charging the canvas

Saturday, November 16, 2002

"Bull" Market
What's disturbing is that many of the same economists who didn't predict a recession in 2001 and preferred to view the coming slowdown as more of a "soft landing," are now ruling out the risk the economy may again stumble. Although the economic numbers are changing, they're still not changing their minds.

"When everyone is thinking alike, no one is thinking very much," says Ray F. DeVoe Jr., publisher of the DeVoe Report, a financial newsletter. "The unintended message is they must be paid to be optimistic or have not done their homework."

History shows that recessions are like cockroaches. When you see one, there's bound to be another waiting in the wings. Recessions that began in 1957, 1960, 1969, 1973 and 1980 were all followed by an economic recovery prior to a second dip into negative territory, DeVoe says.

8:37 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

We can sell your war for more than you're able to afford

The Rendon Group and Hill & Knowlton make war irresistable with spin and disinformation
But nothing quite compared to H&K's now infamous "baby atrocities" campaign. After convening a number of focus groups to try to figure out which buttons to press to make the public respond, H&K determined that presentations involving the mistreatment of infants, a tactic drawn straight from W R Hearst's playbook of the Spanish-American War, received the best reaction.

[...]

Weeping and shaking, the girl described a horrifying scene in Kuwait City. "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," she testified. "While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns and go into the room where babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die." Allegedly, 312 infants were removed.

The tale got wide circulation, even winding up on the floor of the United Nations Security Council. Before Congress gave the green light to go to war, seven of the main pro-war senators brought up the baby-incubator allegations as a major component of their argument for passing the resolution to unleash the bombers. Ultimately, the motion for war passed by a narrow five-vote margin.

Only later was it discovered that the testimony was untrue.

12:26 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, November 15, 2002

Bankruptcy bill pushed through the House, Senate won't pass til next year

Again, this punishes the poor and middle class, boosts the bank/credit cartel.

9:24 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Compromise "independent" commission on 9/11 finally created

Why am I not convinced? Why would anyone be -- particularly the relatives of the victims?

1:44 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Another post from Undernews -- but this is just too good
Top ten reasons
to be disgusted
about corporations

[Excerpted from the new book The Corporate Cult, by Rich Zubaty]

1) CORPORATIONS ARE LEGALLY REGARDED AS PERSONS: they have all the privileges and none of the responsibilities of being people. They do not eat, sleep, die, feel anything, pay a fair share of taxes or get drafted in time of war.

2) CORPORATIONS COMMIT CRIMES BUT ARE NOT PROSECUTED AS CRIMINALS: according to the law, corporations do not possess a mens rea, a mental state, and therefore do not possess the intent to commit crime. Therefore they cannot be prosecuted as criminals. So, according to the law, corporations are "persons" devoid of a mental state. In other words, certified idiots. And instead of protecting society from them by institutionalizing them -- as we do with most sociopaths -- we let them own property, hire workers, and shout at us from TV.

3) CORPORATIONS ARE ON WELFARE: Corporate welfare costs U.S. taxpayers $400 billion every single year. Welfare for human people costs $40 million.

4) CORPORATIONS COST THE U.S. ECONOMY MORE EVERY YEAR THAN THEY CONTRIBUTE TO IT: Corporations claim profits of $2.4 trillion per year but they cost us $2.6 trillion per year in waste, subsidies and pollution. The mom and pop economy subsidizes the corporate economy. The Stock Market would disappear overnight -- there would be no "profit" -- if corporations were required to pay their true costs of production: pollution, health care, education, infrastructure, taxes.

5) THERE WERE NO GIANT AMERICAN CORPORATIONS 150 YEARS AGO: Now they dominate our nation and have overrun the globe.

6) TEN LARGE CORPORATIONS CONTROL 90% OF AMERICAN MEDIA: TV, radio, publishing. How can we claim we have free speech, if we can't get to the mike to claim it.

7) A TYPICAL AMERICAN CHILD SEES 350,000 COMMERCIALS BY AGE 18

8) CORPORATE SOVEREIGNTY LIMITS THE CHOICES OF THE MARKET PLACE: We do not enjoy "free trade" or live in a "free market." We toil under corporatism not capitalism. Corporations squash competition -- not encourage it -- as the capitalist market would require. Corporations seek government handouts with one hand while they bribe politicians for lower taxes with the other. . .

