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Silent Coup: The Removal of a President - Len Colodny & Robert Gettlin

George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin (free online version/download here)

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STOP TERRORISM

ABBREVIATIONS FOR SITES I OFTEN STEAL NEWS ITEMS FROM:

og = J Orlin Grabbe
u = Progressive Review's Undernews
a = Antiwar

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Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia

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Just consider what current events will sound like two thousand years from now -- the greatest nation on Earth bombing some of the smallest and weakest for no clear reasons, people starving in parts of the world while farmers are paid not to plant crops in others, technophiles sitting at home playing electronic golf rahter than the real thing, and police forces ordered to arrest people who simply desire to ingest a psychoactive weed. People of that era will also likely laugh it all off as fantastic myths...

It is time for those who desire true freedom to exert themselves -- to fight back against the forces who desire domination through fear and disunity.

This does not have to involve violence. It can be done in small, simple ways, like not financing that new Sport Utility Vehicle, cutting up all but one credit card, not opting for a second mortgage, turning off that TV sitcom for a good book, asking questions and speaking out in church or synagogue, attending school board and city council meetings, voting for the candidate who has the least money, learning about the Fully Informed Jury movement and using it when called -- in general, taking responsibility for one's own actions. Despite the omnipresent advertising for the Lotto -- legalized government gambling -- there is no free lunch. Giving up one's individual power for the hope of comfort and security has proven to lead only to tyranny.

from Rule by Secrecy by Jim Marrs

* * * *

You had to take those pieces of paper with you when you went shopping, though by the time I was nine or ten most people used plastic cards. . .It seems so primitive, totemistic even, like cowry shells. I must have used that kind of money myself, a little, before everything went on the Compubank.

I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult.

It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.

Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control.

I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.

. . . Things continued on in that state of suspended animation for weeks, although some things did happen. Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons they said. The roadblocks began to appear, and Identipasses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn't be too careful. They said that new elections would be held, but that it would take some time to prepare for them. The thing to do, they said, was to continue on as usual.

from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

* * * *

By the time Oscar reached the outskirts of Washington, DC, The Louisiana air base had benn placed under siege.

The base's electrical power supply had long since been cut off for lack of payment. The aircraft had no fuel. The desperate federal troops were bartering stolen equipment for food and booze. Desertion was rampant. The air base commander had released a sobbing video confession and had shot himself.

Green Huey had lost patience with the long-festering scandal. He was moving in for the kill. Attacking and seizing an federal air base with his loyal state militia would have been entirely too blatant and straightforward. Instead the rogue Governor employed proxy guerrillas.

Huey had won the favor of nomad prole groups by providing them with safe havens. He allowed them to squat in Louisiana's many federally declared contamination zones. These forgotten landscapes were tainted with petrochemical effluent and hormone-warping pesticides, and were hence officially unfit for human settlement. The prole hordes had different opinions on that subject.

Proles cheerfully grouped in any locale where conventional authority had grown weak. Whenever the net-based proles were not constantly harassed by the authorities, they coalesced and grew ambitious. Though easily scattered by focused crackdowns, they regrouped as swiftly as a horde of gnats. With their reaping machines and bio-breweries, they could live off the land at the very base of the food chain. They had no stake in the established order, and they cherished a canny street-level knowledge of society's infrastructural weaknesses. They made expensive enemies. . .

Louisiana's ecologically blighted areas were ideal for proles. The disaster zones were also impromptu wildlife sanctuaries, since wild animals found chemical fouling much easier to survive than the presence of human beings. After decades of wild subtropical growth, Louisiana's toxic dumps were as impenetrable as Sherwood Forest.

from Distraction by Bruce Sterling

and s-integrator

Saturday, June 08, 2002

Well, Mozilla wasn't for me. Couldn't get it to import current bookmarks from opera or gul, and it's slow and a bit bloated. The features are probably nice if they work. I'd like to have tried the email client and HTML editor. But at one point my taskbar simply disappeared while I had Mozilla and K-Meleon open at once. Uninstalled it immediately.

