the Greens - to join all those other Americans that liberal leaders can't stand (and then wonder why they won't vote for them) such as gun-owners, church-goers, southerners, people who still believe in local government and so forth.

Residents voluntarily doing their part to save water because of the drought are being warned by homeowner associations that brown lawns violate neighborhood rules.

Associations in at least two subdivisions in Highlands Ranch and Westminster are enforcing their regulations, which seek to maintain a neighborhood's neat appearance.

Marilyn Geerdes, who lives in the Arrowhead Filing subdivision of Westminster, sent a letter to management company Management Specialists after receiving a note that said her thirsty lawn "creates an unsightly condition.''

"I would say the entire state of Colorado is 'lacking in water.' Perhaps you haven't heard, we are experiencing a drought,'' she said. "As a consequence of dry conditions, farmers may have to sell their land and cattle, but we will have our lush, green lawns, by golly.''

[...]

Neither Westminster, nor Douglas County, which governs Highlands Ranch, have imposed water restrictions.

Karen Becker, a community manager for Management Associates, said the drought doesn't let homeowners off the hook.

"A certain amount of stressed lawn is going to be acceptable due to the conditions,'' she said. But, "to use water properly doesn't mean you'll have a dead lawn.''

Yet, while it trawled the empty waters, the bureau failed to cast its hook into the only ponds in which the perpetrator could have been lurking. In February, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the FBI had yet to subpoena the personnel records of the labs which had been working with the Ames strain. Four months after the investigation began, in other words, it had not bothered to find out who had been working in the places from which the anthrax must have come. It was not until March, after Barbara Rosenberg had released her findings, that the bureau started asking laboratories for samples of their anthrax and the records relating to them.

To date, it appears to have analysed only those specimens which already happened to be in the hands of its researchers or which had been offered, without compulsion, by laboratories. A fortnight ago, the New York Times reported that "government experts investigating the anthrax strikes are still at sea". The FBI claimed that the problem "is a lack of advisers skilled in the subtleties of germ weapons."

Last week, I phoned the FBI. Why, I asked, when the evidence was so abundant, did the trail appear to have gone cold? "The investigation is continuing", the spokesman replied. "Has it gone cold because it has led you to a government office?" I asked. He put down the phone. [George Monbiot]

Emphasising that he is arguing from a strategic standpoint, Arquilla suggests that there are three possible ways out: first, total US victory, which would be "highly problematic particularly in the light of events in Afghanistan", as Bin Laden escaped and al-Qaida is regrouping elsewhere; second, victory by al-Qaida if its members succeed in obtaining weapons of mass destruction; and, third, a world in which there might be a dozen al-Qaida type networks, linked in some cases to nation states.

As a way out of this dead-end situation Arquilla proposes to focus more attention on "non-military strategies towards non-state actors [and] explicitly engage civil society actors to try to be the interlocutors of a peace. ... It seems to me that the NGO's are in a unique position to respect both sides and act as a clearing house for communication between them."

This is the least convincing (though the most attractive) part of their strategy. It is based on a complete theory presented by Arquilla and Ronfeldt in one of their books (5). They propose the theory of "noopolitik" inspired by Teilhard de Chardin and his "noosphere", or sphere of consciousness. This has nothing to do with the cyberworld, computers and cables, explains Ronfeldt. He adds: "Noopolitik is foreign policy behaviour for the information age that emphasises the primacy of ideas, values, norms, laws and ethics - it would work through soft power". With others, such as Joseph Nye, Arquilla and Ronfeldt define soft power as "the ability to achieve desired outcomes in international affairs through attraction rather than coercion."

But this must be consistent with other actions, Ronfeldt points out. "The more we use military force in an indiscriminate way, the harder it makes it to create a cooperative network to fight against the non-state actors. That, I think, is the great strategic challenge of this war against terrorism."

[...]

...the military do not have the only answer to combating networks that feed on world poverty. Ronfeldt believes we should attack the root of the problem and also intervene with massive economic aid. "I think that terrorism can be diminished through economic solutions that address poverty and other forms of deprivation." He believes the current Islamist movement does not have a great deal to do with poverty. Bin Laden and his friends are driven by a feeling of "utter disaster. And this disaster is not simply economic and social. It's also political, military, strategic. They see their own world as being trampled upon, not only by external forces like the US, but also by parts of their own society." Although Ronfeldt is confident that US foreign policy can confront poverty and deprivation, he is not sure "it can alleviate, at least not easily, this sense of utter disaster." [via Undernews]

The interview is worth reading for Belafonte's take on The New Oppression.

