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

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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, July 20, 2002

Paul Krassner is still crazy after all these years -- fortunately for us
Did your satire ever get you in trouble?

I think the part out of the Kennedy book that is in my book The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race was probably the most controversial thing I ever did. It took several months to get it printed. My printer refused to print it. His wife, who was a law student, said I could go to prison for it, and he was afraid that as a result of that article someone might try to assassinate Lyndon Johnson or that Jackie Kennedy would commit suicide.

Is this Johnson having sex with Kennedy's corpse?

Yes. And so there was a lot of pressure on me not to do it, but there was no question in my mind. First of all, it was a literary challenge. I didn't learn till later there was a term for it: apocrypha. It began because there was an authorized biography called The Death of a President, authorized by Jackie and Bobby Kennedy. When it was going to be published they refused for certain portions to be published. I tried with my contacts to get a copy of the original manuscript so I could publish the parts that were left out. I was unable to do that so I was forced to write them myself. There was no other option. The challenge there was to nurture the incredible in the context of credibility. I structured it starting with totally true stuff about LBJ calling Kennedy's father a Nazi sympathizer--that was all true--and then going on to other things that reporters knew but were taboo, like the affairs with Marilyn Monroe and things like that. And so it was like an onion: I would peel off layer after layer of verisimilitude. I got a lot of feedback from intelligent people--working-class people or professionals or attorneys, a journalist-- who said they believed it, if only for a moment. I met a 25-year-old musician, and she told me the JFK stories not knowing that I had written it and believing it was true!

10:09 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Heather Wokusch on shrub's forgotten children
The welfare reform bill additionally throws hundreds of millions of dollars into marriage-promotion schemes, yet puts roadblocks in the way of young mothers hoping to receive education and job skills training. Mechanisms for accountability have been conveniently left out of the bill, and programs/services to directly help poor families eliminated. The administration is now pressuring the Senate to pass the legislation it calls "compassionate."

Brings back memories of campaign era Bush insisting that "the biggest percentage of our budget should go to children's education," then submitting a 2002 budget bulging with corporate perks, defense contractor pork, and 40 times more money for tax cuts than for education.

It says something about a nation's short-sighted priorities when it spends three times more on each incarcerated citizen than on each public school pupil. When just one month of its military spending would be enough to eradicate poverty for all of its children for a full year.

10:00 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

The Peculiar Institution of Mormon Rock
Sometimes people get the idea that Mormons -- all Mormons -- are identical, have never struggled with their religion, and live in a nightmarishly wholesome, unrealistic '50s episode of Leave it to Beaver. And sometimes Mormons get the idea that other Mormons should speak, dress and behave a certain way to be a "good" Mormon. To say encountering these mindsets in my life has been frustrating would be an understatement.

I am an active Mormon and my biggest passion in life is rock 'n' roll. Some of my favorite bands are Nine Inch Nails, PJ Harvey, AC/DC, Metallica, the Melvins and classic rock greats The Who, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones. I subscribe to music magazines, I play several instruments and I've played in more than 10 rock bands since I was 19 (I'm 26 now). Most of my friends are not Mormon.
Have to admit I like some of Low's stuff. Didn't know about Randy Bachman (Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive) or Mick Ronson.

But the Mormon hierarchy and obsession with genealogy creeps me out. Mind control is mind control.

Just ask Mikal Gilmore. Boy did Shot in the Heart spook me back in '96. Excellent book. A ghost story really -- the ghosts being their Dad and Joseph Smith.

Come to think of it, I can see how rock n roll could easily erupt from that stew. . .

9:47 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Remember that obelisk that Italy stole from Ethiopia and then got struck by lightning? They're giving it back.

12:20 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Argentinian seniors turn to prostitution
A documentary recently broadcast in Argentina has revealed how the grip of economic crisis has meant that many older women are now working as prostitutes in order to survive.

Speaking to BBC World Service, the Argentine film-maker explained how grandmothers have resorted to selling their bodies so that they can feed their families.

"Some of these mature prostitutes have been prostitutes in the past," explained Rolando Grana, "but what we found was a high percentage that had never done anything like this before."

Made by the Argentine channel, TV America, the television documentary revealed the plight of women like Alicia, who is in her 60s and currently working as a prostitute.

"I don't normally charge more than 20 pesos or the clients would be off like a shot," she told reporters.

"About 90% of my clients are young men, which is good because I don't like old men."

