High on the list is the anthrax vaccine "scandal waiting to happen." Maybe someone is about to reveal that the company with the exclusive rights to manufacture the vaccine, BioPort , is owned by a cartel consisting of the Carlyle Group, a prominent Saudi, members of the Bin Laden family, and Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr., former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Reagan.

That could explain why the company's grounds are so well guarded -- and why all company employees are instructed not to tell anyone, from reporters to family members, anything about the company's ownership. If they did, the trail might lead to some very nasty questions ... like why was a plant that failed FDA inspections three times in the past four years was suddenly reviewed by Donald Rumsfeld just a few weeks before the first anthrax letter was sent? And why has the same troubled plant, as of Jan. 31, was miraculously passed by FDA and named the sole provider of anthrax vaccine? Or why is a vaccine that has killed and disabled dozens of soldiers being forced on said soldiers under threat of court martial? And, perhaps most interesting of all right now ... WHY hasn't the mainstream media (beyond BioPort's home town, anyway), mentioned that among the things found in terrorist hideouts was a goodly supply of info on anthrax from BioPort?

But if I had a son or daughter fighting in Afghanistan or wherever's next, I'd sure be doing some research.

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Pretty funny (I hope) screed on "The Emergence of the Fascist American Theocratic State:"

Pentagon spokesman began looking beyond 911. They branded "activists, anarchists, and opportunists" as the terrorists of tomorrow. In fact, the FBI began scanning the Internet for web sites that contained what The State considered seditious and unpatriotic content and, in a few cases, began shutting them down in a sort of cyberspace version of Nazi book burning. With the apprehension of John Walker Lindh in northern Afghanistan, Americans were inundated with the misdeeds of the "American Taliban," the Traitor. Not since the witch hunting days of Joe McCarthy and the execution of the Rosenbergs had the country been swept up in a tempest of quick accusations of traitorous activities. Off the Orwellian telescreens run by the three cable news networks was any mention of the close contacts between American oil companies, like UNOCAL, and the Taliban, and the fact that the firm, unlike Lindh, made cash payments to the regime in return for the much-sought-after trans-Afghan oil and natural gas pipeline. This was done with the active encouragement of key members of both the Clinton and Bush II administrations. U.S. laws prohibiting such influence peddling, like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, were overlooked. This hypocrisy and the overarching influence of oil over The State's foreign policy is described in a new book by ex-CIA agent Robert Baer, a veteran covert operator in the Islamic world. He states that he found "that the tentacles of big oil stretch from the Caspian Sea to the White House." [link via Grabbe]

Imagine being able to learn without dialing a single digit whether another person's phone is in use, or in the case of a cell phone, whether it is even turned on. Now imagine being able to do the same thing with any wired or wireless device of the future - whether it is in the car, in an airplane or at the gym. Not only could you learn whether a person is available for a chat, but you could also deduce what that person might be doing at that exact moment, all without exchanging a word.

That is the idea behind a programming concept called presence awareness, which is based on the realization that appliances on a network can automatically be detected by other devices.

[...]

The prospect of information that can reveal a person's availability at a given moment, anywhere in the world strikes many people as both creepy and intriguing.

[...]

"When you have these technologies you really expose yourself and your day to a lot of people," said Bonnie Nardi, an anthropologist at Agilent Technologies Inc., a California company that makes high-tech monitoring devices.

After spending a few years studying instant messaging, Nardi said she became aware of the subtle impact of presence technology on people's lives. It is time, she said, to think about "what we want people to know about what we are doing at a given moment."

Edmond O'Brien won an Oscar for SDIM, by the way, and he's great along with Lancaster & Douglas and the rest...

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The Bush-Lay connection laid out by Consortium News.

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This is f*****g ridiculous.

An airline passenger who allegedly left his seat to go the bathroom less than 30 minutes before landing became the first person arrested under a new federal flight regulation adopted for the Olympics.

