the FBI might be "dragging its feet" in pressing charges because the suspect is a former government scientist familiar with "secret activities that the government would not like to see disclosed [...]"

"We know that the FBI is looking at this person, and it's likely that he participated in the past in secret activities that the government would not like to see disclosed," Rosenberg said. "And this raises the question of whether the FBI may be dragging its feet somewhat and may not be so anxious to bring to public light the person who did this.

"I know that there are insiders, working for the government, who know this person and who are worried that it could happen that some kind of quiet deal is made that he just disappears from view," Rosenberg said.link]

Maybe. Or maybe the FBI is flat-out lying.

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Q. How worried are you about the erosion of civil liberties in the wake of 9-11?

A. Very. If you ask Ashcroft, "Are you going to erode our civil liberties?" he'll say of course not. But their behavior is to the contrary. I have asked what civil liberty didn't we give up before Sept. 11 that would have caught the hijackers. I haven't gotten an answer to that question. [link]

The new Office of Strategic Influence is headed by Air Force Brig. General Simon P. Worden, a personable and in many respects admirable figure who has a record of pursuing ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful projects.

"Worden is an excellent choice to head a foreign disinformation office because of his experience with disinformation in the US," quipped one of Worden's former bureaucratic foes.

He cited Worden's advocacy role in several programs that had failed to realize their declared potential: "the Russian TOPAZ space nuclear reactor fiasco; the DC-X, which led to the U.S. spending billions on an impossible single-stage-to-orbit concept; and ballistic missile defense." [Secrecy News]

If you're mourning the demise of Family Guy along with me, here's the petition to bring it back. Nearly 60,000 signatures so far. Do it now, or Stewie will blow you back to the wretched hole you came from.

This is one of the shows (along with Northern Exposure, Daria, King of the Hill, Twin Peaks, and Six Feet Under) I hope to have complete on DVD someday. Throw a couple aborted series I liked in there too: The Oblongs and Maximum Bob. OK, and for sentiment's sake, X Files.

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A car rental company that used satellites to track customers and fine speeders $150 was ordered Wednesday to stop the practice and refund an estimated $13,000 or more.

''This just wasn't fair,'' state consumer protection Commissioner James T. Fleming said. ''It is not a car rental company's job to enforce the speed limit in any state.'' [link]

Few here question the veracity of the study, which was a tabulation of prescription orders, said Dr. Curtis Canning, president of the Utah Psychiatric Assn. But trying to understand the "why" has puzzled many, he said.

"The one true answer is we don't know," said Canning, who has a private practice in Logan. "I have some hunches.

"In Mormondom, there is a social expectation--particularly among the females--to put on a mask, say 'Yes' to everything that comes at her and hide the misery and pain. I call it the 'Mother of Zion' syndrome. You are supposed to be perfect because Mrs. Smith across the street can do it and she has three more kids than you and her hair is always in place. I think the cultural issue is very real. There is the expectation that you should be happy, and if you're not happy, you're failing."

The study did not break down drug use by sex. But according to statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health, about twice as many women as men suffer from depressive disorders.

Discussion of the issue inevitably falls along Utah's traditional fault lines. Some suggest that Utah's unique Mormon culture--70% of the state's population belongs to the church--requires perfection and the public presentation of a happy face, whatever may be happening privately. The argument goes that women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are beset by particular pressures and are not encouraged to acknowledge their struggles.

This really isn't a good idea.

[this and last post via Undernews, the Progressive Review's daily newsletter, which Tom Tomorrow boosted on his weblog recently, and for which I thank him.]

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Though I never took their word as gospel or anything, at least NPR seemed to be a step aside from the increasingly incestuous relationship between the press and the pols. Lately, with a story recently about Nina Tottenberg hobnobbing with a Supreme Court Justice and now Middle East reporter Linda Gradstein accepting honoraria from pro-Israeli groups, it's hard to take them seriously anymore. Actually I stopped listening to All Things Considered a year ago or so; the Net is where I get most of my news now. I'm referring here to NPR News BTW.

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And tomorrow, Ashcraft [sic] will be saluting African American History Month. Catch the love on C-Span.

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PR-USA presents The Truth As You Need To Hear It.

The Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries, military officials said.

The plans, which have not received final approval from the Bush administration, have stirred opposition among some Pentagon officials who say they might undermine the credibility of information that is openly distributed by the Defense Department's public affairs officers.

The military has long engaged in information warfare against hostile nations for instance, by dropping leaflets and broadcasting messages into Afghanistan when it was still under Taliban rule.

