Good interview on electronic publishing with Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive project.
Out of the Internet Archive's offices in San Francisco, he and his staff are busy filling terabyte after terabyte with the digital images, sounds and text of our times. It costs 2,000 to add a terabyte (1 million megabytes) of storage to the archive. Kahle considers that a pittance compared with the billion a year spent on libraries.
Kahle puts his goal simply: "Universal access to all human knowledge." Unreachable? Hardly, he says.
"I am a designer of a digital device such as a "personal computer", and I want to spend my energies creating exciting new technology, rather than in understanding and implementing the requirements of the DTPA [or] I am a user of such a device, and I want it to be designed to serve my interests, rather than the interests of the Consortium ..."
The Underground Publishing Conference is for Zinesters, Activists, Comic Artists, Hackers, Low Power FM Broadcasters, Librarians, Web Designers, Filmmakers, Musicians, Artists, Academics, Street Theorists, Readers and Writers. In other words, YOU!
BUZZFLASH: Now specifically, a little bit about your book [Stupid White Men]. You've written in your columns that after September 11th, your publisher was going to deep-six the book unless you took out critical comments on Bush. You held firm. Is it true that the librarians of America came to your defense and saved the day?
MICHAEL MOORE: That's what it looks like. I mean, I didn't know who any of these people were. They -- this one librarian found out about it, and she got in a, I don't know, library chat room. Or she sent a letter out to a list of librarians, and they sent it out to a bunch of people, and the thing kind of mushroomed from there. So, I'd say it's a combination of these librarians and the Internet, because they started sending letters to Harper-Collins, and Harper-Collins saw that it wasn't gonna be a good thing to ban the book. But I'm really happy about it. I really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group.
BUZZFLASH: Subversive.
MICHAEL MOORE: They are subversive. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man.
"Sleep disruption, coupled with heavy physical demands, he said, may impair critical decision-making and other cognitive skills. The role of caffeine in countering such decrements and new ways to deliver this drug were the focus of a 2-day meeting at the National Academy of Sciences ...
"Caffeine is no substitute for adequate sleep," Penetar stressed ...
(The amount of caffeine in an average cup of coffee is 100 mg.) The 600-mg dose improved cognitive performance, objective alertness, and self-ratings of mood to the same extent that 20 mg of amphetamine had been shown to do in a comparable study. The caffeine caused fewer adverse effects ...
The studies show that a nap prior to sleep loss improves alertness, he said. A daytime nap followed by two cups of coffee restores nighttime alertness to daytime baseline levels.
House officers perform better and stay more alert if they take a 2-hour nap after 2 PM on the day before a night shift and then stay up all night with the aid of caffeine, according to Michael Bonnet, PhD, of Wright State University School of Medicine in Dayton, Ohio.
Normal young adults, particularly those with a chronic sleep debt, he said, fall asleep easily in the daytime in a sleep-conducive environment, that is, a quiet, dark room where they are protected from interruptions. Bonnet's research suggests, he said, that 200 mg of caffeine (two cups of coffee) at 1 AM preserves alertness through the night. Another 200 mg at 7 AM helps alertness the following day ... Napping on night duty, even if one's workload permits, may harm rather than help alertness."
Why the obsession with sleep and staying awake? Because I have worked at jobs which required top mental alertness, and my 9-hours-of-sleep, night owl body clock is at odds with the rest of the world. Since it's tough to prioritize the requisite 2-3 hours of daily light aerobics for getting by with less sleep, I'm always on the prowl for alternatives.
One gap in our system has been what to do when you encounter someone who in addition to acting like a jerk or a wingnut, also appears to be potentially violent. How many of us have had unpleasant encounters with someone displaying the level of hostility portrayed in the ABC coverage of the USDA loan officer's disturbing interview with Mr. Atta? Perhaps we'll start to get a little more response from County Mental Health or the local police when we run across people like this riding the bus or in our public contact jobs. "The customer is always right" and "don't mess with strangers" are not necessarily correct and ethical maxims when the individual you're dealing with shows signs of being both off-the-wall and violent.
Another point of note: 'Throughout the interview, he [Atta] continued to refer to Bryant as "but a female," and Bryant said, "He would say it with disgust."' This is precisely the sort of behavior that clues you in to a potentially dangerous individual, according to the pamphlets on avoiding "date rape" for college students.
"Depending on the nature of the organisation concerned, we offer a minimum of 50% discount or even free of charge ... We fully respect and believe in the spirit of Internet - sharing of information and resources voluntarily."
Big Brother Wants to Look Into Your Bank Account (Any Time It Pleases)
The US government is constructing a system to track all financial transactions in real-time - ostensibly to catch drug traffickers, terrorists, and financial criminals. Does that leave you with the warm fuzzies - or scare you out of your wits?"
The Orlin Grabbe Homepage - Make Money At Home, Investigating Financial Irregularities! - (Not "worksafe!" What good-looking ladies, what trouble could they be? This is becoming a standard technique, adding pictures of nekkid women next to controversial links. Howcome?)
"If this evening's news reports are right, the President is about to call for a very large reorganization of government. In the newest scheme, disparate agencies - Lawrence Livermore Labs, the Coast Guard, FEMA, the Secret Service, INF, Border Service, et cetera - are going to [be] ripped from their cabinet departments of origin, and placed under the direction of a new Cabinet-level officer, the Secretary for Homeland Security.
"There is no such thing as an objective point of view.
Critical questions for detecting bias
- What is the author's / speaker's socio-political position? With what social, political, or professional groups is the speaker identified?