Each time we arrive at a new level in extricating ourselves from economic, social, spiritual domination, we have a moment when we dance in the world of these new experiences, only to find that the music soon stops, the dance ends, and we’re struggling once again to save ourselves from being thrown back into those conditions.

I don’t know what America has really learned. We are too quick to do what’s expedient on behalf of our culture of greed and hedonism. We’re quite prepared to go to conditions of tyranny in order to sustain that culture, and we do it in the name of democracy, when nothing could be more undemocratic. We do it in the name of saving the values of our society, when the way we behave corrupts those values. We do it in the name of God in whom we believe, when in fact we have corrupted our own vision of the Christian journey.

[...]

Of course when you get into that work, you’ll forever come up against those who find you unacceptable and will do whatever they can to get you out of the way. McCarthyism was an attempt to do that. And I think we’re headed that way now, with the very divisive and cynical way in which leaders of our present government are manipulating the democratic process and the constitutional system to deny us our basic rights, and to extract more control and power for those already in power and who are already corrupted by that power.

Sarah van Gelder: Having survived McCarthyism, do you have any advice on how to survive this period of political repression we seem to be entering and to keep the movements for positive change alive?

Harry: Do not submit. It is extremely critical that repression be met full head- on and that it be resisted with every fiber in our being. There is just absolutely no compromise that can be made with it. As a matter of fact, compromise is what oppression feeds on.

Without compromise it would be defeated. Just as some cancers feed on hormones, compromise becomes the hormone of oppression.

The war on terrorism in Europe is being undermined by a military communications system that makes it easier for terrorists to tune in to live video of U.S. intelligence operations than to watch Disney cartoons or new-release movies.

For more than six months, live pictures from U.S. aerial spy missions have been broadcast in real time to viewers throughout Europe and the Balkans. The broadcasts are not encrypted, meaning that anyone in the region with a normal satellite TV receiver can spy on U.S. surveillance operations as they happen.

NATO, whose forces in former Yugoslavia depend on the U.S. missions for intelligence, first expressed disbelief. After inquiring, a NATO spokesman confirmed that "we're aware that this imagery is put on a communications satellite ? The distribution of this material is handled by the United States and we're content that they're following appropriate levels of security"

The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment.

THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW is pleased to announce its anti-terrorism program: cheap, safe, constitutional and effective. Since terrorism is just part of the operating costs of running an empire, you can free yourself of it by getting rid of your empire. DC can help by opting out of the empire, no big deal given that DC isn't even allowed in the union. Specifically, we propose that DC invite Jenin, Palestine to become a sister city much as this city and others had sister city relations with Nicaraguan towns during America's war against that country. Jenin is the ideal choice since it, like DC, is denied self-government and is an occupied colony of a nation prone to gratuitous violence. This relationship could include visits by Mayor Williams and City Council Chair Linda Cropp, on scene reports from WTOP's Mark Plotkin, soccer matches, and joint conferences on how to survive without democracy, decent housing or adequate health care. The relationship, among its other virtues, might also speed the prospects of peace in the Middle East and reduce the prominence of Washington as a target of pro-Muslim guerillas. [link]

If the worst-case scenario comes about -- the brain drain, the collapse of a vulnerable, financialized economy -- what happens? Who does it hurt most here?

It's hard to say. If you have a financial implosion from this, it'll hurt people who have money, they'll lose value in the stock market, big time. If you lose industry, slowly but surely it'll hurt more average people. You can have scenarios for everyone being hurt.

It's always hard to discuss all of this in the future tense, because it hasn't happened yet. The whole sense of invulnerability and triumphalism is there. The politicians say "It can't happen thus."

The British had all these discussions, and one of the conservative party leaders actually made a speech that I have in the book about how "you say the financial sector will be able to carry the load. But if the real economy isn't there, the banking and finance is going to wither." He was absolutely right. You can't shift and say it's all going to be finance, we're going to make all this money speculating and providing services, because we've got the global financial network.