But it recently created the Office of Strategic Influence, which is proposing to broaden that mission into allied nations in the Middle East, Asia and even Western Europe. The office would assume a role traditionally led by civilian agencies, mainly the State Department.

The small but well-financed Pentagon office, which was established shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was a response to concerns in the administration that the United States was losing public support overseas for its war on terrorism, particularly in Islamic countries.

[...]

But the new office has also stirred a sharp debate in the Pentagon, where several senior officials have questioned whether its mission is too broad and possibly even illegal.

Those critics say they are disturbed that a single office might be authorized to use not only covert operations like computer network attacks, psychological activities and deception, but also the instruments and staff of the military's globe- spanning public affairs apparatus.

Mingling the more surreptitious activities with the work of traditional public affairs would undermine the Pentagon's credibility with the media, the public and governments around the world, critics argue.

"This breaks down the boundaries almost completely," a senior Pentagon official said. [link]

Hey a guy can dream.

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Jackson Lears' literate and interesting review of James W. Cook's new book on Barnum as the proto-post-modernist has a interesting point on a new definition of macho in the last 150 years -- "to cultivate a blasé attitude toward the source of mass perceptual confusion:"

Even perfectly legal tricks could have a destabilizing impact on the popular sense of reality. The trompe l'oeil paintings of William Harnett and his contemporaries set off a popular furor that did much to illuminate the new metaphysics of uncertainty. Walter Benjamin once remarked that the characteristic urban habit of the nineteenth century was "testing one's eyes" amid the constantly changing spectacle of the crowd; and the response to trompe l'oeil in the United States in the nineteenth century underscored the centrality of visual tests as mass entertainment. Harnett's clever illusions (pistols, banknotes, fresh-killed hares) provoked a recurring pattern of audience reaction: "confusion, adaptation, and mastery." But the sense of mastery was tenuous and ephemeral at best. "In the dizzying world of the modern metropolis," Cook writes, "perceptual certainty itself was an illusion."

Trompe l'oeil painting produced effects similar to those of that other nineteenthcentury spectacle, the cyclorama (which aimed to dramatize epic events on a vast scale). Both apparently induced a kind of vertigo among audiences. In the 1880s, a cyclorama depicting the battle of Gettysburg left the spectator "dazed and helpless, feeling much like the little girl in Alice in Wonderland when told that she was but a thing in the dream of the sleeping King." Harnett, John Haberle, and other illusionists showed their work in non-academic venues: bars, stores, industrial expositions. Like Barnum, they engaged the public--especially men--in perceptual competition.

As artisanal skills became less important in the industrial workplace, manliness began to require demonstrations of knowingness in leisure realms. Illusionist tricks gave men the opportunity to see through deception, to resist charging at the canvases (as greenhorns unused to trompe l'oeil sometimes did), to cultivate a blasé attitude toward the source of mass perceptual confusion--the hyper-reality of the painting itself. But the sense of mastery was always fleeting, subject to further testing. What remained most constant was a pervasive atmosphere of uncertainty.

The persistence of epistemological confusion among the audience was a version of the broader revolt against positivism that was beginning to stir among artists and intellectuals, even as Harnett's paintings were creating near-riots among frustrated, baffled audiences. Ironically and perhaps unintentionally, trompe l'oeil illusionism raised the specter of the subjectivity of sight as surely as Impressionism did. Both styles were part of the same seismic shift: the emergence of "a new, post-Enlightenment conception of vision, understood as prone to error and often in need of correction through other sensory mechanisms--in short, a subjective vision," as Cook writes. Artful deceptions escaped their creators' control. Their influence seeped into the larger culture and undermined literal ideas of truth.

And so frivolous entertainments had long-term intellectual consequences. Against the rigidity of existing symbolic forms, Barnum and his contemporaries had posed the formlessness unleashed by the market--the shape-shifting arts of the commercial trickster. The effect was initially liberating but ultimately unsettling. Once the genie of formlessness was out of the bottle, popular notions of reality would never be the same. Delusions of technical mastery could not provide ontological coherence. Warhol and the World Wrestling Federation were awaiting their turn on stage.

Unlike Lears however, I don't think 9/11 killed irony. It made things even more uncertain and fluid, particularly political realities. Many people's reaction to the attacks has been to re-enact a 19th century moral simulacrum which pretends that nationalism is some kind of bottom line and we have to defend ourselves from some kind of invasion. When -- symbolized rather weirdly by the presence of US troops in Arab lands and Saudi Arabia in particular -- the main thing 9/11 was a reaction to was -- the encroachment of relative realities from the West onto an unstable, static and pretty spooked Muslim reality. And this isn't about science vs religion -- or religion vs religion -- either. The instability of reality threatens both equally. Christian fundies as well as Islamic fundies or whatever.