9) CORPORATIONS HAVE NO SOUL: They are unable to "feel" anything. They have no conscience. They are incapable of connecting thoughts with actions. . .

10) CORPORATIONS ARE CULTS: They are secretive organizations dedicated to making money and gaining political power at any cost. They conceal their holdings and their operating procedures from public scrutiny. They brainwash their employees and their customers to gain compliance. They control our behavior, thoughts, information and emotions.
And here I am again -- just like yesterday -- agreeing with a guy who's really got it in for women. Though he's at the other end of the political spectrum from Mr Makow.

Huh.

1:09 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Excellent Robert Dreyfuss cv of Ahmed Chalabi -- Our Man in Baghdad? [u]
If T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia") had been a 21st-century neoconservative operative instead of a British imperial spy, he'd be Ahmed Chalabi's best friend. Chalabi, the London-based leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), is front man for the latest incarnation of a long-time neoconservative strategy to redraw the map of the oil-rich Middle East, put American troops -- and American oil companies -- in full control of the Persian Gulf's reserves and use the Gulf as a fulcrum for enhancing America's global strategic hegemony. Just as Lawrence's escapades in World War I-era Arabia helped Britain remake the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, the U.S. sponsors of Chalabi's INC hope to do their own nation building.

"The removal of [Saddam Hussein] presents the United States in particular with a historic opportunity that I believe is going to prove to be as large as anything that has happened in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the entry of British troops into Iraq in 1917," says Kanan Makiya, an INC strategist and author of Republic of Fear.

Chalabi would hand over Iraq's oil to U.S. multinationals, and his allies in conservative think tanks are already drawing up the blueprints. "What they have in mind is denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to American oil companies," says James E. Akins, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Even more broadly, once an occupying U.S. army seizes Baghdad, Chalabi's INC and its American backers are spinning scenarios about dismantling Saudi Arabia, seizing its oil and collapsing the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). It's a breathtaking agenda, one that goes far beyond "regime change" and on to the start of a New New World Order.

12:48 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Art Bell POW photos

Think about looking at these photos of POWs through the eyes of a psychiatrist and you'll see how much power the government/military complex acknowledges these prisoners have, that they must be so restrained, even as they're surrounded by soldiers with automatic weapons

Is this the real (or subconscious) reason the Pentagon is so upset they were published?

12:34 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Porpoises off Scotland are attacking humans and other porpoises because of the declining fish population

12:19 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sam Smith on the Dept of Homeland Security
LIES OF OUR TIME

YOU SOLVE PROBLEMS BY CREATING NEW CABINET DEPARTMENTS - When national politicians get stuck, they create a new cabinet department. There is little evidence to suggest that this helps whatever it is the department is meant to be doing. It does, however, greatly increase the opportunities for waste and fraud.

For example, in the post-war era there have been a number of new cabinet departments such as:

- In 1949, a few years after victory in World War II, the Department of Defense was created. America never again won a major conflict. Instead it fought three wars - Korea, Vietnam and Gulf - to a stalemate and was reduced to bombing and invading tertiary countries such as Granada, Panama and Afghanistan.

- In 1965, LBJ created the Department of Housing and Urban Development. A few years later America's cities were ravished by riots and went into a long decline. No new major housing programs on the scale, say, of the VA or FHA programs were ever created again. Further, HUD became a center of fiscal corruption second only to the Department of Defense.

- In 1979 the Department of Education was created, following which the quality of American public education has continued to decline to the point that it is now relies on George W. Bush for ideas.

The new Department of Homeland Security [sic] will undoubtedly follow in this pattern, especially given that it will even be stripped of civil service protections. You may fairly expect it to be inefficient in its tasks and wasteful in its spending, corrupt, anti-democratic, a honey pot of political patronage, and, as a consequence, an additional danger to the homeland security of the American people.

12:11 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Jim Kunstler on post-election state of the 2 parties
It occurs to me that the Democrat's position this year is a bit like the year 1856 when the only-recently dominant Whig party began its spectacularly rapid dissolution. That year, the nation moved inexorably toward the righteous convulsion of the Civil War. Now, the nation slides toward the yawning multiple catastrophes of war, global warming, financial meltdown, and the collapse of our ridiculous drive-in living arrangement (in which an economy is supposed to be an endless chain of hamburgers). All of which is to say that I don't know if the Democrats have anywhere to go from here; they may never return from the wilderness.

