Saturday, May 10th, 2008

Time	Event
4:10a	Cheney is still alive! Working as night porter in Bates motel WASHINGTON - Former CIA operative Valerie Plame is trying to resurrect a lawsuit against those in the Bush administration she says illegally disclosed her identity. A federal judge dismissed Plame's lawsuit last year, saying there was no basis to bring a case. Plame's lawyers asked a federal appeals court Friday to send the case back before the judge and force him to consider its merits. Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, sued Vice President Dick Cheney; his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby; former White House political adviser Karl Rove and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Plame's CIA position was revealed in a syndicated newspaper column in 2003, during a time when her husband was criticizing the march to war in Iraq. Armitage and Rove were the original sources for that story, which Plame believes was retribution for Wilson's criticism. The article touched of a lengthy criminal investigation. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald never charged anyone with the leak but convicted Libby of obstruction and lying to investigators. During the trial, it was revealed that Libby and former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer also discussed Plame with reporters. Plame says those leaks violated her constitutional rights. But U.S. District Judge John D. Bates dismissed the case, saying the law requires Plame's complaints be raised under the Privacy Act. Plame's attorneys say that law is insufficient. They asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to send the case back to Bates for reconsideration. With the exception of Cheney, those named in Plame's lawsuit have left the administration. END President peanut joined in a criminal conspiracy to cover-up the crimes of the pervert neocon Irving Libby but the real nut of this is the main reason proffered for starting an aggressive illegal war - the Supreme crime according to Nuremberg precedent. This main reason was a binary weapon of mass distraction and without fresh uranium falls apart. That the cover up is ongoing may be seen by the 21 words directly following the 'retracted' 16 words. ( Not retracted at all at the W/house website) The story of these 21 words is best told by the Jim Moore, 'Judy tubes of terror' post @ Huffpo http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/judy-and-the-litt_b_5117.html The democrats have dropped most investigations into this massive criminal enterprise as many of them collaborated in it and they are presently distracted by dividing themselves into bitter squabbling sects. So the outstanding problem of the world is to to expose this neocon instigated plot - destroy the power of the last empire through netbased attacks on the heart of the military-entertainment death star. The rebel alliance is well advanced in this as a weakness has been discovered - many anarchists died getting us this knowledge - the weakness is centered in the twin core motors of the last empire - god and the state, so Darth Cheneys days are numbered. The force is with us online. (Comment on this)
4:29a	Tour de force Murry in America As a victim/veteran of the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-1972) I cannot take seriously any discussion of America's role in the world that does not proceed from Barbara Tuchman's classic definition of it: namely, "Folly," or "the pursuit of policy contrary to self interest." Two iron laws of mindless bureaucratic growth explain how President Eisenhower's quaint "Military-Industrial Complex" has essentially self-inflated to the point of consuming America's capacity for rational self-government and effective policy-making. The ludicrous and completely unforced American reprise of Vietnam II in today's middle-eastern Bay of Goats only adds the insult of historical amnesia to the self-injury of vapid, venal vainglory. Expressed as a simple algebraic formula, American domestic/foreign "policy" amounts to this: PARKINSON'S LAW + THE PETER PRINCIPLE = LUNATIC LEVIATHAN. Or, the (unnecessary, made-up) "work" will expand to fill the (endless) time alloted for its (non) completion, while people in the hidebound hierarchy rise to their level of incompetence, producing nothing of value but only debilitating Warfare Welfare and Makework Militarism. Or, as the Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swindburne wrote at the conclusion of "A Forsaken Garden": Here now in his triumph, when all things falter Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead. Bluntly but fairly: America has crawled up its own constipated "conservative" asshole and nearly died -- again. In fact, crypto-fascist domestic religious-politics reign supreme in America and have since at least since America's evangelical missionaries drove the so-called "Open