Goals, resources & tactics in a "New Middle East": it's still about WATER and OIL, folks

Iraqi intuition: As Joe Biden and Chris Matthews talked about on Hardball the other night, apparently President Bush did not expect Iraqi Shiites to support Hezbollah. This is the shrewd leadership of the War on Terror, folks. Sy Hersh was talking about how Cheney's office spoofed the intelligence on Lebanon and Israel. Again, the rosy shock-and-awe type scenarios failed tactically and stategically, as they always do. Strategic bombing never really works.

Apparently, The Pentagon's Air Force types were convinced Israel's planned tactical air campaign (long planned) would work. According to Hersh and others, the Marines and the Army are very skeptical about attacking Iran, since they would get sent in to invade Iran when the Air Force plan fails. It turns out that the intuitions of the Pentagon skeptics were right, not surprisingly. Any kind of military action on Iran would make our whole Middle East situation completely fall apart – and yes, the Iranians have a lot of fancy missiles they've bought with all the oil money. Iran's mountainous terrain makes South Lebanon look like a golf course.

This image comes from former Defense Intelligence Agency officer Pat Lang's blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis, which has had some of the best commentary on the tactics between the IDF and Hezbollah.

Various commentaries: "How I found myself with the Islamic fascists" by Jonathan Cook. This essay would make Bill O'Reilly's head explode. "Israel, Defeated: Round one: Lebanon, 1 – Israel, 0" by Justin Raimondo at AntiWar.com.

Huzzah for Shias: Check out the book review of The Shia Revival.

Hezbollah's suicide bombers in past campaigns were mostly not Shiite: this is fascinating because it indicates that 'religion' per se is not the motivating factor for suicide attacks. What is? Foreign military occupation. Evidence: Professor Robert Pape found this, posted in the Guardian: What we still don't understand about Hizbollah, August 6:

This week, world terrorism expert Robert Pape will share with the FBI the findings of his remarkable study of 462 suicide bombings. He concludes that such acts have little to do with religious extremism and that the West must engage politically to halt the relentless slaughter: Israel has finally conceded that air power alone will not defeat Hizbollah. Over the coming weeks, it will learn that ground power won't work either. The problem is not that the Israelis have insufficient military might, but that they misunderstand the nature of the enemy.

In terms of structure and hierarchy, it is less comparable with, say, a religious cult such as the Taliban than to the multi-dimensional American civil rights movement of the 1960s. What made its rise so rapid, and will make it impossible to defeat militarily, was not its international support but the fact that it evolved from a reorientation of pre-existing Lebanese social groups.

Evidence of the broad nature of Hizbollah's resistance to Israeli occupation can be seen in the identity of its suicide attackers. Hizbollah conducted a broad campaign of suicide bombings against American, French and Israeli targets from 1982 to 1986. Altogether, these attacks, which included the infamous bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, involved 41 suicide terrorists. Researching my book, which covered all 462 suicide bombings around the globe, I had colleagues scour Lebanese sources to collect martyr videos, pictures and testimonials and biographies of the Hizbollah bombers. Of the 41, we identified the names, birth places and other personal data for 38. We were shocked to find that only eight were Islamic fundamentalists; 27 were from leftist political groups such as the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Union; three were Christians, including a female secondary school teacher with a college degree. All were born in Lebanon. What these suicide attackers - and their heirs today - shared was not a religious or political ideology but simply a commitment to resisting a foreign occupation. Nearly two decades of Israeli military presence did not root out Hizbollah. The only thing that has proven to end suicide attacks, in Lebanon and elsewhere, is withdrawal by the occupying force.

Previous analyses of suicide terrorism have not had the benefit of a complete survey of all suicide terrorist attacks worldwide. The lack of complete data, together with the fact that many such attacks, including all those against Americans, have been committed by Muslims, has led many in the US to assume that Islamic fundamentalism must be the underlying main cause. This, in turn, has fuelled a belief that anti-American terrorism can be stopped only by wholesale transformation of Muslim societies, which helped create public support of the invasion of Iraq. But study of the phenomenon of suicide terrorism shows that the presumed connection to Islamic fundamentalism is misleading.

There is not the close connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism that many people think. Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist campaigns have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organisations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective. Most often, it is a response to foreign occupation.

Understanding that suicide terrorism is not a product of Islamic fundamentalism has important implications for how the US and its allies should conduct the war on terrorism. Spreading democracy across the Persian Gulf is not likely to be a panacea as long as foreign troops remain on the Arabian peninsula. The obvious solution might well be simply to abandon the region altogether. Isolationism, however, is not possible; America needs a new strategy that pursues its vital interest in oil but does not stimulate the rise of a new generation of suicide terrorists. The same is true of Israel now.....

The backdrop is energy resources, and water too. From The Wilderness teased a pay story:

AS THE WORLD REELS FROM ISRAELI ATTACKS ON INNOCENT CIVILIANS DURING THE PAST THREE WEEKS, CULMINATING IN THIS WEEKEND'S ATROCITIES AT QANA, WE HEAR LITTLE ABOUT THE PIPELINE POLITICS AND WATER ISSUES BEHIND THE SCENES. BUT ISRAEL'S DESPERATE MILITARY MADNESS CANNOT BE FULLY UNDERSTOOD WITHOUT GRASPING THE FRANTIC RESOURCE WARS THAT FORM THE BACKDROP OF THE CURRENT MIDDLE EAST CARNAGE.

True enough. Encircling the Shiite's area of oilfields is important to guys like Dick Cheney. The situation in Iraq is fueled by the conflict over Iraq's oil revenue, of course. That crazy relief map is from here. It shows the Rumaila and other key oilfields around the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border. Rumaila was one of the key reasons Saddam invaded Kuwait. He claimed they were slant-drilling under the border, which was probably true since the Kuwaitis are dickheads.

Here is a map of the Sunni-Shiite distribution. In my opinion it actually doesn't show the Shiites of eastern Saudi Arabia correctly, but oh well... Shiites are darker.

And here is the famous Iraq oil map (PDF) from Cheney's energy task force:

There is this kind of strategy to encircle the general area... The Christian Science Monitor had this badass map showing where American troops are, relative to the pipelines: (more on this here)

I don't know what the hell this is, some kind of "heat map", but it looks cool from a cool-looking site:

The Israelis are holding the Golan Heights because of water, as they tell you, and the West Bank wall is laid out to cut off many wells from Palestinian access. The largest settlement in the West Bank, Ariel, is situated on a ridge area in the north, directly above the main aquifer. One wonders why the Litani River is such a big deal anyway. More on Ariel.

source (more)

I recommend reading this page about Israel's water wars. It's very relevant. For your comparison here, the 'nose' of the West Bank that juts just outside of the red mountain aquifer is Kalkilya - the northern West Bank's westernmost Palestinian city. Ariel, the most horizontal blob, is centered on the red aquifer, as you can see with the power of imagination (since the American media is never going to fucking tell you this).

Source of this one - direct:

Iran noise: so we've gathered that this whole thing was an overture to a war in Iran (aka "World War III"). As one pretty pissed off international studies professor, Alon Ben-Meir put it:

The war of perception: Israel`s failure will undoubtedly embolden Iran to challenge it at a different time and circumstance, while Syria may decide that Israel is not such a formidable military after all and resort to more aggressive tactics to regain the Golan.

Hamas` resolve to resist Israel may harden, and Hezbollah which, by every objective military standard, suffered a strategic defeat, has already emerged as triumphant in the eyes of the Arab world for having withstood the Israeli onslaught with valor, may be emboldened to lie in wait for the next confrontation.

Having lost the war of perception Israel must be careful not to translate this into real strategic losses in dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict or with Iran.
.......
The real danger in the future comes from Iran, and it looms extremely large. If it is to respond effectively, Israel must develop strategies that deny Iran not just the opportunity to meddle in the Arab-Israeli conflict but make Tehran fear for its very existence, and so refrain from even contemplating any act of hostility against Israel.

An Israel that is, rightly or wrongly, perceived as weak, will simply invite more serious military challenges because Israel`s real enemies like Iran are relentless, and now they smell blood.

That's all for now. I really like maps!

Del.icio.us is Del Pimpin

I had a power failure and lost some goodies. Not a colossal disaster, but lame! I used to have a backup power supply but the damn battery gave out. Anyhow, I discovered that there are some plugins that let Firefox remember what tabs you have open if it crashes or there's a power failure. There are lots of awesome Firefox plugins and extensions, and Tab Mix Plus is among the best. It will save the browser windows and tabs you have open if Firefox or the computer suddenly konks out!

Del.icio.us experimentation: del.icio.us is a 'social bookmarking service' that allows you to save bookmarks to the public, attaching tags so that you can have a sliceable and diceable batch of links. Right now I have a home page on del.icio.us, organized with quite a few bookmarks.

My plan is to have the Del.icio.us bookmarks appear on sidebars in their respective category pages, once I switch to Drupal (this is not too hard to do). In the meantime, I'm going to have del.icio.us spit out my fresh links to the HongPong.com front page every day. Ideally this should produce some more daily bite-sized content. The usual style around here is to aggregate stuff into huge, unwieldy posts, and a good strategy is to give everyone more little things on a more regular basis – and it's easy to do from other computers. Our other occasional contributors will also be able to include their del.icio.us bookmarks when the Drupal site FINALLY comes together. (see del.icio.us tags on Drupal!) Drupal kicks ass, i really gotta get this moving.

Hezbollah tactics and weaponry: the analysis rolls in

Now that the dust is settling, we are hearing reports from the field about what exactly Hezbollah was doing down in South Lebanon. For more military analyses look at this excellent thread on Agonist.org Lessons Learned. Guys like William Lind have good stuff too.

For the moment, we are going to post a big chunk of Anthony Cordesman's summary of the whole damn thing. The press conference is here (PDF), the actual doc is here.

Center for Strategic and International Studies
1800 K Street, N.W. • Suite 400 • Washington, DC 20006
Phone: 1 (202) 775-3270 • Fax: 1 (202) 457-8746
Web: http://www.csis.org/burke/
Preliminary “Lessons” of the Israeli-Hezbollah War (PDF)
Anthony H. Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy acordesman@aol.com
Working Draft for Outside Comment, Revised: August 17, 2006
[Page 16]....
Lessons and Insights into Various Tactical,
Technological, and Other Military Aspects of the War
Once again, it is important to stress that many key details of the tactics, technology, and
other aspects of the fighting are not yet clear. There are, however, several additional
lessons that do seem to emerge from the conflict.
High Technology Asymmetric Warfare
There is virtually no controversy over whether the fighting with the Hezbollah shows just
how well a non-State actor can do when it achieves advanced arms, and has strong
outside support from state actors like Iran and Syria. Top-level Israeli intelligence
personnel and officers stated that most aspects of the Hezbollah build-up did not surprise
them in the six years following Israel’s withdrawal in Lebanon.

Mosad officials stated that they had tracked the deployment of some 13,000 Katyushas,
far more sophisticated Iranian medium and long-range artillery rockets and guided
missiles (Zelzal 3), better surface-to-air missiles like the SA-14, SA-16, and possibly SA-
8 and SA-18, the CS-801 anti-ship missile, and several more capable anti-tank weapons
like the AT-3 Sagger Two and Kornet. They also identified the armed UAV the
Hezbollah used as either the Iranian Mirsad-1 or Ababil-3 Swallow.

Israeli intelligence officials also stated that they knew some 100 Iranian advisors were
working with the Hezbollah, and that they knew Iran not only maintained high volumes
of deliveries, but also had created a Hezbollah command center for targeting and
controlling missile fire with advanced C2 assets and links to UAVs. They noted that they
had warnings of better sniper rifles, night vision devices, and communications as well as
of technical improvements to the IEDs, bombs, and booby traps that the Hezbollah had
used before the Israeli withdrawal.

Israeli officials and officers were not consistent about the scale or nature of the
technology transfer to the Hezbollah or of how many weapons they had. In broad terms,
however, they agreed on several points.
Hezbollah Rocket and Missile Forces
Israel faced a serious local threat from some 10,000-16,000 shorter-range regular and
extended range versions of the Kaytusha. These are small artillery rockets with individual
manportable launchers. The rockets have small warheads and ranges of 19-28 kilometers
(12-18 miles) that can only strike about 11-19 kilometers (7-12 miles) into Israel unless
launched right at the border. They can easily be fired in large numbers from virtually any
position or building, and the Hezbollah had a limited capacity for ripple fire that partly
made up for the fact that such weapons were so inaccurate that they hit at random, could
only be aimed at town-sized targets, and had very small warheads. They were, however,
more than adequate to force substantial evacuations, paralyze local economic activity,
and drive the Israelis that remained to shelters.
Israeli officers and officials made it clear that Israel’s real reason for going to war,
however, was the steady deployment of medium and longer range systems, and the
potential creation of a major Iranian and Syrian proxy missile force that could hit targets
throughout Israel.
This force included Syrian 220mm rockets and systems like the Fajr 3, with ranges of 45-
75 kilometers, capable of striking targets as far south as Haifa and Naharia. The IAF was
able to destroy most of the Iranian Fajr 3 launchers the first night of the war, but the IDF
did not know the Syrian rockets were present.
The Fajr 3, or Ra’ad, has a range of 45 kilometers, a 45-kilogram warhead, a 240-mm
diameter, a 5.2-meter length, and a weight of 408 kilograms.

A total of some 24-30 launchers and launch vehicles, carrying up to 14 rockets each, seem to have been present.
The IAF feels it destroyed virtually all launchers that fired after the first few days, but
Israeli officers did not provide an estimate of how many actually survived.
They also included the Syrian 302-mm artillery rockets and Fajr 5, with ranges of 75 and
higher kilometers. The IAF again feels that it was able to destroy most of the Iranian Fajr
5 launchers the first night of the war, but the IDF again did not know the Syrian 302-mm
rockets were present.
The Fajr 5 is launched from a mobile platform with up to four rockets per launcher, and
has a maximum range of 75 kilometers, a 45-kilogram warhead, a 333-mm diameter, a
6.48-meter length, and a weight of 915 kilograms.

A total of some 24-30 launchers and launch vehicles seem to have been present. Again, the IAF feels it destroyed virtually all
launchers that fired after the first few days, but Israeli officers did not provide an estimate
of how many actually survived.
The level of Hezbollah capabilities with the Zelzal 1, 2, and 3 and other possible systems
has been described earlier. These missiles have ranges of 115-220 kilometers. The Zelzal
2 is known to be in Hezbollah hands and illustrates the level of technology involved. It is
a derivative of the Russian FROG 7, and has a range in excess of 115 kilometers. It has a
610-mm diameter, a 8.46-meter length, and a weight of 3,545 kilograms.

It requires a large TEL vehicle with a large target signature.
Anti-Ship Missiles
The Hezbollah C-802 missile that damaged an Israeli Sa’ar 5, one of Israel’s latest and
most capable ships, struck the ship when it was not using active countermeasures. It may
or may not have had support from the coastal radar operated by Lebanese military fires
destroyed by IAF forces the following day.
According to Global Security, the Yingji YJ-2 (C-802) is powered by a turbojet with
paraffin-based fuel. It is subsonic (0.9 Mach), weighs 715 kilograms, has a range 120
kilometers, and a 165 kilogram (363 lb.). It has a small radar cross section and skims
about five to seven meters above the sea surface when it attacks the target. It has good
anti-jamming capability.
Anti-Armor Systems
The IDF faced both older anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) threats like the AT-3 Sagger,
AT-4 Spigot, and AT-5 Spandrel—each of which is a wire-guided system but which
become progressively more effective and easier to operate as the model number
increases.

The IDF also faced far more advanced weapons like the Russian AT-13 Metis-
M which only requires the operator to track the target, and the AT-14 Kornet-E, a third
generation system, that can be used to attack tanks fitted with explosive reactive armor,
and bunkers, buildings, and entrenched troops. Many of these systems bore serial
numbers that showed they came directly from Syria, but others may have come from Iran.

The AT-14 is a particularly good example of the kind of high technology weapon the US
may face in future asymmetric wars. It can be fitted to vehicles or used as a crew-portable
system.

It has thermal sights for night warfare and tracking heat signatures, and the
missile has semi-automatic command-to-line-of-sight laser beam-riding guidance. It flies
along the line of sight to engage the target head-on in a direct attack profile. It has a
nominal maximum range of 5 kilometers. It can be fitted with tandem shaped charge
HEAT warheads to defeat tanks fitted with reactive armor, or with high
explosive/incendiary warheads, for use against bunkers and fortifications. Maximum
penetration is claimed to be up to 1,200mm.
Other systems include a greatly improved version of the 105.2-mm rocket-propelled
grenade called the RPG-29 or Vampire. This is a much heavier system than most
previous designs. It is a two-man crew weapon with a 450-meter range, and with an
advanced 4.5-kilogram grenade that can be used to attack both armor and bunkers and
buildings. Some versions are equipped with night sights.

The IDF saw such weapons used with great tactical skill, and few technical errors,
reflecting the ease with which third generation ATGMs can be operated. They did serious
damage to buildings as well as armor. The Hezbollah also showed that it could use the
same “swarm” techniques to fire multiple rounds at the same target at the same time often
used in similar ambushes in Iraq. As of August 11th, however, a total of 60 armored
vehicles of all types (reports these were all tanks are wrong) had been hit. Most continued
to operate or were rapidly repaired in the field and restored to service. Only 5-6 of all
types represented a lasting vehicle kill.

Anti-Aircraft
The IDF estimates that the Hezbollah at least have the SA-7 and SA-14 manportable
surface-to-air missile system, probably have the SA-16, and may have the SA-18. The
SA-14 and SA-16 are much more advanced than the SA-7, but still possible to counter
with considerable success. The SA-18 Grouse (Igla 9K38) is more problematic.
According to the Federation of American Scientists, it is an improved variant of the SA-
14 that uses a similar thermal battery/gas bottle, and the same 2 kilogram high-explosive
warhead fitted with a contact and grazing fuse. The missile, however, is a totally new
design and has much greater operational range and speed. It has a maximum range of
5200 meters and a maximum altitude of 3500 meters, and uses an IR guidance system
with proportional convergence logic, and much better protection against electro-optical
jammers.

It is possible that it may have been given a few SA-8 Gecko (Russian 9K33 Osa) SAM
systems that are vehicle mounted, radar-guided systems with up to a 10-kilomter range,
and six missiles per vehicle.

The IDF is concerned that these systems would allow the Hezbollah to set up “ambushes”
of a few IAF aircraft without clear warning—a tactic where only a few SA-8s could
achieve a major propaganda victory. This concern, coupled to the risk of SA-16 and SA-
18 attacks, forced the IAF to actively use countermeasures to an unprecedented degree
during the fighting.

Low Signature; Asymmetric Stealth
One key aspect of the above list is that all of the systems that are not vehicle-mounted
are low signature weapons that very difficult to characterize and target and easy to bury
or conceal in civilian facilities. Stealth is normally thought of as high technology. It is
not. Conventional forces still have sensors geared largely to major military platforms and
operating in environments when any possible target becomes a real target. None of these
conditions applied to most Hezbollah weapons, and the problem was compounded by the
fact that a light weapon is often easier to move and place without detection in a built-up
area than a heavy one.
This signature issue applies to small rockets like the Qassam and Kaytusha that require
only a vestigial launcher that can be place in a house or covert area in seconds, and fired
with a timer. Israeli video showed numerous examples of Hezbollah rushing into a home,
setting up a system, and firing or leaving in a time in less than a minute.
It also applies to UAVs. Israel’s normal surveillance radars could not detect the Iranian
UAVs, and the IDF was forced to rush experiments to find one that could detect such a
small, low-flying platform. (This may be an artillery counterbattery radar but Israeli
sources would not confirm this.)

Technological Surprise
Israeli officers and experts did indicate that the IDF faced technological surprise and
uncertainty in some areas.
Syria evidently supplied nearly as many medium range artillery rockets—220 mm and
302 mm—as Iran, and a major portion of the Katyushas. The RPG-29 anti-tank weapon
and possible deployment of more advanced anti-tank guided weapons was not
anticipated. It was not possible to determine how advanced the surface-to-air missiles
going to Hezbollah forces were. It was not possible to determine the exact types and level
of capability for Iran’s long-range missile transfers because the three types of Zelzal are
so different in performance, and other Iranian systems (including ones with much better
guidance) are similar to what Israel calls the Zelzal 2 and 3.
The fact Israel faced some degree of technological surprise should not, however, be a
source of criticism unless there is evidence of negligence. If there is a lesson to be drawn
from such surprise, it is that it is almost unavoidable when deliveries are high and many
weapons are small and/or are delivered in trucks or containers and never seen used in
practice.
It is even more unavoidable when rapid transfer can occur in wartime, or new facilities
are created, such as the joint Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah intelligence (and advisory?) center
set up during the fighting in Damascus to give the Hezbollah technical and tactical
intelligence support. The lesson is rather that the war demonstrates a new level of
capability for non-state actors to use such weapons.
Cost
The US and Israel quote figures for the cost of these arms transfers that can reach the
billions, and talk about $100-$250 million in Iranian aid per year. The fact is that some
six years of build-up and arms transfers may have cost closer to $50-$100 million in all.
The bulk of the weapons involved were cheap, disposable or surplus, and transfers put no
strain of any kind on either Syria or Iran.
This is a critical point, not a quibble. Playing the spoiler role in arming non-state actors
even with relatively advanced weapons is cheap by comparison with other military
options. The US must be prepared for a sharp increase in such efforts as its enemies
realize just how cheap and easy this option can be.
Reevaluating the Level of Tactical and Technological Risk in the Forces of
Asymmetric and Non-State Actors
Experts like Sir Rupert Smith have already highlighted the risk posed to modern military
forces and states by opponents that fight below the threshold in which conventional
armies are most effective. Iraq has shown that even comparatively small transfers of
technology like motion sensors, crude shaped charges, and better triggering devices can
have a major impact in increasing the ability of insurgents and terrorists.

The Hezbollah have raised this to a whole new level, operating with effective sanctuary
in a state and with major outside suppliers—which Al Qa’ida has largely lacked. It is also
only the tip of the iceberg. It does not seem to have used the advanced SAMs listed
above, but the very threat forces IAF fighters and helicopters to constantly use
countermeasures. The use of ATGMs and RPG-29 not only inhibits the use of armor, but
sharply reduces the ability to enter buildings and requires dispersal and shelter.

The simple risk of long-range rocket attacks requires constant air and sensor coverage in
detail over the entire Hezbollah launch front to be sure of hitting launchers immediately.
The IDF’s task also could grow sharply if Iran/Syria sent the Hezbollah longer-range
rockets or missiles with precision guidance—allowing one missile to do serious damage
to a power plant, desalination plant, refinery/fuel storage facility with little or no warning.

The lesson here is not simply Hezbollah tactics to date. It is the need to survey all of the
weapons systems and technology that insurgents and terrorists could use in future strikes
and wars with the thesis that technology constraints are sharply weakening, and the US
and its allies face proliferation of a very different kind. It is to explore potential areas of
vulnerability in US forces and tactics non-state or asymmetric attackers can exploit,
carefully examine the holdings of state sponsors of such movements, and reexamine web
sites, training manuals, etc, to track the sharing or exploration of such technology.
Like Israel, the US and its other allies face long wars against enemies that have already
shown they are highly adaptive, and will constantly seek out weaknesses and the ability
to exploit the limits to conventional warfighting capabilities. The US must anticipate and
preempt when it can, and share countermeasure tactics and technologies with its allies.
Informal Networks and Asymmetric "Netcentric Warfare"
Like insurgent and terrorist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan—and in Arab states like
Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other states threatened by such groups—the Hezbollah
showed the ability of non-state actors to fight their own form of netcentric warfare. The
Hezbollah acted as a "distributed network" of small cells and units acting with
considerable independence, and capable of rapidly adapting to local conditions using
media reports on the, verbal communication, etc.

Rather than have to react faster than the IDF's decision cycle, they could largely ignore it,
waiting out Israeli attacks, staying in positions, reinfiltrating or reemerging from cover,
and choosing the time to attack or ambush. Forward fighters could be left behind or
sacrificed, and "self-attrition" became a tactic substituting for speed of maneuver and the
ability to anticipated IDF movements.

Skilled cadres and leadership cadres could be hidden, sheltered, or dispersed. Rear areas
became partial sanctuaries in spite of the IDF. Aside from Nasrallah, who survived, no
given element of the leadership cadre was critical.

A strategy of attrition and slow response substituted for speed and efficiency in command
and control. The lack of a formal and hierarchical supply system meant that disperse
weapons and supplies—the equivalent of "feed forward logistics"—accumulated over six
years ensured the ability to keep operating in spite of IDF attacks on supply facilities and
resupply.

The ability to fight on local religious, ideological, and sectarian grounds the IDF could
not match provided extensive cover and the equivalent of both depth and protection. As
noted earlier, civilians became a defensive weapon, the ability to exploit civilian
casualties and collateral damage became a weapon in political warfare, and the ability to
exploit virtually any built up area and familiar terrain as fortresses or ambush sites at
least partially compensated for IDF armor, air mobility, superior firepower, and sensors.
The value and capability of such asymmetric "netcentric" warfare, and comparatively
slow moving wars of attrition, should not be exaggerated. The IDF could win any clash,
and might have won decisively with different ground tactics. It also should not be
ignored. The kind of Western netcentric warfare that is so effective against conventional
forces has met a major challenge and one it must recognize.

Well that sounds like some badass shit. More later, but for now, dig the asymmetrical networkality of the low apogee swarm missile strategy. It delivers the goods!

Something completely different

Via the Agonist, a guy named Jeff Han has this incredibly cool giant multi-touchscreen thing put together. You could do most anything with that... funny music, too.

Just thought that was sweet!

Where is the 10th Dimension; CIA FOIA Bling

This was pretty cool, a flash animation of the ten dimensions of reality. Check it out. (via Shoutwire)

Also via Shoutwire, the CIA is trying to up the fees on FOIA for journalists:

The National Security Archive today filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), challenging the Agency's recent practice of charging Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) fees to journalists pursuing news. The FOIA says that "representatives of the news media" can be charged only copying fees since they help to carry out the mission of the law by disseminating government information; but the CIA last year began claiming authority to assess additional fees if the Agency decides any journalist's request is not newsworthy enough. In adopting this new practice, the CIA reversed its prior 15-year practice of presumptively waiving additional fees for news media representatives, including the National Security Archive.

"The CIA takes the position that it should decide what is 'news' instead of the reporters and editors who research and publish the stories," explained attorney Patrick J. Carome of the law firm Wilmer Hale, who is representing the Archive. "If the CIA succeeds in exercising broad discretion to charge additional fees to journalists, despite the plain language of the law, then too often we will find out only what the government wants us to know."

"Today is the day that federal agencies are turning in their FOIA improvement plans under President Bush's Executive Order for a more 'citizen-centered' and 'results-oriented' FOIA system. But the CIA has taken the opposite approach, and is instead trying to close off use of the FOIA by journalists," commented Archive General Counsel Meredith Fuchs.

Alright time to get movin again: Bob Saget, Tourette's Guy; NSA research on social networking

One of the things about taking a break on the site is that you're not sure where to get going again. Now that I am opening up the content to more things, I'm thinking about how to streamline the content while sticking to some general direction in the site's form. Random content is part of the appeal, but more focus - or rather a more clear set of foci - would make the site a lot more enjoyable for all.

At the same time I don't want to spend an inordinate amount of time working on it, especially in the nice summer with a more full-time job starting up next week. So there's a balance to be found...

Or a bunch of randomness.

The HBO show Entourage would be far less watchable without Jeremy Piven as Ari Gold, the fanatical agent. Fortunately someone did an Ari clip video. Some guest stars have been excellent, in particular Bob Saget's turn as a brothel-crazed bong smoking Bob Saget.

Saget's career also blew up a bit with this odd music video that went around a while ago. Jamie Kennedy and George Lucas roll on the strip with Saget.

Fuck Colgate - free Crest Whitestrips!!! Won't make you feel like a piece of shit!!

Which brings us to TourettesGuy, a strange man with his own set of online videos, wherein he misses a shot in pool, screams and shouts "Bob Saget!!"

And of course, "Don't talk shit about Total!" and the new one, Tit Dirt. A major crowd favorite.

Cartoon Network is throwing free Adult Swim shows up including a new Venture Brothers. Venture Brothers is hit-or-miss but this one was entertaining (link only temporary)

The quasi-anarchist-subversive site Disinfo notes that

'New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

It is interesting that the Pentagon itself is taking over all these functions. They are already combing my phone records, high school GPA's for recruiting, all kinds of things. On the other hand, Disinfo is an entity on MySpace. BlackListedNews has some interesting stuff, but they're on Myspace too..... Even Alex Jones is on MySpace, yet he says:

...the purpose of this profile is to test the censorship of MySpace--primarily based upon political content... I disagree with the censorship and control of MySpace, which is only one step away from China's Internet policy where anything critical of the government is kept from dissident eyes.

The flick A Scanner Darkly even has a myspace page... and Alex Jones is in the movie:

This is all getting much too circular...

Software notes: Civilization IV for Mac has just been released. Sweet. Also if you need an OS X timer program (my new/old oven doesn't have one), Chimoo Timer is your best free bet.

Al Gore says perhaps he'll speak on FL vote fraud someday; Sibel Edmonds tidbits; new 9/11 conspiracy video; the Teflon pharaoh

I am going up to Hibbing to see my aunt's Dylan documentary until Saturday afternoon and probably won't have time to post until Sunday.

A tantalizing nugget: my friend's dad stumbled across a massive embezzlement scheme in the Chicago branch of the Head Start education program. This is only now coming into public view and I will try to get something real on it later.

So the Administration wants to eat reporters who spill classified information. This lends itself to a new strategy: classify everything embarrassing and evil. Now that's your tax dollars at work!

Wednesday night I was hanging out with some folks soon parting ways with Minnesota, and it was a good time. In exchange for a nice old hat, various objects were offered for barter, including a Krazy Kat book. Krazy Kat was a weird old comic from the 1920s that has reached a kind of Major Art status, while really it's just pretty weird. I noticed that Itchy & Scratchy seems to be kind of based on it, including the cat's androgynous quality. Anyway.

Finally a Democrat in the House is getting busted for a scandal. Poor Jefferson was caught taking major cash in a pretty blunt kind of way and they're saying indictments next month, yet there is a big ruckus from Republicans after the FBI searched his Congressional office and took boxes of documents. Due to the bipartisan uproar, Bush has sealed the docs from the FBI, at least temporarily.

It's an interesting case. I feel that Republicans are a bit terrified that a potential future Democratic president could find evidence of all kinds of illegal stuff in their offices. For the whole history of this country, the executive hasn't been able to storm these places (or had the guts to). I tend to think that this is appropriate, that there ought to be a sphere of immunity of some sort to protect Congress from the executive. On the other hand, I would like to see Hastert, DeLay and all the other homies get nailed for all their Abramoff corruption. Just because you're in Congress doesn't mean you're above the law. Laura Rozen asks, is it panic?

But, what if (and certainly this has happened), member X has lots of evidence proving that Gonzales is a lawbreaker himself, that Rummy is a psychopath who permits war crimes, that Cheney helped channel Halliburton contracts and Porter Goss partied with hookers at the Watergate for a decade? In other words, what if I had Sen. Carl Levin's file cabinet? Well, that file cabinet would serve as a crucial check in the pretty corrupt system we've got now, and it seems clear that the founders intended to privilege stuff like that file cabinet. I also think that it should be impossible to charge Rep. Cynthia McKinney for slapping that Capitol police officer (in particular since it's been said that the Capitol police corps have been taken over by southern GOP good-ol-boy sheriff types).

We should note that the great Joseph McCarthy could not be sued for all the crazy slanderous and libelous garbage he puked onto the floor of the Senate during the 1950s, because, well, it was his constitutional right as a Senator to say plainly false and libelous things there. If the legislative branch gets under that kind of pressure, well, they will be 'chilled' in the legal speech sense, and it's curtains for that supposedly equal branch of the government. Never forget that people with their hands on executive power don't necessarily care about the truth, but they'll try to silence those who get in their way. McKinney has been a pretty vocal anti-imperialist (not to mention 9/11 skeptic), despite her silly style, and that whole thing reeks of an effort to kill the messenger. Movin' on.

Al Gore stares into the distance: From New York magazine, via the Brad Blog:

Does he, like many Democrats, think the election was stolen?

Gore pauses a long time and stares into the middle distance. "There may come a time when I speak on that,” Gore says, "but it’s not now; I need more time to frame it carefully if I do.” Gore sighs. "In our system, there’s no intermediate step between a definitive Supreme Court decision and violent revolution."

Later, I put the question of Gore’s views on the matter to David Boies, his lawyer in the Florida-recount battle. "He thought the court’s ruling was wrong and obviously political," Boies says. So he considers the election stolen? "I think he does—and he’s right."

Brad Blog was a leading place for tracking the election fraud in Ohio, and while I don't read regularly, it's well done.

Check out Wot is it Good 4 by Lukery, which has especially followed the case of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds - with its bizarre stories of drug money laundering, 9/11 links, FBI corruption, the whole bit. Sibel herself (official site), under many federal gag orders, has said that Lukery has been able to digest the known facts of the case better than anyone else. There's fresh stuff on a daily basis. For example, if you want to get waist-deep in some weird defense contractor shit, connected laterally with Manucher Ghorbanifar, Rep. Curt Weldon (of Able Danger fame), plus Edmonds' belief that Weldon has been kind of duped about some of the fake Iraq intelligence, well this story is what you need, and this one about some kind of corrupt link between neoconservatives, Turkey and military-industrial defense contractors, which Edmonds is also tied up in, another good one. Read this and trip out: Bing Bang Boom Shazam. The Edmonds case is way under the radar, extremely weird, but it seems to connect to the AIPAC scandal, Chalabi and the fake Iraq intelligence, some kind of secret 9/11 financing arrangements, drug money laundering, Turkish spies, and perhaps illegal money in the campaign coffers of people like Rep. Dennis Hastert. Or maybe not (Hastert is getting sucked into the Abramoff scandal, either way). I think at some point, Sibel Edmonds will finally break out into a major scandal and I'd like to say that we got a bit of the early word out here. SourceWatch on Sibel Edmonds too. (tiny side note: Lukery suggests this woman's skillful negotiation sites)

But who are Sibel Edmonds, Curt Weldon, Able Danger and what do these have to do with 9/11?? Fortunately in the expanding field of 9/11 conspiracy videos, a new one introduces these issues in an accessible way. Check out Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime. I thought it was better than Loose Change, in terms of consisting of actual information and loose ends. However it doesn't have as many fun video clips. It has a pretty good introduction to the Able Danger, the pre-9/11 military intelligence project that apparently pinpointed some of the hijackers, and then was abruptly shut down with its terabytes of records vaporized. But ironically the problem perhaps might have been that it was based on illegal data mining?

Chinese spy update: Pretty cool stuff on the next hurrah about Katrina Leung, a pro-Republican Chinese spy who is basically getting let off by the Justice Department. She admitted tipping off the Chinese to the identities of FBI agents investigating nuclear sales to China (which mighta been tied to Iran-contra - whew). Evidently, she fed disinformation to the FBI to go after the unfortunate scientist Wen Ho Lee.

OS X operating system design: Check out this Flash animation if you want to know how OS X is structured internally. This guy's book will kick ass if you are into kernel hacking.

Israel claims Iran gets nukes in "months": My Ass. Antiwar.com's Raimondo, in a column bitching about the Iran badge story, the peripheral Israeli connections to the fake Iraq intelligence, and new and shiny paranoia from Israel about Iran, notes that well, Israel is definitely going to jerk the U.S. down this path.

AIPAC notes: I thought this was a good writeup about the power of the Israel lobby from Stephen Zunes: FPIF Special Report: The Israel Lobby: How Powerful is it Really? He points out an interesting example of a Congressman, who, when challenged about his heavily anti-Palestinian votes, basically says that the Jews made him do it for fear of losing fundraising, but even after he announces he won't run again, he still votes against Palestinians. The Jews are just - wait for it - a scapegoat for his actual anti-Arab bias. And of course there's the basic fact that Bush depends a lot more on the hardcore rightwing (and often apocalyptic) Christian Zionists that Jewish ones.