9:16 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Superfund for toxic cleanups running out

Since Congress refused to renew the tax on corporate polluters to fund the Superfund when it expired in '95, the fund has shrunk and taxpayers are shouldering more of the burden of cleaning up corporate pollution.

So if the states and volunteers end up doing it, they might start talking and wondering what their taxes are paying for the feds to do exactly. Fund an increasingly suspect and expensive militarization against an elusive terrorist foes, and giving Stasi-like powers to the intelligence complex? And paying for a Congress that does whatever the corporations want?

And shrub will just say people should volunteer to clean up corporate pollution "for the cause of freedom"?

". . . one in four Americans lives within four miles of one of the Superfund sites -- 85 percent of which have contaminated groundwater."

9:04 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Reality video of the homeless fighting each other strikes a chord

I guess this isn't new for fans of Howard Stern or FixedNews, but it's new for me.
One homeless man, his pants sliding off his back end, pummels a foe into the corner of a public toilet. Another rips his front tooth out with pliers. A third bashes open a candy machine with a sledgehammer.

That's entertainment? For thousands of people who have forked out at least $22 each for a copy of "Bumfights: A Cause for Concern," apparently so.

The hour-long flick, which through violence and gore depicts the worst imaginable behavior of homeless people in Las Vegas and southern California, has sold more than 250,000 copies since its April debut. It's also turned its producers into millionaires.

This is how desperate people are to feel superior. And for some, no doubt, to justify their apocalyptic beliefs.

8:40 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

The Malls of Gilead
With its unusual move into commercial real estate, the congregation has become one of a growing number of Christian groups trying to transfer the Bible's message from the pulpit to the retail rack.

Whether it's giant Baptist churches, evangelical ministries, loose associations of churches, or even individual developers with a religious bent, Christian capitalism is taking root everywhere from small towns to the sprawling centers of Dallas and Atlanta.

The developers' pitch to busy modern Christians: Get all your spiritual -- as well as shopping -- needs fulfilled at one central location. On a deeper level, though, the Christian malls seem to be responding to a desire to establish self-sustaining -- what some critics call insular -- religious communities that extend beyond Sunday morning communion.
I particularly like the L.A. DoD complex that is now "part church sanctuary, part shopping mall."

That would be a nice image to write a novel depicting the fall of empire around.

8:26 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, July 19, 2002

R.I.P. Alan Lomax

Long before the rest of us got on the roots music bandwagon, Lomax was stumpin' the backroads, recording a heritage which would otherwise be lost.
Alan Lomax was still in his teens when he began assisting his father's efforts to interview and record musicians of almost every stripe.

Long before tape recording became feasible, the work entailed lugging around recording equipment that weighed hundreds of pounds.

Lomax said making it possible to record and play back music in remote areas "gave a voice to the voiceless" and "put neglected cultures and silenced people into the communications chain."

Among the famous musicians recorded by the Lomaxes were Woody Guthrie; Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly; "Jelly Roll" Morton; Muddy Waters; and Son House.

Much of their work was done for the Library of Congress, where the Archive of American Folk Song had been established in 1928.

Some of the music that seemed exotic in the '30s had a profound influence on the development of rock 'n' roll. In "The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll," critic Robert Palmer wrote about a black religious "ring shout" song, "Run Old Jeremiah," recorded by the Lomaxes in a tiny rural church in 1934.

"The rhythmic singing, the hard-driving beat, the bluesy melody and the improvised, stream-of-consciousness words of this particular shout ... all anticipate key aspects of rock & roll as it would emerge some 20 years later," Palmer wrote.

[...]

Two songs from the younger Lomax's collection were featured on the 2000 Grammy-winning soundtrack of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

11:41 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Can't find the link now, but there was an article in the SF Bay Guardian about the new David Bollier book Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth which looks worth a look.
In Silent Theft, David Bollier argues that a great untold story of our time is the staggering privatization and abuse of our common wealth. Corporations are engaged in a relentless plunder of dozens of resources that we collectively own -- publicly funded medical breakthroughs, software innovation, the airwaves, the public domain of creative works, and even the DNA of plants, animals and humans. Too often, however, our government turns a blind eye -- or sometimes helps give away our assets.

Amazingly, the silent theft of our shared wealth has gone largely unnoticed because we have lost our ability to see the commons. Spooling out one outrageous story after another, Bollier skillfully weaves together debates about the Internet, the environment, biotechnology, and the communications revolution. His fresh and compelling critique illuminates a rarely explored landscape in our political and cultural life. [MapCruzin]

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

Chuck Stephens' engagingly snarky review of Minority Report

Which has already left your local multiplex as it has mine, but which is the only movie this summer (so far) I might be able to sit through.