The Republicans are now left to defend a nation that amounts to little more than a 3000-mile parking lot. They wanted it that way. They cheerleaded suburban hyper- development and the WalMart economy that services it. They outsourced our productive capacity to places where factory slaves get paid a dollar a day or less. They pimp for the corporate colonialism that has erased community life. They stand for the United States of Television, not the wreckage that really exists on the ground in real places. And they're going to be at the controls as it all unwinds.
I don't agree with everything he's on about in the post, but I liked these last paragraphs.

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

Thursday, November 14, 2002

From before the election: Daniel Forbes on how state and federal officials are mobilizing to maintain drug prohibition

The only people this helps are people who make money from illegal drug distribution, police who get bigger budgets for chasing drug users, and people who build and invest in prisons.

Everyone else is worse off.
"There's a certain irony in all this that the state and federal governments have learned how to beat back democracy," said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws Foundation.

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

NPR affiliation is squeezing out community programming

9:28 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

What Does a Torturer Tell His Kids?
It sounds as if the Monroe Doctrine is being extended to the entire world. Exporting tools and techniques of torture to governments in our hemisphere was a logical consequence of the Monroe Doctrine, which insists that we can do anything in our own neighborhood in defense of our interests. If that neighborhood is now the world, if the front lines are everywhere, then the expediency of forgetfulness under fire applies to the basement of the local, state or national police as well.

A person who can calmly suggest using torture, who believes that a warrant will adequately handle the inevitable mistakes or malevolent intentions of people with power, is someone who can not imagine themselves being tortured. They can only imagine the torture of the Other.

[...]

So long as the screams come from someone who is a little less than human, we can live with it. The goal, after all, as Dershowitz explains, is short-term excruciating pain, not long-term damage. It's just a job. Somebody has to do it, and we can imagine the practitioners of that craft having a picnic with their kids, flying kites or running in slow motion through a wildflower meadow, then tumbling laughing into the tall grass and telling the kiddies what they do for a living.

The sadness of the human condition is that if we are honest with ourselves, we can each see how under the right conditions we too will enter into collusion with the state, if not actively participate in the practice. History has illustrated time and time again that under the right conditions, individuals will do anything.

Which is why preventing those conditions from happening in the first place is the only defense against the abyss.

9:19 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

shrubco begins to dismantle federal government in earnest: all jobs to be outsourced except President and VP

Well, almost. . .

I posted about this a while back. While it's an obvious ploy to bust unions and boost favored contractors, and the possible effects are unknown -- maybe it's also the beginning of the end of a corrupt political structure.

Maybe we'll miss the feds a lot less than we realize.

7:55 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Who gets the job of processing the returned tests that get thrown up on?

Susan Ohanian on the testing mania [u]
The political mania for inflicting high-stakes tests on students has reached such insanity that Harcourt, publisher of the widely used Stanford 9 test, sends out instructions on what a teacher should do when nervous children vomit on the tests (Soiled tests cannot be discarded but must be returned to Harcourt.)

No one seems to be stepping forward to demand that schools discontinue practices that make kids vomit.

Instead, a principal in San Diego insists that kindergartners must take pre-Stanford-9 tests, declaring ?Unless students become familiar with the exam format, they cannot zero in on the academic skills. Try passing a bar exam without preparation."

Hello. This is kindergarten.
I'm child-free and can only observe from outside this remarkable situation. But I can't believe parents haven't started picketing schools about this stupid bullshit.

4:24 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Undernews mentioned recently that there is anecdotal evidence that ex-military people are being aggressively recruited for service in the federal bureaucracy

4:14 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

As war coverage becomes more like a cross between a character in the movie Network trying to cover a scene in The Terminator, Peter Arnett gets the jones for live action again [u]
At 67, Arnett is getting ready to go back to Baghdad -- and to war.
Arnett is an equivocal, or transitional, figure in the history of war reporting. He is the real thing, an actual slogging-in-the-mud combat reporter, an anonymous wire- service guy who, by a media fluke (the advent of CNN and 24-hour news coverage), became, from the Hotel al-Rashid in Baghdad in 1991, a famous person. (Edward R. Murrow also got famous by a media fluke -- but Murrow has always seemed sui generis.) Overnight, Arnett was the larger-than-life face of the war -- harm's way's big enchilada. What every next-generation war reporter now aspires to be.

Of course, there isn't really a next, post-Arnett generation -- or perhaps there is, but youth isn't the point. Positioning is.