Door" (i.e., equal colonial rights in subjugated China) policy at the begining of the twentieth century. Professor Tuchman accurately observed (at the end of her book Stillwell and the American Experience in China) that a half-century later, "China went her own way as if the Americans had never come." Ditto for Southeast Asia a quarter century after that. Ditto for Iraq and Afghanistan soon. In fact, as Professor Tuchman stated in her classic The March of Folly, the American government reacts mainly to "intimidation by the rabid right at home" which proceeds from the social and psychological instigation and exploitation of various-and-nebulous public dreads like "Monolithic World Communism" or today's favorite closet monster, "Global World Terrorism." When Gore Vidal called Americans "among the most easily frightened people on earth," he did not exaggerate our tawdry temerity. We Americans "go to war" by going shopping on our posterity's already-overdrawn credit card. What sentient carbon-based life form above the level of the amaoeba could possibly consider us as anything but dangerously crazy? Anyone who could dignify America's fascist-consumed Orwellian self-destruction by assuming it "thought out" or "reality based" needs their indidual and/or collective heads examined. Intimidation by the rabid right at home explains everything one needs to understand about the "conservative" American government from President Harry Truman through Dick Cheney's puerile propaganda-catapult, Deputy Dubya Bush. Attempting to cloak crass institutional credulity in the melliflously modulated mush of delicate doublethink fails to disguise the truth of what we drafted or bullied-into-enlisting types said back in the day in Southeast Asia: namely, that ... "We are the unwilling led by the unqualified to do the unnecessary for the ungrateful." "We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here." "We lost the day we started. We win the day we stop." Updated to today's cliche-spewing rendition of the same madness: "The tipping point will soon turn the corner and begin connecting the dots on the ink-stained flypaper dominoes in the tunnel at the end of the light." Americans most need to discuss mental illness -- their own -- and cease presuming to understand what happens in other countries who most often go their own way as if us bungling, meddling Americans had never come. Posted by Michael Murry FROM http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/05/08/is_neoconservatism_the_america/ (Comment on this)
4:38a	'We'll move Left' Neocon godfather Bill Kristol Or back left in many cases. Take Michael Costa. Here is a classic left Neocon quoting the devilish scripture of Milton Friedman in order to help 'wither away the state'! The lunar right neocons are increasingly being exposed and isolated - faster please! But the numbers of leftist neocons is increasing. These merge seamlessly with characters like the Clinton's, Gordon Brown and Kevin Rudd. ' We're all Wilsonians now' Lest we forget the Leninist 'Left turn' in the last twenties that was when Marxism ( Bottom line neocon totalizing ideology comes down from Plato via Marx) went from merely murdering thousands to slowly torturing millions to agonizing deaths. Remember the Holodomor. Trotsky and Rosa both approved of the Left turn. So do a lot of authoritarian democratic socialists today approve of Bills move left. Clearly millions of lives are at grave risk until we take out all the neocon trash. (Comment on this)
4:55a	Perils of Paulinism Never Thought I'd Say It How far off track is Hillary's campaign? It's so bad even Peggy Noonan is making sense, painful as that is to say. --David Kurtz http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121027865275678423.html?mod=opinion_columns_featured_lsc Political junkies only. This thing of ours...the Res publica is a Latin phrase, literally meaning "public thing" (Comment on this)
5:04a	All American Hood From the New York Times:( via Firedoglake ) When the Pentagon announced in March that Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood would become the senior American officer based in Pakistan, it reflected the military’s aim to put a crisis-tested veteran in a critical job at a pivotal time in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal areas. But nearly two months later, the military has quietly canceled the assignment of General Hood, a 33-year Army veteran who was excoriated in the Pakistani news media for one of his previous jobs: commander of the United States prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. During General Hood’s command from 2004 to 2006, military authorities force-fed with tubes detainees who were engaging in hunger strikes at the Guantánamo prison, a step they justified as necessary to prevent the prisoners from committing suicide to protest their indefinite confinement. Also during General Hood’s