It's a magician's world now.

Now you see the towers, now...

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Normally erudite and articulate US president shocks with "devaluation" comment, sends yen reeling.

A short wave of panic took over the forex trading floors on Monday sending the yen lower after George W Bush, the US president, said he had discussed the devaluation of the Japanese currency with Junichiro Koizumi, Japan's prime minister.

Speaking at the press conference after his first meeting with the Japanese prime minister, Mr Bush said: "He [Koizumi] said I want to make it very clear to you exactly what I intend to do and he talked about non-performing loans, the devaluation issue and regulatory reform and he placed equal emphasis on all three."

Minutes later, the yen dipped to ¥132.80 against the dollar. But soon after a White House official released a statement saying that the US president had meant to say "deflation" not "devaluation". The Yen promptly recovered to its opening levels and at 1030 GMT it stood at ¥132.62 against the dollar.

"Old souls" and "young souls" was a classification that ruled my mind in this New York period: my mother was of the former, my father of the latter. In the Old lay innate the fruits, the results, the memories of many previous lives, and this ripeness of long experience showed itself in certain ways -- in taste, in judgment, in their standard of values, in that mysterious quality called tact; above all, perhaps, in the type and quality of goods they desired from life. Worldly ambitions, so-called, were generally negligible in them. What we label to-day as the subconscious was invariably fully charged; also, without too much difficulty, accessible. It made them interesting, stimulating and not easily exhausted. Wide sympathies, spread charity, understanding were their half-marks, and a certain wisdom, as apart from intellect, their invariable gift; with, moreover, a tendency to wit, if not that rare quality wit itself, and humour, the power of seeing, and therefore laughing at, oneself. The cheaper experiences of birth, success, possessions they had learned long ago; it was the more difficult, but higher, values they had come back to master, and among the humbler ranks of life they [f]ound the necessary conditions. Christ, I reflected, was the son of a carpenter.

The Young Souls, on the other hand, were invariably hot-foot after the things of this world. Show, Riches, and Power stuck like red labels on their foreheads. The Napoleons of the earth were a[m]ong the youngest of all; the intellectuals, those who relied on reason alone, often the prosperous, usually the well-born, were of the same category. Rarely was "understanding" in them, and brillliant cleverness could never rank with that wisdom which knows that tout comprende, c'est tout pardonner. To me the Young Souls were the commonplace and uninteresting ones. They were shallow, sketchy, soon exhausted, the Dutzend-menschen ; whereas, the others were intuitive, mature in outlook, aware of deeper values and eager for the things of the spirit. . . . [pp. 296-7]

* * *

...Thought and longing now turned to an older world. There were ancient wonders, soft with age, mature with a beauty and tenderness only timelessness can give, that caught me on the raw with a power no Yosemites, Niagaras, or Grand Canyons could hope to imitate. Size has its magic, but size bludgeons the imagination, rather than feeds it. My heart turned suddenly across the sea. I love the big woods, but behind, beyond the woods, great Egypt lay ablaze. . . .

[...]

...My detestation of the city both cleared and deepened. I began to understand more vividly, more objectively, the reasons for my feeling alien in it. I missed tradition, background, depth. There was a glittering smartness everywhere. The great ideal was to be sharper, smarter than your neighbour, above all things sharp and smart and furiously rapid, above all things -- win the game. To be in a furious rush was to be intelligent, to do things slowly was to be derided. The noise and speed suggested rapids; the deep, quiet pools were in older lands. Display, advertisements, absence of all privacy I had long been aware of naturally; I now realized how little I desired this speed and glittering brilliance, this frantic rush to be at all costs sharper, quicker, smarter than one's neighbor, to win the game at any price. I realized why my years in the city had brought no friendships, and why they had been starved as well as lonely. . . . [pp. 346-7]

BTW, if the name sounds familiar, Blackwood went on to write some classic supernatural tales like "The Willows" in later years, and this is what he's most remembered for. He was Lovecraft's favorite writer of "weird tales," apparently. A new biography seems essential, though not definitive. Have to pick it up.

Episodes isn't in print, unfortunately -- the edition I read is an Interlibrary Loan, published in 1924. You can find it used if you look around though.