Oh well.

11:27 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

White House staffers were taking Cipro weeks before the anthrax attacks were made public.

11:18 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Frank Rich on the credibility of the corporate model applied to National Security.
What is clear is that the White House has lost control of a hagiographic story line that, as codified everywhere from Annie Leibovitz's triumphalist photos in Vanity Fair to a multipart series co-written by Bob Woodward at The Washington Post , portrayed it as a steely, no-nonsense team of razor-sharp executives running government like a crack Fortune 500 corporation. When it comes to domestic security, the administration turns out to mirror America's C.E.O. culture all right ? but not that of Thomas Watson's I.B.M. or Jack Welch's General Electric -- so much as that laid bare by the dot-com crash. It's a slipshod business culture in which arrogant C.E.O.'s, held accountable by no one (including their own boards), cash out just before their own bad deals take their companies south. It's the culture that has wrecked Americans' trust in the market and that this week prompted Henry M. Paulson Jr., the chief of Goldman Sachs , to speak out, chastising "the activities and behavior of some C.E.O.'s" and concluding, "I cannot think of a time when business over all has been held in less repute." [link]

5:24 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Conservative on compassion.
lizardboy kaiboshes global AIDS relief.

5:14 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

"It's everywhere in the Arab world ? this anti-American feeling," says Saleh Khathlan, a political scientist at King Saud University. "If there is a single factor behind the [Sept. 11] attacks, it is that US policy is perceived to be anti-Muslim. The hijackers were brought up to believe the world is divided into Muslims and nonbelievers. What's missing is a view of the whole world, something broader that is connecting all humans." [link]
Indeed. Just as the world outside the US is perceived as anti-American if they don't drink Coke and agree to be fiefdoms of multi-nationals, perhaps?

3:09 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Yes, that Perot.
Enron et al's manipulation of California's energy grid was apparently designed by Perot Systems Corp.
After Perot Systems Corp. helped develop the computer systems used to track California electricity trading, it peddled a detailed presentation to energy companies on ways to "game" the state's power market, newly released documents show. The blueprint outlined schemes similar to "Death Star" and others later used by Enron Corp. to inflate profits.

[...]

An industry consultant testifying before the Senate committee Wednesday likened it to "handing grade-school children loaded revolvers," and concluded that power traders armed with such information would clearly have put the schemes to use.

"This is corporate behavior at its despicable worst," said Sen. Joseph Dunn, a Democrat from Orange County's Santa Ana, the state lawmaker leading the inquiry, adding that it appeared that Perot's firm might have played a role in the "economic rape of California."

Gov. Gray Davis quickly entered the fray, calling for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to investigate Perot Systems' actions.

"If true, this is an ethical violation of the highest order and quite possibly a criminal offense," Davis said.

2:37 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Reptilian reign reasserted in UK.
Instead of a reflective look at the past 50 years of Britain's most dysfunctional family, which might have uestioned its existence, Gawd bless you, Ma'am, was suddenly an acceptable thing to shout in public. I wanted to shake people by the shoulders. What were we celebrating? Was the Queen giving back half a century's worth of taxpayers' money so the trains could run on time? Was the Queen to give all her palaces to the homeless? Were her superannuated sons and daughters and all the other Royal hangers on to become self-financing in line with Labor's plans to reduce the number of families living off the state? Were they going to pay inheritance tax like the rest of us - and ring fence the money for the NHS? No, we were to carry on living in a feudal hangover, ruled by a ragbag of pompous unelected inbreds.

2:20 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

It's looking more and more as though the feds have only a rhetorical case against John Walker Lindh, but given the state of the American judiciary - especially in spook and military inundated northern Virginia - that may be more than enough. Still, applying conspiracy theory to military combat is imaginative even if a bit against international law.
Sam Smith, referring to this article.