Richard Bizarro, 59, could get up to 20 years in prison on charges of interfering with a flight crew. [link]

For the past few years, the camera industry has been racing to achieve higher pixels, which translates to sharper pictures. The highest-pixel point-and-shoot cameras are now at 5 megapixels.

But until now, image sensors inside the cameras can only partially capture the three primary colors - red, green and blue. Except for high-end professional cameras which use multiple chips to carry out the task of achieving true-color capture, most digital cameras resort to using software to help it extrapolate the colors for the picture.

Foveon claims its X3 technology attains higher quality for each pixel itself by capturing the three primary colors completely and all at once. It does so by stacking three photodetectors in the silicon at each pixel.

Nice move, shrub.

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Etgar Keret on Israel.

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Stop Otto Reich. Though there are no hints how exactly.

Bush remained firmly behind Reich, despite scores of press editorials and news stories opposing Reich for his divisive and hard-line policies, particularly on Cuba. Reich, a Cuban American has been deeply involved with the Miami Cuban community and is certain to call for a tightening of the US embargo. This will put the U.S. more out of step with the rest of the hemisphere which has been establishing closer trade and political ties with Cuba.

Reich first gained notoriety in the 1980s as director of President Reagan's Office of Public Diplomacy which was involved in "black propaganda" operations aimed at supporting the covert war against the leftist government in Nicaragua. Reich's office was officially closed in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal.

The bill, HR 2977, specifically outlaws a variety of weapons detailed in the December 6, 2001, Columbus Alive article “Stormy Weather,” which exposed allegations of secret government aerial spraying activities. Kucinich’s bill explicitly outlaws “chemtrails.”

Alive asked Kucinich why he would introduce a bill banning so-called chemtrails when the U.S. government routinely denies such things exist and the U.S. Air Force has routinely called chemtrail sightings “a hoax.”

“The truth is there’s an entire program in the Department of Defense, ‘Vision for 2020,’ that’s developing these weapons,” Kucinich responded. Kucinich says he plans to reintroduce a broader version of the bill later this month. “Plasma, electromagnetics, sonic or ultrasonic weapons [and] laser weapons systems” were among those banned by HR 2977.

Two scientists working at Wright Patterson Air Force Base informed Alive of the ongoing secret experiments, one involving weather modification and the other involving the creation of an aerial antenna using a barium stearate chemical trail. The scientists referred to the work of legendary inventor Nikola Tesla. Before Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (or “Star Wars”), there was Tesla’s vision of high-tech space-based warfare and weather modification.

That would've been an interesting screen test.

(Click on "Interviews" in left column, then scroll down to "Interviews & Articles related to David Lynch", then find the excerpt from Hopper's bio. If you're interested.)

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Good week for Conservative Idiots -- but you knew that.

Just when you thought Ari Fleischer couldn't talk any more crap, he comes up with a humdinger so immense that you could orbit satellites around it. In the most extravagant and nonsense-filled defense yet of Dick Cheney's refusal to hand over energy documents, Fleischer tried this one on for size: "the very document that protects our liberties more than anything else, the Constitution, was of course drafted in total secrecy.'' Yes folks, Ari is comparing the White House energy policy to the Constitution. Well, I mean, you can see the similarites, can't you? One guarantees freedom, the other guarantees large profits for Dubya's corrupt buddies. Interestingly though, delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were, in fact, publicly identifed. So if you follow Ari's "the more secret, the better" train of thought to its logical conclusion, you realize that while the Constitution is really great and all, the energy policy must be EVEN BETTER! What on earth could they have been discussing in those meetings? Cold fusion? A plan to teleport the human race to some kind of Star Trek-style paradise planet? I'm sorry, but they can't tell you, because, you see, that would spoil the whole thing. Schroedinger's Cat would be rolling in its grave, um, if you could tell whether it was dead or not.

The Virtual Acquisition Shelf and News Desk
formica
Schism Matrix (Bruce Sterling)
Acetylene
J. Orlin Grabbe
This Modern World (Tom's blog)
a dam site

All listed in left column now.

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Friday, February 08, 2002


Newsy (apparently) Canadian site I've added to my column: moon farmer.