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Monday, February 18, 2002


The twinning of drug traffic and terrorism reached a new peak (so to speak) of absurdity in the Philippines as a bill introduced in the Senate proposed life imprisonment or death for the possession of as little as 10 grams of ecstasy, GHB or LSD.

The effort to get a hard-line drug bill passed is not a new one. Sen. Barber introduced essentially the same bill two years ago, vowing to make drug use "a thing of the past." At that time, the legislation stalled, but even then officials were playing the terrorism card, accusing Abu Sayyef rebels (linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network) of participation in the drug trade.

"The illegal drugs menace is now considered public enemy No. 1 all over the world and poses a grave threat to our country's national security. It has alarmingly penetrated almost all sectors and levels of society including the government, business, and even law enforcement agencies, and it may only take a little more time before the Philippines becomes another Colombia," Barbers told the Manila Spectator at the time.

Now it will be even easier to play the terror card to win converts to a repressive drug bill. [via Undernews]

BoschUniverse has great blow-ups of all of his work. Only 33 pieces, what an influence! Having spent a lot of time with Cities of the Red Night, I came to know the detail of Pieter Breughel's Triumph of the Dead very well (it's the cover illustration). Though a little too complex and showy for my taste, this site is one of the best artist's sites I've seen. The pic is a detail from Bosch's Allegory of Gluttony and Lust. [via a dam site]

Environmental and labor activists say the scrap metal was contaminated by other debris from the twin towers -- such as cancer-causing asbestos, PCBs, dioxins, mercury and lead -- and accuse the United States of dumping "toxic and hazardous material" in India. They have launched an aggressive campaign calling for a halt to further movement of the scrap.

"What I have purchased is just steel scrap," said Kumar, 36. "I believe it may contain some scrap from the WTC site, but there is no label, no sticker on the scrap that says it is WTC scrap. Now it has become a headache for me."

[...]

"This is not normal demolition steel scrap," said Anantha Padmanabhan, executive director of Greenpeace India. "Just look at the circumstances in which the twin towers came down. High-temperature incineration with jet fuel has taken place. This is incineration steel."

"Each office in the WTC had computers, chip boards, tube lights, electrical lights, video and computer monitors, plastics and furniture," he said. "There is every possibility that high levels of toxins are in the debris that would pose serious health and environmental risks to uninformed recycling workers in India."

British universities will demand changes to the Government's new Export Control Bill so they can assure explicit protection for academic freedom.

Universities UK, which represents the vice- chancellors and principals of British universities, said yesterday it would press for an amendment to the legislation being considered by the House of Lords. It warned that certain parts of the Bill were so broadly worded that "essentially all of science and technology falls into it" – meaning that the Government could suppress scientific work before it appeared, and limit communication about it. [link]

Some dolls of different races and ethnicities, including black Barbie, have been around for years. But industry experts say an increased demand and awareness of other cultures has spawned a new wave of diverse dolls.

Sometimes they have a historical theme. The popular American Girl doll company makes Addy Walker, a fictional character said to be a freed slave from the Civil War era, and Josefina Montoya, a Hispanic doll from colonial New Mexico.

There are also new lines with more modern themes, including the Yue Sai Wa Wa Asian fashion doll and the Get Real Girls. The latter is a line of six dolls from a variety of backgrounds who do everything from snowboard to play basketball.

At least one new line, called the Ghetto Kids, was criticized by some parents and TV commentators because its packaging included hard-hitting doll ''biographies'' that mentioned parents who were drug addicts, or who abandoned and even sold their children.

Officials at Chicago-based Teddi's Toys, who created the dolls, have since removed some of the made-up doll background. But they're keeping the Ghetto Kids name as an attention grabber. They also hope information on their Web site, including a cartoon series, will spur parents to talk to kids about such topics as smoking, guns and teen-age pregnancy.

''It's real life, real time,'' says company founder Tommy Perez, who unveiled a Jewish Ghetto Kid at the New York toy fair. ''It doesn't pull many punches.'' [link]

Osama bin Laden's most senior lieutenant, the Egyptian militant Ayman al-Zawahiri, has been captured and jailed in Tehran, a leading Iranian newspaper reported yesterday.

Zawahiri, the founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, was arrested several days ago and has been imprisoned in the city's Evin jail, where political prisoners are usually held, the Hayat-e-Nou newspaper said. [link]

Even as polls show the public continuing to rally behind Bush and the war against terrorism, values issues are back on the campaign trail. Shifting candidate positions on abortion and gun control -- and the issues of trust that such shifts raise -- are front and center in contests for governor in California and senator in North Carolina.