There's the stylized ridiculousness of, say, Ashleigh Banfield and Geraldo Rivera, or the careful hauteur of Christiane Amanpour, or the equally composed big-foot gravitas of the anchors themselves (who are obviously the opposite of young) rushing "in-country" for an interview and background shot. And with them there is Arnett, whose positioning is as the last war correspondent trying to do what he did one last time.
As it happens, he is oddly able to do this, and all the other glamour-pusses are able to position themselves in the war picture, too, because nobody really does now what war reporters used to do.

Nobody is covering combat -- nobody is in combat. Armies, after all, don't invite reporters along to battle anymore; and the point about digitized combat is that there is nothing but an explosion (recorded by gun cams) to cover; and, what's more, highly paid famous people are not, as a rule, able to endure great discomfort.

4:07 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Life at Camp Delta [u]
It is a regime of total control; of 30 minutes spent outside a cell per week; of shackles and interrogations; of starvation and suicides; of the threat of the 'cooler box'; of being trussed up and carted to hospital. Many inmates have gone on hunger strike; 34 have attempted suicide or harmed themselves. Others have developed serious mental illnesses.

Nearly all the prisoners were rounded up in Afghanistan by American soldiers and spies. But there is a growing belief that many of the 620 inmates are not terrorists. Some were pressganged into fighting for the Taliban; others were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

At night arc lights shine on the complex. But, despite the 24-hour light, the prison is hidden from the outside world. It lies on an American naval base and the only viewing point is 100 metres away. Held within are men from 38 nations. Some are in their seventies, one is only 15. Each man spends 30 minutes a week showering and exercising; the rest of the time he is alone in a cell measuring 8ft by 6ft 8in.

A prisoner raising his voice is sent to 'the cooler': a metal box just big enough to move in. An isolation wing houses 80 prisoners. In the main wings, prisoners move cell every few weeks to prevent them forming relationships with other inmates. Any trips to the camp's clinic involve the prisoner being shackled to a trolley and wheeled out of his cell. He is then chained to the hospital bed. Prisoners are exercised, shackled at the ankles, waist and hands. Guards hold each man's arms as he walks.

Interrogations are carried out by operatives from a special unit called JTF 170, made up of agents from the CIA, FBI and military intelligence. No beatings have been reported, but psychological techniques - including sleep deprivation - are used. Perhaps this is what Iqbal meant when he wrote about the visit of a British official. 'I told him the problems with this place but I'm not allowed to write [about them],' he noted. Certainly the three Afghan men - two in their seventies - released last week condemned the harsh conditions. 'We were kept like animals,' Mohammed Sadiq said when he arrived back in Kabul last Tuesday.

3:54 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

First Amendment Zones [u]
The president's supporters and detractors have an equal right to stand at the same site, at the same time, and tell him what they think.

The name itself is a joke: "First Amendment Zones." The term describes those fenced-off areas designated for protesters at political events. It may seem benign enough, but in reality the zones are another way government controls speech. Protesters are kept so far away from their intended target that their presence becomes almost invisible.

Earlier this month, seven people were arrested outside the USF Sun Dome during a political rally where President Bush was appearing on behalf of his brother Gov. Jeb Bush . The group was charged with trespass for refusing to move into a "First Amendment zone" that had been set up hundreds of yards from the entrance to the Dome. Their experience is similar to that of three protesters who were arrested last year at a public rally at Legends Field at which President Bush was promoting his tax cuts.

A bedrock free speech principle is that the government cannot give freer rein to some messages than others. Yet, in and around these Bush rallies, supporters of the president were welcome anywhere. It was only those opposing administration policies who were banished to a spit of land out of earshot and eyeshot of the president.

3:45 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Talking Iraqis into letting us liberate them -- as the bombs fall [drudge]
"I think it's going to be a terribly challenging effort. There are all kinds of different audiences. You've got to somehow figure out how to reach people," said retired Army Col. Charles P. Borchini, who commanded the 4th Psychological Operations Group during the U.S.-led bombing campaign against Serbia. The group, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., takes the lead in writing scripts, beaming radio and TV messages and publishing newspapers aimed at foreign foes and their civilian counterparts.

William Arkin, a former Army intelligence officer and now a military analyst, said that if the United States invades Iraq, "bombs are going to do the talking," rather than any psychological operation that attempts to influence the entire country. Some elements of Iraqi society might not trust an American-led campaign to set up a new government, said Arkin, who also doubted U.S. operatives would be able to reach any Iraqi officers with the "Gucci methods" of cell-phone calls or faxes.