2:15 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, June 07, 2002

Zogby and the Marijuana Policy Project: partners in polling.
Pollster John Zogby had a problem: Too many political conservatives and not enough lefties were signing up to participate in his online surveys of public opinion.

Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project also had a problem: He didn't know what Americans really thought about legalizing the five-leafed devil weed.

But both problems went up in smoke recently when Zogby's polling firm approached Kampia's Marijuana Policy Project with a novel proposition: Help us recruit smokers and their pals to participate in our cyber-surveys, and we'll let you add a few dope questions to our national polls.

Kampia jumped at the chance for free market research. And suddenly, Zogby International, a high-profile polling firm that has worked for some of the biggest names in the media, politics and corporate America, became a player in the pot lobby's ongoing war on the war on drugs.

[...]

Word of the deal instantly sent pot opponents eight miles high.

"The insidious inroads that the small but heavily financed drug culture continues to make into the fabric of society is truly frightening," said Charles Perkins, president of Drug Watch International, in a prepared statement. "It is time for the media to expose these lobbyists, just as they would expose pedophiles who try to influence child abuse laws and enforcement." [my emphasis]
That's right. You start with a joint and first thing you know you're buggering the 7 year-old next door. It's the Pot Pedophile Cabal.

"Heavily financed drug culture"?

11:28 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug says (in the Wall Street Journal, natch) corporate farming using GM foods and pesticides is the only way to feed the world. It's a persuasive argument -- "These people will starve! Organic farming just doesn't work fast enough in Africa!!" But there are alternatives.
Credible alternatives to Borlaug's 'Green Revolution' are outlined by Frances Moore Lapp� (author of Diet for a Small Planet, 1971) and her daughter Anna Lapp� in their new book Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet. They visited Belo Horizonte, Brazil, a city of 2.5 million. Its citizens, under the leadership of the Worker's Party, decided that good food was a human right, rather than a matter of wealth. It is the only city in the capitalist world to make food security a right of citizenship.

Belo Horizonte offers a model for communities to solve hunger on a local level. It focuses on programs such as community and school gardens, fresh food delivery to poorer neighborhoods, and linking hospitals, restaurants, and other big buyers to local organic growers.
And as my post below mentions, the spread of GM foods will subvert organics -- and decimate the seed diversity that provides insurance against diseases that can wipe out crops.

11:53 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

New Peter Pan film challenges de-sexualized Wendy. While I don't think this is for kids under say 15, I don't have a problem with this like some folks.
Laura Duguid, 73, the god-daughter of author J.M. Barrie, said he would have been appalled.

"It is a shame the play is being treated in this way. My father and Mr. Barrie would have been horrified. Mr. Barrie just was not interested in that sort of obvious sexuality and romance, and it certainly is not in the original story."

She said her father "always said Barrie was asexual. He didn't see women as sexual beings, he put them on a pedestal."

[...]

The casting notes describe Wendy as a girl "imbued with rebellion," "an English rose out for adventure; an angelic girl paradoxically born to wield the sword. Adventure unleashes the animal within her, making her ever more appealing.

"But womanhood has a hold of her -- she wants to both kiss Peter and mother him, for his boy-man quality stirs both within her."

[...]

"The background is that, like Wendy, Barrie's own mother had to bring up her siblings when she was still a teenager. Later, when her favourite son, David, died in a skating accident, she confined herself to bed in grief."

Ms. Phil[i]p said Mr. Barrie, who was only six at the time, was traumatized by the events and desperately tried to win his mother's approval. "He dressed in the dead boy's clothes and tried to stunt his own growth, believing this would please his mother. In the play, Peter Pan is the boy who does not want to grow up."
There are several relatively faithful versions out there -- and there's no reason a new version with an empowered girl who's past puberty shouldn't be made for viewers over 15 either.

11:28 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Hopefully C-Span will carry the " 9-11 and the Public Safety: Seeking Answers and Accountability" news conference at the National Press Club on Monday. It's the inauguration of the Unanswered Questions.org website.