Misc notes: Watch Lazy Ramadi, a video from some troops with a video camera. You won't regret it.

Sidney Blumenthal notes Iraq is doomed. Of course, it has literally the most corrupt government ever created (although maybe DC actually wins that right now). Duly noted by the brave Patrick Cockburn:
Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold:

Across central Iraq, there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale.
By Patrick Cockburn in Khanaqin, North-East Iraq (20 May)
The state of Iraq now resembles Bosnia at the height of the fighting in the 1990s when each community fled to places where its members were a majority and were able to defend themselves. "Be gone by evening prayers or we will kill you," warned one of four men who called at the house of Leila Mohammed, a pregnant mother of three children in the city of Baquba, in Diyala province north-east of Baghdad. He offered chocolate to one of her children to try to find out the names of the men in the family.

Mrs Mohammed is a Kurd and a Shia in Baquba, which has a majority of Sunni Arabs. Her husband, Ahmed, who traded fruit in the local market, said: " They threatened the Kurds and the Shia and told them to get out. Later I went back to try to get our furniture but there was too much shooting and I was trapped in our house. I came away with nothing." He and his wife now live with nine other relatives in a three-room hovel in Khanaqin.

The same pattern of intimidation, flight and death is being repeated in mixed provinces all over Iraq. By now Iraqis do not have to be reminded of the consequences of ignoring threats.

I liked this list from Juan Cole:

There are now four distinct wars going on in Iraq simultaneously
1) The Sunni Arab guerrilla war to expel US troops from the Sunni heartland
2) The militant Shiite guerrilla war to expel the British from the south
3) The Sunni-Shiite civil war
4) The Kurdish war against Arabs and Turkmen in Kirkuk province, and the Arab and Turkmen guerrilla struggle against the encroaching Peshmerga (the Kurdish militia).

The struggle of the Turkmen is starting to branch out into Turkey. Note how Turkey is now red on the lovely Reuters map, seems ominous:

Kurds say Turkish shells land in Iraq, Turkey denies: By Sherko Raouf
SULAIMANIYA, Iraq, May 17 (Reuters) - The government of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region accused Turkish forces of shelling an area inside northern Iraq on Wednesday.
A Turkish government official dismissed the accusation as "total fabrication."
Ankara traditionally launches a spring offensive against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas in southeastern Turkey, an area which borders Iraq.
Earlier this month, villagers in Iraq's Kurdistan accused neighbouring Iran of hitting targets inside Iraq, a charge Tehran denied.
Khaled Salih, a senior official of the Kurdish regional government in Arbil, said by telephone that no one was hurt when three shells slammed into a mountainous area close to the town of Kani Masi a few km (miles) inside Iraq.
"A village ... has been bombarded from the Turkish side. There were no casualties, but there was material damage," Salih told Reuters. "This is the second time in a week villages have been bombarded in the north."
"We will report this to the government in Baghdad so that they can contact the Turkish government and ask for an explanation," he said.
Salih said there were no PKK fighters in the area where the shells landed. NATO member Turkey has stationed some 1,500 troops stationed inside northern Iraq since the late 1990s when it launched regular raids into the region to hunt PKK fighters.
In Turkey, a government official told Reuters: "This is not true ... All the measures are on our side of the border." Turkey has sent 40,000 troops to its own Kurdish areas to reinforce the 220,000 already there, the biggest build-up in years after an increase in PKK attacks.
The PKK, seeking a Kurdish homeland including southeastern Turkey, accuses Ankara and Tehran of mounting coordinated operations against the group and its Iranian wing, PJAK.

NSA Total My Phone Bill Awareness: Crusty CIA veteran Ray McGovern rails against NSA monitoring of Americans. Sy Hersh with a few bits and pieces on the NSA situation. Congressional Quarterly reports on mysterious data links between Homeland Security and the NSA. TPMM observes how DOJ sends out TONS of subpoenas for data daily, apparently outside of judicial oversight. National Security Letters. Someday, the Letter will come for you (or more likely, me). TPMM also looks at how there is a cottage industry of companies that handle all our phone records, passing them from the telcos to the government, allowing AT&T to claim that they aren't giving Big Brother the records directly. Check this: Fuck NeuStar, the "scapegoat" for hire.

Billmon hung out in Egypt for some conference. Egypt is autocratic, the Teflon pharaoh. I like that phrase.

As always, Prof. Cole is the go-to man for direct analysis of the situation and Arab media. He also follows up further on the fake Iran Jew Badge story. Firedoglake traces back the root of the fake Badge story. The National Post had to retract the story:

Last Friday, the National Post ran a story prominently on the front page alleging that the Iranian parliament had passed a law that, if enacted, would require Jews and other religious minorities in Iran to wear badges that would identify them as such in public. It is now clear the story is not true. Given the seriousness of the error, I felt it necessary to explain to our readers how this happened.

Then, of course, the bastards require you to register to read the rest. Fuck! (this early, erroneous bit on the badge story struck me for its interesting historical content, but also classic pompous ignorati*-style writing)[ * "Ignorati" has been trademarked by Mordred]

We noted earlier a report about 200,000 AK-47s from Bosnia, that were purchased by the US for the Iraqi security forces, but now there are more reports that the AKs basically vanished and are now in the hands of insurgents because of - you guessed it - private defense contractors!! BBC reports on how the guns that ruined Yugoslavia are getting dumped straight into the Iraqi civil war.

Ah, the irony of how shitty neoconservatism worked out to be.

Murray Waas reports that Rove and Novak may have hatched a conspiracy to cover up the Valerie Plame leak (via TPMM):

On September 29, 2003, three days after it became known that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate who leaked the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, columnist Robert Novak telephoned White House senior adviser Karl Rove to assure Rove that he would protect him from being harmed by the investigation, according to people with firsthand knowledge of the federal grand jury testimony of both men. . . .
Rove and Novak, investigators suspect, might have devised a cover story to protect Rove because the grand jury testimony of both men appears to support Rove's contentions about how he learned about Plame.

Chinese PCs feared to be bugged: There's always time for Sinophobia.

Blockquotes are plagarism?! Plagarism Today (what a name for a site) talks about how the practice of blockquoting from other sources is really the new plagarism. I think that's a bit retarded since if you're naming your source, it's not plagarism at all. However, there are sites that exclusively skim off content and pass it as their own for spamming purposes. There are actually Hongpong.com fragments on spam sites out there. We blockquote a lot here, but damn, no one can read the whole damn Internet themselves! It seems like a silly argument, but on the other hand, the game ought to be about original content. However, I like to put lots of sources in here, since, well, you gotta at least weigh their credibility apart from mine in order for my arguments to sink in. Anyway, slashdot reacts.

Long ass random post. However more than enough stuff to keep anyone busy for a while. True?

Last second Friday geekdom: Encrypted BitTorrent + Firefox = AllPeers. Teh sw33t

i found this on David Erickson's blog (Erickson's one of my co-conspirators at Politics in Minnesota and works with Blois Olson at New School Communications).

AllPeers, currently in Beta testing, is some kind of software extension that plugs into FireFox and allows you to share your files in an encrypted way with other AllPeers users - and you can set up a friend network a la Myspace or Facebook - but the catch is that it's a BitTorrent network for moving goodies in a decentralized way. And it's apparently easy enough to use.

I think the basic idea is that your own media will be copied to your friends' computers, so that when someone tries to access a big thing like a movie file, it can be downloaded directly from everyone at once - because it's based on BitTorrent. At least I think that's the idea.

PeerPressure is the official AllPeers developer blog. It will be released for Windows, OS X and Linux. Main features will be free but there will also be some pay services. The info:

AllPeers is a free extension which combines the strength of Firefox and the efficiency of BitTorrent to transform your favorite browser into a media sharing powerhouse. Regain control! You decide which media files you want to share with whom and to maximise your privacy, communications are encrypted.

Forget about complicated setup or obscure user interfaces. If you know how to use Firefox you know how to use AllPeers.

The FAQ says:

Isn't email fine for sharing digital files?
Email has the advantage of being simple and ubiquitous, but it also has many disadvantages. When you share files via email, you don't know exactly when they will arrive. A lot of people use web mail, so they may not be able to receive large attachments. Since email is designed for text, it's tedious to view pictures or watch videos, especially if you receive a whole set of files at one time. And if you want to go back and find a specific file later, you'll find yourself laboriously opening and closing emails and attachments.

AllPeers MediaCenter is designed specifically for … you guessed it, sharing your media! Files are received instantly and are displayed in beautifully laid out albums of convenient thumbnail images. Browsing through new files, or finding old ones, is a breeze. We guarantee you'll never want to go back to email.

With AllPeers, you just drag-and-drop your files right into the program. They're available for sharing instantly! Then decide exactly who you want to share which files with. No uploading, no waiting. Want to browse your existing library? Click on an album and you see the thumbnails immediately. And since your files are stored directly on your computer, it's all completely free.

How can it be free? There must be a catch.
Nope. Because we’re using P2P technology, we don’t need to maintain a large server farm for managing huge files collections as our network grows. On top of that, we don’t think people should have to pay to share with friends. Of course, we are still a company and we need to make money to pay for the luxurious lifestyle of our development team. That’s why we will be deploying new services on AllPeers, some of which will require payment.

You can sign up for beta testing and I damn well have, although the beta programs are being handed out in a random restricted selection kinda way.

Well that is some quality geek stuff at 9 PM. However, it is also worth noting that a program like this, if it included encryption and many small autonomous networks of people, would be almost an almost unbeatable way to get around the copyright enforcement that wants to rain on your party.

Sunlight Foundation looks kinda sweet

There is an organization called the Sunlight Foundation that just got rolled out. It would appear to be one of these combined blog/exposing data/grassroots participation type things. (it runs on the Drupal content management system, if you care) There is also a CongressPedia wiki that is being hosted through the sweet anti-power-conspiracy type site SourceWatch.

Earlier this week, on Wednesday, April 26, the Sunlight Foundation officially opened its doors. Our goal is to use revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy.

Sounds like it could really be a pain for the Powers that Be Corrupt.
About the Sunlight Foundation

The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. We are unique in that technology and the power of the Internet are at the core of every one of our efforts.

Our initial projects – from the establishment of a Congresspedia, the making of “transparency grants” for the development and enhancement of databases and websites, and two separate efforts to engage the public in distributed journalism and offer online tutorials on the role of money in politics efforts – are based on the premise that the collective power of citizens to demand greater accountability is the clearest route to reform.

Sunlight’s work is committed to helping citizens, journalists and bloggers be their own best watchdogs, both by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and websites to enable all of us to pool our intelligence in new, and yet to be imagined, ways.

Well hey, way to go. Check it out....

Onward slogging Christian Leader-Man; Net neutrality gets legs; FDA bosses states on pot laws; USAF censors DailyKos

Big Poppa Doom informed everyone that, in a handy and expedient combination of Apocalyptic middle eastern wars and invisible men with booming voices, God is determining our foreign policy. What could go wrong? Catch the video. Editor&Publisher and the WaPo on it.

Bush: I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true. One, I believe there's an Almighty. And, secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody's soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free.

Also the following statement:

One decision he questions: After the successful invasion, "preparing an Iraqi army for an external threat. Well, it turns out there may have been an external threat but it's nothing compared to the internal threat." He did not explain what external threat the Iraqis were being trained for.

FDA 420 political diktat: Last week the FDA published a fancy condemnation of marijuana medical studies -- and in an odd example of a federal bureaucracy trying to dictate rules to state legislatures, condemned efforts at the state level to reform marijuana laws. It's kind of improper for federal agencies to order state legislatures to Jump. Scientific American on it, and here's the FDA statement.

As more than a few people are noticing these days, this is another example of fake politicized science, like ordering NASA scientists to shut up about global warming (read the damn NASA memo). (don't forget that national parks are falling apart and of course the government doesn't care about global warming) Go hang out at smokedot to compensate, and don't forget all those tax dollars flushed down the toilet for the war on drugs.

Net Neutrality: Couple more articles about the impending cancellation of the internet's egalitarian structure. Fortunately, Nancy Pelosi is supporting an amendment that would save Net Neutrality. You can become a "citizen co-sponsor" about it here. The attempt to fix it is called the Markey Amendment. Despite having a serious uphill battle, the word seems to be spreading:

We now have over 75 coalition partners, everyone from the Parents Television Council to the Texas Internet Service Provider’s Association to Consumer Action, and the blogosphere is on fire. We launched yesterday, and net neutrality is just blowing up.
Comic book collectors, video gamers, librarians, hip hop sites, music fans, more video gamers, designers, small business owners, and nonprofits have heard of the issue and are very angry at the telecom cartel’s move.

And now the tech companies have chimed in with Don’t Mess with the Net.

Iraq for Sale: The liberal documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed and others) is working on a new film, Iraq for Sale, about corrupt defense contractors, in time for the election this fall. However, they are trying to get $50 donations to finance production. I advised them that the trailer on their website doesn't seem to work on Mac.

Air Force censors liberal websites: According to someone at the DailyKos, the Air Force is blocking the DailyKos, Atrios Eschaton and TalkingPointsMemo. The roughly equivalent (although more hateful, I would say) rightwing sites FreeRepublic and LittleGreenFootballs are not blocked. More on this. If you are in the military and are trying to circumvent ideologically tainted censorship, try these tips on Peacefire. You can see if a program called SmartFilter is blocking URLs here (we are classed as "personal pages"). There is something odd about how the Air Force seems to be the most fundamentalist branch of the military.

It is also interesting that Armed Forces Radio is extremely tilted towards rightwing commentary that is rebroadcast from civilian sources. It's like 90% conservative. More on Armed Forces Radio bias here and here. This has bad effects, wherein for example, Rush Limbaugh tells soldiers through Armed Forces Radio that the Abu Ghraib torture was basically acceptable to "blow some steam off".

This website is clearly not blocked at many military installations, including the Air Force. However, I have also been sent screenshots of this site being blocked on military internet at a particular place that I won't elaborate on.

MZM meta-scandal: Corrupt defense contractor trying to start a war in Iran, and pretty much everything else too:

Disgraced defense contractor planned to promote democracy in Iran: March 24
By Warren P. Strobel - Knight Ridder

WASHINGTON - In a new example of disgraced defense contractor Mitchell Wade's attempts to exert influence in Washington and beyond, Wade and two business partners formed a nonprofit group in 2004 to promote democracy in Iran, according to documents and interviews.

Wade and the two partners, who have been large contributors to Republican political campaigns, formed the Iranian Democratization Foundation in April 2004, according to incorporation papers filed in Washington.
....In November 2004, Congress approved spending $3 million to promote democracy in Iran. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last month asked Congress for a large boost in funding, to $75 million. Behrooz Behbudi, who helped incorporate the foundation, said in a telephone interview that Wade "was supposed to get funds from the Congress" for the project. The two later fell out over business dealings in Iraq, Behbudi said.

Wade, who headed contractor MZM Inc., pleaded guilty last month to bribery-related charges and making illegal campaign contributions. His chief congressional patron, former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, pleaded guilty in November to taking bribes. Wade's dealings, which include contracts MZM received from Pentagon intelligence agencies, are under investigation.

MZM is a fun one. It is interesting how there are so many scandals around Washington, they sort of blend into and overlap each other. MZM was one of Duke Cunningham's corrupt companies, but in the Jack-Abramoff-of-all-trades go-get-em style of DC operators, MZM shadiness has also been a major cause of Katherine Harris' Senate campaign disintegration in Florida, and MZM contractors helped cover up the fake Iraq intelligence in one of the Congressional investigations, by working for the Silberman-Robb Commission for WMD Whitewashing, as TPMmuckrakers have dug up. Isn't DC great? The muckies also said that MZM helped select bombing targets early in the Iraq war:

In addition to its work at CENTCOM, MZM is known to have had contracts to support CIFA, the Pentagon's domestic spying operation; the FBI's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force; the Department of Energy's Counterintelligence Office; the White House's Robb-Silberman Commission to study WMD intelligence; the Homeland Security Department's watch center; and the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center.

Check out PrivateForces.com for more on privatized military firms, the sector of the economy that's gonna eat all the others.

Gas Temperature Map: You gotta check this out. It's getting hot out there.

Save the Internet: The Bush Administration wants to wiretap you for downloading MP3s; "Net neutrality" is in trouble; Is music the new Drugs?

Another great moment for freedom. Sit back, have a couple shots, and use the power of your Imagineering (© Disney Corp), for a world where only your own ass can be Xeroxed™ is coming. It will be a federal crime to tell someone how to break a DMCA-protected copyright technology. This would also make it illegal to get rid of that Sony Audio CD rootkit thing. If the new expansion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act goes through Congress, we're pretty much all as fucked as the undocumented migrants -- if by fucked, you mean, federal criminals. And computers could be seized DEA-drugbust style.

Another tech story (which I shoulda mentioned a while ago) is the potential splitting of the Internet's egalitarian structure into a kind of tiered fee or other privileged system. One of the Internet's core design principles is called "net neutrality", which basically means your residential ISP can't allocate bandwidth unfairly to websites you visit. Nor can they try to jam Internet-based phone services. But net neutrality is also about to fall apart due to a bill in the Congress from Hell. Watch the Net Neutrality Video to see how it works. See SaveTheInternet.com. More on it here and here. Even the Gun Owners of America want to save net neutrality!

These bills are coasting through a Congress that is messed up in every way, but still willing to go with Big Media to buy themselves some breathing room. It is pretty shitty that both the new DMCA and the Net Neutrality bills are totally off the media radar because -- guess what? Vested interests from CNN on down want to make more money for their digital cable services, and of course thoroughly terrorize all those fucking movie and music downloading kids.

Gee, do I smell information warfare?

CNET: Congress readies broad new digital copyright bill
By Declan McCullagh
Story last modified Mon Apr 24 10:28:06 PDT 2006

For the last few years, a coalition of technology companies, academics and computer programmers has been trying to persuade Congress to scale back the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Now Congress is preparing to do precisely the opposite. A proposed copyright law seen by CNET News.com would expand the DMCA's restrictions on software that can bypass copy protections and grant federal police more wiretapping and enforcement powers.

The draft legislation, created by the Bush administration and backed by Rep. Lamar Smith, already enjoys the support of large copyright holders such as the Recording Industry Association of America. Smith, a Texas Republican, is the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees intellectual-property law.

A spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee said Friday that the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2006 is expected to "be introduced in the near future." Beth Frigola, Smith's press secretary, added Monday that Wisconsin Republican F. James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the full House Judiciary Committee, will be leading the effort.

"The bill as a whole does a lot of good things," said Keith Kupferschmid, vice president for intellectual property and enforcement at the Software and Information Industry Association in Washington, D.C. "It gives the (Justice Department) the ability to do things to combat IP crime that they now can't presently do."

During a speech in November, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales endorsed the idea and said at the time that he would send Congress draft legislation. Such changes are necessary because new technology is "encouraging large-scale criminal enterprises to get involved in intellectual-property theft," Gonzales said, adding that proceeds from the illicit businesses are used, "quite frankly, to fund terrorism activities." [i.e. the Al Qaeda branch of LimeWire]

The 24-page bill is a far-reaching medley of different proposals cobbled together. One would, for instance, create a new federal crime of just trying to commit copyright infringement. Such willful attempts at piracy, even if they fail, could be punished by up to 10 years in prison.

It also represents a political setback for critics of expanding copyright law, who have been backing federal legislation that veers in the opposite direction and permits bypassing copy protection for "fair use" purposes. That bill--introduced in 2002 by Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat--has been bottled up in a subcommittee ever since.

A DMCA dispute
But one of the more controversial sections may be the changes to the DMCA. Under current law, Section 1201 of the law generally prohibits distributing or trafficking in any software or hardware that can be used to bypass copy-protection devices. (That section already has been used against a Princeton computer science professor, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov and a toner cartridge remanufacturer.)

Smith's measure would expand those civil and criminal restrictions. Instead of merely targeting distribution, the new language says nobody may "make, import, export, obtain control of, or possess" such anticircumvention tools if they may be redistributed to someone else.

"It's one degree more likely that mere communication about the means of accomplishing a hack would be subject to penalties," said Peter Jaszi, who teaches copyright law at American University and is critical of attempts to expand it.

Even the current wording of the DMCA has alarmed security researchers. Ed Felten, the Princeton professor, told the Copyright Office last month that he and a colleague were the first to uncover the so-called "rootkit" on some Sony BMG Music Entertainment CDs--but delayed publishing their findings for fear of being sued under the DMCA. A report prepared by critics of the DMCA says it quashes free speech and chokes innovation.

The SIIA's Kupferschmid, though, downplayed concerns about the expansion of the DMCA. "We really see this provision as far as any changes to the DMCA go as merely a housekeeping provision, not really a substantive change whatsoever," he said. "They're really to just make the definition of trafficking consistent throughout the DMCA and other provisions within copyright law uniform."

The SIIA's board of directors includes Symantec, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Intuit and Red Hat.

Jessica Litman, who teaches copyright law at Wayne State University, views the DMCA expansion as more than just a minor change. "If Sony had decided to stand on its rights and either McAfee or Norton Antivirus had tried to remove the rootkit from my hard drive, we'd all be violating this expanded definition," Litman said. [Your computer would belong to them! Nice.]

The proposed law scheduled to be introduced by Rep. Smith also does the following:

• Permits wiretaps in investigations of copyright crimes, trade secret theft and economic espionage. It would establish a new copyright unit inside the FBI and budgets $20 million on topics including creating "advanced tools of forensic science to investigate" copyright crimes.

• Amends existing law to permit criminal enforcement of copyright violations even if the work was not registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.

• Boosts criminal penalties for copyright infringement originally created by the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 from five years to 10 years (and 10 years to 20 years for subsequent offenses). The NET Act targets noncommercial piracy including posting copyrighted photos, videos or news articles on a Web site if the value exceeds $1,000.

• Creates civil asset forfeiture penalties for anything used in copyright piracy. Computers or other equipment seized must be "destroyed" or otherwise disposed of, for instance at a government auction. Criminal asset forfeiture will be done following the rules established by federal drug laws.

• Says copyright holders can impound "records documenting the manufacture, sale or receipt of items involved in" infringements.

Jason Schultz, a staff attorney at the digital-rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the recording industry would be delighted to have the right to impound records. In a piracy lawsuit, "they want server logs," Schultz said. "They want to know every single person who's ever downloaded (certain files)--their IP addresses, everything."

(the entire article has been copied for ironic value, which was a part of "fair use" in the 20th century)

Intel agencies using blogs more, Blackwater lawsuit, etc...

WASHINGTON TIMES: CIA mines 'rich' content from blogs
By Bill Gertz April 19, 2006

President Bush and U.S. policy-makers are receiving more intelligence from open sources such as Internet blogs and foreign newspapers than they previously did, senior intelligence officials said.

The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin.

"A lot of blogs now have become very big on the Internet, and we're getting a lot of rich information on blogs that are telling us a lot about social perspectives and everything from what the general feeling is to ... people putting information on there that doesn't exist anywhere else," Mr. Naquin told The Washington Times.

I'm gonna throw some random stuff at you. It's not a waste of time to look at, but it won't tell you one coherent story, so much as some shades of what went down over the last week while I was wrapped up in all the Macalester festivities... which I will elaborate on later.

Tony Snow for WH press sec.?: Lying water carrier for Republicans + doesn't stammer or sweat so much == why not? Tony Snow's many lies make him an unacceptable press sec'y

New protest album: NEIL YOUNG - Living With War, reviewed positively. Won't be in stores until the beginning of May, but online purchases later this week.

A.Norman sends along the following cartoon:

Spam keywords auto-pass NSA filter?: The odd internet journalist Wayne Madsen offered that

April 20, 2006 -- Beating Bush's NSA e-mail surveillance simple. According to NSA sources, there is a simple method to avoid having one's e-mail captured by NSA Internet filters that have been installed within major Internet exchanges, such as the AT&T facility in San Francisco, which is the subject of a class action suit against AT&T. By typing "Viagra" or "Cialis" in the message text, the filters will automatically identify the e-mail as spam and ignore it. The e-mail could contain the words "Al Qaeda" or "Bin Laden," but as long as Viagra or Cialis are also contained in the text, the e-mail will pass through the filters without being intercepted.

(Madsen's site design now looks much better, BTW)

Execrable writing: Powerline has an odd poop fetish. They use 'execrable' to describe everyone from Rybak to Kofi. I will have to remember to give Scott Johnson a wedgie when I see him.

Earth Day: This House site is fucking crazy: On Earth Day website, House Republican Committee seeks to 'dispel environmental myths'. Really crazy.

Time to kiss some Caucasian ass as the rather autocratic president of Azerbaijan visits the White House. Bush still claims that final Iraq war decisions happened after an ultimatum. Rolling Stone features: is Bush the worst President in History?

A really long article in the American Prospect (a liberal mag) about how the Democrats need to find some values and stuff. It may have been a good article but it was too long even for me.

If you have an online group, try Frappr to map them globally.

Rice is getting roped into AIPAC case: A lot seems to be transpiring in the AIPAC case for this summer, and we'll have to dig into the AIPAC angle a lot later. But for now, AP reports:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice leaked national defense information to a pro-Israel lobbyist in the same manner that landed a lower-level Pentagon official a 12-year prison sentence, the lobbyist's lawyer said Friday.

Goss CIA analyst crackdown: RawStory: The CIA announced today that it has fired an employee for leaking classified information to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest. Also a big story in the NY Times on it. Pretty fucked up. Juan Cole compares how in DC these days, it is good to leak Valerie Plame's name, but bad to inform the American public about a network of secret prisons in eastern Europe.

Secret torture flights: There is a global shadow detention gulag of sorts, and all kinds of rumors about it around the Internet. Perhaps we'll stir up a little trouble later with some of those exotic stories, but in the meantime consider: Amnesty International claims CIA used private airlines to hide CIA torture flights (from a couple weeks ago).

Apple lawyers say blogs not journalism: Apple is trying to sue some blogger-type guy at PowerPage.org and say he's not a journalist with journalist-style credentials because of a story about Apple developing a consumer-oriented Firewire-based GarageBand music interface - codenamed 'Asteroid' according to AppleInsider.

Corporate dudes are suing against NSA wiretaps along with the ACLU. NSA wiretaps were a prominent part of Sunday's West Wing episode, wherein President-elect Santos calls up the Chinese premier to do some saber rattling over Kazakhstan – I don't know why the hell Bartlett, or anyone, would place thousands of US troops between the Russian and Chinese armies, but to the West Wing's credit, Santos doesn't like it either.

I loathe that Clifford May and his neocon ways. But "What to make of the anti-antis?" is a pretty sublime exercise in Orwellian labeling and slanders. Also the Zarqawi psyops story makes an angular appearance I don't really understand – but it appears that he supports the psyops because it manipulates perceptions against "anti-antis"... WTF?

The media, too, have more than their share of anti-antis, and I'm not talking here only about the left-wing blogs that compare President Bush unfavorably to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Recently, the top story on the Washington Post's front page was headlined: "Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi: Jordanian Painted as Foreign Threat to Iraq's Stability."

Is there anyone -- even Ward Churchill -- who would argue that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the commander of Al-Qaida in Iraq, is not a "foreign threat to Iraq's stability"?

A seemingly more cogent reason for the Post to object to what it blasts as a U.S. military propaganda campaign: An American colonel is quoted as saying that Zarqawi and other "foreign insurgents" are only "a very small part of the actual numbers" of those fighting Iraqi government forces and the American-led coalition.

The Moussaoui case distracts from profound problems in the legal system that need to get unraveled.

Is Bush ripping Beatles onto his iPod? The RIAA is arguing in court that turning your own CDs into MP3s is not fair use, which is insane. But since you can't buy Beatles digitally at all, this means that Bush must have been ripping them. Should the RIAA bust his yarblockoes? Well as this guy says, "They nailed Al Capone for tax evasion, didn't they?"

Boston Globe says Bloggers fanning the controversy over Rumsfeld. Describing a few milblogs, the blogs in turn hasten to redefine themselves. I am in favor of military blogs, as they open new and interesting channels of information. Among those mentioned: COUNTERCOLUMN: All your bias are belong to us, and Guidons. OPFOR is apparently the standard bearer these days. Is it part of military.com? Features such bits as "Somalia Remains Free of US Imperialism, Food, Laws, Prosperity, Peace…" under the category "The Long War." Real progressive. The mil blog wire is an aggregator which looks interesting.

The Blackwater lawsuit: Those Defense contractor guys hung on the bridge probably shouldn't have been in Fallujah -- but can their widows sue over it? After the Fallujah hangings, did Blackwater cover up their own negligence and fake documents to protect their Pentagon contract? More on it here in the DailyKos. In the broader context, it's evidence that these private companies treat their employees like shit while causing the military industrial complex to spiral out of control:

The Nation: Blood Is Thicker Than Blackwater by JEREMY SCAHILL [from the May 8, 2006 issue]
It is one of the most infamous incidents of the war in Iraq: On March 31, 2004, four private American security contractors get lost and end up driving through the center of Falluja, a hotbed of Sunni resistance to the US occupation. Shortly after entering the city, they get stuck in traffic, and their small convoy is ambushed. Several armed men approach the two vehicles and open fire from behind, repeatedly shooting the men at point-blank range. Within moments, their bodies are dragged from the vehicles and a crowd descends on them, tearing them to pieces. Eventually, their corpses are chopped and burned. The remains of two of the men are strung up on a bridge over the Euphrates River and left to dangle. The gruesome image is soon beamed across the globe.

In the Oval Office the killings were taken as "a challenge to America's resolve," according to the Los Angeles Times. President Bush issued a statement through his spokesperson. "We will not be intimidated," he said. "We will finish the job." Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt vowed, "We will be back in Falluja.... We will hunt down the criminals.... It's going to be deliberate. It will be precise, and it will be overwhelming." Within days of the ambush, US forces laid siege to Falluja, beginning what would be one of the most brutal and sustained US operations of the occupation.
.....
Shortly after Helvenston left that message, the men left the base and set out for their destination. Without a detailed map, they took the most direct route, through the center of Falluja. According to Callahan, there was a safer alternative route that went around the city, which the men were unaware of because of Blackwater's failure to conduct a "risk assessment" before the trip, as mandated by the contract. The suit alleges that the four men should have had a chance to gather intelligence and familiarize themselves with the dangerous routes they would be traveling. This was not done, according to Miles, "so as to pad Blackwater's bottom line" and to impress ESS with Blackwater's efficiency in order to win more contracts. The suit also alleges that McQuown "intentionally refused to allow the Blackwater security contractors to conduct" ride-alongs with the teams they were replacing from Control Risk Group. (In fact, the suit contends that Blackwater "fabricated critical documents" and "created" a pre-trip risk assessment "after this deadly ambush occurred.")

AP: Israel Preparing to Retake Gaza Strip. Probably saber rattling, but the situation is getting really bad. Some other newsbits:

Senate Bill Shorts Gear for Troops By ANDREW TAYLOR, AP Thu Apr 20, 3:46 PM ET
WASHINGTON - A Senate measure to fund the war in Iraq would chop money for troops' night vision equipment and new battle vehicles but add $230 million for a tilt-rotor aircraft that has already cost $18 billion and is still facing safety questions.

Kyrgyz Leader Threatens to Expel US Troops By KADYR TOKTOGULOV , 04.19.2006, 10:36 PM
Kyrgyzstan's president threatened Wednesday to expel U.S. troops if the United States does not agree by June 1 to pay more for stationing forces in the Central Asian nation.

Some random DailyKos goodies: What is the 'center' in American politics? What of the innocent people in Guantanamo? (and what of that Abbasi guy?) Are we becoming the Republic of Gilead?

Some random Israel goodies: "We could lose the next war" - an interview with idiosyncratic Likud hawk Yuval Steinitz, wherein he suggests that the Israeli military leads its government, not vice versa. Really interesting stuff. He is also paranoid about Egypt. Editorial: The UN versus Hezbollah. Hebron settlers assault two female international aid workers. I had some more links but they disappeared because of that damn Haaretz auto-reload thing.

I promise that the Big Lebowski-themed Iran exegesis is on its way. It's a new week now... Gotta get real before oil goes $80+/barrel.....

State Dept, military industrials, CBS, NBC, Homeland Security all agree: our story about Zarqawi was interesting

"While I don't doubt any word of Hong Pong's diary, I have to wonder...hmmm...is Hong Pong actually just playing the part of a nice Minnesota conspiracy buff with a web log...but he is actually holed up deep inside a secret bunker in rural Virginia, with dark sunglasses and a black jumpsuit on, sucking us deep inside a complex web of psyop war games designed to further alienate the most politically informed American progressives from the public at large. Behind him, Dick Cheney stands, rubbing his hands together, cackling gleefully..."

--DailyKos member themank - eerie, isn't it

My computer is acting a little dodgy so I'm a bit concerned right now. Hopefully one of the interested parties that's been around Hongpong this week didn't hack my shit.

I crossposted Monday's Zarqawi PSY OPS story to the DailyKos and The Agonist, where it got read by thousands of people! (and featured on the Agonist's front page!) Within a few hours, as I slept Monday morning, my DailyKos entry had been voted up by dozens of people as a "recommended diary," which caused it to be listed in a privileged spot on the front page. Also a top DailyKos contributing writer, SusanG, included a plug for my story in her main frontpage story at 12:15 PM. Which was sweet:

If you think "leveraging xenophobia," as the Washington Post article examined by Hong Pong claims the military is doing in Iraq, is confined to our Middle East policy, think again.

The story sparked a lively discussion in which all could take a certain freaky pride in the fact that in this case, Paranoia is Right. All could agree that this Psychological Warfare planning against the American public is some fucked-up shit, and since my sources were Sy Hersh and the Washington Post, it was pretty hard to refute what I was saying. It got more than 160 comments. A huge counterintelligence success!

I wrote a poll for "Favorite Pentagon PSY OP of the war", which 887 people voted in. Results:

"It's like every day is an October Surprise!" polls really well. Though my veiled suggestion that the Nick Berg decapitation video was faked also did surprisingly well. (I don't really believe it was faked, but its worth considering how it could fit into a PSYOPS "marketing strategy"). And of course Jessica Lynch's fabricated Pentagon tale is still a classic favorite.

So within the 24 hours of Monday, a deluge of hits came mostly from the DailyKos. Damn, it sure caught the interest of some Big Wheels. And lots of government agencies. So these were some of more interesting visitors: either some random worker was surfing around, or else the word got passed and the story was Monitored by Gray Actors. Or a good bit of both.

Readers In 24 Hours: Most of the cabinet? Including the federal courts, NASA, the FAA, the FCC, the Postal Service, NOAA, NIH, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Health and Human Services, the State Department, Treasury, Homeland Security, many Army, Navy and Air Force computers, iraq.centcom.mil, army.pentagon.mil. And "croydon.gov.uk".

Many esteemed members of the military industrial complex, such as Boeing (several different hits), Halliburton, ChevronTexaco, the Citadel Group, SAIC, Northrop Grumman, the Shaw Group (of Katrina contract-hustling), Raytheon, Citgo (Chavez!) and even the Rendon Group. Now they are some shady cats.

Some in the media liked it too: E Entertainment, Disney, CBS, ESPN, NBC, NY Times, Scripps, Al Hurra (the American-funded mid-eastern TV network: [are they also tied to Zarqawi ops?]), TimeInc.com, Reader's Digest, Sony Pictures, RandomHouse, the Prague Post, McGraw-Hill, Discovery.com, PR Newswire, Union Tribune, HarperCollins...

Why not? WalMart, Napster, Intel, Microsoft, PlayBoy, Adobe, Apple, Ford, Kodak, Philips, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Progressive.com, Blockbuster, and a ton of random law firms.

Traffic Tuesday was back down to normal levels. Oh yah, check out Rolling Stone's National Affairs Daily page, in which Tim Dickinson uses the same opening quote for a fine piece along my lines -- Hyping Zarqawi, and also The "Selective Leak", about how Dexter Filkins at the New York Times was made into a cut-out for Pentagon disinformation about Zarqawi.

So the story has not been missed by the mainstream, I think it's safe to say (see above). I wonder if this counts as a dangerous counterintelligence effort?