[...]

Daniel T. Kuehl, a professor of information warfare at the National Defense University, said a psychological operation in Iraq may be the most extensive effort since the Vietnam War, which included a 6-year-long wave of loudspeaker announcements, radio and TV broadcasts, newspapers and leafleting by U.S. forces.
6 years?

How do you reach people who just don't get advertising?

3:31 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Random traffic checks within 25 miles of Canadian border begin in Michigan

A common practice along the Mexican border because of drug prohibition, now terrorism is the excuse -- though illegal immigrants and drug and weapon smuggling are mentioned as well.

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

If corporations persist in branding/copyrighting everything from words to the water from your tap to the "One Click Checkout" feature on a website, I think intellectual rights are going to disappear completely

Because people will just say "fuck it!" and do it anyway on a scale beyond litigation, just like with music files. Just out of frustration and spite.

1:38 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

"Oh, looking for love in a looking-glass world is pretty hard for you"

This is how weird things are getting: I find myself agreeing with a guy (about the threat to freedom/democracy of shrubco) who thinks feminism is a "New World Order hoax" [og]

He wrote a book on having to go to the Philippines to find a woman subservient enough for his taste!

Yet -- except for the Christian symbolism and the bit about international bankers "inventing Muslim terrorism" -- he's not far off the track with his worst-case scenario. Just foreshortened into a John Birch cartoon.

I can see an Army of Amazons lurking behind Lucifer's hand here, exposed in the final act of some James Bond movie mutation.

Talk about the Weird Turning Pro. . .

1:06 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

"Germany has subsided into a moral numbing pacifism."

From Richard Perle, one of the "brains" behind The ~~Seventh Reich~~ New Neo-Con Agenda. [og]

People laugh at Ann Coulter, but this guy could be her twin. And he's framing policy.

Never thought I'd see the day when someone would accuse Germans of being too pacifistic. "Moral numbing," no less. And a Jew to boot.

It's the "numbing" here in the US that concerns me. When are people going to wake up and see these fascist bobbleheads for who they are?

12:40 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, November 13, 2002

Old Testament to replace state and federal laws soon

Whoops, above link fixed. (Thanks, Sylvain!)

5:02 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Restoring Buddhas in Afghanistan

Even if the statues can be rebuilt, what business is it of the UN or anyone outside Afghanistan if the Afghanis want to build new ones instead?

It is still their country right? I mean except for the gas and oil, which obviously belong to The Big Dog.

4:59 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

CSM article claims nothing would change if everyone voted

Ohhh yeahhhh. . .

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

OK -- so the 2 translations of Putin's remarks about Chechen rebels both mention circumcision, one implies castration and one doesn't

The one that does seems closer to the truth, since it seems odd he'd bring circumcision up to begin with, unless he had his Ivan the Terrible mask on and maybe a bit too much vodka under his belt.

Is this a ham-handed Russian attempt at shrub's cowboy-swagger humor?

Never mind that the connection between al-Qaeda and the Chechens is as much of a stretch as Iraq being this imminent nuclear threat, or that the Russians have been extremely brutal in Chechnya -- or that both countries just happen to have oil -- Putin seemed to at least have a brain in his head until now.

3:47 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Greenspan bows to War God, abandons reason

10:39 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Tuesday, November 12, 2002

Retraction

Bill Olds has retracted his claim that the FBI was monitoring library computer usage in Hartford

3:15 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Antibiotic addiction comes back to haunt

Vancomycin-resistant staph was discovered last summer in Detroit [drudge]

This article claims that intravenous drug-users' practice of mixing an antibiotic with heroin -- mistakenly thinking this would stop infections -- has created the resistant bacteria. The number of deaths from infections could skyrocket now to over 100,000 a year in the US. Vancomycin is the last known defense against bacteria resistant to other antibiotics.

Misguided resistance to educating and providing assistance to intravenous drug-users -- part of the general shunning they experience -- and overuse of antibiotics and anti-bacterial products are coming back to haunt Americans.

Suggestions: throw out all your anti-bacterial products, avoid meat laced with antibiotics, avoid antibiotics unless in dire need.