- Does the speaker have anything to gain personally from delivering the message?
- Who is paying for the message? Where does the message appear? What is the bias of the medium? Who stands to gain?
What sources does the speaker use, and how credible are they? Does the speaker cite statistics? If so, how were the data gathered, who gathered the data, and are the data being presented fully?
- How does the speaker present arguments? Is the message one-sided, or does it include alternative points of view? Does the speaker fairly present alternative arguments? Does the speaker ignore obviously conflicting arguments?
- If the message includes alternative points of view, how are those views characterized? Does the speaker use positive words and images to describe his/her point of view and negative words and images to describe other points of view? Does the speaker ascribe positive motivations to his/her point of view and negative motivations to alternative points of view?
"the first in a periodic series on digital storytelling techniques." Examples: touch-screen voting demo, a feature on an airport baggage screener, etc.
BTW, have you heard about the "Necessity for Enlightened Thinking"? It's on the same page as the above article about "who knew what when," and it explains enlightened thinking with lots of really outstanding pictures. Much cheaper than a college class in Western Civ!
"As Head of the Artificial Intelligence Department at the U.S. Army War College for several years, and previously, I explored personality simulation systems which capture a person's mental components: beliefs, ideas, attitudes, etc., translate these into a computer system: hardware and software use the system to manipulate and control that person's ideas and behavior.
This may sound like science fiction or Frankenstein's laboratory, but it is the actual state of the technology in personality simulation and control ..."
And as you might expect, the author goes on to promise that his online book will help you learn to "think for yourself ..." Trust him, it's on the Internet!
"Today's drumbeat of cowardice comes from the Czechs -- who, despite what the State Department keeps leaking, insist that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer. They even give the reason for the stories denying the meeting ..."
"The Army has decided to close its Peacekeeping Institute, the only arm of the military devoted entirely to developing principles of how to conduct peacekeeping missions, officials said Friday."
I don't get it. You would think this would be helpful for dealing with situations like Afghanistan!
"In which a conference on foreign intervention in Bosnia is told that abandoning failed states is perilous in the wake of 11 September ..."
"Opening the conference, the president of the Open Society Institute in New York, Aryeh Neier, said it was not possible simply to abandon a state after a conflict because failed states such as Somali and Afghanistan could become places where terrorists could establish their bases.
And he said the United States Government must make more effort towards the people of key allied states such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt as well as their governments."
"My concern is, what message does this send to the world?" Col. George Oliver, director of the institute, said in a telephone interview Monday. "It's going to say that the U.S. military doesn't really care about peacekeeping."
"How perceptive of you Colonel, but I guess that's military intelligence."
"It would be a good idea to explore the idea of creating regional training centers for training peacekeeping units. For direct training of peace-operation units it is desirable to use national centers physically and geographically similar to the areas of the impending operation. Creating and using such centers could be discussed at international conferences and at Russia-NATO SFOR meetings.
Although the problem of training peace forces has great practical importance, it has not yet been sufficiently studied. Considering the multiple aspects involved in using a multi-national force, resolving this problem inside our own national structures is probably not possible. Hence, the study of this problem should be brought out into the international arena. The following topic could be discussed at international military-science seminars and conferences: "The Problem of the Correlation of Multi-National and Mono-National Peacekeeping Units and their System of Command and Control." Based on the conclusions drawn, it should be possible to make recommendations to the OSCE on the procedures for providing national contingents for peace operations and on their command-and-control system."
Note that the person whose financial transactions are considered "suspicious" has no right to see the report.
"... its software can "reduce the risk of money laundering with comprehensive, enterprise-wide surveillance of your customer, account, and transaction information . . . to reveal suspicious and previously unknown behaviors."
"... suspicious-activity reports, which require officials to fill in more than 50 kinds of information, including addresses, account numbers, Social Security numbers and phone numbers.
They are maintained by FinCen in databases that are available to local, state and federal law-enforcement agencies. Under Patriot Act provisions, intelligence agencies also have the right to get such reports on demand. People who are the subjects of the reports may not see them, a FinCen official said."
Wednesday, June 5, 2002 09:42 a.m.
"An invaluable talent which few individuals own is the ability to listen. By listening I mean not just the laid back passive kind of listening but the skill to listen attentively and actively, thereby really understanding what the other person is trying to get at. In my daily routine, especially while involved with the very hectic surroundings of my work, it seems that people rarely really listen to each other. They only hear what they want to hear, mostly to gain their own advantage in a win-or-lose attitude. This is a real shame. We can all learn alot from each other if only we could listen to each other better. This is just an observation of mine based on my experiences during the last month. Rather than talking alot and discussing around the bushes wouldn't it be more productive listening to each other and together pursuing a win-win goal in mind? Together and not apart and many as one."
"As a committed infovore, I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy ...
I flip back and forth between my browser and my editor, entering a few keywords and instantly retrieving the details of some salient point -- it's my personal knowledge management system, annotated and augmented by my readers. Being deprived of my blog right now would be akin to suffering extensive brain-damage. Huge swaths of acquired knowledge would simply vanish.
Blogging begets blogging. [Yup!]
I blog because I'm in the business of locating and connecting interesting things ... The more I blog, the more of these things I get, as other infovores toss choice morsels over my transom."
WASHINGTON — Add "public nudity" to the nightmare scenarios associated with terrorist attacks.
A new report by a disaster-planning expert confirms what others have said: In the event of many biological or chemical attacks, removal of victims' clothing is one of the most important and effective means of decontamination.