11:05 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Gonna check out the new Mozilla 1.0 today.

10:58 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Good Zippy today.

10:53 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

By decimating the Palestinian infrastructure, Sharon ensures that Arafat can't stop the bombings. Even if he wanted to, or could afford to politically. [NYT username: aflakete password: europhilia]

10:22 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Yep, the NSA had info too.

Will all this money being thrown at the Intelligence agencies make them stop being catty and share info? Will the emphasis on secrecy in the shrubgroup make things worse?

10:13 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Thursday, June 06, 2002

Dark Lord of the House Tom DeLay nods approvingly at the new CNN.

Indeed. The Seventh Reich is Nigh. Prepare the Blitz.

4:51 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Snap City
Moneyline's Lou Dobbs declares jihad.

4:44 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

R.I.P. Dee Dee.

4:39 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Cory Doctorow on blogging.
Blogging begets blogging. I blog because I'm in the business of locating and connecting interesting things. Operating a popular blog gives people an incentive to approach me with interesting things of their own devising or discovery, for inclusion on Boing Boing. The more I blog, the more of these things I get, as other infovores toss choice morsels over my transom. The feedback loop continues on Boing Boing's message boards, where experts and amateurs debate and discuss the stories I've posted, providing depth and context for free, fixing the most interesting aspects of the most interesting subjects even more prominently in my foremind.

4:39 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

9/11
Timeline and breakdown of what was done and what could have been done.

3:59 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Poor children in Argentina forced to eat rats and frogs. [6 JUN12:17:00 entry]

3:50 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, June 05, 2002

Look, ma, I'm an amateur economist
Never mind the consequences to the rest of us, what happens when investors lose faith in the accounting practices of American corporations? Foreign investors are already favoring other countries for other reasons, after pouring billions into the US during the 90s. The Ballardian nightmare in Argentina described in the last post isn't exactly what would happen here, but what would happen might not be very pretty...

7:49 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Tim Frasca's sobering portrait of the collapsing middle class in Argentina, and the shrinking reality tunnel syndrome that's always affected Argentinians and Latin America in general.
Estela Galinde would rather be spending her Sunday afternoon in more restful activity than selling sweet breads at a political rally of the enraged citizens who chased the first of Argentina's five recent presidents from office last December. In her careful coif, blouse and schoolmarm glasses, the 38-year-old Galinde looks more like a trained social worker, which she is, than a market mammy, but as she hasn't had a job in over two years, the bake sale is not volunteer work, but survival. Stepping carefully over the other declassed residents sprawled out in Buenos Aires' Centennial Park to listen to firebrands denounce the banks ("Thieves!"), the Congress ("Gangsters!"), the IMF ("Thugs!"), the unions ("Cutthroats!"), even the bishops ("Fascists!"), Galinde is a typical middle-class Argentine wondering where she'll get her next meal.

[...]

An estimated 2,000 people a day are being driven into the ranks of the poor. The gross domestic product, at $9,000 per head a few years ago, has plunged to $3,000. That means a capital that once thought of itself as the Paris of Latin America now subsists at the same level as San Salvador or Guatemala City.

[...]

Strolling around the boulevards and cozy neighborhoods of this capital, amid its stately apartment buildings with heavy glass doors, its fancy shops, endless caf�s, the spectacular cuisine on every corner and the unmistakably European feel of the place, one can hardly imagine the institutional decay taking place just behind the fa�ades. Weimar Germany must have had a similar aroma, although there are no Austrian psychopaths in evidence, and Argentines are far better inoculated against fascist adventurism than Americans would be under similar circumstances. (They've lived through it quite recently and are in no mood for seconds.)

[...]

