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READING

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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all art/music/culture links (including music biz/file sharing news), fiction I'm reading and what I'm listening to and watching -- all moving here

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NOW AVAILABLE AT ME-ZINE

STOP TERRORISM

ABBREVIATIONS FOR SITES I OFTEN STEAL NEWS ITEMS FROM:

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

amazon wish list

alibris wishlist

Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia

Amazon Light

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, July 06, 2002

Pledge

From The Atlanta Constitution, via Undernews:
Q: Do other countries have pledges to their flags, or is this a uniquely American custom? - Fred Gates, Norcross

A: "Pledges of allegiance are marks of totalitarian states, not
democracies," says David Kertzer, a Brown University anthropologist who specializes in political rituals. "I can't think of a single democracy except the United States that has a pledge of allegiance." When Hitler ruled in Germany and Mussolini in Italy, their regimes demanded that "true patriots" publicly vow their allegiance to their respective fatherlands. Postwar democratic governments of the two countries made a conscious effort to minimize such shows of national pride.

3:03 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Just keeping up with the times

The Cali drug cartel had such a sophisticated network set up, the DEA is hiding their mainframe.
In a sense, the cartels are putting their own dark twist on the same productivity-enhancing strategies that other multinational businesses have seized on in the Internet age. Indeed, the $80 billion-a-year cocaine business poses some unique challenges: The supply chain is immense and global, competition is literally cutthroat, and regulatory pressure is intense. The traffickers have the advantages of unlimited funds and no scruples, and they've invested billions of dollars to create a technological infrastructure that would be the envy of any Fortune 500 company -- and of the law enforcement officials charged with going after the drug barons. "I spent this morning working on the budget," the head of DEA intelligence, Steve Casteel, said recently. "Do you think they have to worry about that? If they want it, they buy it."

[...]

Henao's cartel is a champion of decentralization, outsourcing, and pooled risk, along with technological innovations to enhance the secrecy of it all. For instance, to scrub his profits, he and fellow money launderers use a private, password-protected website that daily updates an inventory of U.S. currency available from cartel distributors across North America, says a veteran Treasury Department investigator. Kind of like a business-to-business exchange, the site allows black-market money brokers to bid on the dirty dollars, which cartel financial chiefs want to convert to Colombian pesos to use for their operations at home. "A trafficker can bid on different rates -- 'I'll sell $1 million in cash in Miami,'" says the agent. "And he'll take the equivalent of $800,000 in pesos for it in Colombia." The investigator estimates the online bazaar's annual turnover at as much as $3 billion.

Henao and other cartel leaders recruit IT talent from many sources, intelligence officials say. The traffickers lure some specialists from legitimate local businesses, offering scads of cash. They also contract with Israeli, U.S., and other mercenaries who are former electronic warfare experts from military special ops units. Cartel leaders have sent members of their own families to top U.S. engineering and aeronautical schools; when the kids come home, some serve as trusted heads of technical operations. Most of the high-end gear the cartels deploy comes from household-name multinational companies, many of them American; typically, front companies purchase equipment from sales offices in Colombia or through a series of intermediaries operating in the United States.

[...]

More recently, the cartels have built their own subs, with help, Soto suspects, from Italian engineers who stayed in Colombia after overseeing the construction of the navy's own fleet of commando submarines two decades ago. Henao, for instance, is believed by military and intelligence officials to have a small fleet of mini-subs -- used for, among other things, hauling dope to those toxic waste freighters. So far, Colombian authorities have found only two drug subs, both of which were under construction. The most recent one, discovered 21 months ago outside Bogot�, was a 78-foot craft that cost an estimated $10 million. Intelligence sources say it belonged to Henao's North Valley Cartel. A Colombian official says Henao wanted a vessel that could carry several more tons than the Buenaventura mini-subs and travel as far as 2,000 miles -- say, to the coast of Mexico or Southern California.

Arrayed against this formidable technological arsenal is, well, not much. The commander of the narcotics agents in the Buenaventura area is a world-weary man who rarely ventures outside his military compound not far from town. He never goes into Buenaventura itself. Traffickers have put a price of 35 million pesos (about $17,000) on his head. "Life is cheap here," he mutters. He displays boxes and boxes of seized high-tech gear. Even personnel at the bottom of the cartel food chain have Israeli night-vision goggles, ICOM radio frequency scanners, and Magellan GPS handhelds. [link via bb]

2:21 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

R.I.P. John Frankenheimer

I guess this just happened, coz there's no obits on google's first page, and I found this Onion interview which is more interesting anyway.

Seven Days in May, The Manchurian Candidate, and George Wallace were my favorites, though I haven't seen a lot of his stuff, and very little of his live TV from the 50s, which was great I'm sure.