When Legos get militant

This is apparently the 701st entry on HongPong.com. I'll be damned.
First the Boondocks. The Creative Mafia Syndicate will prolly get me for this, so enjoy it now. Boondocks is now running their very first comics so if you want to see where it started, check that out.

What happens when you combine Legos and Counterstrike? At Techeblog, Genius.

This site is full of modern marvels, including the Whiskey Bottle PC, a pen-sized scanner, and a sweet Top 20 collection of gadgets including a clock propelled by a mouse, an RSS feeder that prints onto toilet paper, pseudo-skin gear and cardboard speakers. (via the time-wasting genius of GM)

I've got a strange day ahead of me and I don't know where I'll be at. But this should provide some amusement. And check out the new links under "allied operations & sites of interest", I guarantee you'll find something interesting.

Staring into the abyss for a while; these are some rebellious people

Check out this 50-state composite survey of whether Bush broke the law in the wiretapping scandal. It certainly breaks down along red/blue lines, but it is still good to see that, say 39% in Virginia think he broke the law, to only 36% who think he didn't.

We are this close to starting the apocalypse. Isn't that fabulous?!

Bush Adviser Foresees Iraq Violence Lull
WASHINGTON - President Bush's national security adviser said Sunday that Iraqi leaders had "stared into the abyss" and determined that sectarian violence was not in their interest.

Although bombings and other attacks have surged in the last week, Stephen Hadley expressed optimism in the light of statements from Iraqis who have condemned the attacks and pledged to move forward with building a unity government.

"It is a time of testing for Iraqis," Hadley said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

"They've stared into the abyss a bit, and I think they've all concluded that further violence, further tension between the communities, is not in their interest," he said.

The cumulative Iraqi death toll since the shrine situation reached at least 400 today. And yet again this is presented as evidence that "the terrorists are getting desperate." Thanks for that insight.

MySpace machinations. I thought this sounded eerily familiar, as adults spazz out about MySpace, now that the kids have literally nowhere to hang out in RealSpace anymore. Wired on it:

The profile the Hermitage, Pennsylvania, Hickory High School student bestowed on his principal was not kind. For "birthday" he listed "too drunk to remember." And for vital stats like eye and hair color he wrote, simply, "big" -- a poke at the educator's girth that he managed to weave into most of the 60-odd survey questions in Trosch's fictional profile: Do you smoke? "Big cigs." Do you swear? "Big words." Thoughts first waking up? "Too … damn … big."

The teen told some friends at school about the gag. Big mistake.

As a judge would later put it, "word of the parody … soon reached most, if not all, of the student body of Hickory High School," and the fake MySpace profile, along with several less nuanced commentaries crafted by other students, became a monster hit at the school. The administration banned student PC use for six days, canceling some classes, while they traced the profile to 17-year-old senior Justin Layshock, who promptly confessed and apologized.

"We grounded him and didn't allow him on the computer for two weeks," says Layshock's mother, Cherie Layshock. But the school had stronger medicine in mind. Layshock was suspended for 10 days, then transferred into an alternative education program for students incapable of functioning in a regular classroom.

A gifted learner who had been enrolled in advanced-placement classes and tutored other kids in French, Layshock spent the next month in a scaled-down three-hour-a-day program where a typical assignment saw students building a tower out of paper clips as a lesson in teamwork. The punishment led to an ACLU lawsuit that is ongoing, and garnered the school district a slew of critical stories in the local papers.

Wherein they make the point that (public) schools can't really control the speech of students at home. The concept of digital satire, ah, so attractive, the Siren Song of mocking bastards at school. Well I learned that lesson the hard way. Anyway.

Afghanistan is intrinsically rebellious, and that is pretty much all you need to know:

Afghan, Nato and US forces surrounded the main high security prison in Kabul yesterday with tanks after it was taken over by more than 1,500 Taliban and Al-Qaida prisoners during a violent riot. At least 30 prisoners were injured and unconfirmed reports said seven others were killed in fighting after inmates took two women prison guards hostage in protest at new regulations requiring them to wear uniforms.
Bursts of gunfire could be heard throughout the day from Pulicharkhi prison after the Afghan police rapid reaction unit, armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, entered the complex in an attempt to prevent a mass break-out. Prisoners were heard chanting “Allah-o-Akbar” in between the firing.
Pulicharkhi, which holds around 2,000 prisoners, became notorious during Afghanistan’s Communist era with allegations of torture and secret executions. About 110 detainees held by the US at Guantanamo Bay are expected to be transferred there later this year.
The prisoners had allowed 70 women inmates to be moved to another part of the prison after storming into the female wing from their own. As night fell, negotiations announced by the Interior Ministry to end the stand-off were suspended. Security forces had yet to gain access to parts of the jail under the prisoners’ control.
“I have heard that prisoners have been injured. Taliban and Al-Qaida members from different countries are behind this unrest,” said the Deputy Justice Minister, Mohammad Qasim Hashimzai. “They still control the wing from where they had started the riot. They have demands; we are going to listen to what they want. If we cannot solve it through negotiations, we have our own options.”

If the United States and NATO cannot administer Kabul's main prison, are they really going to be able to check the heroin industry or even deal with (let alone attempt to dominate) the various heavily armed ethnic factions?

The Soviet Union was defeated here, bankrupting them. The British were defeated here (twice - perhaps thrice depending how you score it), expending a huge amount of cash from the India colony, and ultimately helping drag down British-Indian colonization. And now, NATO and the United States cannot control the Afghani equivalent of Abu Ghraib. To me, this is totally in keeping with the pattern of history.

After all, they've had opium since Alexander the Great stopped by. [maybe apocryphal, but sounds good].

And of course America's Iran paranoia is skating off into a dimension all its own. Google News 'Iran Nuclear' search:

Results 1 - 50 of about 64,400 for iran nuclear

A final note. Let me introduce a nice old map from the Great Game. Via Wikipedia's recommended Great Game history, a really subtle HongPong.com geopolitical illustration:

That's Persia in Blue. 1848. Good times. (Also note that Kuwait didn't exist)

Apple breaks out a new Mini

My good friend dschned had his nice Apple laptop stolen recently (although fortunately he had just backed up most of his stuff). So now he is trying to find a good replacement, and was attracted to the older G4-based Mac Mini. We went over to FirstTech on Hennepin to see what was going on, and the guys there advised us that Apple was releasing new models of something today, with the typical Jobs mystique of theatrical surprise.

They didn't let us down. The new Mac Minis look damn good and feature either single or double-core Intel chips, at $599 for a 1.5GHz Intel 'Solo' or $799 for a 1.66 GHz Core Duo, with built-in wireless Internet. They finally added more USB ports, Bluetooth, and one of those spiffy remotes. You can also get a DVI to analog video adapter for the TV, and other such stuff. They also released the hilarious iPod Hi-Fi, which I really hope isn't a boondoggle.

Again, I am not really sure if Apple is going to screw the pooch by letting the Intel chip lead to OS X all over generic PCs, thus killing Apple's profit margin (a la the Clone Wars). However, releasing a Mac Mini starting at $599 (and even less for education - $579) is a great way to get the Apple brand throughout the various more economically constrained niches of the world, putting them more on par with Dell and generic manufacturers. I am imagining Mac computer labs in Pakistan or something like that. Apple always used to neglect the low end, and it's great that they are releasing what appears to be a pretty good machine for that.

I really want to write something about the oil wars right now, (surprise) but I have real work of sorts to deal with. The new Politics in Minnesota campaign site is nearly finished, and I gots to get it out the door.... thanks to the contributors for carrying some weight right now!!

Внимание! The Russian (spam) is coming!!!

Ironically enough, earlier today I was playing Call of Duty, a WWII first-person shooter game which takes you through a few classic parts of the war, from the perspective of a Brit and a Soviet soldier. I just got to the Stalingrad levels, full of fog, rubble and snipers. Good stuff. And I just got some returned spam, as some Russian is forging "thwart.net" emails to other Russians. But it looks like a hell of a deal!

I have used the Dashboard translator to illuminate some of what it means. The Russian advertising industry is probably baroque and sinister in really amusing ways.

Внимание! ДО 31 МАРТА КУРС ДОЛЛАРА $ 1 = 3 РУБля!!!
Attention! UNTIL 31 MARCH THE EXCHANGE VALUE OF DOLLAR I 1 = 3 RUBLES!!!

Рекламно Агентство «RBA MEDIA» проводит распродажу собственных рекламных площадей и предлагает Вам организовать эффективную рекламную кампанию, а именно – разместить рекламу в издания на уникальных условиях:

Advertising agency "RBA MEDIA" is conducted the sale of its own advertising areas and proposes to you it organized effective advertising operating period, namely - it placed advertisement into the publications on the unique conditions:

ВАША РЕКЛАМНАЯ КАМПАНИЯ ПО ЦЕНЕ $ 1 = 3 РУБЛЯ!
YOUR ADVERTISING OPERATING PERIOD ON THE PRICE I 1 = 3 RUBLES!

Данный курс действует на размещение рекламы любого объема в любых номерах изданий 2006 года на страницах журналов, участвующих в акции при оплате не менее 3-х публикаций до 31.03.06 г. Кроме того, каждый рекламодатель данной акции получает бесплатную полугодовую подписку на издание с собственной рекламой.

This course acts on the arrangement of the advertisement of any capacity in any numbers of the publications 2006 on the pages of the periodicals, which participate in the action with the payment not less 3rd publications to 31.03.06 g. furthermore, each sponsor of this action is obtained free half year subscription to the publication with his own advertisement.

Звоните: 8-909-630-3868
и Вы получите уникальную рекламу кампанию за минимальные деньги!
Стоимость рекламы в журналах, участвующих в данной акции:
and you will receive unique advertisement operating period for the minimum money!
Cost of advertisement in the periodicals, which participate in this:

[And there are several items like this:]
Журнал «АВТО - ОБОЗРЕНИЕ»
Официальная стоимость рекламы:
1/16 полосы - $ 600
Стоимость рекламы во время акции:
1/16 полоса - 1.800 руб.

Periodical "IS AUTO- - REVIEW" the official cost of the advertisement:
1/16 strips - i 600 cost of advertisement during the action: 1/16
strip - 1.800 rub.

I have to say that Russian is probably the coolest looking language.

It's Tester Time for Andy

My good friend Andy Tweeten is out in Great Falls, Montana, working for the Jon Tester for Senate campaign. He sent out an email today to let people know where he's at.

He also takes care of the TesterTime campaign blog. Right on. Tester is something of a prairie populist, and he's in a neck-and-neck race with some DLC-style city slicker lawyer type for the Democratic primary. Tester's opponent in November (hopefully) will be the wildly unpopular Conrad Burns. It's a fight worth watching, and I'm glad Andy's around to get a handle on things.

Something completely different: Andy also alerted me to a tidbit about how Facebook is used by the Man to peer into our lives. Interestingly, one of the groups behind Facebook, the Accel Group, has been tied to DARPA. Including a nasty threat to the president that led to Secret Service visits for some pissed-off student.

The story has a sad little note at the end:

This is a revised version of this piece. An earlier version incorrectly implied that U.S. intelligence agencies were involved in Facebook and may have been read as suggesting that Facebook played a role in disseminating information to authorities. CampusProgress.org regrets these errors.

Well, if you post stuff publicly, and intelligence agencies use Facebook to find it, it's not exactly facebook's fault. If it would be bad for the District Attorney to see your facebook page, then you shouldn't have it there. But I wonder if facebook uses heuristics / AI methods to dig for incriminating stuff that people have posted themselves. And what of the private messages?

MySpace, on the other hand, is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, who will ultimately own all their poor souls. Kind of a pity.

Tester will have to come riding in at the last second to save the day. Go Jon!!

Mac OS X 10.4.4 runs on generic Intels now; Apple brandishes DMCA to quash links to the hacker's website; plus a Gary Busey Turkish spectacle

Thanks to pixeldusted for the post, it says more about the bureaucracy than I can even convey. Sweetness.

OS X is at 10.4.5 right now, but an intrepid hacker known as Maxxus has developed a hacked version of 10.4.4 that can be set up and operate on ordinary Intel-based PCs. I really wonder what Steve Jobs is really thinking right now. He must surely realize this is the most leet (1337) or stylish way to get people around the world interested in running OS X on PCs. Thus, he's prepped to fight Microsoft Windows on his own turf, and the first attack wave could be the hackers. This would be cool as hell.

On the other hand, the bread and butter that kept Apple solvent through the bad years was hardware sales, not OS sales. Nowadays, the iTunes Music Store has good volume but razor-thin margins, and OS sales are pretty much icing on the cake. (also Apple podcasting is starting to do pay subscriptions, via Slashdot) If Apple tried to license its operating system, they could essentially cannibalize their hardware market share.

Oh wait, that already happened in the days of the Mac Clones, a misstep that nearly killed Apple. So when they saw that Maxxus had posted the hacks to one site, the vaunted packs of carnivorous Apple lawyers sent out a DMCA warning to that site, osx86project.org, which is focused on the possibilities of OS X + x86. The proprietors of that site have no wish to offend Apple, and have removed the links to Maxxus' site and the patches he developed.

As I also have no real desire to receive a DMCA notice from Apple, I will leave it to you to google the matter if you really want the patch, or refer to BoingBoing's coverage, MacSlash on it, or Slashdot. As one internationalist hacker type I know remarked,

Dude, it is illegal to DISCUSS how to go around encryption in the US.

Yes, this is what happens nowadays. But it's nothing new. Consumer electronics like your DVD player are now Black Boxes of Mystery which you, as a mere Owner, are un-Privileged to mess around with. It is a horrifying infringement of freedom that will require a second Revolution to defeat. In the meantime, well damn, the OS X patches are still on the Internet (hosted in more rebellious countries) so you can get them.

Linux is booting on Intel Macs now, even via an external USB drive (via MacSlash). Better yet, it is on Gentoo Linux, the same flavor that powers this very website.

In its infinite loop wisdom, Apple decided to embed a secret message to hackers in the new Intel machines, via CNN, slashdot and OSX86project:

Your karma check for today:
There once was a user that whined
his existing OS was so blind
he'd do better to pirate
an OS that ran great
but found his hardware declined.
Please don't steal Mac OS!
Really, that's way uncool.
(C) Apple Computer, Inc.

There is also a hidden kernel extension, Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext . Apple has never made it very hard to pirate the OS — which I think is actually part of a long-term subversive strategy, rather than some kind of incomprehensibly huge oversight on Jobs' part. They have never required call-in serial activation or any of that shit, for example. Again, the OS was always icing on the cake. Bill Gates is perplexed.

Gary Busey nukes conventional cinema: In other news, Gary Busey plays a crazed American doctor stealing organs of Arabs for Israel in a wildly popular Turkish film, "Kurtlar Vadisi Irak" or "Valley of the Wolves: Iraq". Billy Zane is also in it. Apparently it was on Turkish television for a few seasons before getting turned into a movie.

Fortunately I have ascertained a way to download this film from the Internet, as (somehow) it has not yet found an American distributor. Get it off BitTorrent right here. There are warnings that the sound and video quality are terrible (1 or 2 out of 10), but such a spectacle cannot wait. I will post if i find a better version.

I am not the atheist chaplain; Halliburton gets the Domestic Detention Center contract: feel safer?

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
Starts when you're always afraid
Step out of line, the men come and take you away
You better stop, hey what's that sound, everybody look what's goin down...

There is one thing you really ought to reflect on this week. Halliburton has a contract to build detention centers in the United States now. Upon some random catastrophic event (or as they say in conspiracy land, a False Flag terrorist attack orchestrated by the government to start Fascism®™), then all the political subversives get taken away. This is the Angry Paranoia™ version from PropagandaMatrix: "Halliburton Detention Camps For Political Subversives" (admittedly it's funny, and I personally nearly ended up in the New York Political Dissident Holding Tank pictured, so I can relate). But this is totally for real. Here is the KBR/Halliburton press release:

KBR Awarded U.S. Department of Homeland Security Contingency Support Project for Emergency Support Services
ARLINGTON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 24, 2006--KBR announced today that the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component has awarded KBR an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contingency contract to support ICE facilities in the event of an emergency......

With a maximum total value of $385 million over a five-year term, consisting of a one-year based period and four one-year options, the competitively awarded contract will be executed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District. KBR held the previous ICE contract from 2000 through 2005.

"We are especially gratified to be awarded this contract because it builds on our extremely strong track record in the arena of emergency operations support," said Bruce Stanski, executive vice president, KBR Government and Infrastructure. "We look forward to continuing the good work we have been doing to support our customer whenever and wherever we are needed."

The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs. [sounds juicy!] The contingency support contract provides for planning and, if required, initiation of specific engineering, construction and logistics support tasks to establish, operate and maintain one or more expansion facilities.

The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster. In the event of a natural disaster, the contractor could be tasked with providing housing for ICE personnel performing law enforcement functions in support of relief efforts.

Ahh the Post-Nuclear Bird Flu concentration camps of North Dakota. 2008 will really be a doozy.

I am intrigued by the Russian moves on HAMAS, because Russia is always intriguing. Russia is huge, they are playing games with the energy (when they shut off the European gas, it was a clever way to remind everyone they can make the European winter very cold & expensive). Israelis are plenty pissed with Russia about the Hamas thing -- Bee stings not bear hugs in Haaretz. More on this later but I don't want to deal with it now. Raimondo on this.

Hamas Assumes Control of Parliament. On the new Hamas agenda: 'learn to queue like the British'

Meanwhile all these strange things are happening in Israel (what else is new). "Hilltop - or down-to-earth? By Avraham Burg" about the crisis of religious Zionism - the Gaza withdrawal kinda shattered the settler messianic theology of "build this settlement or God breaks out the lightning bolts for YOU." So are religious Zionists going to get pragmatic or not?

Favorite Internet List via the geniuses of GorillaMask: The 213 Things Skippy is No Longer Allowed to Do in the U.S. Army: This guy who was in psychological operations (around Albania apparently) made a list of things that were expressly forbidden - either because he did them, or was asked about it and ordered not to do said things. There are some damn good ones:

2. My proper military title is "Specialist Schwarz" not "Princess Anastasia".
3. Not allowed to threaten anyone with black magic.
4. Not allowed to challenge anyone's disbelief of black magic by asking for hair.
7. Not allowed to add “In accordance with the prophesy” to the end of answers I give to a question an officer asks me.
10. Not allowed to purchase anyone's soul on government time.
11. Not allowed to join the Communist Party.
12. Not allowed to join any militia.
13. Not allowed to form any militia.
14. Not allowed out of my office when the president visited Sarajevo.
20. Must not taunt the French any more.
21. Must attempt to not antagonize SAS.
22. Must never call an SAS a “Wanker”.
23. Must never ask anyone who outranks me if they've been smoking crack.
24. Must not tell any officer that I am smarter than they are, especially if it's true.
26. Never tell a German soldier that “We kicked your ass in World War 2!”
29. The Irish MPs are not after “Me frosted lucky charms”.
31. Not allowed to let sock puppets take responsibility for any of my actions.
32. Not allowed to let sock puppets take command of my post.
41. “Keep on Trucking” is *not* a psychological warfare message.
44. I am not the atheist chaplain.
49. Not allowed to trade military equipment for “magic beans”.
51. Not allowed to quote “Dr Seuss” on military operations.
54. “Napalm sticks to kids” is *not* a motivational phrase.
58. The following words and phrases may not be used in a cadence- Budding sexuality, necrophilia, I hate everyone in this formation and wish they were dead, sexual lubrication, black earth mother, all Marines are latent homosexuals, Tantric yoga, Gotterdammerung, Korean hooker, Eskimo Nell, we've all got jackboots now, slut puppy, or any references to squid.
59. May not make posters depicting the leadership failings of my chain of command.
60. “The Giant Space Ants” are not at the top of my chain of command.
66. There is no “Anti-Mime” campaign in Bosnia.
67. I am not the Psychological Warfare Mascot.
68. I may not line my helmet with tin foil to “Block out the space mind control lasers”.
69. May not pretend to be a fascist stormtrooper, while on duty.
71. I must not flaunt my deviances in front of my chain of command.
75. May not conduct psychological experiments on my chain of command.
84. Must not use military vehicles to “Squish” things.
85. Not allowed to make any Psychological Warfare products depicting the infamous Ft. Bragg sniper incident.
94. Crucifixes do not ward off officers, and I should not test that.
106. I may not trade my rifle for any of the following: Cigarettes, booze, sexual favors, Kalishnikovs, Soviet Armored vehicles, small children, or bootleg CD’s.
140. I am not authorized to sell mineral rights.
155. Teaching Albanian children to taunt other soldiers is not nice.
158. The revolution is not now.
162. Past lives have absolutely no effect on the chain of command.
174. Furby ® is not allowed into classified areas. (I swear to the gods, I did not make that up, it's actually DOD policy).
198. Not allowed to lead a “Coup” during training missions.

I was a bit suspicious this was recently written by some recruiter-like guy to make the military seem more palatable, but it's apparently quite a few years old, and he's not in the military any more. It is too bad they are tangled up in all this mess - really such sarcasm ought to be the general mission. Mineral rights?

Blogs are getting big at the U for classwork. Strib website is messed up. Can you believe it takes three steps to even find the index of reporters & staff?

If you can do this ridiculous bouncing object thing for more than 18 seconds, you are amazing.

United Arab Emirates chosen for sub-orbital tourism spaceport. What more can I say?

Christopher Hitchens is a fat boozy British son of a bitch who has believed in everyone from Trotsky to Wolfowitz. Which admittedly isn't very far. But between bottles of scotch he likes to act like some kind of demented nanny: "Garrison Keillor, Vulgarian". Who cares? I don't know. Sorry I wasted your time.

The Recording Industry Jihad. They are trying to screw everyone using the DMCA to say that you can't make backups of your own CDs, as they claim this is basically the same as piracy. So, for them, "Freedom" means "if you break your CD, you are free to go to Sam Goody and Buy a New One," rather than the current legal arrangement, "you are allowed to make fucking backups, because this is not East Germany."

The [submitted arguments in favor of granting exemptions to the DMCA] provide no arguments or legal authority that making back up copies of CDs is a noninfringing use. In addition, the submissions provide no evidence that access controls are currently preventing them from making back up copies of CDs or that they are likely to do so in the future.

A bit more here.

The Onion: Senate Ethics Committee To Meet In New Ethics Committee Mansion.

Sorry that's all for now. Happy Mattress Sale Day.

A Trojan Horse comes to OS X - not really a big deal; Bonus: How viruses work (roughly)

It appears that a trojan horse called usually called "latestpics.tgz" made it into the Mac OS X world, but it doesn't work like a typical Windows virus or Worm - though it attempts to spread itself through iChat.

It is called Oompa-Loompa or "OSX/Oomp-A" for now, as deemed by one Andrew in the Ambrosia Software forums. This forum thread has literally all the gory details of how it works. It has also been classified as OSX/Leap-A. It originally appeared on MacRumors.com as supposed "pictures of Mac OS X Leopard 10.5", and here is their look at it. The slashdot crowd says it's more FUD (Fear Uncertainty & Doubt) really. And i tend to agree. Notes from the Day in the Life of an Information Security Investigator. In the WaPo Brian Krebs reports on it. Those links should tell you everything. But if you want to hear my ramble on a bit more, follow along....

[this became a bit longer than I intended, but I hope it explains how viruses work generally - and why OS X works all right to prevent this shit. It is relevant to your life. And then you can get into the Matrix.]

I am by no means a professional expert, but I have to deal with this shit, and there are good reasons that Unix and Mac OS X are preferred to Windows by lots of security professionals.

The amount of damage that computer viruses do consists of one thing in particular: propagation: The technical method of reproduction and how it transmits. Duh ok. If it can copy itself without any humans 'clicking OK' on a dialog box, viruses can spread far and wide. If they exploit holes in the memory structure to avoid the safeguards, that's really the key method -- and is NOT the problem for Apple today.

The famous Nimda/Code Red worms, which infected millions of Windows computers running IIS webservers, worked because there were "magic request" that an infected computer could make towards the target IIS webserver -- this let the worm overflow the usual safeguards and insert the self-propagating code. [More details here]

Read on for some more about it.

It also hit email systems by tricking the user or Microsoft Internet Explorer to executing a binary file: Cert advisory:

any mail software running on an x86 platform that uses Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 SP1 or earlier (except IE 5.01 SP2) to render the HTML mail automatically runs the enclosed attachment and, as result, infects the machine with the worm. Thus, in vulnerable configurations, the worm payload will automatically be triggered by simply opening (or previewing) this mail message. As an executable binary, the payload can also be triggered by simply running the attachment.

A normal HTTP request - the bit of text that your browser sends a webserver in order to receive a webpage looks like so:
GET /farms/side_125x125/advertise_125x125.jpg
is a browser request for a JPEG. With me so far?

But the webserver viruses like Code Red used special GET commands that sneak through a flaw in the way that the Webserver handles that very command. The virus writers wrote a program that sent a huge GET command -- and the content of the command itself spills out of the memory location in the webserver RAM. Then the end of the command are actually instructions (machine code) that let the virus take over the computer. This repeats a million zillion times, and you get an epidemic.

The trick is that Microsoft forgot to make sure that the little memory container for the "GET" string didn't spill out of control - called a "buffer overflow" that isn't detected and stopped. That is the vulnerability enabling the method of propagation. When new buffer overflow methods are discovered, a flurry of viruses are written in the Windows world, yet somehow Mac OS X has been essentially immune from this. Why? One sec. First, the method Example from this HP Labs report on Code Red:

The Code Red payload..... is a HTTP GET request for filetype.ida. The .ida extension is mapped by IIS to cause the indexing service (IDA module) to run on that filetype. The vulnerability that the virus exploits is a buffer overflow. The “NNN” is padding to increase the size of the request in order to overflow the buffer, and the Unicode characters are machine code to coerce IIS into running the binary payload.

GET /default.ida?NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801
%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090
%u9090%u8190%u00c3%u0003%u8b00%u531
b%u53ff%u0078%u0000%u00=a

[binary payload] Figure 2: Code Red HTTP Request. It is a buffer overflow attack on the indexing service (default.ida)

And then these infected computers attack everyone else. I saw about a million of these hit hongpong.com when things were really bad. Here is a Dutch graphic from Funktionsprinzipien von Sabotagesoftware. Whatever that means. Just use your damn imagination.

But somehow this kind of shit never really fucks with Linux or OS X. Why?
Well for one thing, in Linux people make custom programs - especially the Apache web server engine. When you compile Apache, your individual program is unique in how it's put together. This is like genetic diversity in a way. Plus the overflow bugs seemed to be taken care of better, and just don't appear in Linux as much as Windows.

But what about Desktops? Yah. OS X does not yet have any real viruses. A lot of the core of the system is protected, and before any programs can alter it, it asks you for your password. It is perfectly possible to write a program that will erase all your files and email itself to everyone, but OS X will still ask you for your password before the OS will erase itself.

This is assuming that the underlying instructions can't be tricked or misdirected, and in some ways, they can. For example, apparently a lot of legit OS X programs that DO need the admin password, expose the password through a part of the system that is visible to all the other programs, via the "ps" or "top" activity monitoring programs for example. [this is how it works]

Hypothetical exploit: Thus a little virus that was somehow already running could wait and listen for the password via 'ps', then it would have the root pass, and it could finally break all the way into your system. But that would be STILL rely on your password to get there -- and it is a pretty thin reed to rest a working virus on.

Ok... this is taking too long to not really explain anything. Finally, a big difference between Windows and OS X is that if you are a Windows administrator, programs can do a lot of shit without asking for your password. On OS X, it also asks you if it is OK to run programs you've never run.

Today's OS X Trojan: This Trojan does not sneak through a buffer overflow, like dangerous Windows viruses. If you agree to let this "latestpics.tgz" program - whose icon looks like a Jpeg - run, AND you type in your root password, THEN it will overwrite some applications - making them unlaunchable - and it will insert itself in some places on your computer. And try to propagate through iChat.

I mean, what the hell is the Operating system supposed to offer to protect itself, besides asking for your password?

If it could make itself run as soon as it appeared in OS X Mail, and send itself to everyone else, and infect iChat, without asking for your password, then it would be a threat. This requires people to "push it along" and even the average Mac user probably won't type in their password -- but then again, Mac users aren't used to catching this kind of thing.

But of course, warning pop-ups appear when your download executable files. This is crucial. As long as Apple continues to fix discovered buffer overflows and designs its OS in a way that denies random code from executing and sneaking into shit (the Big If) we'll be ok. And laughing at all the infected PCs.

Just look at the record. It's not bad. 60,000 viruses for Windows, 40 for the original Macintosh (pre-OS X), 40 for Linux. It is totally structural. It is not just because "no one tries" to make them for Linux or OS X.

All these narcotics make me woozy; but not as woozy as ADVISE's Ultimate Power; Pentagon: 'we must fight the net'; Wilkerson: Powell UN Speech a 'Hoax'

Cheney 'Authorized' Libby to Leak Classified Information
By Murray Waas, National Journal
Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been "authorized" by Cheney and other White House "superiors" in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein's purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

As we say on the Internet, LOL. Atrios notes it's slightly hypocritical. Another CIA official has come out of the woodwork to accuse the Bush Administration of cherrypicking Iraq intelligence – and guess what, Robert Novak hated him too! Paul R. Pillar, thanks for being a patriot. We need guys like you. WaPo: "Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq":

The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.

......Pillar was identified in a column by Robert D. Novak as having prepared the assessment and having given a speech critical of Bush's Iraq policy at a private dinner in California. The column fed the White House's view that the CIA was in effect working against the Bush administration, and that Pillar was part of that. A columnist in the Washington Times in October 2004 called him "a longstanding intellectual opponent of the policy options chosen by President Bush to fight terrorism."

Add these two bits together, and boom, there you go, they smoked Valerie Plame in an attempt to protect all their fake intelligence and swat at the CIA. But why the hell do I bother repeating myself for the 124,639th time?

Fair and Balanced Editing of Applause: Fox "Memory Hole" News edited out anti-Bush applause at the Coretta Scott King funeral, then Morty Kondracke said that the audience obviously didn't like the partisanship. Now that's a reality distortion field. MSNBC was caught in a Harry Reid-Abramoff headline changing dodge. More on yesterday's Reid smear below.

<woozy> What's going on everyone? After my wisdom teeth were yanked, I have been popping Vicodin like candy for the last couple days, but everything seems to be going pretty well so far. No dry sockets yet. I had never been under general anesthesia before, so I was a little nervous because it can supposedly kill you. But it was plainly awesome to wake up with all my wisdom teeth yanked, loaded up with drogas.

Hilarious stuff from Mordred. Well done. </woozy>

ADVISE is the New Total Information Awareness: Yes, this "Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement" program will know your favorite soda and pornography. Of course they will be totally responsible when drunk on Ultimate Power. CSM: "US plans massive data sweep: Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, even e-mails. Will it go too far?" More here.

The CounterTerrorism Blog looks good. They are skeptical of Bush's latest West Coast marquee terrorist conspiracy. So a good place to start.

Israeli Shin Bet director says Israel 'may rue Saddam overthrow' to young Israeli settlers: You can't make this shit up:

The head of Israel's domestic security agency, Shin Bet, has said his country may come to regret the overthrow of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Yuval Diskin said a strong dictatorship would be preferable to the present "chaos" in Iraq, in a speech to teenage Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
He also said the Israeli security services and judiciary treated Arabs and Jewish suspects differently.

.....His speech to the students at the Eli settlement as they prepared for military service was secretly recorded and broadcast on Israeli TV.

When asked about the growing destabilisation of Iraq, Mr Diskin said Israel might come to rue its decision to support the US-led invasion in 2003. "When you dismantle a system in which there is a despot who controls his people by force, you have chaos," he said. "I'm not sure we won't miss Saddam."

This goes into my theory that Shin Bet directors are actually quite sane, and are in fact opposed to neo-con bullshit because they can understand that widespread chaos is not really in Israel's interests at all. 1995-2000 Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon was not the only one to speak against this garbage. Also, from the New Yorker, a cynical old Israeli intelligence operator who wasn't surprised that about HAMAS' victory and rising fundamentalism all over the place. Just wait until this gets to Syria and Jordan.

Cryptome.org spills secrets: Cryptome is a totally sweet site and I'd like to throw out a few goodies. One: the somewhat suppressed Official CIA History of the Bay of Pigs Operation. Plausible Deniability. The introduction on Cryptome's front page, and the official history is here. Two: all kinds of weird stuff like this list of MI6 officers that has attracted the attention of FBI Counterintelligence.

Three: famed national security writer James Bamford writes about his involvement with the NSA lawsuit. Talks about Nixon's illegal Operation Minaret, which sounds pretty similar to things these days. Four: Also consider the Pentagon's declassified "Information Operations Roadmap" they published:

We Must Fight the Net. DoD is building an information-centric force. Networks are increasingly the operational center of gravity, and the Department must be prepared to "fight the net." [1 line redacted.] but be fully prepare to ensure critical warfighting network functionality and to [1 line redacted].

.....In particular, PSYOP must be refocused on adversary decision-making, planning well in advance for aggressive behavior modification during times of conflict. PSYOP products must be based on in-depth knowledge of the audience's decision~making processes and the factors influencing his decisions, produced rapidly at the highest quality standards, and powerfully disseminated directly to targeted audiences throughout the area of operations.

....We Must Improve Network and Electro-Magnetic Attack Capability. To prevail in an information-centric fight, it is increasingly important that our forces dominate the electromagnetic spectrum with attack capabilities.

I'll drink to that. Actually, I think I'll drink a lot to that. Five: Cryptome.cn publishes information censored by the Chinese government, as well. This is really what the Internet is all about.

OSS.Net: Way too cryptic: "Commercial Open Source Intelligence, Risk Mitigation, and Security for the Seven Tribes. Global, New Craft, Tribal & Sub-State, in 29 Languages with Integrated IT and Underlying Geospatial." Whatever that means, I want to get a job there.

Tabs on John Bolton: Check BoltonWatch at the TPMCafe. All right. Clemons is on point here too.

The latest smear on Harry Reid doesn't really have anything behind it: Trying to tie him to the Abramoff mess, but there's no there there.

Another reason to slash PBS funding: Evidence of a "hoax" & "cabal": on NOW with David Brancaccio, they did an excellent job explaining the shady mysteries of Iraq pre-war intelligence and interviewing Lawrence Wilkerson. Brancaccio was gutsy and far more accurate than any cable news garbage. It was a great primer to Intel-gate for the un-initiated. It must make Bush's skin crawl to realize that government cash is being used to shatter their grand tale:

DAVID BRANCACCIO: We've been talking grand policy. The then director of the CIA, George Tenet, Vice President Cheney's deputy Libby, told you that the intelligence that was the basis of going to war was rock solid. Given what you now know, how does that make you feel?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: It makes me feel terrible. I've said in other places that it was-- constitutes the lowest point in my professional life. My participation in that presentation at the UN constitutes the lowest point in my professional life.

I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council. How do you think that makes me feel? Thirty-one years in the United States Army and I more or less end my career with that kind of a blot on my record? That's not a very comforting thing.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: A hoax? That's quite a word.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, let's face it, it was. It was not a hoax that the Secretary [Powell] in any way was complicit in. In fact he did his best-- I watched him work. Two AM in the morning on the DCI and the Deputy DCI, John McLaughlin.

And to try and hone the presentation down to what was, in the DCI's own words, a slam dunk. Firm. Iron clad. We threw many things out. We threw the script that Scooter Libby had given the-- Secretary of State. Forty-eight page script on WMD. We threw that out the first day.

And we turned to the National Intelligence estimate as part of the recommendation of George Tenent and my agreement with. But even that turned out to be, in its substantive parts-- that is stockpiles of chemicals, biologicals and production capability that was hot and so forth, and an active nuclear program. The three most essential parts of that presentation turned out to be absolutely false.......

DAVID BRANCACCIO: ....You've said that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld somehow managed to hijack the intelligence decision making process. You called it a cabal. And said that it was done in a way that makes you think it was more akin to something you'd see in a dictatorship rather than a democracy. Now those are strong words. Why a cabal?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, the two decisions that I had the most profound insights into and which I have spoken to are the decision to depart from the Geneva Conventions and to depart from international law with regard to treatment of detainees by the Armed Forces in particular. But by the entire US establishment, now including the CIA and contractors in general.