10:52 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

FBI and ATF bicker like soap opera divas as Bush ramrods Homeland Security Bill thourgh Congress [drudge]
The F.B.I. has initiated an unusual behind-the-scenes attack on another law enforcement agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, as part of an effort to protect its turf and responsibility for domestic security, law enforcement officials said today.

An internal F.B.I. draft full of criticisms of the firearms agency has circulated in the last week among law enforcement officials. Some of those officials say the draft is part of an effort by the bureau to head off a plan to move the firearms operations from the Treasury Department to the Justice Department in a broad reorganization of domestic security.

3:48 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

"Wildcard"

Delmart "Mike" Vreeland and 9/11, Marc Bastien, Marc Rich, Vince Foster, Leo Wanta, Naval Intelligence, Dick Cheney, another case of special ops "bi-location" and The Nation's disinformation defense of what Bush knew

I posted about Vreeland back when Mike Ruppert was touting his exile and house arrest in Canada. Lost track of the story and missed the shredding of his credibility. Now catching up with the latest, though this piece by publisher (Fortunate Son, the "discredited" Bush bio) and playwright Sander Hicks has been up for a couple weeks I guess.

Essential reading, though it will make your head hurt.
In the end, this six-month investigation for GNN confirmed what many already know: Delmart Vreeland is a liar and an accomplished con man, adept at spinning tales, and manipulating allegiances to further his own goals. In other words, he is the perfect candidate for work in U.S. intelligence.
Phil Dick would've loved this guy. He embodies the vertiginous and deadly moat/force field of deniable psychosis that shadows the powers-that-be.

Do not exceed recommended dosage

2:54 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monday, November 11, 2002

Meta Search Engines
I know what you're thinking: Google gives you such accurate results that you don't need any other search tool. Well, let's see about that.

You might - or might not - know that no major search engine indexes ALL the existing Web pages. OpenFind states that it indexes 3.5 billion Web pages, Google claims 2.4 billion, AlltheWeb - 2.1 billion, Inktomi - a little more than 2 billion, WiseNut - 1.5 billion and AltaVista - 1 billion Web pages.

The truth is, nobody knows how wide the Web is. Some say 5 billion pages, some 8 billion, some even more. Anyway, what's definite is that the major search engines (SEs) index only a fraction of the "publicly indexable Web". Moreover, every SE indexes different Web pages, which means if you use only one SE you will miss relevant results that can be found in other search engines.

One way to more effectively search the Web is to use a meta search engine.

[...]

Now, you might ask yourself: If MSEs are so good, do we still need the search engines?

Well, it depends. I use a search engine - yep, Google - when I search for general information. I use a meta search engine when I'm looking for a unique or obscure search term or if I want to make an in-depth analysis of what's out there on a specific subject.
Looks like a pretty comprehensive list. Bazac likes ez2www.com and vivísimo (I listed the latter in the right column a while ago) the best.

5:03 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Moyers on The Mandate [drudge]
That mandate includes the power of the state to force pregnant women to give up control over their own lives.

It includes using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich.

It includes giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment and control the regulatory agencies meant to hold them accountable.

And it includes secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine. Above all, it means judges with a political agenda appointed for life. If you liked the Supreme Court that put George W. Bush in the White House, you will swoon over what's coming.

And if you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture. These folks don't even mind you referring to the GOP as the party of God. Why else would the new House Majority Leader say that the Almighty is using him to promote 'a Biblical worldview' in American politics?

4:37 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Politics and Science collide on the Wild Drug Frontier [u]
Ecstasy is being hailed as the key to better treatments for the Parkinson's disease, marking a complete turnaround from a few weeks ago when ecstasy was condemned for causing the disease. [link]

12:04 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Latest combined search referrals

About a week ago, my search referrals jumped suddenly to levels I haven't seen since I switched from blogger.

So. Last time I posted on planing lakes, this time I'll post them here.
2002+email+contact+address+of+home+cleaner+bulletin+board+in+kuwait
celebrity cause mistreatment of carriage horses
ran muto pic
san tropez property ownership
canvas supplier to iraq army
Jeb Bush's promises og governor
"doublegirl"
propaganda+war+afghanistan+Iraq+twain+general+other+capital+gangster
"triangle defense" +basketball
poster "heaven 2002"
winnie the pooh hunny b's cereal
"cliff notes" for Handmaid's Tail
hawala "queens"
false diagnosis of mental illness to silence whistle blower
rio de janeiro slums pics
Hartsdale, NY condos real estate
canvas squat suit
sylvia plachy + astronaut
2002 e - mail guest book of traders contractors in saudi arabia
No spellcheckers were harmed in the course of this post.