2:01 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, July 05, 2002

Parcel Pissed

Last October in a hare-brained scheme to "speed up delivery" and supposedly resolve the post-9/11 parcel transport tangle -- and without warning apparently -- USPS switched from direct delivery to 23 European countries to distributing them through Consignia, Britain's less than efficient semi-privatized mail service.

Just in time for Christmas...

For Karen Kaja, an American living in Paris, Christmas came very late this year.

Friends of hers in the United States, hoping to surprise her, wrapped some books and candles, tied them with a bow, and sent them through the U.S. Postal Service in December for a presumed beeline delivery to Kaja's front door.

Instead, the parcel took the equivalent of the Incredible Journey, first to Frankfurt, then to a warehouse outside of Paris. Curiously, she was told the package next went back to the States before finally ending up back in France.

Kaja got her Christmas parcel - in June. But she had to pay E20, or about $19.60, more than a third the price of the gift itself, to a French delivery service, Extand. By the time she had taken delivery, she had called Extand numerous times to ask why she had to open her wallet for a package already paid for at a U.S. post office. The phone calls alone cost her E40 as she was placed on hold on Extand's pay-per-minute line. A delivery date was finally set in early March - then broken when no one came. Five more delivery dates were ignored over the next three weeks. Then she was told on March 25 that her package had been sent back to the States. No explanation was given.

Her friends, not surprisingly, were baffled and embarrassed.

"To me it felt like extortion," Kaja said. "I was held captive for a package that was paid for and insured in the United States; I couldn't have it until I paid for it - and even then, I had to wait forever."

[...]

To be sure, all European countries assign customs duties and taxes to certain parcels. But a new burden is placed on consumers in Europe receiving packages worth more than E45 because they must now pay fees for customs-processing that are often higher than any imposed by the national post offices that used to handle packages sent from the United States. General Logistics Systems charges through its affiliates a handling fee averaging E17 per parcel, and which may be as high as E20, for "escorting" the paperwork for the package through customs. A value-added tax is assessed on the fee.

Consumers in the United States and Europe seem to be largely unaware of the changeover. Senders are still under the impression that the price paid at a U.S. post office covers the entire cost of delivery, and recipients have had no warning that customs processing fees must now be paid in addition to duties to obtain their parcel.
Bottom line: use FedEx or UPS for overseas packages to Europe til you hear this has been switched back to direct delivery.

3:34 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Testing testing...

Having trouble posting from my remote library location.

My PC won't be up til Monday, our video card died, and Dell is stonewalling. Apparently the card I got 3 years ago when I go the PC is discontinued and blah blah blah...

I'll try to keep posting from here, but regular posting won't be back til Monday, if all goes well.

3:21 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Tuesday, July 02, 2002

Having video card problems, so posts will be less frequent for a couple days.

3:56 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monday, July 01, 2002

Crying for Photoshop File

Coulter, She-Wolf of the Christian Right.

5:48 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

More doubts about connections between the US military/intelligence complex and Islamic militants

Going back to '98, Unknown News points out this piece from the World Socialist Web Site on the connection between Ali A. Mohamed, a former Green Beret and instructor of Gulf War troops who was still actively serving when he was training Afghan guerrillas in bomb-making in the early 90s.

He was later secretly charged in connection with the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Also in the article: how the US was informed in detail -- a month ahead of time -- of the embassy bombings by an Egyptian who was discredited by "a foreign intelligence service" (the Mossad? MI6?).

4:45 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

A bike called "William Burroughs" [Street Tech]

4:12 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Think of the scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex is tied to the chair with his eyes clamped open. . .

Dan Gillmor on the MediaMobsters' "paranoia, stupidity and greed."
The Digital Age is roiling traditional business models. Technological change always has that effect, and industries almost always fight revolutions before they adapt to them.

So it comes as no shock that the owners of information and entertainment are trying to protect their own potentially untenable business models. They've persuaded their legislative pets in Congress to pass ill-considered laws. They're busy erecting technological barriers to their customer's choice and well-being. Law and technology are combining to carve away your rights in favor of the owners' control.

4:06 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Happy Canada Day!

Since I was born in Canada. . .

Origin of the name. (It's Iroquois for the area that is now Quebec City).

Lyrics to "O Canada!" (with sound file!)

Watch Parliament Hill in Ottawa as the celebration unfolds! (Not for the faint of heart.)

Culturezine:
Broken Pencil

Consumer News:
Straight Goods

A couple good Canadian blogs:
wood s lot
formica

Maybe I'll write about my connection with Canada tomorrow.

12:38 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, June 30, 2002

G8 security protocol document found in a picnic area.

