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READING

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

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

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NOW AVAILABLE AT ME-ZINE

STOP TERRORISM

ABBREVIATIONS FOR SITES I OFTEN STEAL NEWS ITEMS FROM:

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

amazon wish list

alibris wishlist

Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia

Amazon Light

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

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

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

from Rule by Secrecy by Jim Marrs

* * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

* * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

from Distraction by Bruce Sterling

and s-integrator

Saturday, November 30, 2002

New interview with Greg Palast [questions, questions]
Greg Palast: ...from BBC television and the Guardian newspapers, which is considered the most prestigious of papers on the planet, I received these documents. And they'd say, officially, don't look at this, World Bank -- you have to be authorized. And each cover says Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Botswana, and it has all these nations. And it has for each nation an economic program. When you look at the economic program, most of them have these very nice names like Poverty Reduction Strategy. And you think, boy or boy, they are really going to help out these nations. So why is it secret if it's going to be so helpful? Have you ever heard of anyone kind of secretly helping someone? So, why the secrecy? And you open this stuff up and these are programs which point-by-point, I mean they go on for sometimes one- hundred pages, and they have specific demands on each country. Which if they don't agree to -- they call them conditionalities -- and they average 114 conditionalities per nation. You get your international finance -- it's cut off unless you agree to the whole package. And one nation after another is required to sell-off their water systems, electric systems to foreign operators. It requires the sale of the banks to foreign operators, allowing, changing rules to allow the banks to remove the capital from nations. And one of the most tragic cases I saw was Argentina where the economy was, where the...

Alex Jones: And they call it the IMF riot. They know it's going to create riots.

GP: Well yeah, one of the things I should mention is that, in the plans they say we know, for example in the case of Ecuador, it actually says that this will cause social unrest if you implement this plan. Which, and so I, now the former chief economist of the World Bank is named Joe Stiglitz. And the guy is not some type of whacko. The man just won the Nobel Prize in economics, okay? Now, I spoke to him for hours at Cambridge University and at one of the schools of economics where we both lectured -- and I'm an economist as well, by the way. And he basically said that they have a plan which they know, and they called it internally the IMF Riot, they deliberately knew that these plans would set off riots and cause these capitols of these nations to burn down.

AJ: And that causes the economy to further implode and they have a consolidation.

GP: And then everything is up for sale -- cheap.

5:04 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

"Bambi" Bembenek story takes another bizarre, sad turn

4:54 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Odd piece on Sharon panicking when voter turnout appeared to be low

One has to wonder about the Kenya attacks in this context, since I wouldn't put that past him -- though as the article notes, it didn't really make any difference.

Interesting snapshot of the usually well-restrained PM.

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

Oh yeah

The archive links will be gone for a bit til our problem is worked out. The Archive search function should still work though.

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

Down

Java trouble because of my high content prevented posting since Thursday night. Hopefully fixed now.

12:57 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Thursday, November 28, 2002

Homelessness -- and crackdowns on the homeless -- are growing
What makes the current crackdowns ironic - and different from the past, say Ms. Foscarinis and others - is that communities are pinpointing groups that try to help the homeless. Orlando, Fla., for instance, is considering a law to limit charity groups' feeding of the hungry in a downtown park to four times a year.

Here in Santa Monica, authorities say they're trying to limit the involvement of social service groups from Culver City on the south to Malibu on the north. "These people are well meaning, but when you suggest to them that they are encouraging a part of the population we are trying to not encourage, they say we are interfering with their personal mission," says Mr. Genser.

And authorities are attacking the issue in new ways. In Minneapolis, for instance, it's a crime to create an odor. And though state laws preempt Santa Monica on trespassing legislation, the city has made public defecation a health issue. Mayor Michael Feinstein, who voted against the current measures, calls them "a dishonest application of current health laws."

4:27 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Oil tanker disaster off Spain highlights the difficulty of assigning responsibility and the likelihood of future spills

4:22 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Apparently Sibel Edmonds was approached by her Turkish colleague to spy on the US, not the Mossad as I figured in the post above [xymphora]

Read xymphora's post for more on this strange (and perhaps disinforming) new twist. He doesn't mention that she's Jewish, which What Really Happened claimed in the story I posted about.

Whatever happened, clearly Herr Ashcroft & the FBI etc. don't want anyone to know about it.