11:02 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Naval EM pulse exercises may have caused passenger plane crashes [u]
Electromagnetic pulses from military craft may have been responsible for several civilian airline disasters in the past four years. If the theory is proved correct, it suggests navy ships and air force planes pose a lethal threat to passenger flights.

Crash investigators have been startled by similarities between several tragedies. In particular, they have uncovered common features in two crashes: Swissair 111, on 2 September 1998, and TWA 800, on 17 July 1996. Both planes took off from the same airport, New York's JFK, on the same day, a Wednesday, at the same minute, 8.19pm. Both followed the same route over Long Island. Both reported trouble in the same region of airspace, and both suffered catastrophic electrical malfunctions. And on both occasions the planes were flying at a time when extensive military exercises - involving submarines and US Navy P3 fighter planes - were being conducted.

These factors - outlined by Elaine Scarry in the forthcoming issue of the New York Review of Books - suggest to many investigators that a routine weekly event, probably involving the generation of strong electromagnetic pulses by military personnel, may have triggered short-circuits in the two planes.
I still think TWA 800 crash was caused by a missile, but this is interesting nonetheless.

1:51 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

15 year-old Oregon cheerleader slammed by Pepsi for fund drive using non-Pepsi bottled water [u]
West Salem High School cheerleader Andrea Boyes didn't mean to land in hot water with soft-drink giant Pepsi.

The 15-year-old just wanted to raise money for her new squad, which can't afford to travel to national competitions or hire an assistant coach. So Boyes hit upon what she thought was a bright idea: to sell bottled water bearing a label with her school logo at school events. She got a $750 donation for startup costs, designed a label, had 6,000 printed, found a supplier and ordered 15 cases.

Then Pepsi, which has an exclusive 10-year, $5 million contract with the district, got wind of the deal. The contract allows only Pepsi products, including its Aquafina brand water, to be sold on school grounds. The district also has exclusive contracts with food-service, furniture, athletic-equipment and computer dealers. "It was really disappointing," said Boyes, who had hoped to net 55 cents in profit for every $1 bottle sold. "I guess now we'll just have more car washes."

1:45 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Jeremy Bentham on secrecy and the British foreign ministry [FAS]
"Secresy in the operations of the foreign department in England ought not to be endured, being altogether useless, and equally repugnant to the interests of liberty and peace," he wrote in his Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace.

"Under the present system of secresy, ministers have...every seduction to lead them into misconduct; while they have no check to keep them out of it."

"The principle which throws a veil of secresy over the proceedings of the foreign department of the cabinet is pernicious in the highest degree, pregnant with mischiefs superior to everything to which the most perfect absence of all concealment could possibly give rise." [published in 1843, 11 years after his death]

12:30 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

A 1977 CIA document recently declassified argues that excessive secrecy and the resultant "failure to integrate information" is at least partially responsible for all intelligence failures since Pearl Harbor [FAS]
Twenty-five years later, the congressional joint inquiry into September 11 continued to find that excessive secrecy had impeded information sharing between CIA and FBI, as well as between government agencies and the American public.

All of which suggests that the problem with CIA's information policies is not a matter of individual personalities, who have come and gone, but a deeply rooted institutional dysfunction that has escaped effective remedial action.

12:18 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, November 10, 2002

From a Washington Post editorial by the authors of a new book Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public: [u]
It would be a mistake to conclude, as many commentators do, that Americans are apathetic citizens gone AWOL. But there's no question that the fundamental relationship between citizen and government has changed. Increasingly, public officials regard us as "customers" rather than as citizens, and there are crucial differences between the two. Citizens own the government. Customers just receive services from it. Citizens belong to a political community with a collective existence and public purposes. Customers are individual purchasers seeking the best deal. Customers may receive courteous service, but they do not own the store.

[...]

The truth is that neither major political party makes much effort to mobilize the millions of Americans of modest means and education who stand outside the electorate. Neither major party supports electoral reforms such as the elimination of voter registration requirements or a shift to weekend voting. Both practices are standard in Western Europe, and the European experience suggests that these two changes alone would appreciably boost turnout.