And the post-invasion Iraq-- planning, which was as inept and incompetent as any planning I've witnessed in some 30-plus years in public service. Those two decisions were clearly-- made in the statutory process, the legal process, in one way and made underneath that process in another way. And that's what I've labeled secret and cabal-like.

Nice.

War is a Racket: I found Major General Smedley Butler's classic Anti-war, anti-imperialist screed, War is a Racket, on the Veterans for Peace website. (interestingly, Butler also testified about a secret fascist conspiracy to overthrow FDR). This was his classic statement, which was not part of War is a Racket:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.

Nothing Works: It is really funny that the White House set up this grand website, expectmore.gov, to provide an evaluation of all the federal government's programs. Among the list of programs that are apparently busted (via first-draft.com):

Dept of Defense-- Military Defense Communications Infrastructure
Dept of Homeland Security Border Patrol
Dept of Homeland Security Coast Guard: Aids to Navigation
Dept of Homeland Security Coast Guard: Drug Interdiction
Dept of Homeland Security Coast Guard: Search and Rescue
Dept of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration: Air Cargo Security Programs
Dept of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration: Aviation Regulation and Enforcement
Dept of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration: Baggage Screening Technology
Dept of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration: Federal Air Marshal Service
Dept of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration: Flight Crew Training
Dept of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration: Passenger Screening Technology
Dept of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration: Screener Workforce
Federal Election Commission Federal Election Laws - Compliance and Enforcement
Office of Natl Drug Control Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign
Department of Energy National Nuclear Infrastructure

To make a long story short via AmericaBlog: Wash Times: 1) Bush is spying on American-American phone calls IN THE US; 2) Known Al Qaeda agents are running free inside US; 3) Spy program useless. Der WaPo says:

"Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use ... Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well. That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause."

And by the way, FISA Court really streamlined after 9/11 so why no warrants? Gonzales: NSA may tap 'ordinary' Americans' e-mail.

BitTorrent evolves to avoid packet shaping: Internet service providers are apparently starting to try to filter down BitTorrent. So the BT developers are implementing encryption so they can't see Torrent traffic. leet.

Nazi mysteries: Some of the weird esoteric stuff within Nazism. Includes really disturbing stuff about Nazi research scientists and their "Holy Grail" style hunts for items of folklore and mystic significance... Somehow our cartoonish enemies these days just can't quite measure up to the Teutonic standard.

Funny t-shirts. Will they never end?

Quick goodies for OS X

Well it's another week and a lot of things should happen. As for me, I am tangled up in some of the shadiest business around, and I don't know where things are going. What I am talking about? I'll explain shortly I promise.

There are some new versions of stuff you should check out. An alternative Mac OS X web browser called Camino finally released v. 1.0 rc1 (for those of you non-geeks, RC means 'release candidate'. Software development goes from Alpha to Beta versions, then to Release Candidate versions, and then final versions or Gold Masters. So RC1 means it's pretty polished). My old acquaintance Josh Aas from Macalester did some development for Camino, so I respect it all the more.

Camino is a side project of Mozilla, so it shares some code with Firefox. It is, however, specifically optimized for the Mac (and now Intel Macs) so it very good, and worth trying out.

There is always a tricky problem of playing Windows Media files on a Mac, and because of Microsoft's petulant bitchiness about how Apple is about to crush them, they quit making WMV plugins for Mac internet surfing. Fortunately a company called Flip4Mac has a free WMV player plugin that works fine.

MacUpdate.com is a good site, and they have a list of nifty new Dashboard widgets, including AirTrafficControl, a sweet Airport optimizing/snooping thing, a digital whiteboard called NoodleBoard, an SMS cellphone text messaging transmitter, Dashlicious to interact with the amazing del.icio.us social bookmark/tagging system, and why not, a molecular protein viewer called ProteinGlimpse (pictured) Keep an eye on your RNA and so forth. There's a lot more dashboard widgets to mess around with too.

At this time I must make sad mention of how dschned's excellent Apple G4 laptop was jacked when he left it behind while coaxing his dog Sam into the car. How tragic. Fortunately he had just made backups of all his old school files, photos and recent work projects the week before, so the only thing truly lost (besides the hardware) was some emails.

Over at Politics In Minnesota we have been having trouble with our email archives as well. BACK UP.

Bush stays two steps ahead of secret Stalinist animal-human hybrid program; but Soviet electromagnetic conspiracies surface

Today's News of the Weird by Chuck Shepherd:

Recently opened archives in Moscow show that in the 1920s, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered his top animal breeding scientist to create interspecies "super warriors." Stalin's half-men, half-apes would be "invincible," "insensitive to pain" and "indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

Scotsman UK reported that

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine". The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.

Well this spurred me down the strange path of gibberish and esoterica on the Internet about the mysterious projects of the Soviet Union. One elaborate story about Soviet electromagnetic research leading to scalar EM weapons was quite an exotic tale. Soviet weather control, applied Tesla Death Ray stuff. It's kind of like Pop Sci Fi from the Cold War, Red Dawn meets electrical engineering. For example, take "Historical Background of Scalar EM Weapons" by Lt. Col. T.E. Bearden (retd.), 1990, which relates

The peculiar "nuclear flashes" seen by the Vela satellites in September 1979 and December 1980 could have been due to a testing of a scalar EM howitzer in the pulsed exothermic mode. In the mode, scalar EM pulses meet at a distance, where their interference produces a sharp electromagnetic explosion (hence the "flash", very similar to the initial EMP flash of a nuclear explosion. Even in the vacuum of space, such an explosive eruption of energy from within the local spacetime vacuum itself may be expected to lift matter from the Dirac sea, producing a plasma. Prompt absorption and re-radiation of energy from this sudden plasma may be expected to present nearly the same "double peak" profile as does a nuclear explosion. This was the profile presented by the flashes. Note that the second flash detected was apparently of an "explosion" primarily in the infrared, almost certainly ruling out a conventional nuclear event. It does not rule out, however, pulsed distant holography using pumped EM giant time-reversed wave transmitters.

He also says that the Challenger explosion was caused by Soviet energy weapons. It is really a compelling kind of story, but of course I'll trust it as far as I can throw it. Also offers this:

In the late 1960's, Lisitsyn reported that the Soviets had broken the "genetic code" of the human brain. He stated the code had 44 digits or less, and the brain employed 22 frequency bands across nearly the whole EM spectrum. However, only 11 of the frequency bands were independent. This work implies that, if 11 or more correct frequency channels* can be "phase-locked" into the human brain, then it should be possible to drastically influence the thoughts, vision, physical functioning, emotions, and conscious state of the individual, even from a great distance.

It may be highly significant that
(1) up to 16 of the giant Soviet woodpecker carriers have been observed by Beck and others to carry a common, phase-locked 10-Hz modulation, and

(2) such a 10-Hz signal has been demonstrated by Beck, Rauscher, Bise, and others to be able to physically entrain or "phase-lock" the human brain, if stronger than the Schumann resonance of the Earth's magnetic field.

This, in turn, leads to Total Conspiracy on the old tinfoil hat - schizophrenic model. But who can deny the mystique of Soviet energy weapons scientists in some secret military city, hunched over their experiments, trying to extract energy from the ether, playing chess and swilling vodka on break? Why not? And what about how the Soviets cooked the U.S. Embassy in Moscow with lots of microwave radiation, the twisted bastards? (this is pretty weird, medical studies of State Dept. staff and Moscow radiation)

And the terrible stories about radioactive contamination around the USSR are also part of this weird backstory to the nuclear apocalypse of the cold war.

Presenting: Stalin's Plan: Neo-monkey-humanoids and Tesla Weapons:

Ok I feel silly right now. But just think: what if the Russians are applying their considerable SAM and directed energy expertise towards Iran? Surely, if Iran would pay, Russia would be down with it.

This guy says that the US military is experimenting with energy weapons that manipulate Iraqis in Iraq. Sounds fanciful, but hey, when in Babylon, do crazy shit like Nebuchadnezzar, right?

And don't forget the classic story of Tesla and the Tunguska Explosion.

One final tidbit: check out the mysterious HAARP, some kind of Alaskan energy device that the U.S. military has set up to muck around with the ionosphere or something. And, um, someone blamed Hurricane Katrina on it. Which goes to show that all this shit about electromagnetic technology is a really great wildcard for any given conspiracy theory. CONTRAILS ARE REAL!!!

Abramoff racket spreads ever wider; Ledeen says bin Laden is dead;

Plains dealing: Andy recommends Left in the West as a top spot for spotting the actions of Senator Conrad Burns in covering up his Abramoff connections, among other things. References to "US-Asia Network" are getting scrubbed off Burns' official website.

Newt Gingrich is posing as a champion of reform, as his 2008 campaign for President opens. However, as David Sirota notes at The Nation, Newt is quite responsible for helping start Abramoff's career, and the whole K Street Project complex that has worked out so well.

Some really wicked lasers: WickedLasers.com is pimp (via HipTechBlog). You can purchase a $559 laser from them that will burn holes in things. Even their most minor laser can mess with someone's eye. Nothing says "now it's really the 21st century" like your own directed energy weapon! Photo/video gallery of laser effects.

Michael Ledeen says Osama is dead: mainly to make his point that the old Middle Eastern patriarchy is wheezing its last right now. Ends "Faster. Please?" as always. Fortunately I'm sure he will make a lot more money dealing arms very soon. Raimondo: "War, Lies, and Videotape: They fabricated the case against Iraq – now they're moving on Iran." Ledeen will play a role in these maneuvers, to be sure. Robert Dreyfuss: "The Bush who cried wolf," pointing out that we can't really pressure Iran much, because of the Iraq disaster.

Chaostan: The theory: Dude named Richard Maybury says that a third of the world (North Africa, middle east, Asia, Europe up to Poland) should basically be characterized as Chaostan, a place of increasing violence and disintegrative political forces – Moscow-based fascists versus Islamic radicals in the north, and the West versus the rest further south. A summary of Chaostan and some principles involved. He thinks that you can make quality investments based on his geopolitical conceits. And sell you a newsletter about it.

Alito scares me. But there is nothing to be done about it, which is depressing. Dionne: A Hearing About Nothing. The Senate is basically a black hole from which no logic can emerge. On the other hand, the media has studiously avoided quoting Russ Feingold, who, like the pretty much the rest of the judiciary committee, is probably running for President.

Google Earth comes to OS X: (and finally isn't beta) Huzzah, we can play with Google Earth now. You can do many cool things to extend its functions, like near-real-time 3D flight tracking as well as the CIA factbook, and even geo-tagging of Flickr photos. Check out the Google Earth Blog for lots more. (Is Apple trying to pad the performance stats in the newly released Intel Macs?)

Family Killed by Ninjas: A photo from City Pages that Nick Petersen sent to me.

Apple == Super Hotness. The only stock I own is some Apple stock. Which is definitely the hot stock these days. In fact, it has been going up about as fast as Google. Somehow, Forbes magazine tells us that even though iPod sales went up 240% last year, and computer sales more than 60%, Apple stock is too hot right now. I rarely never have faith in the market, but seriously, their fourth quarter earnings were 50 cents a share. The video iPod will probably move 4 million units in the first quarter, as they say... so what's the problem?

Russians for Condi: Her whole middle aged single thing is too much for Vladimir Zhirinovsky:

"Condoleezza Rice is a very cruel, offended woman who lacks men's attention," he added. "Such women are very rough. … They can be happy only when they are talked and written about everywhere: 'Oh, Condoleezza, what a remarkable woman, what a charming Afro-American lady! How well she can play the piano and speak Russian!'

"Complex-prone women are especially dangerous. They are like malicious mothers-in-law, women that evoke hatred and irritation with everyone. Everybody tries to part with such women as soon as possible."

Superconductors are frickin sweet: There is apparently this theory now that suggests that superconductors could neutralize gravity fields and propel spaceships while bending the fabric of space. Or something like that. There was this German scientist (who blew off his hands and most of his eyesight experimenting with explosives as a teenager), anyway he developed a theory which was capable of predicting the mass of particles from first principles. He thought that the interaction between gravity and electromagnetism could be explained by adding some extra dimensions to the model of the universe, and now they think that this could be applied to a superconducting method of launching spaceships. Damn, that would be the coolest thing ever.

You can purchase a little superconducting disc, and a couple quality magnets, for $145. Ms. Anderson back at MPA did this in Chemistry class, and it was amazing to see the magnets hovering. I definitely felt like there was some weird shit going on there. Why not try the same stuff, only a couple million times higher intensity? Sweet.

Well that is all for now. I need to go drink and watch the Timberwolves.

Hornets VS Bees; Synthetic life forms? Wal Mart Sux0rs

Ah, pretty damn amazing. National Geo video (WMP): 30 Japanese hornets take on 30,000 European honeybees. But how do the Japanese bees defend against the onslaught?

Scientists in Canada are working on a fully synthetic life form (more here and here).

Microsoft Confirms They are Censoring Their Blogs in China.

Awesome. From Corey Anderson at CityPages (via AmericaBlog).

MNPublius offers a list of MN blogs of the year, copied from MNspeak's author Rex. Publius gets a nod... Hongpong continues 100% under the radar, where all the kool kids really hang out.

Oh those Russians: MOSNews: West Should Not Be Scared of Russian Spies, says Russian Foreign Intelligence Service director Sergei Lebedev. Nice.

What is this bullshit? Students pressed F5 (reload) too much and that's a felony? Student accused of trying to crash school's computer system!

Thinking about Wal-Mart? Need to convince conservatives they suck? Try the Neighborhood Retail Alliance: Conservative Case Against Wal-Mart in NYC . Subsidies for private corporations should be a conservative's enemy. Also ProfessorBainbridge.com: The Conservative Case Against Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart screws up health care. Costs taxpayers a lot. How can the Party of Nixon Reagan support such welfare mommas sucking at the Capitol's teats?

News from the Wilderness: Former LAPD cop Michael Ruppert is an enigmatic, larger than life character among the various conspiratorial journalists and 9/11 researchers that tell exciting tales of intrigue and Peak Oil suspense. He claims to have stumbled into CIA-backed drug trafficking in Los Angeles as a narcotics officer.

His confrontation with former CIA director John Deutsch in a room full of angry Angelenos (as C-SPAN recorded) is an absolute classic para-political moment - the room erupts when he names the CIA programs involved in supporting drug operations (Amadeus, Pegasus and Watchtower, according to Ruppert). This is featured in Guerrilla News Network's video Crack the CIA, an excellent look at the Central Intelligence Agency and its storied associations with Central American traffickers, featuring Ruppert (Iran-Contra didn't pay for itself, hon).

He sort of went on a deep & weird geopolitical tangent from there — Crossing the Rubicon is one of the oddest political books of our times — and certainly one that the mainstream media doesn't want to review or promote. Nonetheless, his view of how peak oil may propel psychotic and reckless behavior in the U.S. leadership is certainly worth considering. His site, From The Wilderness, also carries a lot of energy stories from other sources (with remarks), so it is useful for finding the odd Chinese pipeline story and all that. The Agency That Could Be Big Brother by NSA whiz James Bamford, Nuclear Clouds Gather Over Asia from IPS, and China lays down gauntlet in energy war from Asia Times are all useful.

Oil spikes; Mel Gibson's Apocalypto subliminal madness; Germans speak of US attack plans in Iran

Mel Gibson tries subliminal maniacal grin: Apple - Trailers - Apocalypto. Look at about 1:46 in the trailer for this bizarre film. For a single frame, Mel Gibson is chomping on a cigarette, leaning on the clay-encrusted native. Best weird subliminal moment of the year, so far.

Oil prices climb on speculative buying. Chinese claim to develop first live vaccine against bird flu.

Peter Bartz Gallagher has struck up InfantFoundation.com. Thus far it's a few thumbnails of the crew and such, but it's a fine start.

Strib: Older story, but a fun fantasy: Trolleys may be jolly, say Minneapolis officials.

How evil are you? I came up Evil. Must be because I got an ex-stripper on a Clear Channel station today.

National Security bits: Urban design + war on terror = National Security Sprawl. NSA Web Site Puts 'Cookies' on Computers.

Aljazeera.Net - US increases air attacks in Iraq. Antiwar.com: Two False Options - by William S. Lind

Victory is not an option, and it never was. The strategic objectives the Bush administration set for this war – a peaceful, democratic Iraq that would be an American ally, a friend of Israel, a source of unlimited oil and of basing rights for large American forces – were never attainable, no matter what we did. Strategies invented in Fairyland cannot be implemented in the real world. Pity the military that is ordered to try.

Defeat is an option. In my last column I described one way that could occur, an Israeli and/or American attack on Iran that leads Iraqi Shi'ites to join the Sunni jihad and cut our lines of supply and retreat through southern Iraq. There are additional scenarios that could lead to a dramatic American defeat, a defeat we could not disguise to anyone, not even ourselves.

German media suspects US strike in Iran: UPI: German media: U.S. prepares Iran strike

...the respected German weekly Der Spiegel notes "What is new here is that Washington appears to be dispatching high-level officials to prepare its allies for a possible attack rather than merely implying the possibility as it has repeatedly done during the past year."

The German news agency DDP cited "Western security sources" to claim that CIA Director Porter Goss asked Turkey's premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan to provide political and logistic support for air strikes against Iranian nuclear and military targets. Goss, who visited Ankara and met Erdogan on Dec. 12, was also reported to have to have asked for special cooperation from Turkish intelligence to help prepare and monitor the operation.
[....]
It is possible that leaks from NATO and German security sources are part of a ploy to convince the Iranian government that the Americans and their NATO allies are in dead earnest when they say a nuclear-armed Iran would not be tolerated, and that Iran had better start negotiating seriously.

But the German media speculation about the supposed U.S. plans has been fueled by a number of high-profile visits to Turkey this month, including trips by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, by the CIA's Porter Goss and by the FBI Director Robert Mueller, who also delivered U.S. intelligence reports on Iranian backing for PKK operations aimed against Turkey. There have also been some significant Turkish visits to Washington, as reported by Der Spiegel.
[the PKK Kurdish faction, with Iran, against Turkey and Iraqi Sunnis?! Oy!....]
The original story in the German press which provoked the wider media furore was written for the DDP agency by a veteran reporter on security and intelligence matters, Udo Ulfkotte, who has in the past been criticized in the German media for being "too close to sources at Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the BND" (Bundesnachrichtendienst).

Anti-Imperialists Beware – Bush Is Reading Again - by Jim Lobe. Lobe has been a close follower of the neo-cons since the 1980s as UPI's Washington DC. This makes the point that Bush seems easily swayed by cheesy imperialist writing — these guys really do deceive themselves with breathless talk of empire. Don't miss Robert Kaplan's characterization of the entire Islamic world as "Injun Country." Bush friggin' loves Kaplan, as Lobe details why:

[Kaplan] describes the presumed thoughts of a Filipino in Zamboanga, presumably a descendant of Moro who resisted, at the cost of tens of thousands of their lives, U.S. imperialism 100 years ago: "His smiling, naïve eyes cried out for what we in the West call colonialism."

Good stuff from Raimondo (the anti-war libertarian) at Antiwar.com for how to Beware the New Year:

.... conservatives often pave the way for more government spending and centralized controls in the name of "national security" by supporting war and preparations for war. The same principle operates – in reverse gear – in the case of ostensibly antiwar liberals. As history shows, they are all too often persuaded that the domestic "benefits" of operating in a wartime atmosphere – conducive to economic and social planning – outweigh the moral and material costs of war.

The War Party is counting on this kind of opportunism to quash antiwar dissent in the Democratic party and marginalize the candidacy of Russ Feingold. The Senator from Wisconsin voted against the Iraq war and was the only member of that august body to cast his vote against the PATRIOT Act. On domestic policy, he is the quintessential liberal, well to the left of the determinedly "centrist" Hillary. One can easily imagine the Democrats being persuaded that Feingold is too "extreme" to even think about carrying a single "red" state. If the Democratic "Leadership" Council can successfully invoke the specter of "McGovernism" – convincing Democratic delegates to ignore the antiwar grassroots for "pragmatic" reasons – the War Party can sell Hillary as The Only Alternative to four more years of Republican misrule.

He's right that the Democratic hawks will try to eat Feingold. DLC is almost worse than the Republicans. However, Feingold seems to actually be the most 'vigilant patriot,' if I can wield that phrase. Meanwhile, from the disgruntled old Dem Dept., Sidney Blumenthal: The Long March of Dick Cheney:

The hallmark of the Dick Cheney administration is its illegitimacy. Its essential method is bypassing established lines of authority; its goal is the concentration of unaccountable presidential power. When it matters, the regular operations of the CIA, Defense Department and State Department have been sidelined. [this is what I am talking about!!]

Richard Nixon is the model, but with modifications. In the Nixon administration, the president was the prime mover, present at the creation of his own options, attentive to detail, and conscious of their consequences. In the Cheney administration, the president is volatile but passive, firm but malleable, presiding but absent. Once his complicity has been arranged, a closely held "cabal" - as Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, calls it - wields control.

Within the White House, the office of the vice president is the strategic center. The National Security Council has been demoted to enabler and implementer. Systems of off-line operations have been laid to evade professional analysis and a responsible chain of command. Those who attempt to fulfill their duties in the old ways have been humiliated when necessary, fired, retired early or shunted aside. In their place, acolytes and careerists indistinguishable from true believers in their eagerness have been elevated.

Says it all. Crush the bureaucracy with political appointees. Drink the Kool Aid, we've got New Realities to make here! Study it, judiciously, as you will.

NSA talk on MPR

Right now there is a sweet discussion of the NSA wiretapping situation on Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan. James Bamford is talking about it, and he said that the CIA is approximately half private contractors now - an ongoing integration of the private sector into the intelligence community.

(Which seems to be something that Gillian Harding is moving towards -- how interesting. And now her name is going to be on my highly flagged website. :-D)

The Equation of Life; the Olive Branch is Quaint; 5% vote fraud rate in Iraq asserted as blogs propagandize?

Some scientists determined that apparently, across the scale from bacteria to whale, the basic unit of life is energy and metabolism -- not time. A Master Equation for All Life Processes? Check out the 10 little-known sweet science stories. A Swedish bio-gas (cow poo) train, pillows are laden with fungi, French scientists figured out how to slow down & speed up light, (!!!) leading the way to future all-optical data routers (!!!!!), a robot with square wheels, and of course they are training honey bees to find land mines! (also 50 greatest robots ever - via GM)

The Eagle faces the olive branch: Dear Leader recently addressed the nation about that war thing, and someone told me that it was interesting how the olive branch on the Great Seal of the United States is hidden.

(Bush has also been pressuring newspaper editors a lot lately, including trying to prevent the CIA European prison stories in the WaPo, and the Times NSA story, by summoning the editors to the Oval Office in a vain effort to intoxicate with the fearful trappings of power)

I found out that on the Presidential Seal, the eagle used to face the arrows until 1945:

This one-time change has given rise to the myth that the eagle's head changes position to indicate wartime or peacetime, but that is obviously not true. The eagle faced right from 1880 to 1945, and has faced left ever since. It is nevertheless true that, when the change was made in 1945, the announcement referred to the symbolism of the eagle facing peace instead of war, and this symbolism has been alluded to many times since, although it was not the motivation for the change.

Make no mistake; when the Duke makes a televised address, every visual detail is carefully managed. The fascinating Brian Springer film "Spin", which was made primarily with intercepted satellite signals — open video feeds from the White House and other political and media operations. There's one funny part when they remove a photo from behind Poppa Bush's seat, because it is thought to resemble a recent photo of when he passed out in Japan.

So make no mistake, the selection of the arrows was 100% intentional, in a White House as image-conscious as this one.

(evil witch Peggy Noonan observed Bush talking about the way the eagle faces pre-9/11)

Windy: Energy issues in MN. Apparently the vast majority of windmills around Buffalo Ridge are not owned locally according to an interesting Strib article. Let's think about the means of production here people!

They don't like the vote: Guardian: Religious parties deal blow to US hopes for Iraq. Apparently an official level of 5% vote fraud in Iraq has been accepted, Juan Cole says:

The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq admitted on Sunday that voting fraud occurred in approximately 5 percent of the ballots cast, but said that this level of fraud would not affect the over-all outcome. Still, the IECI announcement will certainly fuel Sunni Arab anger and conviction that the election was stolen.

Bizarre. The Sunnis think that Shiites ganked their votes, and there have been mass protests in Fallujah. KR: "Iran now enemy No. 1, Sunnis say". Violence resumes apace as Sunni Arab student leader killed in Mosul after protesting vote -- Shiite militias and Kurds accused of killing him.

AP reports that US airstrikes are escalating, although of course it is hard to tell how many civilian casualties this generates, or whether they are the 'right targets,' or whether it is strategically useful at all. Such urban bombardments have not been seen in years, but due to 'perception management' techniques, the US public is blissfully unaware. A Steel Curtain for their bodies and our eyes, indeed.

RJ Eskow: Voting Confirms: Iraq Is a Red state. We have generated a fundamentalist theocracy, aligned against Israel, towards Iran, while 45% of the country supports attacking US troops. Why was this such a brilliant fucking idea again? Robert Scheer cackles: Iran's victory revealed in Iraq election.

Ethnic/sect structure of iraqi forces is doomed, man: One of the measuring sticks of how propagandizing a perspective on the Iraq war is how the difference between Sunni & Shiite groups is framed. When Sunnis are "rat's nest terrorists" while the Shiites are "Free Iraqis come to Battle for Freedom" in the northwest of the country, you are looking at some obfuscation.

Consider this first: SF Chronicle: Various private armies still exist, threatening Iraq's national security:

Residents of Samarra, the scene of bloody clashes between U.S. soldiers and insurgents, said they feared a Shiite militia being unleashed on the city. Interviewed in their homes this week, they said they were unaware of a Mahdi Army presence, but claimed they had already suffered when commandos affiliated with al-Sadr's militia were dispatched to the city earlier this year.

Ibrahim Farraj, who lives in the Sikek district, said, "The Interior Ministry forces are very strong. The insurgents are afraid of them, but they are corrupt and we cannot trust them. The last time the Interior Ministry was here, they were al-Sadr -- people are scared of them and the Mahdi Army."

U.S. Army Capt. Ryan Wylie, of the 3rd Infantry Division serving in Samarra, said he had heard rumors that the Interior Ministry was conducting a private war, but had seen no evidence.

These bloggers that have been embedded with US troops in the northwest Euphrates river valley are all about exaggerating this difference. In particular, Bill Roggio at Threatswatch (where the map above came from) explains how Rats Nests are obliterated in Steel Curtain Unmasked, and other interesting dehumanizing euphemisms. See if you can find the subtle twist of meaning here:

Throughout the operation, the 1/1/1 of the Iraqi Army and the Desert Protection Force worked in conjunction with the U.S. Forces, and proved to be an instrumental part of the operation. The Iraqi Army battalion participated in combat operations, and they and Desert Protectors were able to identify foreign fighters and local insurgents.

I wonder if Roggio can wrap his head around the concept that 'identifying' is not a neutral act of observation, but a conscious change of political identity (by Shiite militia, no less) leading straight to violence.

Roggio is not happy about a Washington Post article that characterized his role in Iraq as a military-supported Information Operation. He says that all the cash to get him there was raised independently, and that the military has not 'influenced' his writing. But his main sources are military personnel, and his perspective is deeply enmeshed with the same terminology and concepts that Pentagon spokespeople attempt to beat into our heads. Here's his core point:

Equating military information operations with al-Qaeda propaganda efforts is a form of moral equivalence of the worst sort. The U.S. military is conducting an influence campaign to draw attention to the news which is missed by the media on a daily basis. Their belief (and one that I share) is the portrayal of events in Iraq do not reflect the actual situation on the ground. While the articles may be viewed as “favorable” to the Coalition, the question is, are they accurate and factual? The Washington Post does not address this issue, nor does it provide evidence that the military is running a disinformation campaign.

Misrepresenting the source (such as the placed Iraqi newspaper stories) is a form of disinformation because it manipulates the perception of where it's coming from. The military's justification is that there is a metaphysical or ontological gap between (all?) portrayals and reality, according to him. Well isn't there always? How far can this go? Also consider this ironic statement:

al-Qaeda is running a sheer disinformation campaign which uses human beings as props in events such as beheadings and execution styled killings. It manufactures events, such as the faux uprising in Ramadi in the beginning of December. The truth is not relevant to al-Qaeda’s propaganda operations, only results matter.

The administration has 'manufactured' all sorts of symbolic events and concepts, such as the Statue Toppling, the mysteriously Satanic Terrorist Singularity in Fallujah that needed to be nuked after the 2004 Presidential election, etc. There have been plenty of symbolic constructions. Look at how Pat Tillman died -- that event was manufactured beyond the truth (it was a friendly fire fatality) to burnish the war narrative. Oh by the way, here's what Tillman's dad said:

"They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up," Patrick Tillman said. "I think they thought they could control it and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to hell in a hand basket if the truth about his death got out."

Al Qaeda is not the only force at hand here seeking to 'sharpen the contradictions' through symbolic action. What is Shock and Awe, if not a symbolic gesture? (Roggio also said that lots of Sunnis voted for Allawi in Anbar. That's fucking ridiculous!)

But what can I say about a worldview with ideas like "Samarra, a city once ripe for a Tal Afar styled assault."

By the way, here's a by-the-numbers orthodox propaganda tale about the Terrorists in Mosul. Of course it comes from the American Forces Press Service, part of the 'American Forces Information Service.' Use this to set your propaganda index, I guess.

Sadr City has a good deal of reconstruction, after decades of neglect. A story in the rightwing UK Telegraph claims that Tal Afar is totally ballin' these days:

Their commander, Col H R McMaster, is a counter-insurgency specialist who wrote a book about the Vietnam War, in which he criticised the US military's failure to understand the enemy's culture.

Before deployment, his men were given extensive Arabic classes and intensive lessons on Iraqi history, customs and religion. Proper efforts were made to woo local tribal sheiks with banquets in which goats were slaughtered and concerns listened to.

"The enemy is really good at disinformation and propaganda. We have to win the battleground of perception," he said.

Big Brother & Crying Wolf: People are more willing to believe the right yarn at the right time these days. A student at Dartmouth claimed that Homeland Security questioned him after he got Mao's Little Red Book through inter-library loan. But apparently it was a hoax. This story shows that people are expecting to hear these kinds of things... so stay sharp, we can hit spin real fast here.

Scratch the Checks and/or Balances: How sad is it that Sen. Rockefeller gets to jot secret handwritten notes of concern to the White House like a high school sweetheart, and that is supposed to be his total constitutional role? WTF?

AIPAC says Jump! WaPo: "Pro-Israel Group Criticizes White House Policy on Iran:"

AIPAC, which describes itself as nonpartisan, has criticized nearly every administration's Middle East policies, often speaking out when Israeli government officials express private frustration with U.S. policies.

But the news releases mark the first major criticism of the Bush White House and come as the administration is focused on problems in Iraq and has no clear path on Iran.
[.....]
Ross said the criticisms, though serious, are unlikely to lead to an all-out rift between AIPAC and the administration. "At the end of the day, every administration does what it needs to do, but obviously they will have to pay attention to this," he said.

Which again suggests that AIPAC should be registered as an agent of a foreign power. Well, that, and some of their (former) personnel have been indicted on espionage charges (more info here via the New Yorker).

Biochemical roots of the Munchies: Cannabinoid receptors around the hypothalamus.

In their studies, the researchers concentrated on the lateral hypothalamus (LH) of the brain, known to be a center of control of food intake. Their studies involved detailed electrophysiological measurements of the effects of specific neurons that they had identified in previous studies as being important in endocannabinoid signaling.

Their studies revealed that activation of CB1 receptors, as by endocannabinoid molecules, induced these neurons to be rendered more excitable by a mechanism called "depolarization-induced suppression of inhibition" (DSI).

What's more, they found that leptin inhibits DSI. However, they found that leptin did not interfere with the CB1 receptors themselves. Rather, leptin "short-circuits" the endocannabinoid effects by inhibiting pore-like channels in the neurons that regulate the flow of calcium into the neurons. Such calcium is necessary for the synthesis of endocannabinoids.

Always Ig Nobel

Some scientists have discovered an iceberg that 'sings' at about .5 Hz, but right now the Ig Nobel prize ceremony is on MPR, with infinite lectures on infinity, penguin poo pressure research, paper airplanes and frog sniffers. The geek audience is at its best.

The ceremony video is online. All right.

NSA & UFOs; Mexican army captures marijuana; UK builds road pan-opticon; British tab says Bush wanted to bomb Al Jazeera

Happy turkey days to all. I have been hiding out as a sudden cold has hit me - but its already getting better. Video games and Orange Juice can cure most anything, especially deep in November.

Strange days though. I find myself less concerned than usual about tracking the war. Plus Israel would appear to be shifting to the left, as Sharon looks to ditch the Crazy Right of Likud. That's really good, I think. But let's put aside those nasty situations and consider what Fark tells us about the world.

William Shatner wants to sell a kidney stone on eBay (bottom of page). Same page: Scotty's ashes will not get shot into space on schedule. Now scheduled for January. It seems like they went thru the transporter a few times too many...

Wireless mosquito defense network. Yes. Food Agency Tries To Quell Fears About Glow-In-The-Dark Meats. Police Search for Gary Glitter in Vietnam.

Fox News reviews the upcoming Clooney Middle East flick Syriana very positively. Also calls it a good companion piece to Three Kings, one of my favorite movies. And it's based on a book by former CIA dude Robert Baer. Hmmm... ok I'm interested. Also the guy who did Traffic is involved.

The basic story is that an oil company has set up shop in the Gulf, just as a merger is going through. The local royal Arab family is in the middle of a succession as the Emir (king) is about to step aside for one of his two sons: an idiot, and a sensitive, forward thinker. Guess who gets the job?
Clooney plays a CIA agent who’s a little over the hill and washed up. But he’s onto the fact that the government and the oil companies are trying to stay in control through the manipulation of who becomes king.

Most profitable East Bank poetry ever: Bob Dylan poems written at the University of Minnesota in 1959-60 fetch $78,000. And today it's the Loring Pasta Bar...

NSA and UFOs: The National Security Agency gave out some information about UFOs -- not much information. Surprisingly, the secretive intelligence agency pointed out that since so much of their reports about 'unidentified' phenomena came from spying on foreign communications systems, they couldn't share most of it! Really, that's pretty funny. A 'Top secret UMBRA' file is declassified here (PDF). (more sweet NSA documents from FAS - check out Secrecy News and the CRS reports)

Is the earth in a space-time vortex? NASA's on the job.

All this Raw Milk must be stopped. Russian scientist trains remote control turtles to spy? Cell phone explodes. Robber holds up bar with ham sandwich.

News from the Co-Prosperity Sphere: Japan to have a 'military' again for first time since WWII. Survey shows money can help buy happiness.

Stephen Hawking is tough as hell. Before a lecture, when he was taken off a respirator, he nearly died, but they resuscitated him. Hawking went on to give the lecture via Internet teleconferencing.

What did he think of "The Simpsons" TV show, which has had Hawking as an animated guest star? "It's the best thing on American TV." What did he think of the program to send American astronauts back to the moon? "Stupid," he answered. "Sending politicians would be much cheaper, because you don't have to bring them back."

Also an elderly Georgia man on oxygen managed to foil some robbers.

Mexican border squads (drug militia?) handle their marijuana with aplomb. El Paso Times:

Pot-laden truck creates armed standoff
A marijuana-laden dump truck got stuck in the Rio Grande on Thursday evening in Hudspeth County, leading to a standoff between U.S. law enforcement and what appeared to be the Mexican military, sheriff officials said.
.....Doyal said the truck driver returned with the armed men, including men who arrived in official-looking vehicles with overhead lights and what appeared to be Mexican soldiers in uniform and with military-style rifles.

In related news, the same part of the brain that gets "the munchies" is altered by a new drug suppressing appetite.

Nothing quite like that British All-Seeing Eye. Now they are going to TRACK ALL VEHICLES IN BRITAIN. Oh what will they think of next? Plus it all got snuck through Parliament, of course...