"You hold them, you strip them and you wash them," said Henry Siegelson, report author and clinical assistant professor of emergency medicine at Emory University in Atlanta.
But the reluctance of modest victims to strip naked in front of co-workers or strangers "has been one of the issues that has prevented us from moving forward and developing a scheme to manage mass casualties," he said. "Some people would rather be dead than strip in public."
But most involved in the movement point to a more fundamental reason why the hippie phenomenon has lasted where other cultural trends have faded.
"The reason is that hippie era ideals were very, very sound," says John McCleary, author of the forthcoming Hippie Dictionary. "The whole movement wasn't based completely on sex drugs and rock and roll."
The hippie values of anti-materialism, environmentalism, non-violence, and so on, are both valuable and appealing to a broad range of Americans, McCleary says.
"The truth of the matter is that there are literally millions of people in this country who still live with and are interested in the ideals of the counterculture."
"It's a healthy thing there are demonstrators in the streets. We need a discussion about whether the rich world is giving back what it should in the developing world. I think there is a legitimate question whether we are."
"With not a scintilla of evidence of a crime being committed, the feds will be able to run full investigations for one year. That's aimed at generating suspicion of criminal conduct — the very definition of a "fishing expedition."
Not to worry, say governmental perps — we won't collect data in dossiers on individuals or social or political clubs or church groups — the sort of abuse that suppressed dissent in "the bad old days."
Just because the F.B.I. brass hats are presently computer illiterate, do they think the public is totally ignorant of the ability of today's technologists to combine government surveillance reports, names on membership lists, and "data mining" by private snoops to create an instant dossier on law-abiding Americans?
Consider the new reach of federal power: the income-tax return you provided your mortgage lender; your academic scores and personnel ratings, credit card purchases and E-ZPass movements; your political and charitable contributions, charge account at your pharmacist and insurance records; your subscription to non-mainstream publications like The Nation or Human Events, every visit to every Web site and comment to every chat room, and every book or movie you bought or even considered on Amazon.com — all newly combined with the tickets, arrests, press clips, full field investigations and raw allegations of angry neighbors or rejected lovers that flow into the F.B.I.
All your personal data is right there at the crossroads of modern marketing and federal law enforcement. And all in the name of the war on terror.
This is not some nightmare of what may happen someday. It happened last week."
Per VOA, the rationale behind the first WTC bombing ran as follows:
An Iraqi man who admits helping out with the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 says Jewish parts of New York City were the bombers' original targets.
In an interview with the U.S. television network CBS, Adbul Rahman Yasin says convicted bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef first planned small-scale bombings in Jewish neighborhoods. But he says Youself decided an attack on the World Trade Center would be easier and kill more Jews.
"Which makes it very strange that the US government, in the shape of the State Department, is currently doing all it can to shut down the only reliable pro-western source of intelligence on Saddam's dictatorship, the clandestine "information collection programme" run by the Iraqi National Congress. Whatever Bush may say about the "axis of evil," the INC is anathema in much of Washington, because it wants to replace Saddam not with another military strongman (the State Department Arabists' preferred option) but a pluralist democracy.
I have seen the INC information network in action in several countries bordering Iraq, and it is pretty impressive. Equipped with digital cameras, satellite phones and laptop encryption software, its agents run regular missions inside the country, exfiltrating information and, when necessary, dissident human beings. Some of the resulting intelligence is shared with journalists; some with western authorities ? usually not the CIA, but the Defense Intelligence Agency, run by the INC's main US allies in the Pentagon.
This work is run on not much more than a shoestring. Since September, the State Department has repeatedly cut the INC?s grant, approved by Congress in 1998. Last week, after yet another inspection at the INC London headquarters, US officials said further funds would only be paid if the INC stopped all intelligence gathering immediately. They could carry on with their TV station, but spying was out.
"You can't automate accidental discoveries, but you can manufacture the conditions in which such events are more likely to occur."
Beyond Backlinks - Inspired by Jon Udell's recent articles, I've written a forward looking update to Manufactured Serendipity, focusing on new ways to manage the experience.
But what does surprise foreign policy experts is that an eagerness to comprehend the world remains high nearly nine months later.
Several leading foreign policy organizations say their Web sites are getting several million hits a month, up substantially from the period before Sept. 11, and polling organizations say they are finding strong support for greater international cooperation on major issues.
``People are still searching for some answers to some big questions,'' said Marshall Bouton, president of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations ...
"Flirting is much more than just a bit of fun: it is a universal and essential aspect of human interaction." What social science can tell you about flirting and how to do it.
Telling someone they "lack moral clarity" is essentially a way of saying "you're wrong." Is "lack of moral clarity" becoming a catch phrase for criticizing or silencing those you disagree with? Is "moral clarity" a new code word for "Israel, right or wrong?"
"The cries of the poor are the voice of God." This is moral clarity, if you believe in Liberation Theology.
The Rabid Librarian comments on paying off fifteen years of college. (Academic libraries routinely require a second Masters or PhD-- that's 8-11 years of training, for positions that may pay less than 35K.)
With a SPECIAL PAGE:
OFFICAL INTERVIEWS & INTERROGATIONS - What to Expect
"This web site provides candid, practical, and effective guidelines and techniques for keeping your personal life private."
"In response to a ton of E-mail requests, I am (somewhat reluctantly) adding a section specifically oriented towards government snooping on US citizens. The "Keep Your Secrets" web site is primarily concerned with personal privacy as it relates to interactions with other people...however...from the volume of E-mail I receive asking questions about privacy intrusions (as it relates to government agencies..both local and federal) ...this must be a hot topic on lots of people's minds. To that end I am constructing a section with basic information about government intrusions on personal privacy.