''If you think these values issues are unimportant, just watch the midterm races,'' says Democrat Will Marshall, head of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute. ''Plenty of Republicans will try to make gun control an issue. Plenty of Democrats will try to make choice (on abortion) an issue. We're going to have the same kinds of divides.''

The thing that I want to point out here is that the movement of the industry in that environment was away from copy protection, partly because consumers complained and partly because consumers actively had created this aftermarket for tools that defeated (that is to say, circumvented) copy protection. And there was a kind of arms race between the major software vendors and the copy-protection-defeating utility vendors as copy-protection schemes became more complex. There was a very high degree of evolution of copy protection before finally it collapsed of its own weight. And the general trend, at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, was for software to be relatively unencumbered by copy protection, if not outright unprotected.

Now, as we know, Microsoft since the 1980s has utterly collapsed in the absence of strong copy protection. They have spiraled down the economic drain, and we pity them. You know, I pass Mr. Gates on the street with his cup every now and then and I put a dime in, or a quarter sometimes.

[...]

... the DMCA uncouples the enforcement of anticircumvention provisions from the balances that are built into the substantive copyright law. And Julie Cohen of the Georgetown Law Center has addressed those, I think rather eloquently, in her remarks when she talked about leaky rights -- even when the term of copyright for a work is in force, we expect a certain amount of noninfringing copying, and a certain amount of de minimis copying. Another way of looking at this issue is to say that we normally invoke penalties in the copyright context for serious, damaging infringers, and not against noninfringers, and not against de minimis infringers. That has been the history of our copyright law until relatively recently.

But the DMCA has changed all that. Now our law says that it doesn't matter whether you are an infringer or not, it does not matter whether you are a bad actor or not. It says that if you engaged in this kind of technology development at all or if you distribute this technology at all, you are going to be criminally or civilly liable. This development has unmoored the copyright enforcement framework from its original policy infrastructure, from its original policy foundation.

"Oh, yeah!" the president yelled, pumping his fist, as each archer charged by, notched his arrow and blasted a clay or wooden target. "Yeah!"

Bush attended the display of ancient warrior skills with first lady Laura Bush and Japanese Prime Minster Junichiro Koizumi to begin his first full day in Tokyo.

The competition, called the yabusame, dates back to the 6th century, when warriors performed their skills as a form of prayer. Originally, archers who missed their clay or wooden targets were obliged to commit suicide.

[...]

Afterward, the leaders met at a government conference center where Koizumi gave Bush a painting of an archer on horseback. Apparently viewing the gift as a symbol of the war against terrorism, the president looked at it and said, "We're fighting evil."

Bush noted that none of the archers' arrows hit nearby U.S. reporters. "They weren't aiming at you - at my personal request," a grinning Bush told the White House press corps. [link]

No actually, I have to say, if you're wondering why so many posts are about shrub, he's simply the most entertaining (P)resident since Nixon.

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I'd love it if Hunter Thompson covered this story:

The controversial stripper-turned-mayor in this small mountain town was recovering Sunday from minor injuries suffered when she was assaulted while walking home from the beauty salon where she works.

[...]

"All the controversy we've had with her, we thought it would be better to have an outside agency handle it from the get-go," he said.

Brooks, a former topless dancer, was elected in April to a two-year term as mayor of the town of 1,100 about 40 miles west of Denver. Since then she has come under fire and will face a recall election in April.

Detractors have accused her of dishonesty, creating a hostile work environment, making unsubstantiated allegations against town officials and staffers and misdirecting media attention to herself.

[...]

"I don't know whose toes I've stepped on but I'm stepping on somebody's," she said.

For two decades, high tech moved inexorably toward greater convenience and personal empowerment. Hand-held organizers, satellite phones and other digital devices embodied this ideal. They made it possible to get stock updates by cell phone and to shop for groceries via Palm Pilot. The trend was toward a decentralized system of ever-smaller, cheaper and more powerful gadgets.

These days, fear of terror is shifting the emphasis from wired convenience to physical security, from decentralized technology meant to make life easier to centralized surveillance meant to make America safer.

Across the tech world, money and creative energy are flowing to emerging technologies of vigilance, ranging from disposable surveillance cameras to systems that read brain waves for signs of malevolent intent.

Increasingly, the trend is to use technology to search and identify, to mark boundaries and deny access. At airports and office buildings, in supermarkets and stadiums, on computer networks and city streets, it will observe and control--for our own safety.