It always sounds a little silly to be talking about this because people in this position, even if they don't think they're historically invulnerable, they sort of think history doesn't matter anymore.

[...]

One of the charts in the book shows the increase in the 10 highest compensated executives, in 1981, 1988 and 2000. In 1981, they had an average of 3.45 million dollars. By 1988 they had an average of 22 million dollars. By 2001 the top 10 highest compensated executives had an average of 155 million dollars. That was a 45-fold increase.

Now that's pretty amazing. If the average American knew that, he'd have a lot more understanding of why these people went berserk. They were just trying to do everything to get money. But you're not going to see that sort of stuff on the front pages of a major publication. [link]

The latest blow to investor confidence is the revelation that conflicts-of- interest among supposedly impartial stock market analysts are even more widespread than first believed. Last week brought word that, over the last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission has opened 10 separate inquiries into analyst wrongdoing, five of which have been upgraded to formal investigations. In addition, the in-house securities watchdogs, the New York Stock Exchange and the National Association of Securities Dealers, have launched 37 investigations into analyst misconduct.

[...]

The only thing that will end the abuses of the current system is a new wave of public outrage fueled by a constant stream of disclosures detailing the sordid goings on in corporate America.

But the awful truth isn't coming out on its own. For instance, we never would have known about the latest SEC investigations had it not been for the efforts of Rep. Ed Markey, a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who prodded Harvey Pitt to provide a report on what the Commission was doing about conflicts of interest among stock analysts.

The distinguished New England Journal of Medicine is relaxing its strict conflict-of-interest rules for authors of certain articles because it cannot find enough experts without financial ties to drug companies. [link]

The change comes at a time when the credibility of medical journals is under fire. Just last week, the Journal of the American Medical Association published research criticizing itself and its rivals for running studies that are misleading or riddled with conflicts of interest.

In 2000, the New England Journal of Medicine acknowledged that it had violated its conflict-of-interest policy 19 times over the previous three years when choosing doctors to review new drug treatments. But Drazen said that in the two years he has been editor, he has been able to commission and publish only one review article about a new drug.

"The New England Journal of Medicine sort of joined the rest of us" by adding the word "significant," said Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"It's the most old-fashioned ceremony you can imagine, but it just gets better and better," said Martha Dunphy, 56, of Hartsdale, N.Y., who's seen it hundreds of times. "Since 9/11, all this seems so much more important."

It has always seemed important to Marvin Hume, 81, who owns the Sunset Beach Gift Shop and runs the ceremony.

Hume, who served in the U.S. Navy in World War II, bought the store in 1973. His predecessor had a tradition of playing "God Bless America" at sunset and asked Hume to keep it up.

He did that and more.

Through the years, Hume added the two other songs and introduced the flag to the ceremony. He put an advertisement for veterans' casket flags in a local weekly so he can run a different flag up the 30-foot pole every night.

The sunsets, which illuminate the sky over the Delaware Bay in a dazzling display of color, also are part of the attraction. They're unusual for a New Jersey beach, since most of the state's beaches face east.

The tradition is so beloved among Cape May vacationers, locals and veterans that people sign their children up to help in the lowering of the flag a year in advance.

The ceremony, held every night from May through October, sometimes attracts hundreds of sunburned beachgoers, patriotic locals and World War II veterans to this beach near New Jersey's southern tip. A particularly large crowd was likely this Friday, on Flag Day.

"We're still seeing which way we want to go with it," James Todak, the assistant special agent in charge at the Secret Service's Los Angeles High Tech Crimes Task Force, said of the CardCops leads. Todak declined to say whether he would like CardCops to conduct additional stings. But Robert Pocica, an agent in the new cyber division of the FBI in Washington, commended private online stings.

Pocica expressed concern that private citizens "might put themselves in harm's way or violate the law," but said he had more confidence in "associations and companies that maybe have more tools, resources and training to conduct this type of activity."

David Nesom, who directs the national emergency response service team for another private online anti-fraud firm, Internet Security Systems in Atlanta, said the field was ripe for companies like his because "law enforcement won't take it or they don't have the time to follow up on it."

"It's not a knock against them," Nesom said. "They're just overburdened. When the FBI looks at a caseload, they'll take the most expensive, high-profile cases they can get, and ignore the ankle-biters."