OK, maybe The Road to Perdition. . .
As it turns out, the world is an even stranger place than Dick might have wanted to admit, and Minority Report just happens to be the weirdest, darkest Hollywood blockbuster of the summer. A credit to both the suggestiveness and the resilience of Dick's fiction -- which, it must be admitted, is often filled with a level of flotsam all its own: space toys and robo-cops doing double duty as niche-market sales agents for volumes limned with darker thoughts, like the peeling edges of poorly laminated realities -- and to the ever more adventuresome careers of Cruise and Spielberg, it's a turbulent circus of little big ideas and crass media auto-critique. Marked everywhere by the impressions left on the director and his star by their associations with Stanley Kubrick -- who taught Cruise the value of critical self-reflection and Spielberg the potential of darkening up his yarns of wayward youth -- it's also a film of world-splitting loose ends and suggestive cracked-mirror ruminations.

[...]

As the film's imperiled top cop, Cruise's John Anderton seems far less a typically Dickian hero ("I'm getting bald. Bald and fat and old" is the character's first utterance in the original story) than a reinvention of America's Most Wanted host John Walsh, he of the long-ago abducted-and-murdered son and subsequent career of frothing, Fox-sponsored incarcerationism. Go on from there to imagine the whole shebang as a wayward episode of Homicide: Life on the Streets, with Richard Belzer replaced by Samantha Morton's wet-T-shirted precog and everything photographed in a color palette of ethereal iMac blue and tarted up with streaming dust-light and gaseous blurs --it'll come as no surprise when Spielberg allows the Cops fanfare to cascade in during one particularly overburdened scene. But what in the world is Sam Fuller's House of Bamboo doing playing on the flop-house wall screen of the crackpot optician who swaps out Cruise's eyeballs? And why does everyone keep grabbing Cruise's ass or copping a quick kiss?
May be the first Spielberg movie I really like since Close Encounters.

Still, I'd like to see what that guy who did Donnie Darko would do with Dick's stuff. . .

11:03 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

The Better World Club

A green alternative to AAA. Can't vouch for it personally, but it's worth a look if these things matter to you.

10:48 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Kevin Phillips on signs the US is following the decline patterns of previous empires (Holland, Britain, Spain)
I would suggest the following yardsticks. Don't watch military power -- watch the financial underpinnings and corollaries of that power for shakiness. Edwardian Britain really couldn't afford to pump money into dreadnoughts while her industrial base eroded. As for the U.S, when the U.S. invaded the Gulf in 1990-91, the budget forced Washington to pass the hat to the allies. Now the budget deficit is climbing again, and how will the U.S. finance any unexpected ballooning of the apparently forthcoming war with Iraq?

The U.S. also has a nearly $2 trillion international debt, and the current account deficit is approaching 5 percent again this year. When the British current account deficit finally peaked near 6 percent in 1947-48, the U.K. was becoming a financial basket case.

As for the notion that "the tech industry is American," that has an element of quaintness given the dislocations of the NASDAQ crash, the rapid movement of production and software development to China, India, and the rest of Asia, and the fact that in 2000 some 45 percent of Cisco's workforce in California was Asian because of the dearth of U.S. engineers. All of these relationships are permitting a technology transfer to Asia that may be flowing even faster than the 1880-1914 steel and chemicals-led technology transfer from Britain to the U.S. and Germany. I wouldn't be surprised to see the high-tech flag shift to Asia some time between 2020 and 2030.

Politically, of course, concern about some form of U.S. decline has been threading in and out of U.S. politics since the late 1960s -- defeat in Vietnam, the OPEC crises, the Middle American bitterness in 1978- 80 over the symbolism of the Panama Canal treaties and the Iranian seizure of U.S. Embassy hostages, the Japan scare of 1987-91, and almost certainly some new form this decade. Its components may already be taking shape. [from the email exchange he had with James Fallows at The Atlantic]

10:30 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Web mail today
If you're torn between the big two, Hotmail's recent service cutbacks give Yahoo the edge in a few important categories.

With Yahoo, for example, you get 4 megabytes of inbox capacity for your e-mail, or 6 megs if you signed up with Yahoo before it shrank that allotment last year. With Hotmail, you get 2. People can send attached files as large as 1.5 megs from a Yahoo account, compared with half a meg for Hotmail users. With a Hotmail account, users have to log in every 30 days or the account is shut down; Yahoo mail account users get four months.