One of the undemocratic unmentionables of American politics is that most elected politicians are not eager to see an expansion of the electorate. Boosting the number of voters is a risky strategy seldom undertaken lightly. Lord Derby famously called the increase of Britain's electorate under the Reform Bill of 1867 a "leap into the dark."

6:15 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

America 2002

New Haven CT has a tent city of the homeless, an infant mortality rate as high as Malaysia's, a dire rate of death from AIDS -- and Yale University, one of the most richly endowed in the country, where tomorrow's "leaders" go to school [u]

And Connecticut has the highest ratio of millionaires in the country. And a sign proudly proclaiming its status as George Bush's birthplace.

6:01 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Edison Schools Inc -- once the hottest school-management company -- is sliding quickly into oblivion -- and taking students with them [u]
Over the summer, Edison's shares slid from the year's high of $21.68 to less than a dollar on the Nasdaq Stock Market. (The company traded yesterday at about 50 cents.)

In the classroom, this has had some bizarre effects.

Days before classes were to begin in September, trucks arrived to take away most of the textbooks, computers, lab supplies and musical instruments the company had provided -- Edison had to sell them off for cash. Many students were left with decades-old books and no equipment.

A few weeks later, some of the company's executives moved into offices inside the schools so Edison could avoid paying the $8,750 monthly rent on its Philadelphia headquarters. They stayed only a few days, until the school board ordered them out.

As a final humiliation, Chris Whittle, the company's charismatic chief executive and founder, recently told a meeting of school principals that he'd thought up an ingenious solution to the company's financial woes: Take advantage of the free supply of child labour, and force each student to work an hour a day, presumably without pay, in the school offices.
Geez, who'd a thunk it?

5:45 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

US and Britain discuss new "non-lethal" weapons: metal-cutting lasers and skin-toasting microwave guns
Documents obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act detail talks about battlefield uses of the weapons and whether they could be used to back up economic sanctions against target countries. The weapons include lasers that can blind and stun an enemy and cut through metal to disable vehicles.

Another weapon discussed was a system that uses microwave beams to heat the water in human skin in the same way as a microwave oven cooks a meal. The third category of weapons was the use of gases similar to those deployed to end the terrorist siege in a Moscow theatre, which killed more than 100 hostages.

5:32 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Due to the posting of her article on voting machine manufacturers and their conflicts of interest, Bev Harris has been threatened with a lawsuit unless she removes it from her site [u]

5:28 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

If not for 9/11, Philip Noyce's new version of Graham Greene's The Quiet American probably would have been released to little fanfare before last Christmas
Sir Michael Caine's latest picture The Quiet American has become unexpectedly controversial in the United States.

Its US distributor delayed its release until very recently fearing it might be perceived as less than patriotic.

The film, based on Graham Greene's celebrated 1955 novel, is seen as contentious.

It shows an act of American-sponsored terrorism in Saigon in which innocent civilians die, at a time when the US Government is loudly decrying such lawless acts.

The Quiet American also links early US involvement in Indochina in the 1950s with the quagmire of the Vietnam War that followed a decade later.

Caine gives an unusually serious performance By so doing it implicitly questions the advisability of US interventionism just as President Bush is trying to rally world opinion behind an American-led invasion of Iraq.
Sounds like Caine is quite good in it, and the timing is perfect actually -- if you're not in The War Camp. Joseph Mankiewicz's 1958 version wasn't what it could have been (I just read the book a few months ago), despite a pretty good performance by Michael Redgrave.

This is the only Greene book I've read, and it was because the movie seemed a bit muddled that I took it on. The plot had elements which were as close to what really happened as any of Greene's books:
When my novel was eventually noticed in the New Yorker the reviewer condemned me for accusing my "best friends" (the Americans) of murder since I had attributed to them the responsibility for the great explosion -- far worse than the trivial bicycle bombs -- in the main square of Saigon when many people lost their lives. But what are the facts, of which the reviewer needless to say was ignorant? The Life photographer at the moment of the explosion was so well placed that he was able to take an astonishing and horrifying photograph which showed the body of a trishaw driver still upright after his legs had been blown off. This photograph was reproduced in an American propaganda magazine published in Manila over the title "the work of Ho Chi Minh" although General Th� had promptly and proudly claimed the bomb as his own. Who had supplied the material to a bandit who was fighting French, Caodaists and Communists?
I can think of no movie more timely right now than The Quiet American.

12:23 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Educated Indonesians suspect CIA in Bali attack [og]

1:11 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

charging the canvas

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