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CULTURE BLOG

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

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NOW AVAILABLE AT ME-ZINE

ABBREVIATIONS FOR SITES I OFTEN STEAL NEWS ITEMS FROM:

u = Progressive Review's Undernews

PUBLIC AFFAIRS/HISTORY READING:
(r) = re-reading

amazon wish list

amazon.ca wish list

alibris wishlist

The Buying of the President 2004: Who's Really Bankrolling Bush and His Democratic Challengers -- and What They Expect in Return

Arrogant Capital

Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual: How to Rebuild Our Country So the Politics Aren't Broken and Politicians Aren't Fixed

American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush

Death in the Air: Globalism, Terrorism & Toxic Warfare

The Velvet Coup: The Constitution, the Supreme Court and the Decline of American Democracy

Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of the Free Press

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, August 23, 2003

shrubco harassing sex education group with 3 audits this year [the null device]

7:38 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Immigrants skipping over gateway states (NY, Cali) for jobs in Midwest, South

8:44 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Document gold mine?

The Hutton Inquiry into the David Kelly case allows release of many UK government documents, memos and letters that would have otherwise been withheld for years

Haven't waded through this yet, and the site is slow, but there might be some very interesting stuff here.

8:38 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, August 22, 2003

US resumes shoot-down policy in Colombia

7:45 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

shrubco's pet wallaby lied too

Aussie gov't re-wrote Iraq "WMD" intel

1:10 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Thursday, August 21, 2003

Reason #3254 for homeschooling your kids

Total surveillance in Biloxi classrooms [u]
Hundreds of Internet-wired video cameras will keep rolling all year long, in the hope that they'll deter crime and general misbehavior among the district's 6,300 students -- and teachers.

"It helps honest people be more honest," says district Superintendent Larry Drawdy, who, along with principals and security officers, can use a password to view classrooms from any computer. In an emergency, police also can tune in.

7:58 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Quakes

4.4 in Wyoming and 7.1 at the southern tip of New Zealand

The geysers have been very active in Yellowstone, so this is not a surprise, but a fair size for the area nonetheless. The quake Down Under was felt over a thousand miles away in Sydney.

6:03 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Funny piece by Ellen Goodman on America's persistent discomfort with leisure [u]
In the early 20th century a few hard-working researchers declared that a little time off was a good thing. Not surprisingly, they decided that ''brain workers'' needed a rest from days spent laboring in the minds, while physical workers could do without it. The idea of vacations finally caught on in the middle and working classes, but it was never codified into the law.

Now we arrive at the summer of the incredible shrinking American vacation. It's predicted that we'll take 10 percent less time off than last year, and last year was no week at the beach.

Americans have notoriously fewer vacation days than workers in any other industrialized country. While Europeans get four or five weeks paid leave by law, and even the Chinese get three weeks, we average about eight days after a year with one company and 10 days after three years. Thirteen percent of American companies offer no paid vacation at all.

12:14 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Making smart mobs live up to their name [u]
Unlike traditional rallies, which are very effective for other reasons, a distributed protest is more effective as a long-term media campaign. You are better off running a 30-minute protest each day from 6pm until 6:30pm for 8 days in a row, rather than having 1 protest for 4 hours

11:58 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Your Cellphone is a Homing Device [u]
If you purchased a new cellphone over the past 18 months or so, odds are that one of the features listed in small print on the side of the box was "E911 capable." Or, as in the case of my latest Motorola, "Location technology for piece [sic] of mind." Perhaps you asked the salesman to explain the feature, and he replied that it means that cops can home in on your phone in case of an emergency, a potentially important perk should you ever find your hand pinned beneath an immovable boulder in rural Utah, as Aron Ralston did recently. Assuming he could have gotten a signal, an E911-capable phone might have saved the young backpacker the pain of having to amputate his own arm.

What your salesman probably failed to tell you?and may not even realize?is that an E911-capable phone can give your wireless carrier continual updates on your location. The phone is embedded with a Global Positioning System chip, which can calculate your coordinates to within a few yards by receiving signals from satellites. GPS technology gave U.S. military commanders a vital edge during Gulf War II, and sailors and pilots depend on it as well. In the E911-capable phone, the GPS chip does not wait until it senses danger, springing to life when catastrophe strikes; it's switched on whenever your handset is powered up and is always ready to transmit your location data back to a wireless carrier's computers. Verizon or T-Mobile can figure out which manicurist you visit just as easily as they can pinpoint a stranded motorist on Highway 59.

11:55 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

"Quick, incremetal, economical"

Undernews had a section back on the 8th (delayed post) on Bus rapid transit

11:43 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Summer means fun?

As many as 13,500 people have died from the European heatwave in France alone

August is often a bizarre month, but not usually as volatile as this year -- the biggest blackout in North American history, the Cali recall, escalating violence in the Mideast (Israel, Afhganistan & Iran), and the general sense of shrubco backpedalling fiercely as the Iraqi quagmire gapes wider every day. Plus the dreadful killer weather in Europe and elsewhere.

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

DeLay even crazier than Ashcroft
The office of Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, pressed the Justice Department in May to determine whether federal officials had the authority to intervene in a legislative redistricting standoff in Texas, but senior department officials dismissed the idea as "wacko" and inappropriate, a Justice Department report said today.

11:24 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

BigPharma moves to patent nature [u]

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

Brother of Reuters cameraman killed by US troops says he'd found mass grave of US soldiers killed in Iraqi attacks [xymphora]

11:20 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

World Bank/IMF pull out of Iraq after UN bombing

11:16 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Looks like I'm back

Blackout knocked us out since Wednesday.

Slowly rolling back to post-mind.

3:26 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wonder if this'll make BigMedia today?

Gulf War I vets sue banks, corps. for supporting Iraq's chem warfare program in the 80s [drudge]

3:23 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

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

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

Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

-- Mark Twain

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

CULTURE LINK

Philip K. Dick

DEEPER NEWS LINK

PR Watch

charging the canvas

The Link Section