The elements of this new order go beyond software and servers. Anti-terrorist legislation enacted by Congress after Sept. 11 expands the FBI's authority to eavesdrop and search e-mail and phone records. In California, Gov. Gray Davis is seeking similar powers.

The new technologies will make such searches faster and more extensive. They also will reduce the typical citizen's zone of privacy and clash with deep-rooted American values. [from the L.A.Times a while back]

Beijing has voiced worries about a re-emergence of American unilateralism, which it thought had faded in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But in the last two weeks, Bush's strident tone has suggested just the opposite. In appearances throughout the country, he has built on the "axis of evil" phraseology of his State of the Union address, knowing full well that each repetition irritates and divides the countries he once hailed as his great coalition partners.

His national security aides - who are usually more attuned to how Bush's words play in Poland or Peru than in the U.S. heartland - have begun to cite evidence that the American people support the broader mission of rooting out so-called rogue states that are seeking weapons of mass destruction, even if the allies do not.

They compare Bush's mission with Ronald Reagan's single-minded goal of ridding the world of communism. They describe their boss as a man who emerged from the first phase of the war more convinced than ever that the United States alone had the power to complete its task - with the coalition if possible, without it if necessary.

Delegation members spoke with dozens of victims of US bombing. They say that while the U.S. military claims it has mostly dropped smart bombs that hit precise military targets, in fact more Afghan civilians have now been killed from U.S. bombing raids than Americans died on Sept. 11.

Over 3700 Afghan civilians died from U.S. attacks through Dec. 3, according to a study by Prof. Mark Herold of the University of New Hampshire. He based the figures on verified media accounts of civilian deaths and says the figure is probably too low because the media can't visit some parts of Afghanistan..

[...]

In another south Kabul neighborhood Shems Rhaman Shemsi describes how a U.S. bomb probably intended for a nearby Taliban checkpoint hit his neighbors' homes instead. Two houses were destroyed and four people killed. But Shemsi said he's not angry at the US government.

"It was a mistake by the U.S.," said Shemsi. "We're happy that the Taliban and Al Qaeda are gone. I feel so thankful to Mr. Bush because he sent us some peace keepers in Kabul."

Delegation member Eva Rupp, who lost her stepsister on Sept. 11, said many Afghan bombing victims shared that sentiment.

"All the people we've met, even those who have lost little children, are hopeful for the future because the Taliban are gone," said Rupp. "With tears in her eyes, a woman said, 'yes I've lost my five-year-old daughter. But the Taliban are gone. I'm really glad the US bombed us.'"

Global Exchange Director Medea Benjamin said the Taliban was so hated by Afghans that they are understandably grateful to anyone who helped get rid of the despotic regime.

But Benjamin argues that the U.S. isn't really interested in helping the people of Afghanistan. She says the Bush Administration is using the war against terrorism to aggressively expand U.S. military bases throughout the region and eventually secure a pipeline through Afghanistan for the benefit of UNOCAL and other big U.S. oil companies.

"I think we're getting ourselves deeper and deeper into a very negative relationship with the Muslim world," said Benjamin. "We're expanding our territory. If as a result of this, there is a pipeline going through Afghanistan, UNOCAL getting wealthy on oil from Central Asia, this will only fuel the resentment towards the U.S."

And bin Laden and his Egyptian mentor are unaccounted for.

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R.I.P. John Gardner. Ironically, on the eve of a sweeping campaign finance reform bill finally being enacted -- though we'll see how effective it is. The fight goes on...

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Saturday, February 16, 2002


I've added DJ Martian's music blog to the Music Links at left. Most of the music I listen to is covered here, updates on new releases, stores, etc. Takes a while to load because it's big, but worth it. From the site:

A diverse music positive weblog for the discerning listener with an interest in creative artistic music across the contemporary sound spectrum, including: Jungle/drum n bass, industrial/ electro-industrial/synth sounds, dark metal, darkwave/ gothic/ ethereal, shoegazer/dream pop sounds, techno/tech house/progressive house & trance, electro and breakbeat, epic alt-rock/ art-rock/ electro-rock, IDM/ experimental electronics/ ambient sounds, Leftfield instrumental electronified hip-hop, post rock/ spacerock, hardcore/ metalcore/ noisecore, and many other hybrids and musical mutations.

Forget the curators, forget the frames, forget the idea of a highly designed museum space. Just enter these two large rooms and enjoy the nine painted canvases for what they are. Don't ask for references, don't expect narration, don't look for a grand thesis. Just ... experience them.

[...]

While this concept may seem hardly revolutionary, it is clearly bucking a decades-long trend of highly conceptualized and packaged exhibitions. These, in some artists' minds, favor the curator and the dealer over the artist.