Hopefully this section should be ready by June 2002. Please check back."
"PLEASE NOTE: Portions of this web site suggest techniques for deception, lying, covering up, misdirection, and various other methods of keeping your secrets. If you have no need to for this information...or if you have moral objections to such goings on....then surf right on past this web page."
- (via Farid), an Indonesian blogger. Welcome to the blogosphere! I note that you link to idealist.org, Open Democracy, and introduce yourself by saying some nice things about keeping an open mind / open heart.
"September 11 and its aftermath were indeed a call to arms for bloggers. The impatience many people felt at the Neville Chamberlain-like tone of appeasement that permeated so much traditional media commentary is the gasoline that fueled the bloggers' lit matches."
So did the horror of losing our freedom of expression and all of our civil liberties! Or plunging back into the bad old days of racial tensions, religious intolerance, witchhunts, bad vibes, and violence ...
... (or nuclear war, or bioterrorism, or chemical attacks, etc. ...)
... and should we mention all the sloppiness, slack, and things we've just let slide so that the private sector doesn't have any inconvenient rules to follow while creating sharehholder value? Or all the things we've pretended aren't happening? Things like overlooking creative accounting practices, overlooking how convenient it is not to track the foreign nationals doing menial labor, overlooking the fact that unrealistic laws create an atmosphere of hypocracy, coverup, and lies about underage drinking, alcoholism, marijuana, and recreational drug use, overlooking the fact that while we are so busy lecturing the rest of the world about democracy, we can't even count the votes accurately in our own elections ...
... and oh yeah, who wants to think about the facts that we have routine waits of 6 1/2 hours in major urban emergency rooms for non-crisis care, an army of uninsured and uninsurable citizens, a decaying public health system, and a clear and present danger of maliciously induced epidemics? Who wants to think about the consequences of looking the other way on sloppy tracking of nuclear materials and chemicals, or admit that radiation and toxics present both a money-making opportunity and some very grave problems?
... and there's the question of being totally clueless and unprepared for a blockade of oil imports, for global warming, or the potential for malicious use of nanotechnologies / non-lethal weapons ...
(Not an elegant rant, but there just might be other concerns more pressing right now than countering a post-911 "tone of appeasement.")
An article from a major German paper, "Die Zeit," asserts that the connections between the United States and Germany are becoming weaker. This is especially noticible in areas that were once East Germany.
"Deutschland ist eine Kolonie der USA, lautet das Klischee. Dabei lockern sich längst die Bindungen - die politischen wie die kulturellen"
- (via GesternWarNichHeute)
"We are all conduits for something. Whatever we are in contact with, whatever we surround ourselves with, passes through us whether we like it or not. A driver zooming through traffic because he's listening to speed metal is a conduit for the music. Likewise, we are conduits for the enterprises in which we participate. Ideas pass through us, spirituality and certainly the desire for money passes through us as surely as the cord through the wooden hands of a marionette. When large corporations are the ultimate purveyors of what we make, it has to affect our work. We become conduits for corporate ideology. We take the check and wonder why we're miserable." - Eric Bogosian
"Several things occurred within the past few days on the privacy/surveillance frontier. First, the EU Parliament decision we mentioned yesterday is being widely reported as an assault on privacy (the European press barely mentions the spam angle we covered yesterday). As far as I can tell, this decision will loosen the EU's protections against surveillance, but does not implement any spying itself - national governments are free to NOT spy on their citizens, in the (perhaps unlikely) event that they don't want to do so. In the U.S., the FBI will be increasing their general surveillance - that is, they'll be doing more surveillance unrelated to any suspected crime, using commercial databases, etc. We can expect the Bureau to be used for more overtly political uses in the future - spying on the not-in-power political parties is no longer prohibited and will, therefore, occur. The NYT has an interesting analysis. Finally, the Washington Post reports that banks will be creating a massive financial database/blacklist of terrorists, wife-beaters, anti-globalization protesters, etc."
"Lively, good-looking and subversive - the right mix."
John Pilger
YearZero is the disobedient current affairs quarterly from the UK. Put together under fire by mass media journalists who think the mass media sucks.
Currently a year old it includes columnists Noam Chomsky and John Pilger as well as the best in young British journalism: Michael Holden, Grant Fleming, Zed Nelson, Kerri Sharp, Mark Olden, Mike Karin, Megan Rowling, Adam Porter and many more.
We have run pieces on Democratic Party money laundering by former LA Cop Mike Ruppert, photo journalism from inside FARC territory in Colombia, articles and photos from Mayday/Seattle/N30UK/PragueS26, the destruction of Thailand by tourism, the damming of the Yangzi river, the oil plunder in Angola, East Timor, West Papua, the Sioux people and so on. All first hand accounts by serious journalists ... We also come with a colour poster in the centre of the magazine, Ho Chi Minh, Seattle, Angola & The FARC have all been subjects, why not? If you are tired out from the deluge of commercial shite masquerading as journalism then erect the camo-netting, cement the bunker, put your feet up and enjoy YearZero. Booya...
Adam Porter - Editor
"A popular political magazine, there is nothing else like it."
James Brown
"There's been lots of renewed grumbling about American stinginess in foreign aid since the Bono/O'Neill tour.