But bureaucratic indifference isn't the whole story behind the paralysis caused by Se�ora Beatriz's head cold. The unblinking conviction that this domestic detail logically should and must interrupt all programmed activity reflects an unimaginably narrow mental universe simultaneously at work amid the cosmopolitan splendor of Buenos Aires. Throughout Latin America one can encounter this unattractive capacity to reduce the cosmos to the few square meters where one works, shops and takes a crap, and to refuse to admit any external data whatsoever, like Santiago's taxi drivers who don't know the streets of their own city and have zero interest in learning them. The phenomenon reflects a state of humanity in which few people take delight in doing a good job, because there are no rewards and considerable dangers in doing so. In this regard, Latin America approximates the former Soviet bloc, in which workers quickly grasped that survival required obedience but not competence. Excelling, or doing anything not explicitly ordered, implied standing out, thus opening yourself up for attack, either from the hierarchy or from your alert fellows. Argentina, despite its urbane pride at being a cut above, is deeply infected.

7:35 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

The FBI intimidation of ISPs for webcasting the Daniel Pearl video is exactly the kind of completely-beyond-their-public-purview nonsense that the Privacy Fetishist Police State attitudes of shrub/Soaring Eagle propagate. Unsurprising to see that the Wall Street Journal is earning snitch points by supplying info to the Feds. [sorry for the leaden syntax, I'm tired.]

What's next, modeling the FBI after the old East German Stasi (secret police)?

5:46 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Neat article by jourmalist Paul Andrews on blogging and journalism.
Barton and Foster both operate in a journalistic gray zone corporate media can't quite figure out. They are self-made publishers who create more than content: They're building interactive communities that "meet" online to share their thoughts on the news, often writing polished commentary and connect-the-dot essays that pull together news on a topic from various sources.

Stories that are the end result of the news process in traditional media are just the starting point for online communities, which spin off discussions full of context, historical background, conjecture and related links.

11:50 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) bills itself as "the nation's largest bipartisan, individual membership association of state legislators" with a mission of working for the public good. However, this hefty report put out by the Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council finds the organization is merely a tax-exempt front for major U.S. corporations like Phillip Morris, R. J. Reynolds, National Energy Group and the infamous Enron, who use it to influence state legislative activities. "The organization?s behind-the-scenes advocacy has been surprisingly effective," the report states, "leading, according to ALEC material, to the enactment of more than 450 state laws during the 1999 and 2000 state legislative sessions." [Utne Reader Webwatch Daily]
Here's the content page for the .pdf file of the report.

11:39 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Another factor in the 9/11 mix: shrub was preoccupied with the Cold War.

Yes the one that ended in '89.

Now he seems bent on turning the clock back to the 12th century.

11:23 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Corporations, the church, the uh government and now scientific journals. If these institutions are only self-serving and corrupt, and carry on like secret societies, what's so patriotic about supporting them? Woudn't it be more patriotic to demand transparency, accountability and integrity?

2:27 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Tuesday, June 04, 2002

The website you'd expect from Richard Kadrey, whose pair of Covert Culture anthologies in the early 90s were great fun. Now you can find everything by searching the Web, but they're still a good sampling of interesting music, books, eccentrica. So cheap on half.com, I'll have to pick them up.

The texts of his novels Metrophage and Kamikaze L'Amour are available in toto onsite too. [bb]

11:22 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Pilots that mistakenly bombed Canadian troops were probably on speed sanctioned by superiors.
In the meeting, held in the week before Canadian soldiers were shelled by American bombs in Afghanistan, at least one F-16 pilot complained that requirements for crew rest were not being observed and that many of the pilots were overtired. The pilot was told, however, that further questions about crew rest would not be looked on favourably by the wing command.

Instead, pilots were advised to speak to a flight surgeon about so-called "go/no pills" -- amphetamines used to help stay awake on long missions, and sedatives to help sleep.

10:32 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wondered How Long It Would Take 'Em File
Berkeley is offering a course on blogging. One of the teachers is John Battelle, "one of the co-founders of Wired magazine and former CEO of The Industry Standard", no less. [dotweezy]

10:08 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Good Undernews today on gun control and Greens vs Demos.