Didn't this exact thing happen last year in the US? Is someone "on the inside" doing it on purpose to mock the tightened security? To show how the kind of high-Nazi overkill evident by the Canadian government is necessary? It's just beggars the concept of coincidence, doesn't it? [jog]

11:09 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

A couple from boing boing

Spud Melin, inventor of the hula hoop and the frisbee, passes.

Nice recombined propaganda posters hit Homeland Security, etc.

10:54 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

British actor Steven Berkoff deported over one day overstay 5 years ago

This is the kind of bureaucratic, Kafkaesque nonsense that you'd expect from, say, Myanmar. You know, a country ruled by militaristic half-wits drunk with the power fear has bestowed upon them.

I feel safer, don't you? [blogdex]

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

Yea. For I, Lord of Death, Have Spoken
Overall, Ashcroft has approved capital punishment for one or more defendants in nearly half the eligible cases, the statistics show. Some of the cases come from Michigan, Vermont and other states that have outlawed capital punishment, but where the federal death penalty can be applied under certain circumstances.

The data also indicate that racial disparities in the application of the death penalty, identified as a problem under the previous attorney general, Janet Reno, have lingered during Ashcroft's tenure.

Since Ashcroft became attorney general, the Justice Department has been three times more likely to seek death for black defendants accused of killing whites than for blacks alleged to have killed nonwhites, according to the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project, which was established by the courts to monitor capital cases.
"Soaring Eagle" Ashcroft feels The Power of the Ancient Death-Feeding Lizard Gods Flow Through Him. And The Time for Sacrifice Is Nigh.

9:02 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Calif. Lawmaker Calls For P2P Vigilantism
The legislation likely would halt practices like converting a CD to the MP3 format for use in a user's portable player, and burning a backup copy of a purchased CD.

[...]

StreamCast said it would hope instead that content holders, content creators, technology companies and consumers could come together and find a solution.

"Obviously, legislation must be narrowly crafted, with strict bounds on acceptable behavior by the copyright owner," Berman cautioned.

OK Howie, time to put away the SS leathers and bondage rings and stop sucking Hilary Rosen's toes.

There's a good boy. If you're really good, maybe she'll give you a spanking...

8:42 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Cell phone proof rooms

Japanese scientists have developed wood lined with nickel-zinc ferrite which apparently kills cell signals.

Sounds good to me, although couldn't this be used to prevent unauthorized wireless access etc.?

6:13 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Mp3s/streaming audio outlawed at workplace
Companies increasingly are blocking access to Internet music and video at firewalls and are issuing sweeping initiatives that ban workplace media usage. The trend is a result of two developments: media usage hogging enormous amounts of corporate bandwidth and threats of legal liability as the entertainment industry aggressively pursues copyright scofflaws.

The Recording Industry Association of America is beginning to train its legal guns on companies it thinks are aiding copyright theft by allowing workers to trade free music and movies at work. [fark]

2:01 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Joe Stiglitz's book is out

The former IMFer who won the Nobel prize in economics dissects the IMF's policies in detail.

11:54 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

READ THIS

Apparently magazine titles that command you are the hip thing.

But it's only part of a general trend in the media to capitalize on people's search for someone to tell them what to do. These judge shows on TV, for example.

Is that you Daddy? Mommy?
Cultural observers say that one-syllable titles aren't anything new ? think about publications like Life, Time, and Look. But words that make you feel more included and part of something are.

Shifting for a moment to advertising, consider the Nike ad campaign "Just Do It." That command leaves little room for doubt as to what your next move is, says Jim Heimann, editor of All American Ads, a series of books looking at advertising from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s.

It's saying, "Don't think about this, just go and do it," he says.

Now, advertisers have less time but more outlets to reach out as they did back half a century ago, when all people had to do was sit down and read the ads in the Saturday Evening Post. "They've got to get you right away or they've lost you. So everything has become kind of terse and short. And with that kind of language, you manipulate people into action," Mr. Heimann says.

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

Vietnam II

With how many more in the works? Iraq? The Philippines? What, were there 60 countries on Cheney's list a while back?

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

The New Hong Kong

Unemployment tripled, property prices halved, dissent suppressed. Of course the world economy ism't doing so great either, and China has economic problems otherwise as well. But the Chinese claims that everything would be fine, democracy wouldn't be kaiboshed, seem like hogwash now.

10:19 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

The Birds are back!

Up to 75,000 crows are flocking to a town (in this case Woodstock, Ontario) at once, spooking residents.

No one knows why.

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

South Dakota casino shut down due to wildfire

Geez, 110° in the Dakotas! That's AZ weather.

1:59 AM - [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

The Link Section