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

Hilarious xymphora entry on Kissinger's appointment

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

Britain claims it will declassify UFO reports, list them on Net

10:50 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

American "immunity" from local laws making more friends overseas
Some restaurants and pubs in the South Korean capital are refusing to serve Americans amid anger over the acquittal of two US soldiers for the road deaths of two teenage girls.

"Americans are not welcome here," read a sign on the door and a window of Zeno, a restaurant in Seoul.

On Wednesday US President George Bush sent a message of regret for the deaths of the girls, who were crushed by a US military vehicle in June.

10:36 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Los Alamos fraud investigators do job too well

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

Doug McIntosh on The Economy [Richard McClendon/og]
The system will never allow anything to interfere with the looting it sanctions to enrich itself. The state of the American stock market is one where the fundamental illusion of fair play and honest information has been publicly shown to be a fraud. The proposed "solution" has collapsed in chaos and been shown to be a farce. The stock market is now at a critical juncture. At what point will people withdraw? We are headed towards year three of losses. There are some intense structural stresses being exposed in the American economy by the reduction in stock market wealth, much like tree stumps in a lake suffering from an extended drought. 2003 will be the year these things kick in.
So watch where you put your eggs, and pay cash. I guess.

2:09 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Looking between the lines at tonight's simultaneous bomb/missile attack on Israeli targets in Kenya

Note how amateurish and shoddy the attacks were, compared to the preternatural precision of the 9/11 attacks and the far more deadly embassy hits a few years ago, and the Bali attack. And if the TWA 800 incident was a missile hit -- like the balance of the evidence indicates -- it creates a different context here as well.

Also, the drone hit in Yemen points out how such attacks can be carried out remotely.

How can we know who did this, and with what motive?

1:21 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

The White House Whitewash begins: The Warren Commission II

Kissinger to head "independent" 9/11 commission
...Mr. Bush did not set as a primary goal for the commission to uncover mistakes or lapses of the government that could have prevented the attacks. Instead, he said it should try to help the administration learn the tactics and motives of the enemy.

"This commission will help me and future presidents to understand the nature of the threats we face," he said in a ceremony with survivors, families of victims, and advocates of the bill, including lawmakers.

5:49 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Chiku Management

China starts first first suicide hotline
Long before Deng Xiaoping's reforms began two decades ago, suicide was a problem for China - particularly among rural women plagued for generations by abuse, unrewarding lives and feelings of deep hopelessness.

These days, convulsive change is stirring things up even more. Financial upheaval - a common contributor to suicide - is rolling across the land as the opening of once-stable markets to foreign investment reconfigures the economy and puts millions out of work.

Though there is no standard reporting system for deaths in China, researchers using available figures extrapolate that 287,000 Chinese kill themselves each year, making suicide the No. 5 cause of death in the world's most populous country. Some 2 million Chinese try to kill themselves annually.

Even more alarming to researchers: Suicide is the No. 1 cause of death for Chinese ages 15 to 34, and women have a 25 percent higher rate than men. In addition, rural suicide rates are three times as high as urban rates.

3:44 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Departure of Helms and Thurmond is the passing of an age of marathon filibustering and opposition to civil rights

Though shrubco and its lapdog Congress are doing their best to slide civil rights out of Washington too, on a different scale than these guys imagined.

3:37 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sad story of Texas engineer who wanted to be an astronaut, ends up jumping out of a small plane at 9000 ft

3:25 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Fearful of regulation, WebAdMachine sets privacy/notification rules
Web site operators use Web bugs--fairly undetectable strings of code in the form of 1-by-1-pixel tags--to track site usage, count the number of visitors to a page or monitor visitor behavior. Ad software companies often use the beacons in conjunction with cookies--another, more apparent, monitoring tool--to track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns or collect profiles on Web surfers, which they use to customize future promotions.

For example, search engines often use the tags to keep track of the query terms people type into their navigational tools. They use the data to sell targeted-advertising opportunities, which include the chance to create specialized ads that supposedly promote a better response from surfers.

Privacy advocates have long cautioned that the tags could be used for nefarious purposes, however. For instance, by using the tags in HTML-based e-mail messages, hackers have been able to exploit a security glitch in scripting languages and allow an e-mail's author to read private comments attached to the original message as it gets forwarded to new recipients, a problem called "e-mail wiretapping."