5:20 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monsanto uses viral marketing -- fake posts on a biotechnology listserve -- to get the scientific journal Nature to retract a paper critical of GM crops. It's the first time Nature has withdrawn an article.
While, in the past, companies have created fake citizens' groups to campaign in favor of trashing forests or polluting rivers, now they create fake citizens. Messages purporting to come from disinterested punters are planted on listserves at critical moments, disseminating misleading information in the hope of recruiting real people to the cause. Detective work by the campaigner Jonathan Matthews and the freelance journalist Andy Rowell shows how a PR firm contracted to the biotech company Monsanto appears to have played a crucial but invisible role in shaping scientific discourse.

[...]

On the day the paper was published, messages started to appear on a biotechnology listserve used by more than 3000 scientists called AgBioWorld. The first came from a correspondent named "Mary Murphy." Chapela is on the board of directors of the Pesticide Action Network, and therefore, she claimed, "not exactly what you'd call an unbiased writer." Her posting was followed by a message from an "Andura Smetacek" claiming, falsely, that Chapela's paper had not been peer-reviewed, that he was "first and foremost an activist" and that the research had been published in collusion with environmentalists. The next day, another email from "Smetacek" asked the list, "how much money does Chapela take in speaking fees, travel reimbursements and other donations... for his help in misleading fear-based marketing campaigns?"

4:00 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Deeply Shocked File
Millions of Americans may be taking expensive new pain medications even though they do not need them, pharmaceutical researchers said on Tuesday. [link]
Couldn't be the saturation ad campaign on TV and in magazines could it? Jeez, and these drug companies are so wholesome and understanding, so full of love. (urp)

9:32 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

The Bush 9/11 Scandal for Dummies I agree with this mostly, except that the Demos are the answer. I think the whole 2-party system as we know it is too incestuous to be relied on for anything but more of the same.

12:21 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monday, June 03, 2002

Tony Blair's administration is just as committed to profiting off the India-Pakistan military build-up as the US is. Here's a history of Britain's dismal record around the world, fueling conflict and making money off war.

11:59 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Evidence mounts that the FBI is covering up knowledge that TWA 800 was shot down by a shoulder-armed Stinger missile. After reading the Borjesson and Hendrix essays in Into the Buzzsaw, I knew this would only be a matter of time.

11:48 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sydney archbishop admits offer to pay off families of sexually abused kids.
"I offered them 50 grand in compensation according to the publicly acknowledged procedure," he said.

"They chose not to accept that."

[...]

They said the offer was made to them through lawyers acting on Archbishop Pell's behalf, and they were also warned if they did not accept it that any legal action they might take would be "strenuously defended" by the Church, the Associated Press news agency reported.

However Archbishop Pell, despite admitting the offer, denied that the payment was "hush money" intended to buy the silence of victims.

"I did not attempt to silence any victim or buy them off," he told French news agency AFP.

"The allegations that I attempted to silence anyone are totally unfounded and totally untrue."
Are these guys spooky or what?

12:06 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Charley Reese on Hateman #1.
President Bush is so mismanaging his "war" on terrorism that if somebody doesn't rein him in, he's likely to become a disastrous embarrassment.

His lectures to the Europeans, in which he treated them as if they were naive children who just did not understand what a Great Satan resides in Baghdad, were embarrassing. Only European civility kept him from being laughed off the podium.

12:05 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

105 MPH winds and hail descend on Pitttsburgh amusement park.
Part of the roof covering a ride called The Whip collapsed in Friday night s storm, crushing one person, said Mary Lou Rosemeyer, a spokeswoman for Kennywood Park in suburban Pittsburgh.

2002 - 06 - 03 01:56:00 WEST MIFFLIN, Pa. (AP) - Amusement park workers on Sunday scrambled to assess and repair damage from a storm that damaged several rides, sent at least 47 people to the hospital and killed one woman. Kennywood Park, where 105 - mph winds sent hail and flying debris for about 30 minutes on Friday, was to remain closed through at least Monday, park officials said. One woman was killed and at least 47 people, many of them children, were taken to area hospitals after a storm packing 80 mph winds tore through a crowded amusement park. Thousands of children on end - of - school outings were ready for amusement park rides when the storm barreled through the Pittsburgh suburbs.