"Public aid is not necessarily superior to private aid. In fact I would argue it may be inferior. Military aid (such as policing shipping lanes) can be critical to the success of any other kind of aid. The U.S.'s unfunded backing, not counted in direct aid figures, is indispensible to many (controversial) aid-providing international organizations. There may be a case for more public funded aid, but the U.S. is far from "stingy" in terms of actual value gifted to other economies.
A thought-provoking opinion piece from Nicolas Kristof of the NYT.
Applying an ideological filter to all facts can blind you to critical pieces of reality. For this reason, I like the multi-faceted approach to describing political identity. A constant line of attack that "the left is wrong!" or "that's right-wing!" results in an analysis that prioritizes divisiveness and polarization over insight.
"Under present guidelines, Ashcroft said, agents "cannot surf the Web, the way you and I can," and cannot simply walk into public events to observe people and activities.
"The new guidelines give FBI agents more freedom to investigate terrorism even when they are not pursuing a particular case.
'A senior Justice Department official was asked what reason an FBI agent must give to a superior, under the new guidelines, before entering a mosque.
If it's a public meeting, then "the agent is free to attend on the same terms" as a member of the public, as long as the FBI agent's presence is in connection with detecting or preventing terrorism, said the official, who discussed this scenario only on grounds of anonymity."
decided to leave the public arena and devote themselves to private life / their families. [pick two]
"Baker is still wielding immense, unelected power behind the scenes, subverting US policy to cash in as a member of the Carlyle cabal. Baker was perfectly placed to ensure GW Bush would order the FBI, CIA and other national security agencies to "back off" bin Laden terrorists, trying to avoid "insulting" his Saudi business associates."
"Not only is it not simple, it's probably one of the hardest language you could ever want to learn. With THREE completely different written languages (none of which make sense), multitude of useless, confusing politeness levels, and absolutely insane grammatical structure, Japanese has been crushing the souls of the pathetic Gaijin since it's conception. Let's go over some of these elements mentioned above so you can get a better idea of what I mean ..."
A certain conservative Republican parental unit, busy typing something or other about "freedom" at the neighboring machine, responds to my remark that someone from "senate.gov" hit this site today.
"Mr. Ashcroft's got his people out looking at the web today. He's going to send his secret police out to get you soon."
1. You can't answer questions about something that hasn't happened yet. Or, if it's already happened, it speaks for itself.
2. All contradictory evidence must be submitted in writing; otherwise, you haven't seen it yet and can't comment.
3. Refuse to accept contradictory evidence that comes from anyone unwilling to go on the record and be quoted by name.
4. Make the question at hand into an issue so complicated that you can't possibly be expected to have the expertise to offer an answer.
5. Explain that you're not the appropriate person to ask, go ask someone else.
6. Find some reason to say that this is a hypothetical question, not something that has actually happened yet, so you don't know what would happen and can't answer.
7. Explain how the general process works without offering any useful information or taking a concrete position.
8. Steamroller along with your own agenda without responding directly to anything.
(For specifics about Mr. Fleisher, ask the conservative author who wrote this National Review article.)
A contract computer engineer working for Cadence Design Systems in Germany this week lost his job because he took leave to join humanitarian efforts in the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip and West Bank areas of Israel.
According to silicon.com, James Hanna, a U.S citizen, took 10 days leave in April to work with the International Solidarity Movement, a group of non-violent, pro-Palestinian activists.
Hanna was deported on May 4 after being detained by the Israeli army for attempting to deliver food parcels to armed gunmen and others hiding in Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity.
According to his dismissal letter Cadence terminated Hanna's contract “due to unacceptable conduct and political actions in a geographical area where Cadence does business”.
Under Californian State Law it is illegal to sack staff because of their political activities. But this right does not extend to contract workers.
Hanna said: “I want people to be aware of what happened to me, so they can understand what corporate America is thinking and doing in regards to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict."
"Equally controversial is the effort to speed up and deepen attention through pharmaceuticals such as Provigil. If Provigil works for all-night truck drivers, won't it also help students cramming for exams? Or a working parent who has been up all night with a sick child? ...
As its reputation grows, doctors soon may find themselves faced with a difficult question: When is sleepiness a sickness? And should you prescribe medication for a student or worker who is intentionally sleep-deprived?
``There could be misuse, where someone does not have a medical condition but wants to stay awake,'' Stowers said. ``But we believe the actual abuse potential is quite low. People with a history of substance abuse don't like it because there's no `rush.' It doesn't really do anything.''
In the future, other medications may enhance the mind by boosting memory. Scientists predict that compounds developed to treat Alzheimer's will lead to substances that boost intelligence.
``I worry that our increased use of medical technologies will reduce the range of ways that it's acceptable to be,'' Parens said. ``If more healthy adults use Prozac, for instance, what does it mean to our society that we're all more assertive, confident, resilient people?
``We need to remember that there are a lot of different ways to be in this world.''
"The study, "Co-existence in European Agriculture," predicts that the situation would become critical for organic farming of staple foods such as oilseed rape as well as for intensive production of potatoes and conventional maize, or corn.
The coexistence of genetically engineered farming and organic farming would become impossible in many cases since all seeds would be contaminated with genetically engineered traits to some extent, the study concludes."
3. Memetic networks (MMN): independent networks which coordinate without the unification of a central command ...
4. Nonlinearity and complexity effects: where simple interactions lead to unpredictable outcomes ...
"This is why reasearch and intelligence (RI) are rapidly moving toward more direct methods of information tactics—specifically "neo-cortical warfare." Why try to define and control unstable electronic systems, why not just go directly to the root of the problem. RI is now investigating and developing methods of direct action against individuals and groups that fail to follow the bottom-line of Late Capital.