2:23 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Germ ship
Aliens on board
Fatal attraction
Sponsored by Ford
"Germ Ship"
Wire

1:29 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

Appear. Disappear.

Sorry if the site is down off and on. Wayne's troubleshooting his Verizon connection.

10:46 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Soft money lurches back into Congress: huge, drunk and ready to smash whatever's left of the democratic china
A new fundraising entity opened late last month with the aim of promoting Republican causes in the Senate, filing under a tax- exempt status that allows unlimited and undisclosed contributions.

The National Committee for a Responsible Senate filed its corporate registration with the District of Columbia on Oct. 29, one week before the midterm elections and eight days before the new fundraising laws outlawed party committees from raising unlimited soft money contributions.

Officials at the National Republican Senatorial Committee declined to comment on the new group, saying it would be illegal for them to be affiliated with it or promote it.

And the three Republican lawyers who filed the papers opening the new nonprofit group did not return a half-dozen phone calls last week to their law offices at Patton Boggs LLP.

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

Monday, November 25, 2002

Slate's headlines wonders why this WP story isn't on page one: the big cleanup of unexploded ordnance that's been put off by the military
Unexploded munitions at 16,000 inactive military ranges, including chemical and biological weapons, pose "imminent and substantial" public health risks and could require the largest environmental cleanup program ever implemented by the U.S. government, according to newly released Environmental Protection Agency documents.

The documents, made available by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a Washington-based advocacy group that advises environmental whistle-blowers, also state that EPA officials are concerned by the Pentagon's refusal to abide by EPA regulations when cleaning up the sites.

One of the documents, a briefing paper written this summer for the EPA's head enforcement officer, cites a "disturbing trend" by the military services and the Army Corps of Engineers to limit their cleanup activities or "take ill-advised short-cuts to limit costs."

7:44 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

How about trading cards?

Corporate Scandal Sheet from CBS [refdesk]

7:33 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, November 24, 2002

Lou Dobbs(!) agrees with Sam Smith: Homeland Security has all the earmarks of a disastrous megamerger
Last week, the Senate followed the House in approving the Homeland Security bill. The legislation will combine 22 existing agencies and 170,000 federal employees to create a new government department with at least a $35 billion annual budget request. The new super-sized security bureau could take years to fully put in place. And there's no assurance that we will be any safer than when we started.

Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute says Republicans and conservatives are falling into the same traps that liberals have over the last 50 years.

"If there is a problem in America, create a new government program or government agency to deal with it," says Moore. "And we've seen over the last 30 years that when we created the Department of Energy, that certainly didn't solve the energy crisis. We created the Education Department. That didn't solve the education problem." Indeed, you could argue these departments compounded rather than solved problems.

1:00 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Failure of War on Terror [og]
All this has been the inevitable product of the central choice made last autumn, which was to opt for a mainly military solution to the challenge of Islamist terrorism. That was a recipe for failure. By their nature, terrorist or guerrilla campaigns which have deep social roots and draw on a widespread sense of injustice - as militant Islamist groups do, regardless of the obscurantism of their ideology - cannot be defeated militarily. And as the war on terror has increasingly become a war to enforce US global power, it has only intensified the appeal of "asymmetric warfare" to the powerless.

The grievances al-Qaida is able to feed on throughout the Muslim world were once again spelled out in Bin Laden's latest edict. But there is little sign of any weakening of the wilful western refusal to address seriously the causes of Islamist terrorism. Thus, during the past year, the US has armed and bolstered Pakistan and the central Asian dictatorships, supported Putin's ongoing devastation of Chechnya, continued to bomb and blockade Iraq at huge human cost, established new US bases across the Muslim world and, most recklessly of all, provided every necessary cover for Ariel Sharon's bloody rampages through the occupied Palestinian territories.

3:01 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Not that shrubco cares about our health

Smog reduction effects on health immediate

2:35 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

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

-- James Crumley

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

-- John Mitchell, 1973

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

-- Sam Smith

REVIEWS

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

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

Blog of the Day
1/18/02

WEEKLY QUOTE

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

-- Dennis Lehane, A Drink Before the War

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

-- Malcolm Muggeridge

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

charging the canvas

The Link Section