The same goes for both services' for-pay upgrades -- with Hotmail, you can upgrade to a 10-meg mailbox for $19.99 per year, a fee that also lets users send larger attached files and fetch e-mail from regular Internet mail accounts. To upgrade a Yahoo account to 10 megs of storage will only run you $9.99 a year.

At some lesser-known Web-mail services, meanwhile, you can still get those sorts of extras for free. Mail.com, for example, gives users numerous addresses to choose from (options such as "@mindless.com" or "@earthling.net") and a 10-meg inbox.

9:00 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

At least he can speak intelligible sentences...

But India's new President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, sounds like some weird combination of Gandhi, Edward Teller and Theodore Roosevelt. He's the father of India's nuclear program and seems to be a folksy front for the unapologetically reactionary Hindu nationalists.

The power is still in the hands of Vajpayee and the BJP though.

8:49 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Thursday, July 18, 2002

Good review of the Wen Ho Lee and Stober/Hoffman books on the Lee case

What a travesty. Just about everyone looks bad.

11:07 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

freedominfo.org

"the online network of freedom of information advocates"

Watch the rest of the world become more open and democratic as the US makes The Handmaid's Tale and 1984 look like the quaint views of naïve Pollyanna optimists.

10:49 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, July 17, 2002

Propel software apparently speeds up dial-up access 3X, but it's $4.95/month and there's those pesky privacy issues. . .

You can try it for a week free.

I might.

7:08 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

SHAD

Still catching up on last month's news even, but if I haven't heard about it, I'm posting it.
The Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD) Project was a Defense Department experimental program in the 1960s which entailed the use of biological and chemical agents on U.S. servicemen. The existence of SHAD was first acknowledged by the Pentagon in May of this year.

Yesterday the Senate approved an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act that would mandate declassification of SHAD-related medical records, and their transfer to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
There's a link to the Pentagon page on the 12 out of 113 tests declassified to date.

6:50 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Kevin Phillips on the comeuppance of the New Gilded Age
America is at a turning point. Corporate scandals, the fall of the stock markets, the sudden mobilizations in Washington to legislate against some of the more egregious corporate abuses - all this indicates that the nation's attitude toward business is changing. It is potentially a bigger change than many politicians realize.

Near the peak of the great booms, old economic cautions are dismissed, financial and managerial operators sidestep increasingly inadequate regulations and ethics surrender to greed. Public muttering usually swells into a powerful chorus for reform - deep, systemic changes designed to catch up with a whole new range of and capacity for frauds and finagles and bring them under regulatory control.

Correction is difficult. The big wealth momentum booms leave behind a triple corruption, financial, political and philosophic. Beside the swindles and frauds that crest with the great speculative booms, historians have noted a parallel tendency: Cash moving into politics increases with market fevers.

During the Gilded Age railroad barons bought legislatures, and business leaders bought seats in the U.S. Senate. In the last years of the 19th century, a senator naively proposed a bill to unseat those senators whose offices were found to have been purchased. This prompted a colleague to reply, "We might lose a quorum here, waiting for the courts to act."

6:34 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

An offer they might start refusing

Micro$oft's Software Assurance is basically a protection scheme.
Michael Sloon has had 14 months to prepare, but it still does not make it any easier to cut a $150,000 check to Microsoft Corp.

Sloon, the systems manager for the government of Yakima County in the state of Washington, faces a July 31 deadline to enroll in a new software-upgrade program at Microsoft or else end up paying even more in the future.

"It's a hate-love relationship," Sloon said. "Microsoft can put out great products, but some people are calling this a ransom."

Like it or not, companies and governments are anteing up, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases, for an insurance-like policy for upgrades of Microsoft software.

Two weeks remain before the July 31 expiration of a grace period to switch to the controversial program, called Software Assurance. After that, customers not enrolled will face higher costs to upgrade programs such as Windows and Office.

The changes affect companies and governments that buy software in bulk. The premise is that customers are not buying a commodity, like a PC, but rather a relationship with their software provider.

6:26 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Micro$oft balks at using its own security tool

Love it...

3:06 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

USPS OKs PC-printed stamps -- but right now it costs four buck for 125 labels, plus a monthly fee

I'll stick to buying them at the PO, thanks.

12:56 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Apple iPod for Windows end of August

They're cutting the price on each model by $100 too: the smallest, 5GB, for $299.

I think SonicBlue will have something similar out this fall for PCs too though. And what about random playlists, anyone know?