Gatso 2: rollout of UK's '24x7 vehicle movement database' begins
A "24x7 national vehicle movement database" that logs everything on the UK's roads and retains the data for at least two years is now being built, according to an Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) strategy document leaked to the Sunday Times. The system, which will use Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), and will be overseen from a control centre in Hendon, London, is a sort of 'Gatso 2' network, extending. enhancing and linking existing CCTV, ANPR and speedcam systems and databases.

Which possibly explains why the sorcerer's apprentices in ACPO's tech section don't seem to have needed any kind of Parliamentary approval to begin the deployment of what promises to be one the most pervasive surveillance systems on earth.

The control centre is intended to go live in April of next year, and is intended to be processing 50 million number plates a day by year end. ACPO national ANPR co-ordinator John Dean told the Sunday Times that fixed ANPR cameras already exist "at strategic points" on every motorway in the UK, and that the intention was to have "good nationwide coverage within the next 12 months." According to ACPO roads policing head Meredydd Hughes, ANPR systems are planned every 400 yards along motorways, and a trial on the M42 near Birmingham will first be used to enforce variable speed limits, then to 'tackle more serious crime.'

However, in Britain a 1689 law helped get a man out of a parking ticket. This memorable quote:

A spokeswoman for the National Parking Adjudication Service said no previous challenge to parking fines using the Bill of Rights had been successful.

Good luck with your cameras!! They still love drinking. BBC reported that

Looking back only 700 years, London had over 1,300 alehouses - one for every 50 people living in the city.

Meanwhile in Australia they are still messing around with the gnomes. Worst tech products of 2005.

Machines and objects to overtake humans on the Internet:
The ITU's vision goes further, highlighting refrigerators that independently communicate with grocery stores, washing machines that communicate with clothing, implanted tags with medical equipment and vehicles with stationary or moving objects.

Industrial products would also become increasingly "smart", gaining autonomy and the intelligence thanks to miniaturised but more powerful computing capacity.

"Even particles and 'dust' might be tagged and networked", the ITU said. "

Robot moose foils poachers in Canada (CNN video). Speaking of particles, the nice "Mountains of Creation."

NBC chief says that they pay too much attention to blogs over there, but pushing video over the Internet has improved ratings. What?

Superspreaders of disease are primarily responsible for mass epidemics, new study says. "A lot of people don't infect anyone".

Too much CO2? Stash it underground, says a guy from BP. Weird. An Austrian city is building giant mirrors to get light over a huge hill between November and February. Sweet!!

Bomb the Television. In some ways Bush is a bit of an Anarchist. I mean some radicals have fantasies like this, but really floating this kind of thing in the halls of power, like some crazed giant child -- I find it too easy to believe. Paper Says Bush Talked of Bombing Arab TV Network:

President Bush expressed interest in bombing the headquarters of the Arabic television network al-Jazeera during a White House conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair in April 2004, a British newspaper reported Tuesday.

The Daily Mirror report was attributed to two anonymous sources describing a classified document they said contained a transcript of the two leaders' talk. One source is quoted as saying Bush's alleged remark concerning the network's headquarters in Qatar was "humorous, not serious," while the other said, "Bush was deadly serious."

I have always thought there was something shadowy and vicious about the conflict between al-Jazeera and Bush. The part in Control Room where American planes kill Jazeera correspondent Tareq Ayub is killed in Baghdad was a terrible moment in the history of journalism -- and stories such as this make it seem more likely that the Pentagon really does believe this is a workable PR strategy. Juan Cole reflects on Al Jazeera & the conflict on all this.

Either way, this seems to be serious, given the Official Secrets Act gag orders on the whole thing, reports Guardian. The White House scoffed contemptuously.

Cheney: Drudge: X Marks the spot.

The More Well Known Pong: The history of Beer pong at Dartmouth.

The Mongolian Armed Forces are serving the cause of freedom.This WSJ bit about Mongolia made me sort of happy. I don't know why, but the idea that Bush managed to stir up the spectre of the Mongol Hordes seems so ... appropriate.

But Mongolia, which contributed about 130 soldiers, has maintained its number through five troop rotations, managing to avoid the sort of explosive local debate that has echoed through other foreign capitals. If that number sounds small, consider this: As a proportion of population, the infantry company and engineering platoon Mongolia sent from a population of 2.5 million people makes it the third-largest U.S. partner per capita.
"The Mongolian Armed Forces are serving the cause of freedom," Mr. Bush said, "and U.S. forces are proud to serve beside such fearless warriors."
....In preparing for Mongolia, the president needed to figure out how to tactfully refuse a gift horse. ...Rumsfeld got a horse -- a black-maned steed he named "Montana" -- when he visited this visually stunning nation of desert steppes in October. Such gift horses aren't actually taken home; instead, they are kept around but not ridden, in anticipation of the next visit.
But White House aides say Mr. Bush was worried about the obligations of ownership. Would taxpayers be on the hook for upkeep? Was there any way to guarantee the horse's well-being down the road? The question occupied not one but several meetings at the National Security Council in the days leading up to Mr. Bush's trip...

Kyrgyzstan on verge of anarchy: official.

Gang feuds for control of local bazaars have flared up in the south, while an angry crowd managed to seize and briefly hold the main government building in the north, a severe blow to the reputation of newly elected President Kurmanbek Bakiyev.

Volkswagen rocked by claims of sex junkets. What more can I say? Oh well, it's Brazil?

MOSCOW (Reuters) - An eagle-eyed investigator's wife ended a Russian manhunt by spotting a murder suspect's name in the credits of a television show, a newspaper said Tuesday.

SONY DRM copy protection defeated by tape. I will always believe that Securing Freedom by protecting Fair Use rights are essential to maintaining a vital and healthy culture. Therefore, whenever corporate copy protection systems are defeated be ingenious human beings, I think it makes a real positive -- and immediate -- improvement. A piece of tape defeats Sony's new DRM system - the rootkit one:

The user can simply apply a fingernail-sized piece of opaque tape to the outer edge of the disc, rendering session 2 - which contains the self-loading DRM software, unreadable. The PC then treats the CD as an ordinary single-session music CD, and the commonly used CD "rip" programs continue to work as usual.

Texas sues Sony.

Misc file: What happens when you get possessed by Bill Cosby? Jeff Goldblum is watching you... Cebu mayor: I will go to sex den if I want to. Chinese develop the liquid condom. In the ever-expanding world of the cosmetic surgery industry, new breast implant gel technology promises to be less likely to kill you. Getting a tech job in the XXX internet business.

Interweb securitay: The Bavarian police issue a strangely precise advisory about a Sober.worm virus - before it seemed to appear on the Internet. Always time for intrigue in Bavaria... Oddly enough the worm also comes with (fake) messages that claim to be from the FBI and CIA, implicating illegal activity. Oh my.

Consider the Top 20 Internet Security Vulnerabilities -- and note that there really isn't much wrong with the Mac. Paris Hilton used as virus bait (wha?)

Honduran Teen Escapes Prison for 5th Time. He said he was going to break out and kill all the journalists. Somewhere, the future Karl Rove-Che hybrid of Central America is hiding...

Clocky holds it down; the GOD WARRIOR; shady voting machines in Nov. election

I have to praise Clocky, the clock that randomly rolls away after you hit the snooze button, so you have to chase it down. I also have to praise the BRILLIANT crazy "talking bobblehead nodder Trading Spouses GOD WARRIOR!!" as sold on eBay - a small, talking statue replicating a crazed Christian fundamentalist mom from an episode. This got some major internet and media buzz and got bid up beyond $800!

Many people were shocked and disgusted with Marguerite's behavior on the show. Not me! I thought it was so hilarious and wonderful it inspired me to create a bobblehead in her likeness! She is now my favorite t.v. personality of all time. When judgement day comes, me and Marguerite will be fighting the demons and stabbing the jaws of gargoyles and the demonic "moon creatures"! Everything's unholy!

An interview with the Dude (the basis for the Big Lebowski) on bullz-eye.com. Really enjoyed this. In particular the part where he just keeps running into the Coen brothers at several parties, a coinsidence that inspires them to do the movie.

What happens when you combine Mario and Che for a T shirt? Genius.

In the interests of offending everyone, I'd like to present Al-Jazeerah.info's official list of Jews in the Media. It's quite a list, but they left off one of my new heroes, quasi-fictional Ninja Hollywood Agent Ari Gold! Its posting on the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK site was headlined, "If Jews Can Be This Successful In The Media, Why The Hell Are Mosque Half Wits Not Teaching it!" There's plenty of room in the media for everyone...

SONY Rootkit followup: Sorry i forgot to mention that a virus - worm, rather - has already been found on the internet that exploits this horrible thing. See also Boston Globe.

The Grand Federalist Society conspiracy: David Cumming pointed out to me once that the Masons mostly just eat pancakes. A valuable insight. Meanwhile the FedSoc, as it should be called, has systematically eaten the government. More or less.

Old tidbit on Tracking Election Irregularities: Voting machines in Virginia were reported to malfunction as touchscreen votes for victorious Democrat Tim Kaine were seemingly diverted to Republican Jerry Kilgore.

Virginia televsion station WDBJ-TV reports voters in at least four different precincts "say their votes for Tim Kaine were not recorded or took several attempts to go through. They contend the electronic touch screens repeatedly indicated they were voting for Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore instead of registering their intended vote for his Democratic opponent Tim Kaine."

There were also voting machine problems in Ohio and California. Schwartzenegger himself was initially denied the vote as the system indicated he'd already voted. Wow.

A sweet old 500KB hard drive getting wheeled across a clean room. All right. Sorry I forgot where this link came from.

Ants eat eyeball; Jon Lyons still the Pimp of Anime; Sony Rootkits mess up thousands of PCs

One hundred greatest internet moments, including Pokey the Penguin, James Guckert, the Bert-Osama photo, Hamster Dance, DeCSS.... the hits go on. (and how better to start than an illegal link to DeCSS?)

Ant eats away woman's eye in hospital:

KOLKATA, India (Reuters) - A woman receiving treatment for diabetes at a state-run hospital in eastern India lost one of her eyes after ants nibbled away at it, officials said on Tuesday.

The patient recovering from a post-surgery infection shrieked for help as the ants attacked her on Sunday night, but nurses told her it was normal to feel pain from the infection.

On Monday, the patient's family saw a gaping hole with swarming ants in it when they lifted the bandage on her left eye.

Authorities of the Sambhunath Hospital in Kolkata said they were probing the incident.

"It's not uncommon for ants to attack diabetic patients. We have set up a committee to investigate the unfortunate incident," hospital superintendent A. Adhikary said.

Scampering rats and stray cats and dogs sharing bed space with patients are not uncommon sights at India's overcrowded state-run hospitals that are used by millions of poor and middle-class people.

Jon Lyons with a certain camp Anime style: Jon is still chugging away at the whole "amazingly proficient practitioner of the Japanese cartoon style the kids call anime" thing. He entered a comic in a Japanese contest, and thoughtfully put an English version on the Internet for us (open the links in a separate window). Sort of an afternoon daydreaming imagination, Calvin & Hobbes meets Voltron Retro style sort of thing.

He's been refining it, since well, pretty much any of us knew him. So it's really good now. Good luck, Jon, and you've got a good shot at winning yet another contest. Nice. He is wrapping up a final leg at U-W Madison in the Art and Japanese programs. (duhhhh!)

Post college: Points in Case has some entertaining stuff. The Cost of Living in Athens, Georgia, inside the minds of college guys and girls. Well it's over for me, what a bummer...

Sony CD Root Kit causes 500,000 infected computer networks: BoingBoing tells us that vast numbers of computers have been infested with the rootkit program that automatically installs from audio CDs on PCs, which creates lots of dangerous security vulnerabilities. First the details (via earlier post):

The consequences of the flaw are severe. It allows any web page you visit to download, install, and run any code it likes on your computer. Any web page can seize control of your computer; then it can do anything it likes. That's about as serious as a security flaw can get.

The root of the problem is a serious design flaw in Sony's web-based uninstaller. When you first fill out Sony's form to request a copy of the uninstaller, the request form downloads and installs a program - an ActiveX control created by the DRM vendor, First4Internet - called CodeSupport. CodeSupport remains on your system after you leave Sony's site, and it is marked as safe for scripting, so any web page can ask CodeSupport to do things. One thing CodeSupport can be told to do is download and install code from an Internet site. Unfortunately, CodeSupport doesn't verify that the downloaded code actually came from Sony or First4Internet. This means any web page can make CodeSupport download and install code from any URL without asking the user's permission.

And its effects:

More than half a million networks, including military and government sites, were likely infected by copy restriction software distributed by Sony on a handful of its CDs, according to a statistical analysis of domain servers conducted by a well-respected security researcher and confirmed by independent experts on Tuesday...

Kaminsky asked over 3 million DNS servers across the net whether or not they knew the addresses associated with the Sony rootkit -- connected.sonymusic.com, updates.xcp-aurora.com, and license.suncom2.com. He uses a "non-recursive DNS query" which allows him to just peek into the cache of that server, and find out if anyone else has asked that particular machine for those addresses recently.

If the DNS server said yes, it had a cached copy of the address, which means that at least one of its client computers had used it to look up Sony's DRM site. If the DNS server said no, then Kaminsky knew for sure that no Sony-compromised machines existed behind it.

The results have surprised Kaminsky himself: 568,200 DNS servers knew about the Sony addresses. With no other reason for people to visit them, that points to one or more computers behind those DNS servers that are Sony-compromised. That's one in six DNS servers, across a statistical sampling of one third of the 9 million DNS servers Kaminsky estimates are on the net.

More details here. COPY PROTECTION CAUSES VIRUSES. Fucking A.

Further Geek News: The story of a rebellion in the Linux community and Linus Torvalds demonstrating he is still King of the Geeks (via digg).

China: All this stuff about China, well I ran into an interesting history of Tiananmen Square. Not that interesting. But Chinese history has that sense of theater... The declassified history of Tiananmen Square. Thanks, National Security Archives

Apparently a Chinese scheme to sell tracts of land on the moon was shut down by those heartless anti-Capitalists, who pulled their license on grounds of "profiteering and lunacy."

There is this book (and a forthcoming video game) about nonviolent conflict called "A force more powerful." One part is about how many protests have happened at Tiananmen over many years. Interesting argument about what the student protesters failed to accomplish. However it also has a somewhat patronizing tone ("we are privileged to decide how these things ought to go, why did you kids put up the Goddess statue?"):

But the defeat of the student movement cannot fully be explained by the violence used to send it underground or into exile, for many other nonviolent movements in the twentieth century deflected repression and endured to fight another day. Erratic and divided leadership, that believed more in the power of the moment than seeing the right moment to apply power, was at least as great a problem. This overconfidence diverted student leaders from the necessary work of organization and strategy. Had they seen the value of recruiting support from other parts of society - workers in transport and communication, civil servants, and, most important, the police and the military - they might have consolidated their gains and opted to develop a broader challenge not confined to Tiananmen, a convenient venue for repression.

Failing to appreciate or plan for the possibility of repression was an error in itself, but it also freed the students to indulge in whatever provocative action seemed enticing. Inflammatory gestures such as erecting, opposite Mao's Mausoleum, a "Goddess of Democracy," a replica of America's Statue of Liberty, doubtless antagonized the regime while not changing any facts on the ground. In short, while the students were familiar with the most obvious forms of nonviolent action - occupying public spaces, hunger strikes and playing to the international media - their decisions in using these sanctions did not reflect "any significant degree of strategic thinking..."10

The failure of strategy at the moment of crisis kept echoing throughout its aftermath. The government's use of repression taught the wrong lesson to many about how rights and democracy should be pursued. In 1999 one former protestor called himself "a victim of June 4," since he was fired and prevented from getting another job; he had decided that "the only path for China was. . .cautious, progressive liberalization." Even the flammable Wu'er Kaixi, who fled China and later had to pump gas and wait on tables in California, succumbed to lower expectations. Explaining why he hoped that Beijing would not be forced to acknowledge its Tiananmen savagery, he said that doing so might only set back gradual reforms. And he wanted to return home. "I think if everything goes okay, I'll be able to go home in five years. If something happens, if there are demonstrations and another crackdown, it will take longer."11

Curtains rise on another act; Wurmser (under Bolton) said to be a key channel in Plame case

Amazing Mike Luckovich cartoon illustrates the thousands of dead soldiers. Also as high-rez PDF.

The sun will dawn on a different world in a few hours. Finally the Law has pierced the flesh of that most dangerous of beasts, the Bush Administration, and they cannot keep telling themselves how immaculate they are with an indictment lodged in the corpus... (narcissism in the leadership leading to ego projection in the followers - doesn't lead to good things)

Great diary about Seymour Hersh speech, relating torture, the regular bombing of Turkic people in northern Iraq, etc. Many arguments these days about how the war wasn't a mistake, it was sedition!!!

Basic hypocrisy from the Powerline crew on Clinton scandals vs Bush madness.

To clarify, with the Pat Lang link earlier, evidently Lang has been posting stuff from an experienced journalist using this 'alternate channel.' An interesting approach which will help solve the problem of political pressure from editors. Anyway, the journalist Sale writes (via Lang):

According to the Times account, Cheney told Libby the covert name of the wife of Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. diplomat who had publicly alleged that the administration had mishandled of intelligence relating to Iraq's nuclear weapons programs.

But several former and serving U.S. intelligence officials strongly disputed this. "That is simply not accurate," a very former senior CIA official told this repoter. "Libby's notes on this are misleading and inaccurate or both."

This source, supported by three others, alleged that it was a telephone call from the Department of State that first gave Libby the name of Plame.

The name of the caller? No one is sure. But these sources said that the call defintely came from the State Department office of John Bolton, then the arms control chief of the department.

These same sources alleged that two employees of Bolton, David Wurmser, a virullent pro-war hawk, first told Libby that Valerie Plame had sent Wilson to Niger to attempt to discredit the administration's line on Iraq's nuclear weapons programs.

These same intelligence sources alleged that Wurmser, as Bolton's special assistant, got his knowledge of Plame's classified identity from a colleague in his office, Frederick Fleitz, a CIA officer detailed to Bolton's office from the agency who worked in the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINIPAC.)

"We do not know yet which of the two called," the former very senior intelligence official said.

There are conflicting reports about the fate of Rove and the whole investigation (across LA Times, NY Times, the WaPo). So who knows how it adds up? The money question: is it true that Fitzgerald Expands Probe to Prewar Intel?

Nice little scandal index they got at Perrspectives.

Fortunately we have twits like Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard to blame the Wilsons for their perpetual mendacity. (Hayes himself has many sins to atone for in the intel disinformation game)

Norm is playing a role in Armed Forces Media. DailyKos: Ed Shultz Isn't Popular Enough: Norm Coleman. Galloway swats back against Norm.

Geekiest arm tattoo ever.

Because Beyonce is too black, they had to retone her skin for a fashion magazine. Thanks.

Teams Fail To Recreate Archimedes' Fabled Death Ray. Go Mythbusters.

Peak Corn? As Wal-Mart Shifts from Petroleum to Corn, Farmers Flee the Crop

What the fuck does this even mean? "Metrosexual man bows to red-blooded übersexuals" Apparently now someone has decided that George Clooney is cooler than Jude Law. Well no shit!

Breathalyzers and Open Source:

Lawyers for 150 Floridians accused of drunk driving have asked a court to order the disclosure of the source code for software running in the breathalyzer machines used by police to analyze their blood alcohol level, according to a Tom Sanders story on vunet.
The defendants say they have the right to examine the machines that accused them, and that a meaningful examination requires access to the machines’ software. Prosecutors say the code is a trade secret.

I respect that. Get the code while you can!!!

Iraq: Quite full of explosions these days, even in the Green Zone.The New York Review of Books: Last Chance for Iraq: the forceful argument to let it break up. Sunnis try to merge it up. Abu Ghraib photo court appeal runs out - new torture photos soon to be released?

Google: Chinese dissident observes: My Experience of Google's Censorship. Also good ol Seth Finkelstein's Google Censorship - How It Works.

The Turkish alphabet: CNN:

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) -- A Turkish court has fined 20 people for using the letters Q and W on placards at a Kurdish new year celebration, under a law that bans use of characters not in the Turkish alphabet, rights campaigners said.

Voter fraud: check out video footage of Clint Curtis saying that Florida Congressman Tom Feeney ordered him to make vote-rigging software. (the actual link - an odd site)

Time to Double Down; Instant Messenger viruses are trying to get me

I feel... as if I am looking at the world from the bottom of a well...

And the only way to beat it is to bat it down...

I would like to note for the rest of the Internet that Nick Werth's AOL Instant Messenger client is infected with some kind of nasty program (although he blames John van Wagenen as the source of infection) that sends out links to dynu.com and johnslaten.com , which in turn downloads weird virus files. Fortunately I have a Mac and use Adium as my client. So no problem here!

You need to ditch AOL Instant Messenger and use an alternative IM client program, which will not get infected, and takes less CPU and memory besides. For Macs I recommend Adium. For Windows PCs and Linux, Gaim is the gold standard. Go for it, you won't look back.

Ok, other than AIM viruses, well folks, the hearing for Macalester's May 11 incident is on 9 AM, this Tuesday morning at the County Courthouse/City Hall at 15 West Kellogg Boulevard with Judge Ostby. I can't remember at the moment which room it's at but you should be able to ask for directions to Judge Ostby's courtroom, if anyone is so interested in getting over early to see what happens.

There will be a number of witnesses testifying, including Laurie Hamre and various students. I may also testify.

As you might imagine, it is a tense situation for me, which brings forth all kinds of questions about Truth vs. Expediency, and all the rest.

Wish me luck. It's time to Double Down. :-/

Power failure!

Oh how annoying - the power died after a big storm blew through the Twin Cities. It was out for several hours - knocked everyone's plans for the evening down. Dang.

Meanwhile they say that Hurricane Rita is the third most powerful hurricane ever recorded. Nothing is half assed these days, that's for sure... My wishes for the best of luck to the apparent hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons in this strange nation of ours...

MiG for Sale; Martial Law scares me; Queen Elizabeth I: "We have quite forgot the fart"; Rove: "there is no real anti-war movement"

One of the side effects of looking at Fark is that you come away with a bunch of links that seem like they should be passed along to everyone. You can get a "mint" condition Mig 21 aircraft for a mere $225,000 on eBay. It would appear this seller has all kinds of weird military hardware, and no, foreigners can't buy. No bids yet.

They are putting USB connections into Volkswagens. What could go wrong? Could I drive by mouse? PC World offers 20 tidbits about tech that manufacturers don't really want you to know about. Overclocking, bad warranties, sucking the Windows registration number out of your computer, hacking cell phones and game consoles, worthless product specs made up for marketing.

Some author is getting rich writing about straight girls going for lesbian hookups. Surely everyone will find this fascinating. Apparently the title alone, "The Straight Girl's Guide to Sleeping with Chicks", was good enough that she got a mountain of cash from Simon & Schuster without having to write a word. Nothing like Insane Homophobes protesting at Rehnquist's funeral (via Dailykos).

Martial Law seems to be in the air. Bush called for expanding the role of the military in disaster situations. William Arkin in the WaPo says that this is Real Bad:

I for one don't want to live in a society where "a moment’s notice" justifies military action that either preempts or usurps civil authority.



What is more, nothing about what happened in New Orleans justifies such a radical move to give the military what bureaucrats call "a lead role" in responding to emergencies.



In the wake of Katrina, the military was standing by awaiting orders, as it should be. The White House and the federal government were for their part either on vacation or out to lunch. The problem wasn’t the lack of resources available. It was leadership, decisiveness, foresight. The problem was commanding and mobilizing the resources, civil and military.

Yeah. For more try this really excellent bit on Social Militarization, characterizing it as a "fascist move." Yeah. So this leads to a unnerving discussion of how Liberal Democracy is not good enough to confront the State of Exception (such as catastrophic disasters), and Social Militarization is offered as a kind of illusory panacea. I need to quote this:

The charismatic leader is indeed historically necessary for successful, final-stage fascist movements (i.e. movements that actually lay claim to political power). But there remains a more fundamental and contemporary pressing facist concern, an earlier stage in which the rhetorical structure of fascism is laid by celebrating (Robert Paxton's recent Anatomy of Fascism is quite good on this point) the necessary failures of liberal democracy to respond to the exigencies of the present day. For four years we have been told that a new type of war must be waged, that new types of laws must be passed (even if those laws short-circuit the freedoms they ostensibly protect), that the old conventions by which we fight illegalities and terrorism must be scrapped in favor of more proactive solutions. In effect, we have been told that the liberal democratic state was simply ill-prepared to handle the threat of terrorism, and so something else, something new, defined by a Bush doctrine and a rethinking of our constitutional protections, would be needed. Now we are told that the liberal state can no longer handle the constant challenges of nature, and that now, again, something new is needed: social militarization.



For the facist movements that eventually came to power in Italy and Germany, and that also surfaced in Spain, Poland, and the majority of countries, the supposed failure of liberal democracy became apparent with the ravages and duration of World War I, the Great War. Its intensity seemed so unfitting civilized society, so anethema to the vision of evolved, Enlightened, European culture. For the fascists, it was evidence that the liberal state was weak, that it lacked the necessary will to power to do right by it citizenry. I fear that history is repeating itself.

Josh Marshall:

You don't repair disorganized or incompetent government by granting it more power. You fix it by making it more organized and more competent. If conservatism can't grasp that point, what is it good for?



As for the military, same difference. The Army clearly has an important role to play in major domestic disasters. And they've been playing it in this case. But what broader role was required exactly?



As I've been saying, repressive governments mix adminsitrative clumsiness and inefficiency with authoritarian tendencies. That's almost always the pattern. The direction the president wants to go in is one in which, in emergencies, the federal government will have trouble moving water into or enabling transportation out of the disaster zone but will be well-equipped to declare martial law on a moment's notice.

Rozen makes a small note on Martial Law and The Agonist as well. For the Pissed Off Old CIA Dude perspective on the insurgency and Katrina, try Larry Johnson and Pat Lang at No Quarter. Katrina cleanup volunteers got routed to a casino. An on the scene report via AmericaBlog. Bush's poll numbers are tanked like hell these days (atrios):

President Bush's vow to rebuild the Gulf Coast did little to help his standing with the public, only 40 percent of whom now approve of his performance in office, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Monday.



Just 41 percent of the 818 adults polled between Friday and Monday said they approved of Bush's handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, while 57 percent disapproved.



And support for his management of the war in Iraq has dropped to 32 percent, with 67 percent telling pollsters they disapproved of how Bush is prosecuting the conflict.

Frank Rich memorably puts it, "the administration's priority of image over substance is embedded like a cancer in the Katrina relief process." A very good column. Bush might be Losing it altogether and it seems like his inner circle is more tightly sealed than ever before. A DailyKos followup on how Katrina refugees that were previously photographed have fared.

And so Maybe they're feeling Doomed?! (via Americablog) The American Spectator says:

But at this stage of the game, barring some imaginative political moves that bear some resemblance to the Bush Administration circa 2002, Republicans on Capitol Hill and even some longtime Bush team members in various Cabinet level departments say this Administration is done for.



"You run down the list of things we thought we could accomplish and you have to wonder what we thought we were thinking," says a Bush Administration member who joined on in 2001. "You get the impression that we're more than listless. We're sunk."...



Congressional committee sources on both sides of Capitol Hill predict tough slogging on anything of policy consequence. "Social Security is dead as far as my chairman is concerned. So are the tax cuts," says a Ways and Means staffer of Chairman Bill Thomas.



Before hurricane season wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast and in Washington, the thinking was that Thomas was poised to take up a major tax bill that might feature several critical components of the Bush Administration's Social Security reform. Now those plans appear to have dimmed considerably.

Josh Marshall points out that we can Expect Corruption in the Gulf.

If there's nothing else this decade has taught us it is that there was never and never could have been any Iraq War separated from the goals and intentions of those with their foot on the accelerator. Anything else is just a sad delusion. That's why the whole mess is as it is now: fruit of the poison tree.



Same here.



Maybe you want to spend $200 billion on rebuilding the Delta region too. Fine. Something like that will probably be necessary. But don't fool yourself into thinking that what's coming is just a matter of a different chef making the same meal. This will be Iraq all over again, with the same fetid mix of graft, zeal and hubris. Cronyism like you wouldn't believe. Money blown on ideological fantasies and half-baked test-cases.



You could come up with a hundred reasons why that's true. But at root intentions drive all. You'll never separate this operation or its results from the fact that the people in charge see it as a political operation. The use of this money for political purposes, for what amounts to a political campaign, tells you everything you need to know about what's coming.

The Register reports that Google Earth is getting in trouble with governments that don't like to have their military installations available to the everyday web surfer. Lots of fun imagery. Also you can see the Great Area 51 itself in this article. Not bad. Edwards Air Force Base has all kinds of sweet freakin stuff sitting around. (see also Microsoft cloaks area 51 - hah!)

For the serious visitor, consider some classic internet marijuana imagery via i-am-bored.com and fresh99.com. Also weird Japanese condom wrappers.

PottyGate: In a followup to Bush's UN bathroom break, The UK Times offers a roundup of famous bathroom breaks and undiplomatic flatulence.

From emptying of the diplomatic bag to breaking wind before Virgin Queen

By Michael Binyon

THE need to relieve oneself diplomatically has on occasion determined the fate of nations.



The most notorious practitioner of “bladder diplomacy” was the late President Assad, the hardline Syrian President for more than 25 years. Western statesmen visiting his palace were offered juice, water and bountiful cups of coffee while the President lectured them for hours on end. Eventually the visitors cut a deal simply to escape to the lavatory.



Enoch Powell, the late Conservative politician and noted orator, said that politicians should speak with their bladders half full, as it gave a sense of urgency to their speeches. On the other hand, Morarji Desai, Prime Minister of India from 1977 to 1979, drank a pint of his own urine every day. He lived to the age of 99.



.....In the 1960s, President Johnson used to adjourn conversations when the need arose and ask his interlocutors to accompany him to the men’s room. Their embarrassment was a source of great amusement to him. He often recounted a story about “one of the delicate Kennedyites who came into the bathroom with me and then found it utterly impossible to look at me while I sat there on the toilet”. ....



Court etiquette grew stricter over the centuries. Famously, Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, was so embarrassed at having broken wind in the presence of Queen Elizabeth I that he voluntarily exiled himself from court for seven years. When he returned, her first words to him were: “We have quite forgot the fart.”

Some RawStory bits: Condoleezza Rice took time out of her busy schedule to threaten Syria and compared Islamic fundamentalists to Marxists. Meanwhile, real intelligence experts say that we are repeating "every mistake we made in Vietnam", adding that the WMD fantasy chase precluded early efforts that might have blunted the strength of the various militant movements in Iraq. And another bit offers a guide to the Roberts nomination and his nomenclature. Framers' intent, activist judges, what do these things really mean?

In Iraq, lots of stuff from the new Iraqi Defense Ministry of Doom has been skimmed off for anti-Sunni hit teams and rambunctious Kurds preparing to seize and probably ethnically cleanse the Kirkuk area. Juan Cole has more about $1,000,000,000 or $2,000,000,000 getting stolen. Something insane happened in the Basra area as undercover British agents got mobbed or something. But either way, Reuters/Yahoo provides a photo of what appears to be a British soldier, consumed by fire, falling off a tank. Juan Cole reports that at least five Baghdad neighborhoods have become controlled by militants:

"The situation has deteriorated in Baghdad dramatically today. Five neighborhoods (hay) in Baghdad are controlled by insurgents, and they are Amiraya, Ghazilya, Shurta, Yarmouk and Doura. It is very bad. My guys there report that cars have come into these neighborhoods and blocked off the streets. Masked gunmen with AKs and other weapons are roaming these areas, announcing that people should stay home. One of my drivers in Amiraya reports that his neighborhood is shut down totally, and even those who need food or provisions are warned not to go out.



The government will respond feebly. It will go into a contested neighborhood, and then just like Fallujah, Ramadi, Tel Afar, the insurgents will flee to take over another area on another day. Bit by bit they are taking over the main parts of Baghdad. The only place we are sure they cannot control is Sadr City, unless of course they want to take on Jaish Mahdy [Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army], and that would be bloody.

Rove, His Remarks and His Memos: A memo to Karl Rove about immigration policy from Lamar Smith of Texas, which accidentally got sent to Democrats, says various creepy things. Rove said a bunch of hilarious things to a retreat when he thought he was really Off the Record, according to the HuffyPost:

Karl Rove, President Bush's top political advisor and deputy White House chief of staff, spoke at businessman Teddy Forstmann's annual off the record gathering in Aspen, Colorado this weekend. Here is what Rove had to say that the press wasn't allowed to report on.
On Katrina: The only mistake we made with Katrina was not overriding the local government...
On The Anti-War Movement: Cindy Sheehan is a clown. There is no real anti-war movement. No serious politician, with anything to do with anything, would show his face at an anti-war rally...
On Bush's Low Poll Numbers: We have not been good at explaining the success in Iraq. Polls go up and down and don't mean anything...
On Iraq: There has been a big difference in the region. Iraq will transform the Middle East...
On Judy Miller And Plamegate: Judy Miller is in jail for reasons I don't really understand...
On Joe Wilson: Joe Wilson and I attend the same church but Joe goes to the wacky mass...

In attendance at the conference, among others were: Harvey Weinstein, Brad Grey, Michael Eisner, Les Moonves, Tom Freston, Tom Friedman, Bob Novak, Barry Diller, Martha Stewart, Margaret Carlson, Alan Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell, Norman Pearlstein and Walter Isaacson.

Via Defamer and BB, you too can indicate your insane insecurity and adherence to the last throes of the authoritarian gas guzzling bourgeoisie by purchasing a Hummer brand ugly laptop.

Guess what, Congressional Democrats tried to get Downing Street Memo-related documents out of the White House, and they got shot down. I am shocked, just shocked! John Conyers is on it.

Who thought that 9/11 was an enormous opportunity? I try not to get tangled up with Gibberish from Fukuyama about neoconservatism and his weird End of History nonsense. But if you are interested in how Mr. NeoLiberalism is faring these days...

That's all for now..... Wake me up when September Ends.......

"Bureaucracy has committed murder;" The Big Spinstorm; a little more on Israeli spies shadowing hijackers before 9/11

BROUSSARD [of Jefferson Parish]: We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast. But the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history. … Whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chainsawed off and we’ve got to start with some new leadership. It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.

As featured at ThinkProgress.

Yeah, I don't know if I can put the big picture of the storm together. Nonetheless here are some stories.

Someone told Cheney to go fuck himself on live television. Tomgram: Iraq in America: At the Front of Nowhere at All: The Perfect Storm and the Feral City By Tom Engelhardt really puts it into perspective, and all the nasty parallels and feedback effects from the Iraq war making things worse, the sudden and shocking evidence that the Public Sector in this country has been stripped to the bone, etc. A lot of blame is getting spun around, Brit Hume even claimed that Bush "pleaded" that the mayor of New Orleans would evacuate.

Also this White House photo of Bush in a video teleconference before it hit just illustrates how they shouldn't have dropped the damn ball. Check out the official note from FEMA's Brown (PDF), five damn hours after it hit, putting DHS and FEMA into action in the "near catastrophic event". Via TPM.

The Red Tape and bizarre bureaucratic moves included having firefighters hand out fliers apparently. The pathology of our government:

...as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.

Image before life. Also Barbara Bush said that "This is working out very well for them" in their tortured refugee status because they were "underprivileged anyway." There are some horrible reports about totally staged relief events - entire sites that appeared to hand out supplies, then collapsed as soon as Bush and the less observant American media moved off. The Germans of ZDF were more observant. But wait, maybe that was not accurate at all. Here are some translations of the media in question.

It would appear that Blackwater USA - the same private military firm/mercenary org that's done such a fine job in Mesopotamia - has sent at least 150 people into the New Orleans area. They are patrolling with M-16s. Yeah. A blogger on the ground appears to have broken this story.

The practice of putting political apparatchiks into FEMA makes more sense if we consider what might have happened if it had hit a swing state in an election year, such as the 2004 hit on Florida, where FEMA rolled in and basically showered people with cash well outside the damage zone, resulting in a nice bounce of several points for Bush. Was Michael Brown basically perpetrating fraud in Florida 2004 (PDF)? Salon: The Politics of Hurricane Relief. ThinkProgress Katrina Timeline attempts to counter the spin. Billmon is doing a damn good job these days, as always.