11:13 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, June 02, 2002

lizardboy wakes up to environmental changes? Ya gotta wonder what made this happen....
U-TURN: BUSH ADMIN OUTLINES 'GLOBAL WARMING' EFFECTS ON AMERICA; ACKNOWLEDGES DAMAGE

In a stunning U-turn for the Bush administration, the United States has sent a climate report to the United Nations detailing "specific and far-reaching effects" that it says "global warming will inflict" on the American environment.

MORE

Also for the first time -- the White House places "most of the blame for recent global warming on human actions -- mainly the burning of fossil fuels that send heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere," the NEW YORK TIMES is planning to report on Monday Page Ones, according to publishing sources.

The United States will be substantially changed in the next few decades, claims the Bush report. The United States will "very likely" be seeing the "disruption of snow-fed water supplies, more stifling heat waves and the permanent disappearance of Rocky Mountain meadows and coastal marshes."

MORE

"The new report's predictions present a sharp contrast to the administration's previous statements on climate change, in which President Bush always spoke in generalities and stressed the need for much more research to resolve scientific questions."

The move puts a substantial distance between the administration and the energy industry and automakers.

8:50 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Headhunting for teachers.

3:12 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Nice new crop circle in Germany.

2:56 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

The alleged al-Qaeda warning to Americans that's all over the media refers to a message on a website that is blank except for a message that says "No web site is configured at this address."

Anyone have proof this is for real? Reuters claims there was a site there which "in the past regularly carried news on Afghanistan and statements it said came from Taliban leaders." But where is it? Smells funny to me.

2:48 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

That's one of the great things about living in America: moral superiority is so damned cheap.

-- James Crumley

This country is going so far to the right you won't be able to recognize it.

-- John Mitchell, 1973

Those who think history has left us helpless should recall the abolitionist of 1830, the feminist of 1870, the labor organizer of 1890, or the gay or lesbian writer of 1910. They, like us, did not get to choose their time in history but they, like us, did get to choose what they did with it.

-- Sam Smith

REVIEWS

from Sassafrass (9/23/02)
"Unconventional viewpoints at 'charging the canvas'

Opinions that will ruffle feathers, from someone who clearly knows their way around information and the blogosphere."

Blog of the Day
1/18/02

WEEKLY QUOTE

They tell us it's about race, and we believe them. And they call it a "democracy," and we nod our heads, so pleased with ourselves. We blame the Socias [gangsters], we occasionally sneer at the Paulsons [latest crop of craven pols] but we always vote for the Sterling Mulkerns [good old boys]. And in occasional moments of quasi-lucidity, we wonder why the Mulkerns of this world don't respect us. They don't respect us because we are their molested children. They fuck us morning, noon, and night, but as long as they tuck us in with a kiss, as long as they whisper into our ears, "Daddy loves you, Daddy will take care of you," we close our eyes and go to sleep, trading our bodies, our souls, for the comforting veneers of "civilization" and "security," the false idols of our twentieth century wet dream. And it's our reliance on that dream that the Mulkerns, the Paulsons, the Socias, the Phils, the Heroes of this world depend upon. That's their dark knowledge. That's how they win.

-- Dennis Lehane, A Drink Before the War

In the eyes of posterity it will inevitably seem that, in safeguarding our freedom, we destroyed it; that the vast clandestine apparatus we built up to probe our enemies' resources and intentions only served in the end to confuse our own purposes; that the practice of deceiving others for the good of the state led infallibly to our deceiving ourselves; and that the vast army of intelligence personnel built up to execute these purposes were soon caught up in the web of their own sick fantasies, with disastrous consequences to them and us.

-- Malcolm Muggeridge

NOT IN OUR NAME
(link to list against Iraq War)

charging the canvas

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