12:53 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sounds like the Project Eno show in Somerville MA rocked. . .
I thought I'd post a big public thanks to T Max and his crew on the success
of the Project Eno show last Friday night at the 608 in Somerville MA. For hard core Eno fans this was a real treat. T Max lead a team of nine musicians through a double set of 15 of BE's notable 'rock' songs from:

Here Come the Warm Jets
Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
Another Green World
Before and After Science

Nothing short of seeing this music played by Eno and his cronies could have eclipsed this show. I've heard several well known bands cover some Eno songs over the years but none came as close to the execution and spirit of this group of musicians. The highlights for me was St. Elmo's Fire and Blank
Frank, the former was beautifully executed and the latter was visually stunning and frantic with energy.

In-between sets Sensory Overload Pictures projected some fantastic visuals on a drop down screen over the stage while playing various instrumental Eno pieces from a variety of eras. These worked very well in my opinion, very interesting to watch and the music just loud enough to allow for conversation on what we had all just experienced. [from Dan Downey's email on NerveNet]

They're planning to do it again in September.

9:39 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

FEMA Preparing for Mass Destruction Attacks on Cities

9:38 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Operation TIPS to ask volunteer utility, postal and other workers with access to people's home to spy for ~~Big Brother~~ the government

OK, I'm officially weirded out. This is sick, and needs to stop now. [antiwar]

9:37 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

US to resume shooting down drug planes in Latin America

Colin Powell's a big fan of this, and the State Dept. would take over from the CIA (what would the difference be exactly?...). And the Colombian and Peruvian governments are all for it. Which makes me think about all that could be done under the cover of this. . .

But you know me. . .such a suspicious guy. . . [NYT username: aflakete Password: europhilia]

9:36 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Almost 90 per cent of Britain's hazardous nuclear waste stockpile is so badly stored it could explode or leak with devastating results at any time.

An old link from the end of June, but shocking enough to post now anyway.

Here's a map of UK nuke sites.

9:35 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

All Hail the Dalkey Archive Press!

These guys keep significant books (from Ishmael Reed's The Free-Lance Pallbearers to Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman to Tadeusz Konwicki's A Minor Apocalypse) in print in spite of the commodity-driven book market. Here's the article that clued me in.

This makes me happy, even if I never read them. And I will anyway, because the Reed book blew me away after I found it on a downscale dept. store rack when I was 13 or so. And it's disappeared. Til now. And even though it's probably dated (even Mumbo Jumbo -- Reed's book on the 20s that's probably his best -- has parts that creak), it's unique and a part of my history. I read him before Burroughs, and I guess this was my first "trangressional" novel.

I wish I had the money to donate the whole collection to the local library (only $1000!).

9:34 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Trivial pursuit or oral tradition?

Tim Lemire notes that awareness of where cultural references come from is naturally lacking in young people, can be mortally embarrassing, and older folks should wise up the young'uns -- but where do you find the time to keep track of all this encyclopedic knowledge? And should we? Will we enjoy The Simpson if we don't? And why does this knowledge make us feel more hollow than smart?

9:33 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Global vitamin cartel still rules, despite hundreds of millions in fines

Same old story, like the Dupont Gunpowder Trust in the late 19th century, crime does pay if you're big enough.

9:31 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Tuesday, July 16, 2002

How America's imperial decline started in the 70s and continues at a faster pace since 9/11

Don't know if I agree with all of this, but the general drift seems right on to me.
Finally, there is the ideological sphere. Right now, the U.S. economy seems relatively weak, even more so considering the exorbitant military expenses associated with hawk strategies. Moreover, Washington remains politically isolated; virtually no one (save Israel) thinks the hawk position makes sense or is worth encouraging. Other nations are afraid or unwilling to stand up to Washington directly, but even their foot- dragging is hurting the United States.

Yet the U.S. response amounts to little more than arrogant arm-twisting. Arrogance has its own negatives. Calling in chips means leaving fewer chips for next time, and surly acquiescence breeds increasing resentment. Over the last 200 years, the United States acquired a considerable amount of ideological credit. But these days, the United States is running through this credit even faster than it ran through its gold surplus in the 1960s.