True Blue Conspiracy Theorist Wayne Madsen said that someone, probably the government, was jamming radio transmissions around New Orleans. What the hell? I don't get it. Well, now there is an update that is is coming from some kind of pirate radio station in the Caribbean. Ok, whatever. Here is how you can defeat radio jamming signals. Apparently. Also, he has a grand conspiracy already going into place about depopulating the poor black population of the city. I liked the bit about "secret hereditary societies." So take this with many grains of salt:

September 9, 2005 -- Dallas meeting plans reconstruction of New Orleans without poor African Americans. According to well-informed New Orleans sources, New Orleans' wealthiest families, including those who are direct descendants of the French who settled New Orleans (not the Acadians [Cajuns] who were poor refugees from British tyranny in Nova Scotia) are meeting in Dallas today with Bush administration officials, New Orleans city officials, wealthy Texas oilmen, and bankers to plan for the reconstruction of New Orleans. These wealthy New Orleans residents live in the gated community of Audobon Place, a section of the city near the Garden District replete with personal helipads that still has running water and sewage and was only slightly affected by hurricane Katrina. It is now reportedly being patrolled by private Israeli security forces. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal ran a piece with more details on this story.

Rep. Richard Baker (R-LA): "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

The Dallas meeting focused on rebuilding and re-zoning New Orleans without the "criminal element," a code word for the city's poor African American community.

These New Orleans residents have been scattered across the United States and are now under the control of FEMA. There is an understanding by the wealthy New Orleans elite that the poor will never be able to return. The Journal reported that the person who chaired the Dallas meeting was Jimmy Riess, one of the wealthy New Orleans elite who also served as Mayor Ray Nagin's Chairman of the Regional Transit Authority, which is in charge of the city's buses, trolleys, and trains. New Orleans sources report that public transportation was purposely not used to evacuate the poor New Orleans residents as a means to depopulate the poorer and more flood-prone sections of the city. [hongpong: wtf?!! let me get my tinfoil hat right away!] In fact, after the properties in New Orleans poorer communities are razed many of the deed records of the poor and middle class contained in government offices and title companies of Orleans Parish and neighboring Jefferson Parish may end up being casualties of the flood. As one New Orleans source put it, "people will not have proof they ever owned anything." As for renters and residents of public housing, they will be prevented from returning to their native city, according to New Orleans sources. Louisiana's Republican House member Richard Baker, a strong Bush ally, may have tipped his hand about the future plans for New Orleans when he told a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

Guess Who Is Planning the Rebuilding of New Orleans?

The French-American elite of New Orleans are among the city's "rich and famous." They run the Mardi Gras "crews" (Krews) or clubs, secret hereditary societies that sponsor the annual pre-Lenten festival. Many also run large oil companies and are long time supporters of the Bush family and their associated oil and gas cartels.

Meanwhile, the wars: There was the conference about terrorism and security called America's Purpose, which you can see video about, and some stuff on CSPAN. Washington dude Steve Clemons was involved. In terms of the war, Juan Cole offered an excellent dissection of how Christopher Hitchens is still trying to defend it.

The "sovereign" Iraqi government wants to get those private mercenary / privatized military / security firms under control somehow, including a central registry. Also this news from the Telegraph.

For more than two years such contractors have roamed with impunity. But now the interior ministry has imposed rules requiring all their firms to be registered and weapons to be carried only by guards holding an official licence.

If any of the companies is considered to be a threat or if it angers a government official its official permit could be revoked and the business ordered to depart.

About 25,000 security contractors, many of them British, American and South African ex-servicemen, lured to Iraq by wages of up to £750 a day, are estimated to be in the country providing protection for official buildings, supply convoys or visiting businessmen.

They are highly unpopular with locals. Convoys of contractors have become a common sight on a journey through Baghdad since the March 2003 US-led invasion.

Adorned in sunglasses and bullet-proof vests, they travel in white four-wheel-drive vehicles with gun barrels protruding from the windows. Many refuse to obey road signs and consider traffic jams a security risk so barge through the lines of vehicles which are often forced to pull over rapidly on to pavements.

Their lack of official status has long been a concern and those operating on US department of defence contracts are free from risk of legal penalty under the Iraqi judicial system if they killed anyone in a firefight.

But under the new rules confirmed yesterday all such firms will be brought under the authority of the Baghdad government. All companies will have to provide details of their number of employees, jobs undertaken and office addresses.

Most significantly their employees will no longer be allowed to possess a weapon without approval. Many of the firms have considerable firepower. As well as AK-47s and assault rifles some have heavy machineguns and anti-tank rocket launchers. One company, Blackwater, even has its own fleet of helicopters which criss-cross Baghdad with machine guns poking out from the side.

The surging private military industry is a fascinating subject for me. If you want a really entertaining video shot from the Blackwater guys' helicopters, check out MilitaryVideos.net. The latest video, from August, is Blackwater in Najaf 2 (BitTorrent wmv - legal). Sounds exciting. Index of some of these companies, Global Guerrillas on PMFs, the Guardian on it. Soldiers of Good Fortune by Barry Yeoman in Mother Jones is a really excellent primer. And of course Wikipedia on it.

OS X + Windows Video Tech Tip: For some horrible reason, Windows Media Player for Mac OS X is a very stubborn piece of crap that hates to play lots of WMV files. However, if you retitle the file's type from .wmv to .asf , then lots of them will work. Incredibly stupid, but it works on most of the videos from MilitaryVideos.net.

Juan Cole offers us the following tidbit about how Rummy thinks that we can do a Top Notch job in New Orleans, Iraq AND the Global War on Terror.

The US Pentagon is sending hundreds of members of the Louisiana National Guard home from Iraq. Some of them have lost homes in New Orleans. Internet gossip had earlier suggested substantial discontent in the ranks over being stuck in Iraq while Louisiana faced its biggest crisis in modern history.

The Iraqi Interior ministry said 9 Iraqis were killed, among them a high-ranking official in the ministry of the interior. Another 20, at least, were injured.

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield maintains that the US government can both take care of New Orleans and pursue the "global war on terror."

Uh, Donald, let's look at this situation. First, much of New Orleans is under water. You stole money that should have been spent on its levees for the Iraq War, and you stole state national guards from Louisiana to fight in Iraq. (The state national guards hadn't signed up to fight foreign wars and were surprised when you kidnapped them, sometimes for a whole year at a time.) So you haven't actually done a good job with the effects of Katrina in New Orleans. In fact, the job has been so bad that some wags are saying they can't believe you personally were not in charge of the recovery effort.

Then let's consider the war against al-Qaeda. You may have noticed that Ayman al-Zawahiri issued a videotape late last week. It was bundled with the farewell suicide tape of Muhammad Siddique Khan, the mastermind of the 7/7 bombers in London. It now appears that your inability to capture al-Zawahiri has allowed him to intrigue with Pakistani jihadi groups to recruit British subjects to bomb their own country. Bin Laden and Zawahiri are at large and free men, which is your failure.

Then there is the war in Iraq. I don't need to tell you that that isn't going very well. In fact, what in hell are you doing in the godforsaken Turkmen city of Tal Afar? Is it really a big threat to the United States? Is it likely to be friendly to us if you drop 500 pound bombs on its residential districts?

You left out the fourth war Bush is fighting, on the US poor. The average wage of the average American work fell last quarter, amidst rising corporate profits. Bush cut billions in taxes on the rich, and then gave $300 checks to some poor people, who didn't seem to realize that by taking it they were giving up all sorts of government services and maybe even their social security payments.

So, Donald, maybe it is true that you can save New Orleans, occupy Iraq and fight a global war on terror all at the same time. But you, at least, cannot actually do these things successfully. Which is why you should have resigned a long time ago.

Projects in Iraq are running out of cash. This would include water and power projects. Also, the US is obsessed with gaining control of the town of Tal Afar near Syria, and has been bombing the bridges over the Euphrates River in an effort to prevent militants from circulating. Of course, some people might suggest that such an action is pretty much the Direct Method for "dividing a country", but how could I suggest such a thing? Also the city of Qaim, on the edge of Syria, has been a site of dramatic violence and such... As usual it is all being blamed on Goldstein. I mean Zarqawi. A complex report about the struggle in Iraq over its economic organization. Of course, the US has been crushing the wishes of the more socialist-oriented Iraqis, who realize their country has a good chance of getting ahead with export-led industrial development and a heavily subsidized public sector backed up with oil wealth. Oh well. That is Not Suitable to our Fantasy Vision, dammit!

Israel is wrapping up the Gaza occupation, and the little slice of land between Gaza and Egypt will finally return to Arab hands. This is called the Philadelphi Corridor or Philadelphi Route, which this Fikret Ertan dude reflects on. The matter of border customs stations, overseen by an international team, has not been fully resolved yet. It seems that Bush is intervening with the Europeans, asking them not to pressure Sharon so that he's more likely to win against Netanyahu. However, as writer Gideon Samet points out, they are being lazy and unhelpful, making the wrong moves with the "Israeli hurricane" as well. Israel is sealing the Rafah crossing in Gaza to prep it. The notoriously goofy Rabbi Ovaida Yosef said that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for Bush's support for leaving Gaza.

"It was God's retribution. God does not shortchange anyone," Yosef said during his weekly sermon on Tuesday. His comments were broadcast on Channel 10 TV on Wednesday.

Yosef also said recent natural disasters were the result of a lack of Torah study and that Katrina's victims suffered "because they have no God," singling out black people......Yosef singled out black victims, saying "they don't study Torah." He used the word "Kushim," which in the Bible refers to an ancient African people but in vernacular Hebrew is considered derogatory.

Our last Israel tidbit comes from Amira Hass, on "Gun Envy." Life for a tiny child in the Gaza slums:

In another year or two, he will learn to distinguish between an armed Jew and an armed Palestinian. Instead of fear, maybe he will be filled with pride and excitement. In another three years, he will know how to distinguish between armed men from Hamas and armed men from the Palestinian Authority/Fatah, and will already decide which is his favorite team. Thus, without his parent's wanting it, without realizing it, without his similarly excited friends realizing it - he will be infected with the common malady whose scientific name is "gun envy."

The minor variety of this illness is sympathy (for one organization or another) and emulation (with toy guns). The serious variety is to join an organization. The most common symptom of this illness is reflected in the billboards and posters that constantly crowd one's field of vision: men armed with rifles and mortars, in every pose imaginable, and with each organization competing over whose is bigger. Another symptom is expressed in the public military ceremonies that elicit ecstatic reactions from the crowd.

She astutely points out that the Palestinians are in fact developing mirror images of the main force all around them, the IDF.

Was Israel Keeping Tabs on some of the 9/11 hijackers?

What an interesting question!! What do you say,

senior FOX News reporter Carl Cameron, in December 2001?

CARL CAMERON, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Since September 11, more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations. A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States. 

There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are "tie-ins." But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, "evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information." 

Fox News has learned that one group of Israelis, spotted in North Carolina recently, is suspected of keeping an apartment in California to spy on a group of Arabs who the United States is also investigating for links to terrorism. Numerous classified documents obtained by Fox News indicate that even prior to September 11, as many as 140 other Israelis had been detained or arrested in a secretive and sprawling investigation into suspected espionage by Israelis in the United States. 

Investigators from numerous government agencies are part of a working group that's been compiling evidence since the mid '90s. These documents detail hundreds of incidents in cities and towns across the country that investigators say, "may well be an organized intelligence gathering activity." 

The first part of the investigation focuses on Israelis who say they are art students from the University of Jerusalem and Bazala Academy.....

And so on and so forth. An incredibly weird thing to hear from Fox News. But within weeks this story vanished down the memory hole, and only because someone managed to tape the four Fox reports and put them up on the Internet can we watch all 1 2 3 4 of them right now!

The new twist, as Justin Raimondo brought to attention, is that some corporate lawyer did a massive study (PDF) picking apart all the various weird detentions of Israelis, and he discovered a very serious overlap between where the 9/11 hijackers lived, and where the Israelis were apparently spying from. The maps are hilarious! So it would be quite a dramatic story if it all turned out to be true. Personally, I am not betting my lunch money on it, but I thought it certainly interesting enough to post on the site.

As always, Josh Marshall is holding it down on TalkingPointsMemo.com. There has been plenty of good stuff about the Katrina spinstorms there lately.

I am no fan of Allan Bloom style neoconservative browbeating of the "Liberal Academia", but this review in NYTimes about the effect of his classic "Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Stolen My Maple Syrup" was sort of interesting. I think the interesting point was that Bloom would be appalled how the rightwing is attempting to ideologically straitjacket academia in the same sorts of ways that Bloom thought the Big Scary Left did back in the day.

Misc bits: freewayblogger.com chronicles signs posted on overpasses and stuff against Bush and the War. This is very old news, but the British graffiti artist Banksy bombed the wall constructed by the Israeli government inside the Palestinian Territories. I can't believe he did something so detailed in the high-security area. Badass.

That's all for today, folks.

HongPong.com [OK]: Back in Black + Quad RAM; Gentoo Linux still r0x0rs the b0x0r

A mercilessly geeky tale: I am recording this so that myself and others may deal with similar problems better in the future. I will soon forget the details of how I fixed it, so it is best to write it down now.

It took a couple days, but the Linux server (Tarfin), a reliable Dell Dimension 4400 running Gentoo Linux, is back from its brush with Hardware Hell. The problems began after I found out about my new mysterious Politics in Minnesota project... The work at this stage would best happen using MediaWiki, I reckoned. MediaWiki has performed well as the HongWiki platform, and has reliably served wiki pages that have done Real Well on Google, although with the service problems it's gone south a bit.

So my new WordPress-powered HongPong website (under development) takes a lot more RAM to serve PHP files than this current MovableType-powered HongPong.com, and as I sat down to get the Politics in Minnesota project going, I noticed that Tarfin was basically maxed out for RAM. It only had 128 MB, which is really way too low for this. It only had a few megs of RAM available and had 80 MB in the swap partition (which is the same as Virtual Memory on a PC or Mac). Gridlock.

So in other words the stress of serving had totally maxed out the RAM, which I noticed when the site -- which is usually lickety-split quick over the LAN here -- was going much slower. More RAM, always a good solution. I looked up my usual suspects, namely Tran Micro and General Nanosystems on University, whose prices will pretty much always beat Best Buy type places. Only Nano had the type of RAM for Tarfin, PC2100 SDRAM. So I got two 256 chips (though I'd have liked a 512, they didn't have).

The Dell only has 2 slots, thanks Dell, so I pulled the old 128 and put these in. Turned it on, it booted fine, and I ran 'emerge sync', the nice Gentoo command that permits me to update all the various Linux software packs I have running. This streamlines one of the bitchiest problems in systems administration - tracking down the damn software packs and keeping up with their security patches.

It ran alright until suddenly it hit a Segmentation Fault, followed shortly by a Kernel Panic, the hardest Crash that Linux can Go Down with - it's real ugly, gibberish and Hex codes spilling all over.

So I have to reboot. The file system checker program, fsck, auto-scanned the main partition and found all sorts of horrible errors. I tried to have it fix, but then it hit another Segmentation Fault:

A segmentation fault occurs when your program tries to access memory locations that haven't been allocated for the program's use.

Therefore I should have thought that maybe it was the damn new chips. I had a flashback to the death of the first Hongpong.com (the one that got me suspended from MPA) - which was an old PowerPC 6100/60 running a hacked old Linux, whose hard drive abruptly refused to come back from a nasty death right around when I graduated from high school. And I had no backups. In other words, the first HongPong server died almost exactly four years ago, and took with it the great contributions of everyone in that strange season of 2000-2001. It couldn't happen again, could it?

So I started looking around the various forums for a solution to a sudden filesystem corruption, one of the true hells of computing. To compound this, I hadn't backed up all the new HongPong site stuff, nor the Mysql databases that run the sites, in quite a while. Fortunately I had just exported this entire site a few days ago to put it into WordPress (as it is now - mostly purged of the spam), so if it truly crashed, the Bulk would be safe.

After reboots, I could come back to the low-level emergency maintenance fsck (file system check) shell, and from there I could READ the messed up drive, but not write to it without risking more damage. And I could see that most files seemed ok. But I couldn't get the file sharing, or Apache webserver, or MYSQL database running again, without risking wrecking it. And I couldn't figure out what was really wrong. The solution?

Install a brand new Gentoo Linux setup on another old hard drive I had sitting around, and then pull the old stuff of the messed-up drive in Read-Only mode. After I put the drive in, the handy BIOS error light told me something was dreadfully wrong and it wouldn't boot at all. I found that on a Dell you have to only set the 'cable select' ATA hard drive jumper pins - the machine automatically takes the last drive on the ATA cable to be the Master drive. So I did that but it was still stuck.

I had pulled out the new RAM earlier, but I'd put it back in by this point. Then I tried taking out one of them. It booted! I pulled that one out, and put the other in. It halted! When I put both in, it would boot, but if I switched them, it would halt. In other words, the Dell could detect the bad RAM when it's by itself, but NOT necessarily when it's with others, BUT this depended on their order.

So I returned the bad RAM to Tran Micro the next day, and they nicely exchanged for another one and tested it there in the store. It was OK, so I was on my way, and everything went smoothly afterwards. (Other than this incident of random bad RAM, Tran Micro are fine folks - this could happen anywhere - their service was all right)

I used the memtest86 memory checker on the Gentoo Linux install CD to Make Very Sure they were ok - i wish I'd done it earlier. So it took a few more hours, especially since when I installed Gentoo on this machine a year ago, I hardly took any notes about it. There are some weird things about the Dell machine - in particular, (some/all?) Dells have a strange first boot partition or /dev/hda1 in Linux parlance, which makes the Dell screen and some BIOS stuff happen. I think I destroyed this partition last time, and it's a huge pain in the ass to repair with floppy disks and stuff.

The problem is that Gentoo Linux install instructions tell you to put GRUB, the bootloader, on /dev/hda or /dev/hda1 , and this time I almost commanded grub-install /dev/hda before I caught myself. That would have taken hours to fix. Instead it must be on /dev/hda2 or /dev/hdb1. hda2 is I think automatically loaded up after the Dell thing is done. But I did it right, and so I was able to reboot Linux and finish installing the system.

Downloading & installing the key web programs was easily done with 'emerge apache php mod_php' and the correct USE flags. Other various things were properly updated and recompiled.

I was able to get back into the messed-up drive using read-only mode, which doesn't touch the filesystem. All the elements of the site easily copied to the new drive. Happily, the Mysql database -- which can really be a bitch to put together from a crashed system, if you don't export it cleanly first -- went over VERY easily. All I had to do was 'cp -av * /var/lib/mysql' from the old /var/lib/mysql. Then a reboot, plugging it back where it belongs in my bedroom, and All Systems [ OK ].

So now, in short, I have a TON of Actual Real Professional Work for both Politics in Minnesota and Computer Zone. I don't have time to say much else about the Gaza situation and so forth. sry!

Bad RAM Chips nearly kill HongPong.com

Sorry we are temporarily offline. I purchased some more RAM to speed up the server and one of the chips was bad. But I didn't realize this right away, and then fsck got involved.... Please Stand by.

Final Random Bits: Mozilla goes for profit; Kirkuk looks to go boom; Blair slashes protest freedoms, "the last of the Great British"?

"Bombs Becoming Biggest Killers in Iraq." "Insurgents in western Iraq town prove an elusive enemy for Marines". "Syria rejects US blame for Iraq's unrest." Someone kills Chalabi's cousin. More about the growing sense of Kurdish separatism, which leads us to the problem that Kirkuk is Really a Tinderbox:

Tension was rising Saturday in the oil-rich Iraqi city of Kirkuk as residents say they fear an outbreak of civil war among the Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen.
Local officials in the northern city said a crisis erupted when hundreds of Kurds, accompanied by National Guards, began distributing residential lands to ethnic Kurds who were allegedly expelled from the area under the former regime of Saddam Hussein.
Turkmen sources in Kirkuk said these lands belonged to their own ethnic people before the former regime pushed them out or executed their members, after which the lands were excavated with bulldozers.

The story of murdered reporter Steven Vincent in Iraq is quite sad, but it has been suggested in the Telegraph that he was not killed merely for criticizing hardcore Shiite police behavior. Apparently no one claimed responsibility for his killing, which possibly had something to do with sleeping with his slain Iraqi interpreter, perhaps some kind of honor killing.

It would appear that Blair has decided to cut off some undesirable chunks of free speech in Britannia and push for treason against uppity Muslim clerics. Also, apparently you can't protest within a half-mile of Parliament without a license anymore due to the Serious Organized Crime and Police Act. Protesters have gotten arrested. However, Brian Haw, a dude I personally encountered outside Parliament last spring, has been sitting there since June 2001, and apparently his post has been grandfathered in. As he tartly put it within his unyielding stream-of-consciousness yowling at the government:

As the arrests were being made he shouted to police: "Officer address your heart, officer why are you here?"
Speaking about the protest on Sunday, he said: "I'm the last of the Mohicans, I'm the last of the Great British.
"My fellow compatriots have been denied a voice. I'm outraged by this, I'm outraged that the police are busy chasing old ladies with peace signs down Whitehall when there are bombs going off in London."

How depressing, I really expected better from the folks that brought us such fine traditions of free speech.

"Europe plays nuclear poker with Iran," some pretty good stuff from an Iranian based in India.

Mozilla Foundation is metastasizing into Mozilla (for-profit) Corporation. This is not necessarily bad, so I hope they stay smart. They are still on the open source path, but perhaps now they have ideas for making more money, which can be turned back into development. People ought to keep open minds about the various evolving ways to join open source software and capitalism together.

On a totally unrelated subject, Joel Stein's comparison of the trendiness index for Scientology and Kabbalah is pretty funny. He's very much after the K-Hotties...

New HongPong version coming together

Hey, check it out, it's happening:

http://wp.hongpong.com

The WP stands for WordPress. it will move out to the regular www Real Soon Now. It has a lot of sweet tag features & other bells & whistles. Much better than MovableType, and I will have a more open way for everyone to get logins....

Also, site traffic is up sharply for July, and I am trying out a new program to measure hits. Should be sweet... I am averaging about 1000 hits a day, of which about 40% seem to be from the AskJeeves bot, and another 20% are pure spam attempts. So maybe around 300 real people a day? This new stat program should help me figure it out.

Also for some reason, muddled Macedonian characters have become my top Google search this month. Don't know why.

More later.

P.S. Tuesday morning is the long awaited appearance at the County Courthouse regarding the infamous Macalester Seniors vs St. Paul/Minneapolis/Airport Police May 11 incident. I could be a totally free man just hours from now!! Or not.

And I still haven't gotten my pictures from the police/DA/powers that be.

(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, well I can't blather about it on the Internet. If it's all over tomorrow, then I'll talk)

Geopolitics jumble: Hey, Russia's dissolving, Rove's spiraling, settlers march, the New SS and Paparazzi Intelligence

Ouch. When the Associated Press goes this way, you've lost that bit of spin you really need:

Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide was among the sources for a Time magazine reporter's story about the identity of a CIA officer, the reporter said Sunday.

Until last week, the White House had insisted for nearly two years that vice presidential chief of staff Lewis Libby and presidential adviser Karl Rove were not involved in the leaks of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity.

I found this really weird and interesting: "Vladislav Surkov's Secret Speech: How Russia Should Fight International Conspiracies," complete with allegations of CIA meddling in the recent Ukraine elections, etc. There's even a jab at James Woolsey for interfering. The site also carries a story about possible Soviet WMDs hidden in the US. The government of tiny, horribly poor Russian republic of Dagestan, adjacent to Chechnya, is on the verge of collapsing, and Islamic militants are causing persistent problems.

Eurasia Daily Monitor: LEAKED MEMO SHOWS KREMLIN FEARS COLLAPSE OF DAGESTAN
On July 8, Moskovsky komsomolets published a report leaked from the office of Dmitry Kozak, Russian President Vladimir Putin's Special Envoy to the Southern Federal District. The report, from Kozak to Putin, described Dagestan as rife with interethnic, religious, and social conflicts and on the brink of collapse. Specifically, "One should recognize that, taken together, the unsolved social, economic, and political problems are now reaching a critical level. Further ignoring the problems and attempts to drive them deep down by force could lead to an uncontrolled chain of events whose logical result will be open social, interethnic, and religious conflicts in Dagestan" (Moskovsky komsomolets, July 8). The authors of the report also warned that the rising influence of religious communities, especially at the local-government level, could result in the emergence of "Sharia enclaves" in the mountain districts of the republic. The report warned that an Islamic state could potentially materialize in the Dagestan mountains.

Iraq: Billmon curses the Flypaper theory of anti-terrorism how Bush's advisor, Townsend, still seems stuck on it. Krugman on the depressing White House detachment from reality. Sunni-Shiite violence and tensions intensify. "Insurgents active again on the streets of Falluja". Tales of an Iraq veteran. Another leaked British document indicates that the Iraq war is seen to radicalize British Muslims. "Shiites bring rigid piety to Iraq's south."

A strange story about ongoing conflict between privatized military firms/forces and the US military in Iraq. There are conflicting stories about whether the US wants to build permanent bases in Iraq -- either in the desert or urban enclaves -- as Stratfor reported last year, VS. recent reports that the British want to get the hell out.

Iraqi blogger Raed "in the Middle" Jarrar's brother has been arrested by the new Iraqi security forces or new Mukhabarat / Mokhabarat. "Fortunately, it's a nice governmental gang!"

If your child or sibling vanishes for two days then calls from the secret service jail in any other place on earth, that would be considered a disaster and a violation of human rights… In Iraq, however, it’s Happy News.

Because the other options include: To be tortured, executed, and thrown in garbage by SCIRI and their Badr brigades. To be held by the Iraqi police and left to choke to death in one of their cars. To be held by the US troops then disappear and be mistreated for months in one of their many prisons. To be kidnapped by one of the countless criminal gangs and cost your family some tens of millions of Iraqi Dinars and/or your life.

So now you can see why being held at the mukhabarat jail is such happy news!

Rovification: (defined as a vortex of scandal from which not even spin can escape)
See the Video: Cooper confirms Rove told him! Ouch! Cooper's tell all TIME story (excerpts). Howard Fineman with a surprising amount of candor in Newsweek. Via CrooksAndLiars.com, sweet site. Alex Cockburn bitterly compares coverage of the Rove story with the Franklin/AIPAC scandal, and a lot of nasty things to say about the CIA. Scooter Libby may have released Miller from confidentiality agreement?

Wilson pounces, calls for Rove resignation. Krugman points out that Rove was the guy who changed our political environment post-9/11, making it clear that "we're living in a country where there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth." In other words, we're in Team B country now.

it seems plenty clear that rightwing hawks band together to provide more threatening propaganda about enemies of the United States, in order to undermine other people in Washington's professional intelligence community. This has happened quite a few times, and the general moniker of "Team B" style thinking -- named after a 1976 group that produced dramatically inflated disinformation about the Soviet Union from the CIA's data -- has become associated with manipulating intelligence, to create public impressions the hawks need to support their policies. Wolfowitz was on Team B back in the 1970s, which is where he first started mucking about with the exciting political potential of WMD threat construction. (Andy Tweeten and Adam Zelmer introduced me to this interesting idea about how security discourse is manipulated. Threat construction arguments in debate are very helpful.)

As Rovegate goes down, Team B-style tricks seem to be popping up all over. The Yellowcake uranium forgeries may yet get tied to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which worked quite a bit like Team B to subvert America's intelligence agencies. Scooter Libby was the OSP's liason to the CIA, which means he might be involved with the whole thing, as Wilson has alleged more than once. I earlier linked to this interview with a former top CIA officer, Vincent Cannistaro, who quite directly talks about Ledeen, the Iraqi National Congress fabricating WMD intel, the whole bit.

Keep an eye on TPM, it's damn good.

Juan Cole is yet again saying he thinks that Michael Ledeen was involved with fabricating the Niger-Yellowcake documents. Daniel Schorr on NPR talking about how the real issue is how America was misled into the war, featuring Wilson. Raimondo maps it onto the conflict between neo-cons and the CIA, before the war started:

Seen against the backdrop of the fierce intra-bureaucratic war that broke out in the administration in the run-up to the Iraq war – with the CIA and the mainline intelligence and diplomatic communities pitted against civilian neoconservatives in the upper echelons of the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President – the outing of Plame and her colleagues amounts to an act of espionage committed out of a desire to exact revenge. The leakers meant to retaliate not just against Joe Wilson, through his wife, but against the "old guard" that was resisting the campaign to lie us into war. When the CIA wouldn't go along with the neocon program and "spice up" their analyses with Ahmed Chalabi's tall tales and the outright forgery of the Niger uranium documents, the War Party struck back at them with the sort of viciousness for which the neocons are rightly renowned.

And it goes on further into the links between Scooter Libby, John Hannah, John Bolton, AIPAC, Chalabi, the Yellowcake forgeries, etc. etc. etc. Raimondo's earlier piece about the unmitigated calls for post-London fascism from former Mossad director Ephraim Halevi is also quite interesting, as I noted earlier.

Older stories: "A Flood in Baath Country" about depressing conditions in Syria has been widely acclaimed in Lebanon. The filibuster deal has apparently harmed the Senate Republicans, causing fundraising setbacks--they are way behind the Democrats! It would seem the hard-right base is furious that Senators cut a deal, and ties have loosened between the leadership and the base. All the more pressure on Bush to appease them with some dingbat on the Supreme Court

Iran: Kissinger says don't discount military action if talks fail. (via CFR... bum bum bummm...)

Whatever: Guardian: Reporters find cocaine in EU parliament. World of Paparazzi: Photo Wars. They've got the best intel of all, it seems:

He opens a drawer, pulls out a few stacks of paper. Here, he says, are this week's scheduled movements of every famous passenger of a major limousine company in Los Angeles. He has an employee of the limo company on retainer, with bonuses "if there's results."
Here, too, are what Mr. Griffin describes as the passenger manifests of every coast-to-coast flight on American Airlines, the biggest carrier at Los Angeles International Airport. "I get the full printout," he says. "If they fly any coastal flight, I know. I can also find anybody in the world within 24 hours, I guarantee it. If they don't mask the tail number on a private plane, I'll find it." He says he has law-enforcement officers on his payroll, too, and can have a license plate checked in an hour on weekdays, 20 minutes on weekends.

I thought this set of photographs from the point of view of snipers was creepy but sort of cool.
It's going down in Israel: Fighting both Palestinian militants and hardcore Jewish protesters, the protest actions are starting up pretty much right now. It's coming: "Settlers to march on Gaza despite police ban". Keep tabs with right-wing sites Arutz Sheva (offering opinion from settlers), GAMLA, a for more on settler actions. Of course there is also the weird and disinformation-laden DEBKAfile.
Disturbing new law enforcement stuff: "Genesis of an American Gestapo," a somewhat ranting bit about the spooky new National Security Service, or as this writer dubbed it, the New SS. I don't feel like looking for new horrible news about the FBI-law enforcement shakeup, but it's damn interesting, and real important. The next COINTELPRO or whatever could spring out of this kind of stuff...

Tech: Wouldn't this keyboard be amazing? Programming on offshore boats = sweatshops at sea?

Tech goodies

Kinda sweet. Skype provides free Internet telephony for your Mac, PC, Linux or PocketPC. Sounds frickin sweet! You can also get a phone number assigned to you for 30 euros a year, and in theory you could have the number in Chicago while you live in Paris, saving everyone tons of money.

Sweet desktop backgrounds for yr widescreen via the blog of

Blog Torrent. What a great name. Good work, Downhill Battle!

I am looking at new ways to put HongPong together, in the hope that it could improve my odds of fruitful employment. ftrain has some interesting elements, crazy pretentious tho. Tao Of Mac has wiki or Everything2-style features with each of its pages. (check out ten open source projects to watch) WordPress is going to replace MovableType as the main site engine, and hopefully the HongWiki will get more closely integrated with the pages... Wordpress has lots of plugins now. Liberals Aganist Terrorism and their TerrorWiki. I like the idea of a Terrorwiki.

SoSueMe, the aptly named blog by Jon Lech Johansen of DeCSS/DVD/iTunes cracking fame. He's talking about why VLC has a frickin traffic cone icon. Excellent. Apparently a bunch of affiliated kids came back drunk with a cone. And then they started a cone collection. As someone who has gone coning from time to time, I deeply respect this.

This is the shadiest Microsoft disclaimer I've ever seen, at Start.com: "This site is not an officially supported site. It is an incubation experiment and doesn't represent any particular strategy or policy. For other incubation experiments, see http://sandbox.msn.com. Enjoy!"

So damn funny, a t-shirt that says "I was Butt-Fucked at the NEVERLAND RANCH and all I got was this Lousy T-Shirt!" This kid gets a prize for t-shirt of the century. ()

A Great Day for Freedom: Naked Justice statues back in action

USATODAY.com - Drapes removed from Justice Department statue:

With barely a word about it, workers at the Justice Department Friday removed the blue drapes that have famously covered two scantily clad statues for the past 3 1/2 years. Spirit of Justice, with her one breast exposed and her arms raised, and the bare-chested male Majesty of Law basked in the late afternoon light of Justice's ceremonial Great Hall.

The drapes, installed in 2002 at a cost of $8,000, allowed then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to speak in the Great Hall without fear of a breast showing up behind him in television or newspaper pictures. They also provoked jokes about and criticism of the deeply religious Ashcroft.

Grad school is a shady proposition. Village Voice has a depressing series, "Generation Debt: The New Economics of Being Young" about how kids in grad school end up with mountains of debt and crappy underpaid jobs as TAs and adjunct professors. Oh crap. These aren't new articles but they feel relevant as All Hell...

Wanted: Really Smart Suckers
Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty
by Anya Kamenetz
Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off.

Also the Voice has another piece on "The Ambition Tax: Why America's young are being crushed by debt—and why no one seems to care":

High levels of debt preclude the young from getting the sweetest mortgage deals, and they often end up in the clutches of sub-prime lenders. On average, people who had to borrow their way to a graduate degree are already behind $45,900; median debt for grad students has increased 72 percent since 1997. (Aspiring doctors have it the worst, with average loans of $103,855.) Add to those obligations an investment in a humble bungalow, and you're on the hook for a quarter million or more—not counting interest.
The cumulative effect is that merely keeping one's head above water, rather than getting ahead, has become the top priority for Americans between the ages of 18 and 34. Pursuing the relatively modest dream of doing better than the generation before requires serious capital—up front in the form of tuition and loans, and hidden in the form of lost opportunities. Call it the ambition tax—the money you've got to pony up if you want a college degree and a shot at middle-class bliss. But it's really more of a gamble, as there's no guarantee those tens of thousands of dollars will get you where you want to go.
"The next generation is starting their economic race 50 yards behind the starting line," says Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor and author of The Two-Income Trap. "They've got to pay off the equivalent of one full mortgage before they make it to flat broke, in order to pay for their education. They can never get ahead of the game, because they're constantly trying to play catch-up.
"And once you've got accumulated debt, the debt takes on a life of its own. It demands to be fed, and it takes that first bite out of the paycheck. And it means the opportunity to accumulate a little, to get a little ahead, to maybe put together a down payment—it's just never there. It's just staggering to me that this is not a part of our national debate right now."

On the lighter side, Slashdot is talking about some high school kids with laptops who got themselves in heaps of trouble when they figured out how to subvert the Orwellian spy programs on their computers, and now the kids are seemingly facing charges. Gee, how does this remind me of the good old days at MPA? Well, when we got caught messing around, they cut us a little more slack... Some suspensions were experienced, but no felony charges. This website had a role in all of that, I recall... Useful legal (non)advice:

Unfortunately, under the law, accessing a computer system without authorization is a very serious crime.
And furthermore, the courts have decided that violating an acceptable use policy amounts to accessing the computer without authorization.
Worse, it is accepted within the courts that an existing "terms of use" or whatever does not have to have been read nor accepted for it to be enforceable.
It is presumed that such a policy exists, and it is the burden of the user to find and read it.
It sucks! 
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice

And of course such a thread brings funny old stories about hacking:

Cornell was Mac-dominated (oh, happy memories) and the Upson lab had a network of IIci's just waiting to have their security hacked. I forget the tool that was used, but we figured out that it stored the password in a certain file that we could reach by bypassing the file security with Norton Utilities for Macintosh (haha Mac OS 6 security, bah). We procured a copy of the software, installed it and created a password on my own IIci, then took a copy of that file (with the obfuscated password) and replaced the file on the lab IIci. Instant admin access.