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"Isn't this a great country?": Price-gouging is an Olympic tradition.

While Salt Lake organizers have discouraged price gouging, Salt Lake City chamber of commerce president Larry Mankin makes no apology for the dramatic price hikes.

"Free enterprise is a wonderful thing," said Mankin. "You can charge what the market will pay. Isn't this a great country?"

[...]

Last year, the Utah Legislature passed a resolution urging landlords not to gouge or evict tenants during the Olympics. But nothing was resolved when it came to drinking, dining and parking.

Mankin said high prices are a fact of Olympic life. He recalled Australians being outraged when shops charged $3 for their favorite meat pie during the 2000 Summer Games. But everyone knows Olympic prices are temporary, he said.

"As long as our merchants don't totally gouge the world's visitors -- if they can make a few extra dollars, so be it," he said. [link via Blather]

Given the failure modes, how well do IDs solve the problem? Not very well. They're prone to errors and misuse, and are likely to be blindly trusted even when wrong.

What are the costs associated with IDs? Cards with a chip and some anti-counterfeiting features are likely to cost at least a dollar each, creating and maintaining the database will cost a few times that, and registration will cost many times that -- multiplied by 286 million Americans. Add database terminals at every police station -- presumably we're going to want them in police cars, too -- and the financial costs easily balloon to many billions. As expensive as the financial costs are, the social costs are worse. Forcing Americans to carry something that could be used as an "internal passport" is an enormous blow to our rights of freedom and privacy, and something that I am very leery of but not really qualified to comment on. Great Britain discontinued its wartime ID cards -- eight years after World War II ended -- precisely because they gave unfettered opportunities for police "to stop or interrogate for any cause."

I am not saying that national IDs are completely ineffective, or that they are useless. That's not the question. But given the effectiveness and the costs, are IDs worth it? Hell, no. [link]

For most of the week, Slovenia 3 television isn't very exciting. More or less a public-information channel, Slovenia 3 intersperses static ad pages with grainy live feeds from cameras placed around the old city of Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital. During a one-hour period, a viewer can expect to see a few spots for English-language courses, Internet consulting firms, chic new restaurants ? typical enterprises in post-Iron Curtain central Europe ? and long pans of the city's many picturesque squares, parks and churches.

But between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights, Slovenia 3 sheds its pedestrian daytime visage and becomes the go-to place for the country's sexually frustrated. For those three-hour periods, the station broadcasts nothing but hardcore pornography.

[...]

While Slovenia 3 never provides background, or even the most basic context, for its porn ? titles, actors ? it's clearly amateur, with the emphasis on the act rather than the actors. In fact, most of the people seen on Slovenia 3 wouldn't make it in the Valley, much less into a late-night Cinemax sexcom a la "The Red Show Diaries." Love handles and droopy appendages abound, and for some reason the more bizarre the act, the more unattractive the actors.

When the act reaches its climax, the clip is immediately replaced by another, and so on, with no real logic behind their order. Then, at 4 a.m. sharp, the porn ends and the tranquil shots of early-morning Ljubljana begin again. It's abrupt enough to make the whole experience seem a bad dream. [link]

Scientists are accepting large sums of money from drug companies to put their names to articles endorsing new medicines that they have not written - a growing practice that some fear is putting scientific integrity in jeopardy.

Ghostwriting has become widespread in such areas of medicine as cardiology and psychiatry, where drugs play a major role in treatment. Senior doctors, inevitably very busy, have become willing to "author" papers written for them by ghostwriters paid by drug companies.

Originally, ghostwriting was confined to medical journal supplements sponsored by the industry, but it can now be found in all the major journals in relevant fields. In some cases, it is alleged, the scientists named as authors will not have seen the raw data they are writing about - just tables compiled by company employees.

[...]

"I can think of a well-known British psychiatrist I met and I said, 'How are you?' He said, 'What day is it? I'm just working out what drug I'm supporting today.'"

[...]

[Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine,] wrote: "Researchers serve as consultants to companies whose products they are studying, join advisory boards and speakers' bureaus, enter into patent and royalty arrangements, agree to be the listed authors of articles ghostwritten by interested companies, promote drugs and devices at company-sponsored symposiums, and allow themselves to be plied with expensive gifts and trips to luxurious settings. Many also have equity interest in the companies." [via Unknown News]

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Invented by Bill Hendershot, an engineer from San Jose, Calif., the Time Machine enables television stations to compress their programs to fit in more commercials.

It works by going through these programs frame-by-frame, and when two identical frames appear side-by-side, one is removed. Usually, this can be done enough in a 22-minute program (the actual length of most sitcoms without commercials), to add 30 seconds of time.

[...]

If stations can use the Time Machine to compress the programs, they could shorten the commercials, too, said Kathy Crawford, executive vice president of the ad firm Initiative Media. Advertisers that pay for a 30-second commercial better be getting 30 seconds, not 29, she said. Hendershot said stations don't use the machine to cut commercials.

Advertisers are also concerned that the Time Machine adds to the clutter on television. They're already worried about additional commercial time added over the past decade by networks; the more commercials there are, the lesser the chance that one will stand out.

"It may mean that there is going to be less use of television and more use of other media" by advertisers, Crawford said. "What television has done to itself suggests it is losing value." [link]

ELIZABETH WHO?

As you may know, this is the Golden Jubilee year of Queen Elizabeth II's reign. Obviously, Britons are aware of that. Alas, as results of a new survey show, they don't seem especially excited about it. Six in 10 respondents to the poll by Market Opinion & Research International said they expect to regard her four-day ceremonial weekend in June as just another holiday. In the young-est cohort, 16 to 24, only 18 percent even cared about the lives of the royals, compared with 66 percent interested in the lives of "The Simpsons." Yes, the TV cartoon family.

I tried to find the link to the original page, but their link to the "etc." section is wrong. This is from their email newsletter for Feb 4.

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Shady promoters conned African-Americans into thinking they can get slavery reparations through the IRS.

The Internal Revenue Service received about 80,000 returns last year claiming $2.7 billion in reparations refunds, up from 13,000 the year before. The majority of the claims come from taxpayers in the South, but they have occurred in all parts of the country.

Here's the lure: Promoters, often using terms such as "black investment taxes," "reparations for African-Americans," or "black inheritance tax refund," charge an up-front fee, sometimes a percentage of the promised refund, and provide a fake tax form for claims that often seek between $40,000 and $80,000 from the government. They warn clients not to contact the IRS, saying the government doesn't want the general public to know. By the time the taxpayers discover their refund claims are rejected, the promoters have disappeared, along with their money.

This is a few weeks old but if you haven't heard, the Egyptian Elvis is shaking up the local cultural elites.

The overweight singer, who favors a wet-perm look and sequined suits, has sold millions of records and is so popular that TV hosts are queuing up to get him on their chat sofa. Mr. Shaaban has also released hit record after hit record, building up such a following that some of Egypt's leading political figures now feel compelled to act against the singer's swelling support.

A recent parliamentary debate saw the bemusing spectacle of the nation's elected leaders spending precious time discussing Shaaban's ruinous influence on Egyptian society. Abdel Salem Abdel Ghaffar, head of the parliamentary media committee said: "Shaaban does not represent any artistic or cultural value. In addition, his weird attire, which is far from good taste, affects our youth, who are influenced by what they see on television."

A particular smell the insects have been conditioned to associate with food prompts them to move their heads in a feeding motion, a sign which could be used to alert police searching for explosives or drugs at ports and airports.

But even in frontline policing, a wasp is never likely to become man's best friend.

"The downside is that they live for just a couple of months and dogs have a personality. Wasps don't have that."

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Shrub seeks to restrict investigation of why 9/11 happened to secret Intelligence Committees. [via new world disorder]

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He was especially concerned about the development of new biological weapons that could easily fall into the hands of dissonant groups or individuals and cause widespread devastation. [emphasis added]

Just a thought.

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