"We wanted to show the work of these artists without the intervention of a curator and see what would happen," says museum director Elsa Longhauser. All nine paintings were created for the exhibition. The artists were motivated by the knowledge that the paintings would be seen together.

"These paintings speak to each other," she says. Exactly how the works communicate with one another may be less important than that these artists felt the need to get back to basics.

"Their simple belief in the act of painting is perhaps the most important part of this show," says Paul Holdengräber, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Institute for Art and Cultures.

Here's David Sterritt's appreciation.

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Hard to believe that people still give priests the blind eye about sex abuse. The current scandal in New England is being called "an ecclesiastical Enron" by some. Legal costs are mounting and accusations of coverup are reaching higher up the ladder. We'll see how much things change.

Law insisted last week he won't step down. Outside observers are skeptical about whether the Church will address the problem of pedophilia among priests. "They have been unable to squarely face the conflicts of human sexuality that roil within the culture of the priesthood itself," says Jason Berry, author of a book on sexual abuse by priests. "They are in a state of denial and it's as deep as the ocean."

Prof. Groome says the Church must start treating sexual abuse as a crime instead of just a sin, and welcome greater participation by lay people in the governance of the archdiocese.

Over the past three months, Canada's largest newspaper owner has been at the eye of a nationwide controversy, accused of suppressing diverse opinion in its papers. Moreover, for the first time among big newspaper owners in North America, CanWest has introduced weekly editorials that all its newspapers, from coast to coast, are required to run.

[...]

With newspaper circulation reaching up to half of Canadians, CanWest has the second-highest concentration of papers in the Western world, after Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. chain in Australia, according to John Miller, head of the newspaper journalism program at Ryerson University in Toronto.

CanWest's actions in recent months have been "unprecedented and dangerous,' " Mr. Miller says. "With the freedom of the press comes the responsibility to reflect diverse opinion, and CanWest is stomping all over that.''

Now, Bush is making it clear it's time to rethink the role of treatment. "The best way to affect supply is to reduce demand for drugs," he said Tuesday. "We can work as hard as we possibly want on interdiction, but so long as there is the demand for drugs in this country, some crook is going to figure out how to get them here."

[...]

Public opinion on the issue of treatment has been ahead of politicians for some years. Polls show Americans overwhelmingly prefer giving nonviolent first- and second-time drug offenders treatment rather than jail time. Part of the shift is due to an effort by the National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA) to highlight studies that have scientists viewing substance abuse as a medical disease, rather than as a moral failing.

But in the same issue of CSM, an editorial ran which closes with this statement:

To avoid drugs or kick a habit, individuals need to see that drugs never bring pleasure, escape, or love. In that regard, the compassion and care of parents, communities, and spiritual counselors is crucial. [link]

First off, there are many kinds of drugs, that do many different things. Some are more toxic than others. Some are used medicinally. Morphine is used for escaping pain by doctors. The recreational ones are used for escape and pleasure, you bet. Hello! Who writes this tripe anyway?

And if "the compassion and care of etc." were happening, self-destructive drug use would be far less of a problem, sure. The intolerance, ignorance, and lack of this by the surrounding community is a main reason WHY people turn to drugs addictively. And head-in-the-sand attitudes like the one expressed by this editorial exemplify the Wall of Cluelessness many kids in particular encounter in their elders.

At least there's a glimmer of hope, with people realizing that locking drug users up in abusive prisons isn't the answer. But educating people about drugs and not looking at the drugs as The Evil To Be Eradicated, but a sign of some deeper longing/absence in people's lives is the real answer. Here's a news bulletin: there will always be drug use, of many kinds and types. Hysterical reactions to sex and drugs have caused incalculable harm in this country. It's good to see that maybe that's at last beginning to change.

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Friday, February 15, 2002


Heavy US manners and misplaced patriotic posturing alienate Olympic Committee, international athletes.

The games have already been dubbed the "red, white and blue Olympics" because almost every event has patriotic overtones in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11. Nationalism has always been a part of the Olympics but IOC officials here feel the event is being used simply as propaganda for the US war effort.

[...]

The IOC is embarrassed that the very public presence of the 15,000 police and military is projecting a tense and uncomfortable atmosphere for an event that, since its first staging in 1924, has been a sedate, friendly festival. There are more American security personnel here than in Afghanistan and three times as many as were present at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles during the cold war with the Soviet Union.

[...]