Human capital as agency (or agent) is much more open to C4I tactics than networks are or have been. The gamble that the War Machine is now takening will have little to do with the electronic community. They have already lost that battle and must now mimic it in order to survive within it—now it is seeking the rapid development of meme based weapons and micro-genetic weapons.
If one can stop individuals and groups, a priori, with pre-programmed meme-engines the necessity of any sort of battle will never emerge.
Adversary information warriors are now being defined and treated as "memoids — people who are so possessed by a meme that they can justify any deed, while feeling that neither their own nor their oppenent's survival matters as long as the meme goes foward." Strong "neo-cortical" meme tactics are now being developed with the aggressive focus that the Nuclear Bomb was in the Fifties.
~~~
Better yet kill the root of the problem by stopping the reproduction of specific individual human capital or problematic collections of bodies. ~~~
A final solution for a new century. Gene Based Weapon Research (MBWR) moves beyond Infowar (IW) to the next level beyond surveillance and meme control as its goal: the development of command, contagion, containment, and control virus systems (C4VS).
C4VS will seek out specific genetic registers for erasure. As Sun Tzu states, "if the root is cut, the tree will not grow and bear fruit." Thus command and control issues will move beyond Infowars in the next decade to overcome the problematics of electronic (C4I) related conflicts.
Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
-- Identifying information-level activities in networked environments ...
-- Epistemological and neo-cortical warfare
So-called information-level threats are based on the active or passive distribution of key information to a large audience. Such information may result from discussions in Usenet newsgroups or they may be created purposefully with a certain impact in mind. Examples of such threats are hoaxes, false rumors, revenge web sites, and joe jobs¾spamming under the name of a competitor which has the effect that the competitor is blamed (and punished) for spamming.
Information-level threats need to be distinguished from more technical threats (denial of service, content degrading or destruction). Information-level threats are not targeted at computers and communications networks, but at humans receiving the information: the primary lever of an information-level attack is the content of a message or claim, rather than its form. An implication of this is that information-level threats are less about security in a technical or computational sense than notions of propaganda, opinion formation, and perception management."
"It seems that President Bush and Vice President Cheney want to remove the last vestiges of congressional power - the power to expose. But that will not solve their problem, because it has been the so-called fourth estate, the news media, that has collaborated with Congress in preventing the Executive Branch from operating in secrecy. The news media, as Woodward makes clear, are never going to return to the pre-Watergate days when a president's actions were not questioned. Nor should they, even in a time of war.
Of course, there should not be exposure for exposure's sake - as is the case with too many Congressional investigations, past misguided Independent Counsel investigations, and occasional sensational news coverage. But nor should there be secrecy for secrecy's sake, as appears to be the case now with the Bush Administration.
To claim a need for secrecy to restore presidential power is disingenuous at best, and a deliberate falsehood at worst. Secrecy is the way of dictatorships, not democracies."
When he returned to the United States after spending a month either on missions or at the Bagram military base, Guckenheimer said, he remembered how alienated Americans are from each other. After living in a Third World country, where people he didn't know would smile or say hello to him on the streets, it was jarring to return home, where contact among strangers is mostly shunned.
"These people who lived through life, they seemed to be more grounded," he said. Coming home was like walking back into a "clueless" society where over-consumption is commonly regarded as the route to happiness, he said.
"Originally, the marines had sent patrols into several villages in the mountains near the town of Khost, hoping to catch up with al-Qaeda suspects who last week fought a four-hour gun battle with soldiers of the Australian SAS. The hardened troops, their faces covered in camouflage cream and weight down with weapons, radios and ammunition, were confronted with Afghans wanting to stroke their hair.
"It was hell," said Corporal Paul Richard, 20. "Every village we went into we got a group of men wearing make-up coming up, stroking our hair and cheeks and making kissing noises."
Guess that's one way to get a bunch of red-blooded, hetero male soldiers to go elsewhere. Wonder if this is a standard technique?
This was the busy season, before Christmas, when orders peaked from Japan and the United States for the factory's stuffed animals. Long hours were mandatory, and at least two months had passed since Li and the other workers had enjoyed even a Sunday off.
Lying on her bed that night, staring at the bunk above her, the slight 19-year-old complained she felt worn out, her roommates recalled. She was massaging her aching legs, and coughing, and she told them she was hungry. The factory food was so bad, she said, she felt as if she had not eaten at all.
"I want to quit," one of her roommates, Huang Jiaqun, remembered her saying. "I want to go home."
Finally, the lights went out. Her roommates had already fallen asleep when Li started coughing up blood. They found her in the bathroom a few hours later, curled up on the floor, moaning softly in the dark, bleeding from her nose and mouth. Someone called an ambulance, but she died before it arrived.
The exact cause of Li's death remains unknown. But what happened to her last November in this industrial town in southeastern Guangdong province is described by family, friends and co-workers as an example of what China's more daring newspapers call guolaosi. The phrase means "over-work death," and usually applies to young workers who suddenly collapse and die after working exceedingly long hours, day after day.
There has been little research on what causes these deaths, or how often they occur. Local journalists say many of them are never documented but estimate that dozens die under such circumstances every year in the Pearl River Delta area alone, the booming manufacturing region north of Hong Kong.