But we didn't stop there. We had such organization that we managed, as a team, to use this trick to install a fun little background process called NetBunny... on ALL the macs in ALL the labs. NetBunny does nothing on its own, but paired with a little utility called StartWabbit that we pointed at any campus AppleTalk network we wished, would begin the chain reaction. What then happened is that the Energizer Bunny would walk across the screen thumping the drum, going literally from screen to screen across the whole lab. It was pretty much a riot, if you were in on the joke, but the admins couldn't figure it out (we had hidden the executable well through obfuscation by renaming it and pasting another icon on it) and after they heard the recognizable "thump, thump, thump" sound would jump up and run around helplessly yelling "It's the bunny!!" We did it a few times with "agents" at each location to witness the mayhem. Good geek times.

For some reason our president has an obsession with touching, grabbing and rubbing people's heads. How weird.

'Thermal depolymerization' tech recycles stuff into minerals & useful oil?!

A very strange article about a machine that can take a wide variety of wastes, and efficiently break it down to isolate useful materials, and even create oil molecules... Sounds like a bit of a free lunch. Maybe it's fake. I don't know. The article from Discover magazine, two years ago, seems really friggin appealing but who knows....

The page that the story is posted on has a lengthy discussion of how this technology would not be a panacea, because plastics are horrible, etc etc. Good points. However, we still need to find a way to recover valuable wastes mixed into the consumer crap that's killing our society. Keep an eye on this one.

Anything Into Oil:
Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year
BRAD LEMLEY / Discover v.24, n.5, 1may03 [A Chemist's Comments on CWT]

[caption: Gory refuse, from a Butterball Turkey plant In Carthage, Missouri, will no longer go to waste.. Each day 200 tons of turkey offal will be carted to the first industrial-scale thermal depolymerIzatIon plant, recently completed In an adjacent lot, and be transformed Into various useful products, including 600 barrels of light oil.]

In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost anything into oil. Really.

"This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri. "This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming."

Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too good to be true.

"Everybody says that," says Appel. He is a tall, affable entrepreneur who has assembled a team of scientists, former government leaders, and deep-pocketed investors to develop and sell what he calls the thermal depolymerization process, or TDP. The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.

Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end , he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. "There is no reason why we can't turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil," says engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant.

See also Changing World Technologies, the company putting out this device.

Military builds teen database, intelligence agencies to watch blogs, and those liberal freaks go toooo farr....

This just rolled in: "Supreme Court Rules Cities May Seize Homes" for the purposes of profitable eminent domain, in this case a constructing huge friggin Pfizer research plant that locals objected to. So Pfizer has more rights than Joe pink Flamingo ranch house owner. Really quite awful. But that's just the beginning!

I forget who said: you're not paranoid if they really are out to get you.

Fortunately this circle will apparently widen to include all 16 to 18-year olds, whose private data will be added to a privately owned database administered on behalf of the Pentagon. Adding lots of personal information, including GPAs, Social Security numbers, and ethnicity, for the primary purpose of more closely targeting students to recruit into the military. I'd almost forgotten that the No Child Left Behind Act requires high schools to give the DoD information:

The Defense Department began working yesterday with a private marketing firm to create a database of high school students ages 16 to 18 and all college students to help the military identify potential recruits in a time of dwindling enlistment in some branches.
The program is provoking a furor among privacy advocates. The new database will include personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying.
[.....]
According to the Federal Register notice, the data will be open to "those who require the records in the performance of their official duties." It said the data would be protected by passwords.
The system also gives the Pentagon the right, without notifying citizens, to share the data for numerous uses outside the military, including with law enforcement, state tax authorities and Congress.
Some see the program as part of a growing encroachment of government into private lives, particularly since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"It's just typical of how voracious government is when it comes to personal information," said James W. Harper, a privacy expert with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "Defense is an area where government has a legitimate responsibility . . . but there are a lot of data fields they don't need and shouldn't be keeping. Ethnicity strikes me as particularly inappropriate."
Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the Social Security Administration relaxed its privacy policies and provided data on citizens to the FBI in connection with terrorism investigations.

Oddly enough, an AP story from last year entitled "Blog-Tracking May Gain Ground Among U.S. Intelligence Officials" has since vanished from Yahoo! News. However a Google search on the matter shows that many around the Internet found the story interesting enough to post in full. As the Maritime Homeland Security and Force Protection Blog posted it:

Yahoo! News - Blog-Tracking May Gain Ground Among U.S. Intelligence Officials
Tue Apr 27, 8:53 AM ET
By Doug Tsuruoka

People in black trench coats might soon be chasing blogs.

Blogs, short for Web logs, are personal online journals. Individuals post them on Web sites to report or comment on news especially, but also on their personal lives or most any subject.

Some blogs are whimsical and deal with "soft" subjects. Others, though, are cutting edge in delivering information and opinion.

As a result, some analysts say U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials might be starting to track blogs for important bits of information. This interest is a sign of how far Web media such as blogs have come in reshaping the data-collection habits of intelligence professionals and others, even with the knowledge that the accuracy of what's reported in some blogs is questionable.

Still, a panel of folks who work in the U.S. intelligence field - some of them spies or former spies - discussed this month at a conference in Washington the idea of tracking blogs.

"News and intelligence is about listening with a critical ear, and blogs are just another conversation to listen to and evaluate. They also are closer to (some situations) and may serve as early alerts," said Jock Gill, a former adviser on Internet media to President Clinton (news - web sites), in a later phone interview, after he spoke on the panel.

If they had read my stuff a while ago they might have learned more clearly that the neocons are dangerous liars and so is Ahmed Chalabi. But tragically that circle never got completed.

Well I am not terribly surprised. I have already gotten 95 hits from US military computers this month, 170 in May. More military computers than Israelis or French end up here for whatever reason. And of course the Central Intelligence Agency paid a visit last November, shortly after the election. hm, it doesn't seem that I wrote a post about that. The CIA also came to Hongpong earlier on a search for "tower bridge terrorism" and why not, the Department of Homeland Security came looking for "unedited iraqi prison photos and videos". And of course CENTCOM.mil, the US Central Command, downloaded the whole Iraq category page. The everyday military guys love searching for the helicopter kill video. (my post is lacking in details about the incident: apparently the dead Iraqis were farmers or something)

If you want to see more military video excitement, check out militaryvideos.net, with files via bittorrent. It was really quite shocking, although I couldn't play a lot of the WMVs on my infidel Macintosh.

If you have certain keywords sitting around, then it's not a huge surprise that your site might come up on a few Google searches. Once the CIA starts getting your RSS feed, then you must really be important... I recently noticed that I've also got the top result for "Pipelines balkans" purely because I laid out the sources for a paper on the Pipelines:Balkans hongwiki page, purely for my own use. Google found its way in there, and the rest is history...

Let's not forget,
there's a lot of flag burners who have got too much freedom and I want to make it legal for policemen to beat em', because there's limits to our liberty!
For the fifth time the US House addressed the serious problems facing our troubled nation and passed a Constitutional amendment barring the torching of the American flag. I suppose this will become a justification to bomb Iran. Thune speaks for the mythical fascists of the plains:

Among the new votes for the amendment is Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who pushed the issue in his campaign and helped recruit co-sponsors. "Out in the country, at the grass-roots level, it's seen as a common man's practical patriotism," Thune said.

Not surprisingly, John Kline voted for it, Betty! against, and unfortunately Collin Peterson (D-Rural MN) supported it, as well. Now that's settled, we just have to ignore the budget, steal the Arabs' oil, fund some Israeli settlements, design nuclear bunker-buster bombs and sit back and wait for the apocalypse. While the Pentagon tracks my little brother's GPA.

Apple threatens Microsoft on x86 platform. Oh sweet.

Naturally, the talk about Apple putting Intel chips into Macs has the open source community chattering, and a massive thread on Slashdot revealed a few interesting things about the current possibilities for using open-source tools to run OS X on generic PC hardware, using tools such as Linux as a layer to simulate the proper hardware environment.

The great thing is that there is already software, PearPC, the PowerPC Architecture Emulator, which can simulate Macs on PCs running Linux. Right now, PearPC is relatively slow in convert PPC instructions to x86, but with future Mac software recompiled for x86, an entire technical hurdle will disappear. Speculations on running OS X on Beige box PCs also at PearPC community site.

It will not be hard to get current Mac software to run on Intel chips. The Unreal Tournament developer reports that it is not at all hard to get his games switched over.

I thought this concept was interesting...

The future of Linux in the server market is secure simply because IBM has invested in Linux on the server. IBM never abandons rich customers who have purchased legacy (which, in this case, is Linux servers) from IBM.
However, the desktop is where Linux will die before it is even established. Apple will not drive a stake into the heart of Linux, but rather, the hordes of hackers and Taiwanese-run peripheral factories in China will kill Linux on the desktop. There are 3 scenarios. First, the hackers write a patch that will enable Mac OS X to run on conventional x86-based IBM PC clones. Second, the Taiwanese engineers will violate scores of American patents and build a cheap (possibly, $10.00) hardware plug-in card that will enable OS X to run on conventional IBM PC clones. The 3rd possibility is a combination of the first two.
An interesting side effect of these efforts will be taking marketshare from Windows XP and successors. In the server market, Linux has taken market share from UNIX instead of Windows. However, on the x86 desktop market, there is no 3rd OS to compete against MAC OS X. There are only 2 OSes: Windows and OS X on x86. They will compete head-on, against each other.
Although I would rather that Apple have picked another processor (e.g. ARM), I would be pleased to see Apple crush Windows on x86. Apple has a good chance of winning this matchup since the goodwill of open-source developers is on the side of Apple.
Apple's team: million-person army of open-source developers + freeBSD + most-consumer-friendly (i.e. idiot proof) OS called OS X
Microsoft's team: couple thousand paid but possibly disgruntled slaves (including) H-1Bs + consumer-unfriendly OS. "It" is no contest. Apple wins by 70% marketshare.

This is nothing but good news for Apple. Microsoft should be paranoid as hell...

Apple heart Intel?! What the?

It was strange to hear that Apple is really going to switch to Intel chips soon in the future. Was the PowerPC faith all for nothing?! They are going to produce a program called Rosetta that can convert old PPC code to Intel code, at an estimated speed of around 70 to 80 percent of native. Motley Fool on the Chip Wars. Also ZDnet on "Just one straw remains on the camel's back" in this case.

Macs basically don't get viruses, Except of course there are macro viruses in Microsoft Office documents. But check out the tales on this thread at DealMac.com. Doesn't that sound better than the Windows experience?

A story about switching from Mac to PC in an office. Well, strange stuff for Apple, what can I say?

Now available: Warspying and music produced by Iraq troops on Teh Scene

A couple interesting things reflect how it's becoming easier to come up with original content and offer it up. First I found a link to a video by some young guys at Systm.org (not to be confused with the pretentious System.net 'global aesthetic conditioning'). They released a short video about 'warspying,' or modifying a wireless video camera receiver, putting it in a cash box, with a little LCD screen on it. The guys drive around town and capture other people's unencrypted video transmissions.

So these guys made a short video, complete with custom circuit diagrams, and distributed it over BitTorrent (high quality Quicktime / Windows Media torrents). Related links: Kevin Rose's blog (or this), one of the guys on the video, a very rich Technorati tag, review of the show on O'Reilly's Makezine.com, also randomculture.com, an earlier project called thebroken.org, switcherman.com is their project blog, they got the /. and CNet stories the lucky bastards.

So this would be an example of putting yourself in the right spots for a PR offensive online.

Stuff like podcasting is becoming increasingly popular and sites like podnova and ipodderx provide a constant source of these home brewed audio broadcasts. The idea is that such content might finally fulfill the promise of the internet etc etc.... Meanwhile people can hook into streams of links like those at Make Magazine put onto del.icio.us.

Looking around at this led me to some interesting sites. Digg.com is sort of like MetaFilter for geeks. Fromtheshadows.tv is another crew that put together some videos including another one about the fun of hacking into wireless data connections ("0wning 2.4GHz" is a great name for an episode)

Meanwhile military guys are starting to release rap music, such as the guys featured in Gunner Palace. There was a major feature on MetaFilter about this with many links.

Hackermedia.net gets points for the obvious name, and links to many other little internet TV shows. My favorite title is "Teh Scene" (not a typo). Good luck to all these kids.

Meanwhile such operations as Guerrilla News Network are still rolling along, and let's not forget the classic video they released some time ago, "Crack the CIA" about the links between cocaine trafficking and intelligence agencies.

Google has gotten this insane three-dimensional flyover map thing... not available to the public yet. Or is it some kind of 3D mapping truck scheme where lasers measure the dimensions of buildings to generate maps. Wow.

I just learned today that there is a peace-based organization down the street @ 1045 Selby Ave., Friends for a Non-Violent World and a buddy of mine is interning there.

You can take CEH (certified ethical hacker) exams now. and practice for them.

Hollywood paid for video cameras in LA to catch bootleg DVD vendors. No comment necessary. Located here to be precise.

Oh great, a 'Minnesota court takes dim view of encryption' as they rule that having PGP software on your computer can be seen as part of malicious intent, in this case against some kiddie porn guy.

Your misc blogs: brainwagon.org , mckinneysucks (discontinued since last January, and I don't agree, but it's funny) freedomhater, israelpundit, neocon-insanity, Sabbah's blog. It's the info age and it's all gravy.

Technorati Tags: cia, google, minnesota, encryption, rap, warspying

Elvis Presley, Nazis, (dis)information freedom and whatnot

Vanity, disinformation and rumors get picked up and passed around and our BS filters get sidestepped by the sourcing of the information. Take this Elvis Presley = Nazi idea that circulated lately. Another example of the perils of the information age:

Almost 28 years after his death, fans of the King of Rock, Elvis Presley, can now see their icon in a radically different light; that as a Nazi.

The legend is seen wearing a Nazi cap and giving a Nazi salute in some pictures taken from a grainy half-hour home cine film.

The pictures, believed to be from the sixties, were taken during a boat trip with friends and have surfaced at the same time as Presley's ex-wife Priscilla released his home movies.

"I was given it ages ago, I think when I used to own a bar. But I had never watched it. It wasn't until I found it in the loft that I decided to. When I did I was shocked," Mark Vernon, who owns the tape, was quoted as saying.

The story still appears on News.com.au, an Australian site, FemaleFirst.co.uk, ContactMusic.com. Originally the British tabloid Sun propagated the story but of course the Sun's Elvis page has expired. The counter-story comes from Elvis-express.com, which is filing a complaint with the UK's Press Complaints Commission.

The other horror would be blogebrity.com, an agglomeration of big shots or something like that. So when I first visit I get the bloviating post:

While the majority of the emails we've received have been something along the lines of:

I love it....this is so much fun; I'm glad somebody finally did this, etc.

There have been a few of these:

You suck. Your list sucks and you suck and people should ONLY talk about blogs in the way I WANT THEM TO. Shame on you. Oh....and you didn't put me on your list. You suck and I hate you.

Just a clue to the haters--your whining is more transparent than a glob of used Neutrogena. But please, do keep it up....your sour grapes are like a glass of Opus One to us.

Speaking of which, I do think it's time for an eye-opener.

So right off the bat they are indulging their own egos in the mailbox. This one's destined to be a classic. On the other hand this site declared that blogging has finally passed a critical peak, from which it will roll downhill:

Blogging Jumps Shark, Becomes Trucker Hat
Following the recent whirlwind of blog hype including Nick Denton's love affair with the New York Times, his pie to the face at the Radar Magazine party, the launch of Blogebrity, Jason Calacanis' three million micro-blogs, a sudden explosion of branded character blogs and "all marketers should blog" blog conferences, it's now official. Rick Bruner and I, today, declare blogging to have gone the way of the trucker hat. In celebration of this sacred event, May 20, 2005, you can pick up your memorial, Nick Denton Trucker Hat over at Cafe Press.

That is too bad. HongPong.dyndns.org ran on a hacked-together Mac Linux server in the fall of 2000, when "blog" had not yet become soggy label to spill from the mouths of those grinning chicks on CNN... Before Hugh Hewitt and Scott Johnson appropriated something thought up by far more clever people.

So it is sorely tempting to pull the plug on HongPong.com now that the living situation is changing. Either that or some sort of drastic redesign, something overwrought and bombastic, like a John Williams score.

Elvis might be a Nazi but Jim Morrison is alive, according to rodeoswest.com. Why the hell not? I guess it reinforces my point that there is very little truth to latch onto. "FlashNews" tells us something:

Filmmaker Claims Jim Morrison Is Alive In Oregon
NEW YORK (Wireless Flash) – Here’s news that will light the fire of Jim Morrison fans: A filmmaker claims The Doors’ frontman is alive and raising horses on a ranch in southern Oregon. Rodeo photographer Gerald Pitts insists Morrison didn’t die in July of 1971 and he has current photographs and film footage of the rocker to prove it.

Pitts, who met Morrison in 1998, says the rocker staged his death because of a French conspiracy to kill him, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix with narcotics because they were all Vietnam war protestors. These days, Morrison isn’t the drug user he once was, although Pitts says when he goes over to Jim’s house he’ll “maybe have an occasional beer.”

Now Pitts claims that Morrison is announcing he’s alive, in part, to promote his recent agreement to star in a rodeo shoot-out movie based on events that actually happened to Pitts.

Yet another reason to leave this country, as Arun would put it.

In other random news an online tool called Tor provides anonymity in Internet use, and was originally developed by the Navy. It is becoming popular among government and other such types... Mysterious. But the EFF supports it, so it must be good. Sort of similar to this sourceforge project called ANts, Freenet, (Freenet-china.org looks interesting) and MUTE are all anonymizing systems--that is, they shield a user's IP number and data using layers of encryption. A major problem, for say, your software pirate or Chinese dissident, is making sure the IP can't be traced to you as you engage in things. Centralized servers are another weak point, and other technologies such as our beloved BitTorrent are getting "distributed tracker" features put into their clients. Tor sounds promising, then:

The Naval Research Lab began developing the system in 1996 but handed the code over to Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, two Boston-based programmers, in 2002. The system was designed as part of a program called onion routing, in which data is passed randomly through a distributed network of servers three times, with layers of security protecting the data, like an onion.
Dingledine and Mathewson rewrote the code to make it easier to use and developed a client program so that users could send data from their desktops.
"It's been really obscure until now and hard to use," said Chris Palmer, EFF's technology manager. "(Before) it was just a research prototype for geeks. But now the onion routing idea is finally ready for prime time."
Dingledine and Mathewson made the code open source so that users could examine it to find bugs and to make certain that the system did only what it was supposed to do and nothing more.
The two programmers wanted to guard against a problem that arose in 2003 when users of another open-source anonymizer system -- called JAP, for Java Anonymous Proxy -- discovered that its German developers had placed a backdoor in the system to record traffic to one server. The developers... said they were forced to install a "crime detection function" by court order.
Law enforcement authorities have long had an uneasy and ambivalent relationship with anonymizer services. On the one hand, such services allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies to hide their own identity while conducting investigations and gathering intelligence. But they also make it harder for authorities to track the activities and correspondence of criminals and terrorists.
Anonymizer services can help protect whistleblowers and political activists from exposure. They can help users circumvent surfing restrictions placed on students and workers by school administrators and employers. And they can prevent websites from tracking users and knowing where they're located. The downside is that anonymizer services can aid with corporate espionage.
....Tor builds an incremental encrypted connection that involves three separate keys through three servers on the network. The connection is built one server at a time so that each server knows only the identity of the server that preceded it and the server that follows it. None of the servers knows the entire path the data took.

So I guess my ultimate point is that technology is offering solutions for freedom, as well as coercion. Disinformation, however, is something that only our brains seem capable of swatting away, and it's an uphill battle.

Misc:

Look at this sweet

Robot Hand. More Koran desecration rumors. "60 Minutes Wednesday" gets cancelled, y'all can't keep telling us about insane prisons....

Television newsmagazines in general have been suffering in the ratings. There was some speculation that one of ABC's newsmagazines might be canceled, but both "20/20" and "Primetime Live" were included on the schedule announced Tuesday.

"The mood in the country right now tends to favor escape," Heyward said. "There's a lot of grim news out there. In prime time, when people are looking to be entertained as well as informed, a drama or a reality show is tough competition. The thing about reality shows is they offer the same appeal of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances, but it's all a game. There's a happy ending."

Tech: Microsoft used Apple G5's to demo their Xbox games at the recent E3 conference. That's right, Apples run the Xbox software somehow... Check out ImageSavant.com: this is what the Apple spinning ball should look like.

America's Internal Pro-Democracy Movement

It has been quite a few months since the election, and the fact that we still live in the Modern Babylon is kind of vexing, but our nation's shitty electoral system makes me angry too.

It's a good thing, then, that Brad Friedman of BradsBlog, along with the support of many miscellaneous groups, has started an organization called "Velvet Revolution" to agitate for better electoral systems here, and accountability from officials who try to obscure how flaky those systems really are.

It is a little unfortunate that the Velvet website has the tacky yellow-caps headline style and whirling police light alert of the BradBlog; it appears they just tweaked Brad's layout a bit. Nonetheless they are trying with good faith to raise noise about some shame National Election Reform Commission, which has all sorts of top Bush apparatchiks all over the place,led by none other than James "Stop Counting you Filthy Swamp Yokels" Baker. Jiminy Carter comes along to provide some feelgood vibes, and the whole thing looks like a farce just ginnin' up... A RawStory feature breaks down the lineup. On April 19 the WaPo reported on the panel's initial hearing, which I suppose at least entered a number of disturbing problems into the record.

John Conyers is getting into the blogging game now at conyersblog.us, and he's pushing reform:

As you may be aware, on March 25 it was announced that former President Jimmy Carter and former Bush-Cheney Campaign lawyer James Baker, III, would co-chair a Commission on election reform. I think bipartisanship is desperately needed in the area of election reform. However, for many of us, Mr. Baker will be forever remembered for his ultimately successful efforts to stop the counting of legally cast votes in the 2000 election. Had these efforts not succeeded and had the true will of the voters been ascertained, Al Gore would have been elected President.

How can an individual who played a critical role in the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of Floridians now co-chair a Commission which should have as its mission ensuring that every vote counts?

One of the appointees, Wall Street Journal lackey John Fund, was caught on tape talking about tossing out provisional ballots of people who "Don't look like they live in the neighborhood," and Conyer's blog provides the link.

This column below quickly recalled for me the bitter feeling of realizing that thousands of votes were prevented in the last election, and many more recorded on insecure machines. A columnist from Tribune Media penned the following recently:

The silent scream of numbers
The 2004 election was stolen — will someone please tell the media?

As they slowly hack democracy to death, we’re as alone — we citizens — as we’ve ever been, protected only by the dust-covered clichés of the nation’s founding: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

It’s time to blow off the dust and start paying the price.

The media are not on our side. The politicians are not on our side. It’s just us, connecting the dots, fitting the fragments together, crunching the numbers, wanting to know why there were so many irregularities in the last election and why these glitches and dirty tricks and wacko numbers had not just an anti-Kerry but a racist tinge. This is not about partisan politics. It’s more like: “Oh no, this can’t be true.”

I just got back from what was officially called the National Election Reform Conference, in Nashville, Tenn., an extraordinary pulling together of disparate voting-rights activists — 30 states were represented, 15 red and 15 blue — sponsored by a Nashville group called Gathering To Save Our Democracy. It had the feel of 1775: citizen patriots taking matters into their own hands to reclaim the republic. This was the level of its urgency.
...
In contrast to the deathly silence of the media is the silent scream of the numbers. The more you ponder these numbers, and all the accompanying data, the louder that scream grows. Did the people’s choice get thwarted? Were thousands disenfranchised by chaos in the precincts, spurious challenges and uncounted provisional ballots? Were millions disenfranchised by electronic voting fraud on insecure, easily hacked computers? And who is authorized to act if this is so? Who is authorized to care?

No one, apparently, except average Americans, who want to be able to trust the voting process again, and who want their country back.

There will be more to be seen, thank God.

Now that's a memory hole

In times of difficulty we must not lose sight of our achievements, must see the bright future and must pluck up our courage.

Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, P. 373

Well now college is slipping away, but at least empirical reality is too. David Sirota depresses me. then i go to bed.

President Bush has said that "in a society that is a free society, there will be transparency." That means that in America, we have a government where the public gets to see as much information as possible about its government.

But as the record shows, Bush is anything but pro-transparency. A careful look shows the Bush White House has systematically tried to stop publishing government information that it finds embarrassing or disagrees with - the opposite of "transparent." See the record for yourself:

- Knight-Ridder reports today that the Bush administration announced yesterday that it has "decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered."

- When unemployment was peaking in Bush's first term, the White House tried to stop publishing the Labor Department's regular report on mass layoffs.

- In 2003, when the nation's governors came to Washington to complain about inadequate federal funding for the states, the Bush administration decided to stop publishing the budget report that states use to see what money they are, or aren't, getting.

- In 2003, the National Council for Research on Women found that information about discrimination against women has gone missing from government Web sites, including 25 reports from the U.S. Department of Labor's Women's Bureau.

- In 2002, Democrats uncovered evidence that the Bush administration was removing health information from government websites. Specifically, the administration deleted data showing that abortion does not increase the risk of breast cancer. That scientific data was seen by the White House as a direct affront to the pro-life movement.

Google's a drrrty beast

Here are some quick things.
Henry Earl: I heard about this guy before, but nowadays he really has more sense of purpose than anyone I know... Buy a t shirt. Best mugshot ever.

Data sets for emergency management scenarios in Minnesota - LOGIS - some sort of coordinated government IT system for MN municipalities. Weird.

I ran HongPong.com server log files through an analyzer for the first time since February and I found that there was a certain absurdity to the hits I get through Google. Site traffic is doing all right, although about 40% of it seems to be spam attempts.

As it is now, the old posts on this site have lots of comment spam, thousands of them, attached as dirty little digital barnacles to manipulate some sleaze merchant's search engine ranking. However, I let the practice go on for a while because it improved my own search ranking, and provided a certain surreal quality, a sort of natural accretion of Internet gunk.

In the long run this seems to lead some insane perverts (the "dark magician girl" searcher(s) were quite persistent) to my site, as well as some bizarre political and/or dirty searches such as:

• "kurdish sexi"
• "big penis dick cheney"
• "i salivate at the sight of mittens"
• "5 animal king fu schools in stillwater mn"
• "saddam hussein striping to nude in front of george bush on pics"
• "tbilisi girl dating"
• "salvia victoria hallucinogens"
• "poker addiction campus"
• "hamas organizational pattern structure"
• "ashcroft bacon whitehouse"
• "white house blurred satellite image defenses"
• and of course "xanax hell".

More in a bit....

Use Google to hail a cab

This is too damn cool. The geniuses at Google have rigged up a way to show vehicle fleets on their service, so that you may now see a map of available cabs in a given city. What the hell can I say?

If you're like me, you use a mix of recommendations from friends, the phone book, or standing on the corner with your hand in the air (and hoping it isn't raining) when you need to find a taxi, limousine or shuttle service. With Google Ride Finder, you can tell us where you want to find a ride and we'll show you the actual positions of participating vehicles in that area, along with a phone number you can use to contact the fleet operator (e.g., Chicago).

We're just getting started, so forgive us if we don't have your city or ride provider yet; we'll be adding more as they become available. If you're a fleet owner/operator, get in touch with us; we'd love to include your vehicle.

Look at Chicago. Information Age meets cab dispatching... Also you can have Google provide a whole library of definitions for a given term, for example, define:iran-contra or eschatology. These bits come via the official GoogleBlog.

Berkeley analysis finds 100,000+ extra electronic votes for Bush likely

Third parties are swinging into action to get recounts going in Ohio. The Greens & Libertarians have raised a ton of money to do it, and now they're rolling...

Blue Lemur carries a story from the University of California Berkeley, where researchers have found that Bush was likely awarded an extra 130,000 to 260,000 votes via the electronic voting systems there, including an impressive 72,000 in Broward County alone.

The survey, which is the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of Florida’s 2004 election results to date, found that compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show gains for Bush between 2000 and 2004.
Unlike other analyses, this survey accounted for and ruled out other demographic factors which have clouded the results of other studies, such as the “dixiecrat” phenomenon, where Democratic counties have supported Republican nominees in the past.
“For the sake of all future elections involving electronic voting - someone must investigate and explain the statistical anomalies in Florida,” Professor Hout remarked in a statement to RAW STORY . “We’re calling on voting officials in Florida to take action.”
Among the factors weighted in the study were the Hispanic/Latino population, median income, change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004 and support for Senator Bob Dole in the 1996 election.
The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, respectively. Statistical patterns in counties that did not have e-touch voting machines predicted a 28,000 vote decrease in President Bush’s support in Broward County, yet machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes – a net gain of 81,000.
President Bush should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm Beach County, but instead gained 41,000 - a difference of 49,900. He should have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade County but saw a gain of 37,000 – a difference of 19,300 votes.
“No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained,” Hout added. “The study shows that a county’s use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush.
The odds of this occurring by chance?
“Less than once in a thousand,” he said.
In the reported results, Bush led Senator John Kerry in Florida by 377,216 votes.

BradBlog is a leading spot to follow reports of election irregularities, Brad's got plenty: Indiana, ES&S and One Ungodly Mess!, plus 2600 ballots were double-counted in Sandusky County, Ohio (lucky hacker number, eh?).

Stunning reports of illegally installed software from April of 2004 add to already-horrific mess!
Still waiting for the "Liberal" Media to Show Up!
A series of investigative stories (here, here, and here) by WISHTV.com in Indianapolis from April of this year, have just come to my attention (sent by several different readers).
They concern yet more troubling reports about the Election Systems & Software (ES&S) company, who's software and tabulating machines, along with Diebold's, are responsible for tabulating about 80% of the votes in America. Both companies were founded by the same man, who just happens, along with the rest of their Boards of Directors to be big donor/supporters of the Republican Party.
The series of reports from WISHTV earlier this year tell of ES&S employees surreptitiously installing illegal, uncertified software, into the voting and tabulating machines in Marion County, Indiana. They then ordered their regional ES&S project manager to lie about it to county officials. She refused. As had her husband in a previous ES&S incident, where he was also a project manager, in a different Indiana county. He was fired for his refusal.
In one of the reports, the Marion County Clerk Doris Anne Sadler is quoted as saying that ES&S "has willfully and purposely deceived me and the Marion County election board...[W]ith complete disregard for business ethics and with intent to deceive, [ES&S] deliberately worked to keep their actions from the Marion County election board and its employees."
The county's election board vice chair added, "Throughout the process, there have been missteps and outright fabrications and mistruths given to us by the vendor implementing the election process."
The assiduous BRAD BLOG readers will note that ES&S has popped up time and time again in so many of these stories of "irregularities" related to electronic voting and tabulating machines. Amongst the many troubling incidents so far reported here:
- ES&S Employee found on Auglaize County, OH Computer! Just weeks before election! County had 4th highest Bush vote percentage in the state!
- 10,000 Extra Votes Added in Nebraska County! Another ES&S computer "failure".
- 50,000 Votes LOST in LaPorte County, IN County! Yet another ES&S computer "failure". This one in a heavily Democratic county.
Additionally, DailyKos reported ... on yet another Indiana county where the U.S. Congressional results are now in doubt and a recount may be coming shortly due to revelations from nearby Franklin County where a recount was already held after it was discovered that the optical-scan tabulating machine was counting straight Democratic ticket votes as Libertarian votes!

Then there is the weird story of Jeff Fisher, a Democratic candidate who claims straight up vote fraud. BradBlog followed up on this guy, who seems like he might be crazy. Thom Hartmann, who wrote a piece that raised Fisher's credibility perhaps more than he deserved, has sort of retracted what he wrote earlier. There is a lot of other interesting info in this one... A couple older pieces claiming voter suppression from Bob Fitrakis, "None dare call it voter suppression and fraud" and "And so the sorting and discarding of Kerry votes begins."

To introduce some uncertainty, it's time for electoral spoilage!

What does this election prove? What does it suggest we are destined for? What does it signify about the people of this nation?

I don't think the answers are positive ones. I have some lingering questions about the legitimacy of this one, although we are meant to believe that the results were clear and obvious. Yet I must ask, is it possible that they could have made 11,000 votes for Kerry in New Mexico disappear? A hundred thousand in Ohio?

Adding to the uncertainty, journalist Greg Palast, whose book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy summed up all the electoral fraud in Florida last time, now hypothesizes that Kerry actually won, if the exit polls are to be believed:

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. The exit polls were later combined with—and therefore contaminated by—the tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote. [To read about the skewing of exit polls to conform to official results, click here .] Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.

Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]

Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.

The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.
[.....]
Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly Democratic.

The Impact Of Challenges

First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws—almost never used—allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.

In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional" ballots—a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.
[.....]
New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts—Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.

Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'

Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.

I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.

Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.

"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?

Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.

This rests rather heavily on the idea that the exit polls will be accurate within just a few points. However, it would help explain why the chattering heads on Fox News couldn't stop their disdain for exit polls. Exit polls are in fact the only real way we have to detect electoral fraud, and I'm alarmed at the idea that they would no longer be used. We find widespread discrepancies between the exit polls and election results in Ohio and Florida, and this ought to be explained, yet probably won't be.

Dan Schwartz wrote the following email that rounds up the various rumors and incongruities.

The Democrats have already conceded the presidential election, magnanimously declaring that victory is impossible and that we should therefore spare the nation the excruciating pain of a full vote count. The major media agrees. Pre-election voter disenfranchisement, though widely reported and thoroughly documented (see http://vote2004.eriposte.com/ for this), has completely dropped out of the spotlight; the possibility of an imperfect election seems to be headed the same way.

There is a growing pile of evidence, though, that clearly points to the possibility of outright fraud on election day. The AP and AFP (Agence France-Presse) are both carrying stories now that detail instances where 'software glitches' resulted in Bush winning more votes in a county than are possible- more than the total number of registered voters. These stories come from Ohio and Florida, obviously the 2 most crucial and contentious states in the entire election.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/11/05/politics1149EST0515.DTL

http://www.newbernsj.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&StoryID=18297&Section=Local

This graph shows wild discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote tallies, suggesting the possibility of fraud. The servile mass media relies on these same polls to make their coverage bearable on election night, so you'd better believe they work hard to make sure they're reliable.

Check it out: http://img103.exs.cx/img103/4526/exit_poll.gif

Other counties have made projections based on voter registrations, then found that the election result was massively different. Take Baker County, FL as an example:

Registered Voters
REP: 24.3% DEM: 69.3%

Actual Votes
REP: 7,738 DEM: 2,180

Change from Expected Results REP: 220.4% DEM: -68.4%
(data from http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00000893.htm)

Here's a story from Warren County, Ohio: "Citing concerns about potential terrorism, Warren County officials locked down the county administration building on election night and blocked anyone from observing the vote count as the nation awaited Ohio's returns."

The Miami Herald has reported an instance where officials in Broward County were forced to change a previously announced result on a gambling referendum after discovering a 'computer glitch' that caused the vote tabulation system to begin counting BACKWARDS after hitting a ceiling (chosen by the software programmer) of 32,000 votes. the machine did this for every vote it counted for every race. officials there have apparantly known about the 'bug' for 2 years now but never had it fixed. "Florida's election chief, Secretary of State Glenda Hood, downplayed the significance of a miscount she blamed on 'inadvertent human error' in the Broward elections office. Hood stressed that double-checking procedures had caught what she described as an isolated error. Hood maintained that the incident shows the system worked. 'It's not a problem. . . . They made the correction.'"

Even if you don't think this is conclusive proof of fraud, it is certainly enough to justify demanding a recount. Remember, Kerry's concession is not legally binding in any way. It was a political decision, taken to save face and preserve everyone's perceptions that the system is not corrupt. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE CALL YOUR CONGRESSPEOPLE, CALL EVERYONE YOU KNOW, AND FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE YOU HAVE EVER MET.

dan [Schwartz]

So then, do I conclude that the Republicans stole their second presidential election in four years? That's a tall order to fill, and I don't really believe it that much. However, I will say that our election system does not work perfectly, and provides plenty of opportunities for electoral fraud all around.