Earlier this week the FBI and CIA were forced to tone down the intense security searches of competitors following complaints from many international teams that their athletes were being harassed. Athletes have everything searched repeatedly, and must often queue in sub-zero conditions for more than 30 minutes.

A Russian silver medallist was upset that she was asked to drink from her water bottle to prove it contained water as she was trying to get into the cross-country venue. "Every day we have to go through the same annoying procedures," said Larissa Lazutina. "It's a put-down for the athletes."

Matters took an even more bizarre turn yesterday when nine musicians from a California band had their bus stopped and searched 60 miles south of Salt Lake City after a convenience store clerk told officials they had asked about security checkpoints at the games."It was a surprise and it was funny," said a band member. "What wasn't so funny was that they asked us what ethnic groups were on the bus and after they searched the whole bus and found some articles about terrorism, they pulled one of our guys aside and questioned him a lot." [link via Drudge]

As the Bush administration nears completion of new rules for conducting military trials of foreign detainees, U.S. officials say they envision the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a site for the tribunals and as a terrorist penal colony for many years to come.

[...]

Tom Malinowski, a Washington representative for Human Rights Watch, raised questions about the prospect of extended detention of unprosecuted prisoners. "It is a basic principle of law" that people shouldn't be jailed indefinitely without charges, he said. Yet it could be argued that under international law, detainees such as these could be held for the duration of a war, he added.

"The question is, which war?" he said. "Is it the war in Afghanistan, the one against al Qaeda or the one against terrorism? That could be 50 years."

[...]

Guantanamo's unique legal status also is an attraction. It is Cuban territory that is leased essentially in perpetuity to the United States under a series of agreements.

"It is not in any federal judicial district, so it is not subject to habeas corpus," the legal right for someone in custody to demand a hearing before a judge to decide the legality of the detention, said a lawyer informed about the government's deliberations.

Moreover, the administration believes that a 1950 U.S. Supreme Court decision minimizes the chances a prisoner could file an appeal in federal court. The ruling said that captured German soldiers, who had aided the Japanese military after the armistice in Europe, had no legal right while outside the country to demand a U.S. court hearing on their case.

But many of these deliberations remain murky, one informed lawyer said, because "so much of all this is very, very, very closely held."
[link]

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The Switchouse Team [from email received today]

Then you come across a string you can't make heads or tails of. It goes B++,Es,I++,Sp+,>Sf,b,%,p,@,h,#a,F bad bun veg.

You think some computer code accidentally spilled into someone's personal ad and, man, are they going to be pissed if they had to pay for all the extra letters.

Actually, although you most likely will never find it in a newspaper, this is a real personal-ad code, and here's what it means: I always sleep with a plushie (stuffed animal). I have sexual feelings for plushies. I have rich sexual fantasies involving plushies; they live in my mind. Intimacy with my plushies is an important part of my sex life. I haven't had fursuit sex but the idea appeals to me. I like plushies that are: dressed in bondage gear, show signs of sexual use, are puppets and have a strategically placed appendage. I'm a hermaphrodite and my age is none of your business. I've dressed up as a badger, a bunny and a vegetable. [link]

There, I see I've made your day. It's a strange world.

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I keep getting these referrals about the airline passenger who might get prison time for going to the bathroom on a flight to SLC, with the word "hoax" in the line. Haven't heard anywhere that that's true, though I hope it is.

Note to newbies: most pointless referrals happen because people don't use quotes or a period between words in their phrase.

But don't stop. It's fun.

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For years, critics have scoffed at figure skating judges, accusing them of using the sport's presentation mark -- the non-technical score each judge gives each skater -- to promulgate cultural biases, Cold War politics and seemingly insignificant preferences over costumes, makeup and music. But today's revelation, which hints at deal-making and vote-trading, goes to the heart of the sport's legitimacy and, skating insiders fear, could do long-term damage. [link]

Uh-huh.

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Excerpts and links involving BushCheneyEnronAfghanoilpipe911. [this and last cribbed from nwd]

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First Internet payphone. Surely some form of this will be ubiquitous soon. I'd sure rather use this than carry around a damn cellphone. [for NYT link: user: aflakete password: europhilia]

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Kokomo added to list of places with mysterious hum that sickens some. Hundreds of communities have reported this around the world and I think it's mostly connected with ELF and perhaps other electronic device testing and weapons.

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HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

President George W Bush is set to offer his own alternative to the Kyoto global warming pact.

He wants US businesses to voluntarily track and reduce their output of greenhouse gases.

Mr Bush will offer an array of tax incentives for corporations, farms and individuals to do so. [link]