Robert Frost ~ Gary Snyder ~ Ishmael Reed ~ Galway Kinnell ~ Czeslaw Milosz ~ Robert Haas ~ Robert Pinsky ~ Robert Creeley ~ Goh Po Seng ~ Elizabeth Alexander
Margaret Mead
Malcom X
Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer
Claude Levi-Strauss
Aldous Huxley
Carlos Fuentes
Umberto Eco
Noam Chomsky
James Baldwin
Michel Foucault
Desmond Tutu
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to spend some time around a teacher of Indian classical music. One unexpected thing I discovered was that for some people, personal preferences are of no importance whatsoever. Dedication to the art of music and placing one's mind on the eternal are more than sufficient for this earthly incarnation!
Most conversational foreign language tapes start out by teaching stock phrases for eliciting personal preferences. When I find myself less than fascinated with a conversation, very often it's one that I can just about translate directly into a Language 30 level. Lately it's becoming clear to me that in these parts it's considered more polite to be fascinated by your conversation partner than to be fascinated by the topic at hand. Why do so many people appear to be more interested in communicating personal details than in discussing content or subject matter?
"About eight years ago, early in my new phase of research, I sat in the kitchen of Alice Papineau-Dewasenta, an Onondaga clan mother. Over iced tea, Alice described to me the unbroken custom by which traditional Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) clan mothers nominate the male chiefs who go on to represent their clans in the Grand Council. She listed the qualifications: "First, they cannot have committed a theft. Second, they cannot have committed a murder. Third, they cannot have sexually assaulted a woman."
There goes Congress! I thought to myself. Then a wishful fantasy occurred: What if only women in the United States chose governmental representatives and, like Haudenosaunee women, alone had the right "to knock the horns off the head," as Stanton marveled -- to oust officials if they failed to represent the needs of the people unto the seventh generation?"
"You know, the Communist Party of Iraq is probably the organization with which we have more in common than any other in Iraq ... maybe we should fund them ... ?"
A proposal certain to annoy, but as potentially annoying as the abscence of reasonable verification mechanisms for biological warfare / WMD? As annoying as apocalyptic nuclear brinksmanship proliferating to a new region? (This particular bunch of communists may be just as bad as our old buddies Stalin and Somoza-- but if they're more willing to work on solutions for the worldwide WMD problem than Mr. Hussein, might it perhaps be worth starting some dialogue? Communist party rule in Iraq probably wouldn't be any better than living under Saddam Hussein; however, communist party organizations are reasonably effective for overthrowing despotic regimes.)
"In addition to being home to perverts, liberals, and music-stealing bandits, the Internet is also the knife with which terrorists spread their hummus of evil across the pita bread of the world."
"Jam bands. Floppy knitted hats. Rusted-out Volkwagen vans. Scraggly beards. White men with dreadlocks. Hacky Sack. Multicolored vests from Guatemala. High Times magazine. Radio ads with vague references to "smokables." Synching up Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz. "I didn't inhale." Deadheads. Parrotheads. Phish-heads. The Spin Doctors. Cypress Hill. The Black Crowes. The HORDE Tours. Rap songs about blunts. Dude, Where's My Car? Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers. Half Baked. Woody Harrelson. For God's sake, Woody friggin' Harrelson.
Sounds like Lambeth is doing first things first-- freeing up resources to concentrate on street crime, drug dealers, transit security, and adding surveillance cameras.
Great idea! Group weblogs might make it possible to work through the information overload of conferences in a somewhat more systematic manner. Wonder when the American Library Association conferences will move from "Cognotes" to "Blognotes"?
"premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience." That's what terrorism is.
"According to the U.S. Patriot Act passed 10/25/01 though, a Terrorist is defined as any of about 100 things in opposition of the government. It'll be great when people start getting arrested for opposing the government's view."
"Now it's time for Funny Search Results! Seeing as how my site is subtitled after the end track "Aqueous Transmission" on the most recent Incubus CD, I get about 75% of my searchs solely on that term. I didn't expect that, but it goes to show, if you talk about anything relatively popular when you write, chances are it will lead to some search results. Examples: Star Wars, Dragonball Z, Spider-Man, Britney Spears, Eminem, Anna Kournikova, Marijuana, Natalie Portman, WWF/WWE, Jennifer Lopez, Final Fantasy, Harry Potter, Prom, NBA Playoffs, Graduation, Survivor, World Trade Center, Playstation 2, Shakira, World Cup, Yu-Gi-Oh!, NASCAR, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Pokemon. Thanks to Lycos, I will probably get 3,000 hits tommorrow. It's all about placement. But most people find my site looking for things like: "up front huge pussies", "micheal jackson thriller wallpaper", "real zombies", "spyware essay", and "how about a nice cup of shut the fuck up wallpaper". Sheer brilliance."
"Every major traumatic event in U.S. history generates a new round of speculation about conspiracies. The attacks on 9/11/01 are no exception.
There are real conspiracies throughout history, but history is not controlled by a vast timeless conspiracy. There are powerful people and groups in society, but they are hardly a "secret team" or a tiny club of "secret elites." The tendency to explain all major world events as the product of a conspiracy is called conspiracism ...
In highlighting conspiracist allegation as a form of scapegoating, it is important to remember the following:
-- All conspiracist theories start with a grain of truth, which is then transmogrified with hyperbole and filtered through pre-existing myth and prejudice,
-- People who believe conspiracist allegations sometimes act on those irrational beliefs, which has concrete consequences in the real world,
-- Conspiracist thinking and scapegoating are symptoms, not causes, of underlying societal frictions, and as such are perilous to ignore,
Scapegoating and conspiracist allegations are tools that can be used by cynical leaders to mobilize a mass following,
-- Supremacist and fascist organizers use conspiracist theories as a relatively less-threatening entry point in making contact with potential recruits ..."