I even talked with someone (though I forget who, Your Honor) who planned to vote in both a swing state and Minnesota. I also heard about some foreigner getting into the polls here. This stuff happens, and we cannot ignore that. The question is whether the people on top are gaming the system as much as the random folks I've run across.

Campaign 2004 might be over, thank God, but it was not clean nor honest.

Plans for Arafat's death, while those militant settlers maneuver

Arafat's sudden illness has prompted a flurry of activity all over. The Israeli military is of course concerned about what might happen after he dies, to the extent that rioting Palestinians might overrun settlements and military positions in the territories, or that Jordan, pressed between the West Bank and Iraq, could get violent.

Within the West Bank, occupation policy is tense (via Haaretz):

IDF commanders were instructed, should such a situation arise, to do everything in their power to prevent a flare-up and reduce friction between troops and Palestinian demonstrators in West Bank and Gaza towns. Even so, commanders were also told to make every effort to prevent demonstrations from overrunning IDF roadblocks and settlements in the territories.

In the Ramallah area, IDF troops were put on a raised level of alert, fearing that the gravity of Arafat's condition would spark a wave of Palestinian demonstrations.

Military sources believe that the causes of Arafat's deterioration would have a direct effect on the extent to which Israel is held responsible for his death, even though the IDF is not particularly active in Ramallah recently nor has it strictly maintained the siege on his headquarters.

Still, IDF sources say that should Arafat die, soldiers will be told to respect Palestinian mourning rituals, thereby avoiding a situation in which expressions of joy of Israeli soldiers cause emotions to ignite.

Early IDF discussions on the matter included the question of where Arafat would be buried. The PA chairman had in the past stated that he wished to be buried on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, although it is unlikely that Israel would ever agree to this.

"Divvying Up Arafat's Powers." At least the Palestinians are already planning a round of elections in a couple months.

Inside Israel, we now see the emergence of a messianic, pro-settler faction within Likud led by Benjamin Netanyahu. We need to fear this man:

Netanyahu revolted against Sharon on live television. For three years he has been repeating to his people that he would not depose the prime minister because he is not willing to sit on a chair that is bleeding. This week he did, although in an embarrassing way, but there is no need to worry. He will recover. The person who managed to recover after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and go on to win the elections will ultimately succeed in defeating the elderly leader who is now clinging to the tattered remnants of his party.

Henceforth it will be like in the period prior to the 1996 elections. Netanyahu is now conducting a campaign for the leadership of the Likud party and in order to do this he is turning to his home camp, the Yesha (settlers' acronym for the territories: Judea, Samaria and Gaza - which also means "salvation" in Hebrew) Council, the courts of the National Religious Party rabbis and Shas leader Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef. When the moment rolls around he will run a national campaign - he once again will go back to being "moderate" and speak to Shinui voters.

The dumb Shas party is against withdrawal, says the settler news.

"Dismantling Jewish communities in Gush Katif and northern Samaria would endanger Israel," Shas party spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said Saturday night. "Next, they will chase Jews out of Ashkelon, [West Bank city Hebron] Hevron and Be'er Sheva; there will be no end!"

Speaking in his weekly Saturday night sermon, which drew much more press coverage than usual given its political content and ramifications, Rabbi Yosef ruled that the 11 Shas MKs - and others - must vote against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan. The Rabbi's decision stonewalled Sharon’s attempt to win an impressive majority in the Knesset when the disengagement bill comes to a first reading on Tuesday.

The rightwing WorldNetDaily reported it believed that the ailing Mr. Arafat prefers that Kerry wins. This item via the settler news service Arutz Sheva. It's a one-time opportunity for progress, eh? What kinds of shakeups for the Middle East?

A writeup on CounterPunch critical of Thomas Friedman's sudden turn against the Bush Administration because it regards the Israeli-American hegemon issue as something transmitted via TV.

In some random domestic headlines,

Is Bush's website blocking international visitors?

Tom DeLay's corruption may bite him on the ass in the election, before he goes down for certain indictment. Wouldn't that be sweet if Texas voters knocked him out first?

Ralph Nader has a letter from a Minnesota highway. Fuck him and the tarmac he rides on.

One in three Israelis think their country is "close" to civil war

I ♥ Huckabee's opens tonight at the Grandview. Nice. My Michael Ledeen story will be in The Mac Weekly today... "Lunch Beyond Good And Evil." Coming soon.

Some random tidbits for Friday morning:

Hans Blix on the preposterous games that Bush played with the inspections. Not as funny as Blix's role in TEAM AMERICA, which I saw last Saturday and really liked.

What is going on regarding Major Assaults Planned Right After the Elections? More of the democracy-terror nexus whipping about and killing innocent people.

Get your Armies of Compassion domain names. They're going quick. In the time I was watching this, someone bought armiesofcompassion.net. WhoooO!

As everyone knows by now, Ron Suskind's article in the NY Times Sunday magazine was staggering. I left one quote as my AIM away message for awhile:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

All sorts of faulty technology messed up the war for troops, besides the catastrophic planning.

"Post-war planning non-existent" by those stalwart Knight Ridder guys.

War on Terror spreads terror, says Rami G. Khouri in "Filling the Swamp."

"Allawi Presses Effort to Bring Back Baathists." Yes, that's Moral Clarity! Green Zone sabotage. Actually this proves that the "Green Zone" no longer exists, if it ever did.

On a lighter note, how about that Apple stock?

"Because something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"

Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man (Highway 61 Revisited)

Small, somewhat terrifying factoid: a poll in Israel last week revealed that about 36% of Israelis fear their country is "close" to a civil war. On the other hand, the poll also showed that strong majorities, even of Likud voters, favored withdrawing from Gaza, and most of them also favored holding national referendums to decide the matter, and others. All in all, very very interesting. But also scary.

Are you for or against carrying out a national referendum on the plan to
disengage from the Katif Bloc and Gaza Strip?
Total: For 57% Against 32% Other 11%
Likud voters: For 71% Labor voters: For 54%

And if a referendum takes place on the matter of disengagement from the
Katif Bloc and Gaza Strip how would you vote?
Total: For 62% Against 26% Other 12%
Likud voters: For 54% Against 36%
Labor voters: For 73% Against 19%
[.....]

Do you think that the Israeli public is close or far from civil war?
Total: Close 36% Far 52% Other 12%
Likud voters: Close 43% Far 50%
Labor Voters: Close 42% Far 54%

Danny Rubenstein in Haaretz says that the Israeli setters, who have already conquered the West Bank, are actually turning their sights around and trying to rule Israel. An interesting argument!

From the Palestinians' perspective, and apparently not only theirs, the real battle has recently moved entirely onto the Israeli side of the court. There, one of the sides in Israel is well-defined. These are the Jewish settlers in the territories and their allies, who are doing with the territories what they think is good for Israel - that is, doing whatever they please. They grab land and properties, for the most part in accordance with plans that are defined in advance and with government budgets. They set up settlements and outposts, mark what they think should be Israel's border, and shape the way the Arabs who live there are controlled.

The other side - the Israeli government and its mechanisms - is harder to define because at least in the West Bank, the government of Israel does not exist. If it does, it appears in the form of Jewish settlers. On the weekend, for example, Deputy Defense Minister Ze'ev Boim declared that the Israel Defense Forces will not be able at this time to demand that Jewish settlers who have illegally seized shops owned by Arabs in Hebron's wholesale market, clear out.

The IDF will also not be able to protect Arab olive-harvesters who are attacked by Jewish settlers, and the evacuation of the outposts has already become a joke. Palestinian spokesmen cite many examples of how the settlers and the Israeli government in the territories are one and the same. A significant proportion of the people in Israel's administration and security forces in the West Bank are inhabitants of the Jewish settlements there, and many of them see the rulings by the rabbis of Yesha (the settlers' acronym for Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, which also means "salvation" in Hebrew) and the decisions of the Yesha Council as authoritative and legitimate.

In this context it can be said that the political battle that has moved onto the Israeli side of the field is abandoning the territories of the West Bank and is moving inside Israel proper. The state of the Jewish settlers, which has won in Yesha, is now trying to rule all of Israel.

Hard to know how to respond to that one. At least we know that the second Bush administration will continue its pattern of excellent decisionmaking.

I will have to merge my Campaign 2004 and Israel-Palestine topics: for a rather graphic example of the Republican-Likud merger, check out Republicans Abroad-Israel. Norm Coleman is smiling there, sharing a sign saying "Minnesotans in Israel for Bush."

CIA, Homeland Security visit HongPong.com — the big eye makes modem blink

Why have I been silent for a while here? It is not that I'm being lazy out in the Real World. Between four classes, a radio show, editing the newspaper and all the election stuff, it's really hard for me to get onto here and give you all something new to look at.

In no small part because I had a conversation with Michael Ledeen on Friday during Macalester's International Roundtable conference. I feel like my unbalanced little moral universe has totally spun off its bearings. Yet I now understand the neoconservative mindset much better than before. This is not comforting nor relaxing information to find out about. So I haven't been sure what to say about it yet. We will have something in the Mac Weekly about it later this week.

Still, the website gets hits from all over, and the nature of these global information networks still amazes me. And yet again, the government and the military are all over my shit.

I finally got around to looking at the HongPong.com access log, and I found that traffic is quite high right now, higher than my sputtering efforts here probably deserve.

So I have not looked at the site's traffic patterns for awhile. In the last week, there have been an average 356 requests for pages a day. That's not too bad. Traffic has tapered off a bit during September, but there is a lot of variability any given day, from 200 to 500 hits.

Somewhere among these visits came the Central Intelligence Agency, although apparently they were on a Google search for 'tower bridge terrorism.' I just ran this search and found an old post about my London trip up on the third results page, above MSNBC and National Review stories.

I wonder if the CIA's visit was just a spider logging information about terrorism. That wouldn't surprise me any more than CENTCOM's visit to my Iraq page this summer.

The Department of Homeland Security came by looking for "unedited iraqi prison photos and videos." I don't have those. But I feel safer already.

Someone from the State Department came in on Google via searching for "Dan Senor CPA Israel neo-con" and I didn't disappoint them! (that's the second time I've gotten a search critical of neoconservatives from the State Department!)

There also seems to be an uptick in the number of visitors from Israel, including the Tel Aviv University and Weizmann Institute of Science, as well as the mysterious barak.net.il.

A Palestinian newspaper searching for information about radio transmitters found something totally irrelevant here. This would mark the first connection to my site from the West Bank that I've detected. So the site projects some sort of minute, momentary effect on the situation. That's pretty sweet.

Other strange visitors include mail3.JohnKerry.com, a Russian dating site called your-ideal.com, a couple hits from Brandeis and Stanford. There are quite a few folks from the Netherlands and Pakistan this time, as well. I won't get into the country list now.

I got a couple hits from Army computers who came in on Google searched for "helicopter video kills" and "video of riot control," both of which connected with old stories. The Air Force and Navy have also been visiting on similar Google searches.

Another hit came over something called nipr.mil, described as

Nipr.mil is not a single domain a but a hush-hush web proxy that acts as a gateway for hundreds of U.S. military domains in order to hide their identities. It was established by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) in response to a memorandum (CM-5 1099, INFOCOM) issued in March 1999 by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling for "actions to be taken to increase the readiness posture for Information Warfare." "Uncontrolled Internet connections," the document says, "pose a significant and unacceptable threat to all Department of Defense information systems and operations.

Ok, good the information warfare people are here. Nice. Another Army hit came from a Google search for 'tactical humint team team leader' where surprisingly enough, I am on the first results page due to a blockquote in a story about Army deserters. Great, now some computer thinks my site has sympathy for deserters. I wonder how many bad juju points I get for that.

The prize for funniest scary government computer name goes to:
moses.radium.ncsc.mil

More interested government agencies these days include:

• Dept of Treasury: Customs computers (searching for info about 9/11 tapes?!!)
• The General Services Administration: I think they handle ordering the pens
• U.S. Postal Service
• The Denver Bureau of Land Management returns!
• NASA Gerf, whatever that is.
• The Brazilian Administrative Agency.
• The Chicago office of the Department of Energy

I just found this list that someone made about Big Brother computers watching them. It's roughly like that around here! Hurray Tech!!

Web hosting flips over to new server

I have set up MovableType on the new machine, and it's humming along nicely. I'm quite relieved to stop web serving from this computer and move it onto another server.

Once again, big ups to Dan Schned for finding this machine. Gotta keep plugging now... Please let me know if you find missing files, but I know there's still a big batch of them.

Now all functions should be quite a bit faster, including searches. Hurray!!

Last call

Ok, this is the last round of stories to throw up before I clean up the computer for some hard-core graphics stuff, so....

Chalmers Johnson, the author of Sorrows of Empire and an all-around interesting analyst, says that the troop realignment is a weird gesture, but then again, nothing that the Bush Administration does makes any sense.

In Iraq, Sadr wants to talk. Or not. He is so damn twitchy, it's ridiculous. The 8-day battle grinds to a stalemate. So is Sadr actually a unifying factor? This Pepe Escobar piece says it is... Pepe is one of those anti-Bush folks who always has something interesting going on, but I'm not sure if I find it as credible, as, say, Robert Fisk or Jim Lobe, two other journalists in funky territory.

Meanwhile arms inspector David Kay faults the pre-war intelligence.

Some atoms flew in formation. Wow. I don't get the science involved, but hey, why not?

Clarification on Comcast

Paul commented that

So I'm paying Comcast to fix your puppy chewed outlet? Sheesh.

Oh wait. I don't have Comcast.

Whatever. They're all the same.

That isn't what I meant to convey. The outlet in question was up on the pole in the alley. The puppy didn't do it. The actual term for the fried thing is the 'line tap,' I think, inside the box on the telephone that the cable connects to. And Comcast fixed it for free, because we pay them plenty as it is, so they better fix their own boxes when they get messed up.

Paul would be one of the people I took a class with this summer. He sports the blog Bush-haters.blogspot.com. Big ups to him for stopping by. Next time I'll clarify that we don't have too much electronic puppy sabotage going around here... at least so far.

The consequences that are rendered

Ok, so right now I am sitting in the computer lab at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities West Bank, where I took an electronic arts class. My video is rendering for what I hope will be the final time.

The process of making a DVD entails generating a huge MPEG-2 video file that DVD Studio Pro burns onto DVD-Rs. This process works best when the computer processes the whole video stream twice?or two-pass variable bit-rate encoding. It just started the second pass about 10 minutes ago.

In a delightful turn of events, the DVD recording of John Kerry's appearance at Macalester that I ordered from C-SPAN in the middle of last month finally showed up this morning. I brought it straight into the lab here and extracted my 15 seconds of C-SPAN fame for the project. This would be "Fair Use" if such a thing still exists.

Having just written about DVD decryption for my journalism law class, it was interesting to try the process again. The tools are easier than ever to find. The indispensible VersionTracker readily lists several programs that will hack DVD copyright protections for you, a gutsy step considering that not too long ago, those who linked to DeCSS got their butts kicked in court.

So in other words, to get DVD footage into a personal project on the Mac, it is basically a two-step process. First, extract the chapters you need with DVD2oneX, which works even if you haven't registered (and don't forget to get the audio as well). This will produce a decrypted .VOB file inside a VIDEO_TS folder on your hard drive. Then use the freeware MPEG Streamclip to turn the .VOB file into whatever format you need, in my case a digital video stream.

It took quite a bit of fiddling to find the programs and get it working, but the results are undeniable. Now I've really got the kicker for the end of my disc. Hurry up and render now!!!!!!

In other grand news,
HongPong.com has another blog... bumm bumm bumm...

That dark denizen of Wild Canyon, Mordred himself, i.e. Nick Petersen, is going to shower us with his irregularly formed thoughts on an intermittent basis. Or else he will take us to David Brooks-like heights of flowery mescal divinations.

The new blog is located at http://www.hongpong.com/mordred, and I will be setting up some new menus and update boxes so that Nick's latest is excerpted on the front page.

Nick also has a posting account to this page, as well, so he may yet add some wisdom to the front page, if he so chooses. And Nick has just informed me that his associate Leroy Babolian is about to make his first post.

Further down the road, I have secured the donation of one aged Dell Pentium 4/1.1GHz machine to act as a Linux server once I return from a family wedding after this weekend. We will probably institute something like TikiWiki, Scoop or PHP-Nuke for our global plot to thwart control of everything.

I will be gone from Wednesday to Sunday, up in the mountains above Salt Lake City, participating in a most modern ceremony. Should be fun.

CENTCOM meets HongPong.com, rabbit blogs

Heh, I just ran my server logs for the first time in ages. Seems that my May-June logs went down the memory hole somewhere, which is too bad... The results for the past few weeks have been spectacular, despite my incredible laziness in keeping the site up.

Military surfers took their fiercest interest yet, as I got hits from korea.army.mil, as well as nipr.mil, a mysterious firewall developed by the DoD, as detailed in this blog. andrews.af.mil and eglin.af.mil, maxwell.af.mil, Andrews, Eglin and Maxwell Air Force bases I would presume, also stopped by. gate5-sandiego.nmci.navy.mil, the Navy Marine Corps Intranet, also came thru to the site. blackhawk.goodfellow.af.mil is the most badass sounding. Multiple mach blog surfing??

It looks like all three branches of the federal government, the Australian defense department and several bits of the military think that HongPong.com is just fantastic!! Considering I'm so lazy, that's one hell of an impact.

From further afield in the .mil we get even more interesting entries:

walker-cache.korea.army.mil

gateway5.osd.mil - Office of Secretary of Defense??!?!?

iern.disa.mil Defense Intelligence Services Agency

And the granddaddy hit of hits:

cache1.iraq.centcom.mil

Ladies and gentlemen, CENTCOM was here. Thank you.

denver-254.blm.gov - Bureau of Land Management?!
gov.calgary.ab.ca - Government of Calgary

housegate4.house.gov - The House is in the house.

gk-central-100.usps.gov - Post Office too. What agency isn't hanging out here?!?
gtwy.uscourts.gov - Ahh, the federal courts.
defence.gov.au - And the fine Australian defense department.
nhtsa.dot.gov - The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (they are watching my driving!)
ssa.gov - Social Security Administration
sherman.state.gov - State Department!!

I would like to pull a couple lines from my server logs.... evidence of a technological victory, if not a moral one. The entire contents of my Iraq page was downloaded by the CENTCOM Iraq computer...

[IP deleted] - - [15/Jul/2004:18:16:34 -0500] "GET /hp-archives/topics/iraq/index.html HTTP/1.1" 200 688128 "http://www.hongpong.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"

Meanwhile, we determine that the person at the State Department ran a search for "Chalabi" and "Zell" back in April!

[IP deleted] - - [23/Apr/2004:14:25:19 -0500] "GET /hp-archives/000104.html HTTP/1.0" 200 11699 "http://www.google.com/search?q=chalabi+zell&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&start=10&sa=N" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

This is quite surprising, and I'm not sure how to feel about it. On the whole, I feel I've been brutally as honest as I could have been. I am glad that they got the page and looked at it... or didn't. Who knows? I have removed the IP numbers, despite their public nature, as I wouldn't want to anger the ECHELON system too much today.

As long as everyone is paying attention, I should quickly point out that Kat has an ethereal nightvision picture on the apparently rabbit-run blog fury & frost, itself a side project of Kat's sister at Glucose who helped develop the weather popup menu WeatherPop.

Here's to my growing community of national security readers!! Huzzah! If I'm not a particle in the grand conspiracy yet, at least I may influence some other particles...

New version of Camino web browser

Earlier this week Josh Aas told me that a new version of one of the leading OS X web browsers (for we have many) is about to be released. In this case, the browser is Camino, which is quite fast. Camino is an open-source project of the Mozilla foundation, and Josh is one of the Mac programmers involved. You can download the nearly finished daily builds of 0.8 right now— however these are not guaranteed to work perfectly. Josh is especially happy with the bookmark manager he worked on. It seems more useful than Safari's.

In other Apple news, Apple is patenting transparent windows, apparently in an effort to ward off Microsoft from stealing that for their next release of Windows. Here is a story about some of the other things they've patented. In here are some odd alternative ideas for things like the dock—and a mysterious map program?—that were never made.

I might be getting a digital camera soon. That is a very exciting possibility. Here is a story about hacking digital photos, as a promo for a new O'Reilly book about digital photography. Interesting stuff.

[UPDATE May 18] The beta version has officially been released late last night. You can get it.

Fixing site operations

I hope everyone voted in the MCSG elections today. That's the nice thing about Macalester: you get to vote to oppose forms of domination like capitalism and heteronormativity.* I would like to see St. Thomas and St. Kate's dare to offer such a resolution...

I have made some serious changes in the inner workings of the site, as some may have noticed. Now, when you go to an archive entry like the classic "Battle for Mesopotamia," there are 'breadcrumbs' that lead you back up the hierarchy of days / months / years, although I haven't developed a year index yet.

Also, the URLs for archive entries are now different, such that each entry is down inside nested year, month and day folders, while the actual entry has its title in the URL, such as http://www.hongpong.com/hp-archives/2003/03/26/the_battle_for_mesop.html . I have a nice little yellow box that tells which topics have been deemed relevant to the post.

I have made index pages for each category work a little better, and there are now month archives, but there is a strange glitch in there that I haven't fixed (with the blue "posted XY date" bit appearing intermittently).

I have also improved the master archive listings, but they are not quite as good as I would like.

For now, I am leaving all the old log entries' HTML files in place, so that search engines and people who (anyone?) might have linked here will still be able to access it. However these pages can no longer be reached from the site normally.

So in other words, it is still progressing, even though what I changed this week was really the nut of what seemed incomplete to me. Also the About Me page is nice but relatively uninformative and pointless. I would really appreciate any suggestions, so email or instant message me with your ideas.

I am also hoping to get some kind of aesthetically pleasing photo / image gallery system that actually integrates with the site working, but I haven't found good stuff to do it with yet.

I am also planning to put together a little floating box at the top of the front page with my key links for following the news, and highlighting various special features on the site that have vanished into the archives.

Here is a nice site with really excellent layout and a lot of tips: Bryan Bell. He has a link today to a huge batch of great OS X icons representing all different types of Mac hardware. Time to get a 512K hard drive icon.

*Yes, the computer's spell checker does not understand what 'heteronormativity' is.

Site traffic up!

I have not checked the web traffic level here in quite some time. I have known this site to have high traffic at times, especially after I put up my protest pictures back in the day, and got links from several places.

However, I haven't run an analysis on the numbers since this version of the site started in January. My logfiles may have a chunk missing around March 12, although there were technical problems when I went to London that knocked HongPong.com off for a while. It wouldn't be a surprise that traffic fell when I went on break, in any case.

date	#pages	#reqs	Mbytes
Mar/29/04	91	180	4.77	
Mar/30/04	258	317	6.15	
Mar/31/04	66	155	4.04	
Apr/ 1/04	196	524	15.08	
Apr/ 2/04	248	428	15.43

I have published the web traffic analysis produced by the fine free tool Analog. I used to use third-party counters but then I got tired of their whole method. Although there is nothing particularly wrong with them, I prefer to do it myself.

The report shows that there have been at least a few hits from all over the place, including Turkey, Israel, Japan, Hong Kong and Mexico. Also the most popular day was March 30, followed by April 2nd. (I have filtered out log entries from accessing at my own computer as well as the one I use at work)

I did not have referrer logging turned on, which is key to determining which sites the traffic comes from. I have turned it on now. I suspect most of those hits came from DailyKos postings I made, considering that the biggest waves in years past have usually come from a link in other forum comments.

It is a promising graph right now, but as you can see it has tapered off for a few days. Time to engineer some hits. w00p w00p!

Also you might care to note that both military and government computers have been here. That's interesting.

#pages	%pages	#reqs	%reqs	Mbytes	%bytes	domain

1318	44.77%	2272	35.76%	47.02	32.61%	.com (Commercial)

594	20.18%	1299	20.44%	36.28	25.16%	[unresolved numerical addresses]

327	11.11%	1082	17.03%	27.24	18.89%	.net (Networks)

159	5.40%	826	13.00%	13.60	9.43%	.edu (US Higher Education)

338	11.48%	347	5.46%	4.29	2.97%	.org (Non Profit Making Organizations)

11	0.37%	53	0.83%	3.10	2.15%	.nl (Netherlands)

68	2.31%	75	1.18%	1.87	1.30%	.jp (Japan)

2	0.07%	24	0.38%	1.50	1.04%	.fr (France)

32	1.09%	33	0.52%	1.41	0.98%	.pl (Poland)

11	0.37%	45	0.71%	1.34	0.93%	.ca (Canada)

7	0.24%	38	0.60%	1.27	0.88%	.au (Australia)

15	0.51%	49	0.77%	1.04	0.72%	.uk (United Kingdom)

2	0.07%	15	0.24%	0.64	0.44%	.de (Germany)

13	0.44%	48	0.76%	0.60	0.41%	.nz (New Zealand)

6	0.20%	27	0.42%	0.59	0.41%	.mil (US Military)

3	0.10%	8	0.13%	0.39	0.27%	.pt (Portugal)

4	0.14%	16	0.25%	0.28	0.20%	.se (Sweden)

3	0.10%	16	0.25%	0.28	0.20%	.ch (Switzerland)

5	0.17%	13	0.20%	0.25	0.18%	.hu (Hungary)

2	0.07%	2	0.03%	0.17	0.12%	.mx (Mexico)

2	0.07%	5	0.08%	0.15	0.11%	.tr (Turkey)

3	0.10%	14	0.22%	0.15	0.10%	.gov (US Government)

3	0.10%	9	0.14%	0.15	0.10%	.sg (Singapore)

3	0.10%	13	0.20%	0.15	0.10%	.us (United States)

1	0.03%	1	0.02%	0.13	0.09%	.it (Italy)

1	0.03%	1	0.02%	0.09	0.07%	.lk (Sri Lanka)

1	0.03%	1	0.02%	0.05	0.04%	.cz (Czech Republic)

3	0.10%	9	0.14%	0.05	0.03%	.be (Belgium)

1	0.03%	4	0.06%	0.03	0.02%	.il (Israel)

1	0.03%	4	0.06%	0.02	0.01%	.lt (Lithuania)

1	0.03%	1	0.02%	0.02	0.01%	.hk (Hong Kong)

3	0.10%	3	0.05%	0.01	0.01%	.sc (Seychelles)

A special thanks to the friends who've been coming since 2000, and to everyone else who finds my strange little project interesting.

I am going into the time of massive final projects now, so very soon I will not have much time at all to improve the functions of the site. If anyone has suggestions please let me know via comments below or email! Thanks again!!
HongPong.com traffic report (full)

TioDan operations commence

In the nick of time TioDan, i.e. the kosher slingin' guerilla Dan Schwartz, has started a El Blog de Tio at Blogspot, http://tiodan.blogspot.com . It is nice to see more friends undertaking such projects. He is also most interested in those dang mercenaries!

What is the key to successful blogging? That is a good question that I don't think about too much... The standard policy seems to be 'winging it.'

Hazardous glitches in system files found

This is some weird stuff. I found a whole bunch of system files with lots of garbage. This would affect compiling programs, which could explain why the compiler's been weird all along. Compiler said:
/usr/include/mach/exception_types.h:61:39: invalid suffix "s" on integer constant
/usr/include/mach/exception_types.h:61: error: stray '\10' in program
/usr/include/mach/exception_types.h:61:47: invalid suffix "R" on integer constant
/usr/include/mach/exception_types.h:61: error: stray '\352' in program
Meanwhile inside exception_types.h:

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Things inside /usr/include/mach are the "hooks" for compiled programs to "include" to talk to the computer correctly. If garbled, they won't work. This means I may have to go scanning the directory system to see if it is writing garbage all over. Ohhh dear. Site may go down tonight for checking this stuff.

There are also some indicators (CASIO, JPEG) that this stuff is related to the digital camera. There were some strange buffer overflows when the camera's image card was attached to my computer, so were things being written all over the drive? How alarming.

Mysterious cigarette spam

Alison sent me this weird spam she got:

I am a single serving friend. The continuation of our species matters more than you can imagine. It is the single most important thing we can do. I want you to hit me as hard as you can. I want you to hit me as hard as you.

Suddenly, he disappeared. I'd seen many of the same things I've seen before. He wanted to know more. I didn't have to say: can we change the meeting from 6 to 11? My kids have a music recital and I dont want to miss it for the world.

Don't do that, the cat pointed out. We're going to regret this, my friend said. My job was to apply the formula. Why do guys like you and me know what a duvet is?

This was a place without the internet, without email, without the rush of business meetings and untapped desires. That could well be the answer. But this was a long road, and should I walk down it, I might never come back. What is the answer? What are we going to do tonight? I asked.
YV9ub3JtYW44M0B5YWhvby5jb20=

Bloggers, bloggers everywhere

One nice thing going on today is the profusion of internet weblogs in places like Baghdad and Tehran. During the war Salam Pax got to be pretty well-known as 'the Baghdad Blogger.' I'd suggest looking at his look at the return of the Hashemite prince or the story of depressing Baghdad madness:

Actually we have been having pretty bad days. If you would have talked to me a week ago and I would have told you that I am very optimistic; maybe not optimistic but at least had hope. Now I can only think of two things. One of them was something my mother said while watching the news. She was watching something about the latest attacks on the "coalition forces" and their retaliation. She said that she has always wondered how people in Beirut and Jerusalem could have led any sort of lives, when their cities were practically military zones, she said she now knows how it feels to live in a city were the sight of a tank and military checkpoints asking you to get out your car and look thru your bag becomes "normal". When you turn on the TV and just hope that you don?t see more pictures of people shooting at each other.

The other thing was something a foreign acquaintance has said after spending some time in the city on a really hot day. He went in threw his hat on the floor and said loudly: "I want to inform my Iraqi friends that their country is doomed". I have no idea what that was about but the sentence just stuck to my mind.

Salam has started a photo-log too. Other Iraqi bloggers include 'G in Baghdad,' who describes an encounter with a captured Syrian teenager in an American-run hospital, or the dual reality of the Iraqi mind:

Here in Iraq every citizen was provided -since the early days of the regime- with a whole set of lies that gradually became the foundation on which you would build your perceptions of the world outside. Consequently you end up with two channels, a "channel reality" that is off the air most of the times and "channel rhetoric" a mixture of self-denial, conspiracy theory [apologia] and propaganda.

Of course we shouldn?t blame Saddam and his lies based tyrannical regime only, this phenomenon has its roots deep in our cultural/religious history. Nowadays the main question every Iraqi is trying to answer, since the removal of our beloved leader is: (how should I feel towards the Americans?) and (is the American "liberation / occupation" a good or bad thing?). Don?t expect an answer from me here, until we have our first Gallup poll in Iraq all what you will get is mere speculations-observations gibberish...

I think one of the main issues we have to face, is how to stop using the rhetoric channel, how could we stop this cog mire of stupid conspiracy theories going on and on and on how to liberate our selves from the secret police mechanisms nesting in our brains, this liberation will not be achieved by American tanks, nor by a self-denial flagellation process.

G also has a photolog going now. There's an Iraqi female blogger named Zainab writing now too.

Iran has experienced an upsurge in blogging as well, as View from Iran and Blue Bird Escape look at Iran from inside. Persian Blogger Chronicles is grad student Alireza Doostar's attempt to chart this new form of information as it emerges from Iran.

While on the topic of blogs, notorious uber-blonde right-winger Ann Coulter supposedly has a weblog now, but it hasn't really started. She must be building up steam and bleaching those locks...

There are a whole lot of other blogs out there to check out. Here's a few:

• BuzzMachine carries a nice mixture of news and looks at lots of different bloggers and viewpoints.
• Talking Points Memo is written by Josh Marshall, who has written marvellous pieces on neoconservatives for the Washington Monthly
• AndrewSullivan.com, a very widely known blogger, known for sporting a very conservative homosexual lifestyle.
• Warblogs.cc combines a lot of different feeds from Agonist.org, dailykos.com and others.
• Why not? The official Howard Dean for President weblog.
• I just found Israel's Israpundit.
• The hard core of Israel's internet crew could be found at Haganah b'Internet, perched on the right wing. Also has an amazing collection of links to Arab terrorist websites.
• Instapundit is pretty well-known random punditry.
• Tacitus provides your basic rightist, support-the-war viewpoint.
• unmedia gives a lot of various agreeable stuff.
• The guy who writesThis Modern World, that amazing pop-art political comic, also keeps a weblog. He's an articulate and funny guy.
• I just found Shi'a Pundit, with a tolerant view of religious conflict.
• Also just found USS Clueless, looking at US strategy and other such things...
• CounterSpin is pretty well known.
• If you're looking for quick and nasty things to say about Bush look at MediaChannel.org's news dissector.
• Diplomatica.org rambles on about international politics.

If those don't provide hours of entertainment I don't know what would. Apparently anyone who blogs is just enjoying secondhand reality, anyhow.

Riot control

When you just gotta overrun a rowdy crowd, why not do it in style? The Talon Riot Control Vehicle, an armored truck, will solve your problems with a spotlight, water cannon, CS gas grenade launcher and other exciting features. As the promotional booklet describes it:

Today, in even the most sophisticated communities, the public resort to serious urban or area violence in reaction to the most trivial actions of governments or by other sectors holding opposing views. Matters which in previous times would be highlighted and perhaps resolved by open meetings, petitions and other forms of moderate confrontation now provoke upsurges of violence and destruction on a massive scale.... The Talon support vehicle has been developed specifically to offer assistance to government agencies trying to uphold the social fabric and the rule of law in their countries... Talon puts in the hands of police or the civil authorities a valuable weapon in the fight against those who would overthrow the established order. The use of Talon will restore stability with minimal casualties thus avoiding local or international outcries against the excessive use of force or aggressive tactics. Talon is today's answer to today's problems.

Check out the truck pictures. Apparently most of the units were sold to middle eastern countries, surprising as that is. Also there's a BBC video of the truck causing some havoc.

Bush whorin' for baccy, dangerous Canadians and the new iBling

The Washington Post is righteously angry over the Bush Administration's efforts to redraw an international treaty on tobacco, to make it easier for tobacco companies to push around small nations, and prey upon teenagers. (link from Nick) Real compassionate conservatism:

Although domestic sales of cigarettes are shrinking, Philip Morris International announced that it expects its earnings to grow 10 percent this year, continuing the trend of this decade. In many of its growing markets, such as Russia, Cambodia and Poland, there are fewer obstacles to practices such as distributing free cigarettes in clubs teenagers are known to frequent. For these countries, the treaty is the best defense against the lobbying of big tobacco companies. Like any international treaty, this one would lose clout if the United States failed to sign. But it would lose all its meaning if the Bush administration won this last concession.

A dangerous Canadian writes that "U.S. says Canada cares too much about liberties," in the Ottowa Citizen. It's all in response to a report from the US State Dept. about terrorism trends and lazy unsecured Canucks. This has much to do with Canadian privacy rights, and even Canadian policy on marijuana.

The same report took issue with Canada's move to make possession of small amounts of marijuana a ticketing offence rather than a criminal one. "This will not only harm Canadian society, but have consequences for the United States as well," the report said. Justice Minister Martin Cauchon reiterated yesterday that legislation to decriminalize marijuana will be tabled soon.

Don't the maple leaf people understand moral certainty?!(slashdot link) I wonder what the consequences of that legal reform would be for a border state like us. Hmmmmmmmm...

On a very positive digital note, Apple Computer's new iTunes Music Store sold more than a million songs in its first week. Apple released iTunes 4, which has sweet new features such as streaming your whole music library over networks. The mighty Steve Jobs happily declared, "In less than one week we?ve broken every record and become the largest online music company in the world. Apple has created the first complete solution for the digital music age?you can purchase your favorite music online at the iTunes Music Store, mix your favorite tracks into playlists with iTunes, and take your entire music collection with you everywhere with the super-slim new iPods." The man has a touch of hubris, but he's right. Apple wins! I am pleased as punch to be an Apple shareholder today. Hells yeah!