The United States faces two possibilities during the next 10 years: It can follow the hawks? path, with negative consequences for all but especially for itself. Or it can realize that the negatives are too great. Simon Tisdall of the Guardian recently argued that even disregarding international public opinion, ?the U.S. is not able to fight a successful Iraqi war by itself without incurring immense damage, not least in terms of its economic interests and its energy supply. Mr. Bush is reduced to talking tough and looking ineffectual.? And if the United States still invades Iraq and is then forced to withdraw, it will look even more ineffectual. [via Undernews July 3]

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

The US military wants to be free

Free from oversight. Free to do whatever the fuck it wants, citizen. . .
The Pentagon has proposed eliminating requirements for filing hundreds of reports on its activities to Congress every year. Pentagon officials also are drafting proposals to ban strikes by contract workers, eliminate federal personnel rules protecting civilian workers at the Pentagon and bypass environmentalists in Congress.

Some proposals are more provocative. They include allowing the Pentagon to send its initiatives directly to Capitol Hill before other agencies could review them. Once there, the legislation would require Congress to vote quickly, with only limited debate.

[...]

Rumsfeld's Pentagon is not likely to gain passage of any plan that significantly weakens congressional oversight, political leaders say. But the war on terrorism has given Rumsfeld a powerful platform, and his aides believe they can grab more control than the Defense Department has ever had.

And the proposals are testimony to the ambitious agenda of an administration that believes there are too many strings binding the powers of the executive branch and preventing sensible management of the federal bureaucracy.

8:53 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monday, July 15, 2002

Nice piece on waiting tables
My first service-industry job came when I was a junior in high school. Now it's probably not as good a story as the one where I poked a customer in the eye with a butter knife (accidentally, of course). Or when I mistakenly accused Cate Blanchett of cheating me on the bill. And I know it's not nearly as exciting as when that surly crew of old lesbians came to blows over their weekly game of Uno. But it was, after all, my first experience as a waiter, my initial loss of dining innocence.

Two of my friends and I were sink rats, not waiters, and though we didn't interact with the customers much, we could tell from our grungy post that there was something inherently absurd and demented about the entire industry. What was it beyond those swinging doors that regularly caused waiters to return in tears? And why did cooking food incite our boss to violent fits involving property destruction? My first boss, Tony, was a knot of stress about as stable as a Middle East cease-fire agreement. If he was our captain, then it was obvious we all sailed on a ship of fools.

11:25 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Careful with that nest egg, Eugene
One year ago, Don and Shellie Freund were living the dreams of many entrepreneurs. They owned a home in a gated community on an island on Puget Sound. A new Jeep and Ford Expedition sat in their driveway, and their 10-year-old son zipped around the island in a golf cart.

Today, the Freunds, both 40, are flat broke. They've sold their house and their vehicles. Last week, they moved back to Portland, their hometown, to live with Don's parents. The days when Don handed his son a $20 bill for a round of golf and lunch at the clubhouse are a distant memory. "We don't know what to tell our son," Freund says. "He doesn't know why we moved, and he doesn't know that his college savings is gone."

[...]

Their story is complicated, but it's also this simple: Rencher promised them riches without risk--and they didn't just bite, they swallowed the entire hook.

As a consequence, the couple got reeled into the local offshoot of a Ponzi scheme built on premises so outlandish that they would be edited from even the most amateurish screenplay. Key details include offshore banks stretching from the Caribbean to a Pacific atoll famed for its bird droppings, a 10,000-carat ruby named "Boy on a Water Buffalo," and the puzzling participation of Portland's largest law firm, Stoel Rives.

Authorities believe that the operation--which spans the globe but begins and ends in Oregon--fleeced thousands of investors out of more than $200 million. David Tatman, director of enforcement for the Oregon Division of Finance and Corporate Securities, says the scheme is one of most audacious he's encountered. "I'm pretty stunned by the dollar amounts--and everything else," says Tatman.

11:15 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Astroworld

A site I stumbled upon, with good updates on shrub's transits.

10:59 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

I know this is related to Lysistrata somehow...

150 women in Nigeria staged a successful protest against Chevron by threatening to take off their clothes.
. . .the firm - Chevron Nigeria - had satisfied the women's demands by agreeing to hire more than two dozen villagers and build schools, water systems and other amenities.

[...]

Protests by local communities are common in Nigeria's oil-producing regions, demanding that more of the oil wealth is used for their benefit.

Locals often kidnap workers and demand ransom money from oil companies.

[...]

As well as demanding a greater share of Nigeria's oil wealth, some communities are angry at oil pollution, which has damaged local industry, such as river fishing. [link]
Good for them. I love these kinds of stories.

9:09 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Back online

Finally, though it'll take awhile to catch up with my news emails and such. More about the Nightmare on Dell Street (as Susan calls it) later.

7:08 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

The Link Section