For some unknown reason, Google today identified this weblog as being similar to:
48–119 CC
1998
U.S. INTERESTS IN THE CENTRAL ASIAN REPUBLICS
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON
ASIA AND THE PACIFIC
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
"I don't know if anybody else is going to get involved in Afghanistan now, but I would hope that people of the world focus a little more on these poor people. They helped us end the cold war. If it wasn't for the courage and the bravery of the people of Afghanistan, we would still be in the middle of a cold war, spending 0 billion a year more trying to defend ourselves from the Russians. It was their strength and courage that broke the will of the Kremlin leaders. They decided that they could not stand up to this kind of resistance among the people of the world. So we owe them a lot. They are still suffering. This pipeline will help them, if we can ever get it built. But in the meantime, we owe it to them to help try to bring peace to Afghanistan. The rest of Central Asia depends on it. Thank you very much."
"Alan Schlosser, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said that if Cadence fired Hanna for his political activities, it raises serious civil liberties questions.
``Free speech and political activities would be seriously hampered if a private employer were able to retaliate for political actions,'' Schlosser said.
Hanna said he is still at a loss to explain what happened to him. ``I went to Israel on my personal time and did not affiliate myself with my company while I was there. I didn't associate with any militant or radical groups, and I conducted what I thought were thoroughly humanitarian acts,'' he said."
"Realizing when a diversion has gotten out of control is one of the great challenges of life."
"What is it about TV that has such a hold on us? In part, the attraction seems to spring from our biological "orienting response." First described by Ivan Pavlov in 1927, the orienting response is our instinctive visual or auditory reaction to any sudden or novel stimulus."
"In experiments, families have volunteered or been paid to stop viewing, typically for a week or a month. Many could not complete the period of abstinence. Some fought, verbally and physically. For growing numbers of people, the life they lead online may often seem more important, more immediate and more intense than the life they lead face-to-face. Maintaining control over one's media habits is more of a challenge today than it has ever been. TV sets and computers are everywhere. But the small screen and the Internet need not interfere with the quality of the rest of one's life. In its easy provision of relaxation and escape, television can be beneficial in limited doses. Yet when the habit interferes with the ability to grow, to learn new things, to lead an active life, then it does constitute a kind of dependence and should be taken seriously. Anecdotal reports from some families that have tried the annual TV Turn-off Week in the U.S. tell a similar story.
"Sundar has shown people multiple versions of the same Web page, identical except for the number of links. Users reported that more links conferred a greater sense of control and engagement. At some point, however, the number of links reached saturation, and adding more of them simply turned people off."
"For growing numbers of people, the life they lead online may often seem more important, more immediate and more intense than the life they lead face-to-face ... Yet when the habit interferes with the ability to grow, to learn new things, to lead an active life, then it does constitute a kind of dependence and should be taken seriously."
"it's our opinion that folks watch...
entirely too much television, particularly that really crummy
stomach turning type, ohhhhhhh, like, ahhhhhhhh... nevermind,
we're SO certain you can come up with a few examples without
our assistance. ENNYWAY- New on PBS- FRONTLINE/WORLD;
a little bit of background info avail here at this fishwrap link
Are we mildly polygynous? Rebecca considers the evidence. Although some feel polygyny is a divine right, wouldn't polyandry be the solution to overpopulation?
(How you get good human intelligence (HUMINT) to catch international terrorist networks without area studies programs is beyond me! But trust them, they're the government, they've got it all figured out.)
With Sgt. Stryker's retirement, what's happened to military blog viewpoints? Enough armchair pundits and warblogger watchers, this here hardcore peacenik wants the real stuff. (I'll add more as I find them).
"Welcome to Defense and the National Interest. Our aim is to foster debate on the roles of the U.S. armed forces in the post-Cold War era and on the resources devoted to them. The ultimate purpose is to help create a more effective national defense against the types of threats we will likely face during the first decades of the new millennium.
Contributors to this site are, with a few exceptions, active/reserve, former, or retired military. They often combine a knowledge of military theory with the practical experience that comes from trying their ideas in the field."
Sample material: NYT Article: "The Bush administration has taken a lively new interest in radiation-detection devices that might catch dirty-bomb materials in transit."
"Banning open source would have immediate, broad, and strongly negative impacts on the ability of many sensitive and security-focused DOD groups to protect themselves against cyberattacks," said the report by Mitre Corp."
"It's been about six years now since I've been around ostriches. One day I figured I had handled about 8,000 ostrich eggs, successfully hatching about 2,000. I never dropped an egg. Not one. Near the end of last year I needed part-time work and called the manager at the farm that had been Pacesetter. The new owners raise horses and cattle and I worked there a couple of months cleaning stalls in the barn where I once raised ostriches. At first, it seemed strange to see horses instead of birds in the pens. I felt a little sad that first day there and kept expecting to hear the soft little sound that young ostriches make when they're scared or lonely. Now and then while raking, I'd uncover a dusty feather or two ..."
- (via Breaching the Web)
Wednesday, May 22, 2002 05:09 p.m.
So, *now that you've clicked on all the links here,* what do you think?
Portuges
alfarrabio Joelhasso Joelhasso é um espaço para a discussão e proliferação de idéias a respeito das transformações que estão acontecendo por toda parte. Marketing viral, sociedade da informação, era do
conhecimento, redes de informação, novos paradigmas em comunicação. Não pretendemos entender nem explicar nada, somente confundir mais mentes e em maior grau. Lingua de Fel MiguelCardoso Ponto Media
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