tenure, reports that an American guard may have desecrated a Koran stirred wide protests in the Islamic world. The decision to withdraw General Hood’s assignment has not been announced, but it appears to reflect the widening shadow that the military prison at Guantánamo is casting over American foreign policy. While the United States considers Pakistan a close ally in its counterterrorism efforts, the accounts by Pakistanis who have returned to Pakistan after being held at Guantánamo Bay have added to anti-American sentiment in the country. Several leading Pakistani military and foreign affairs commentators denounced General Hood’s selection in recent weeks, calling on their new government to block his appointment. In interviews this week, American military officials said they had reluctantly concluded that General Hood’s effectiveness could be seriously hindered, and that his personal safety might even be at risk if he were to take up the post.' The personal safety of all screws volunteering for death-row duties should be at risk. The personal safety of all cops. The personal safety of all stormtroopers. The personal safety of all neocons and all their families and friends. The personal safety of all media moguls. The personal safety of all top politicians and bureaucrats. These should all be in play - and with PAM* the Terminatrix they can easily be put in play. ( just my 2$) *Policy analysis markets (Comment on this)
5:18a	Friday scatblogging Friday scatblogging — pornworld edition Let’s just jump right to the facts: Next month, Ira Isaacs, a 57-year-old Los Angeles–based video director, will sit center stage at what may be the most extreme obscenity trial in U.S. history. There's no question the titles are extreme: Laurie’s Toilet Show, Mako’s First Time Scat, Gang Bang Horse (Pony Sex Game), and Hollywood Scat Amateurs No. 7 — the last of which Isaacs directed himself — feature coprophagy and bestiality. So, is this “art,” or even if we aren’t that charitable… Meanwhile, that’s not just a head, that’s art that Radar has to lead off the story. (If you don’t believe it’s art, read the artist’s name that’s part of the photo URL.) Socratic gadfly @blogger pic of Dada urinal ( Duchamp) (If you don’t believe it’s art, read the artist’s name that’s part of the photo URL.) ( R Mutt ) But, the bottom line is … Is it free speech? (Isaac’s videos, that is.) Hell, yes. The government dropped two counts that Isaacs didn’t properly document the age of people in the films. So, it’s just over what is “obscene.” Frankly, the whole “(no) redeeming social value” criterion is obsolete from where I sit. First, what social group or subgroup are we talking about? Can Isaacs claim that a jury of his peers should consist of like-minded hardcore porn producers? Without agreeing that what Isaacs produces is “art,” I don’t doubt that what he produces makes money, enough money to show there’s a fair-sized social group getting some sort of “redeeming” value from it: There was a guy who shit in a can and sold it for the price of gold. [In 1961, Italian conceptual artist Piero Manzoni canned his feces in 90 tins and sold them for the price of their weight in gold.] About when he got busted: There’s FBI all over the place. But I’ll tell you, they were very, very pleasant people. They were really nice. Those guys would rather be fighting terrorism than being the sex police. The FBI guy was as curious as you are. He asked me, “Off the record,” he asked me, “How do you convince girls to do this kind of stuff?” I said, “I do it very well.” I am laughing my head off at some Mormon FBI agent from BYU or University of Utah (the FBI explicitly recruits both campuses) taking notes, and a “Hmmm” moment hitting the back of the frontal lobes of this straitlaced Mormon brain. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors know they don’t have much of a case, I guess: They offer me a plea deal. I met with them at the beginning of March [2007]. They say, “Take a year and half.” I said no. Then they call me up, and they say four months in prison and four months house arrest. And I turned that down. Shit, they’re begging, just to get a conviction for some BushCo U.S. Attorney to mail back to D.C. and Alberto Gonzales (at that time). And, Isaacs has irony: The only thing I regret is not putting Bach in the background. I agree that the feds will have a hell of a time trying to convict him in LA. 1 vote Labels: First Amendment, free speech, pornography, scatblogging Posted by Gadfly (Comment on this)
5:50a	Radically unsound "Opinion is gaining ground that doctrinaire neo-conservative theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century: and a terminal product as well - something akin to a dinosaur or a zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity." Actually this about Freud not Marx this time. http://human-nature.com/freud/tallis.html The sheer crankiness of Freud's ideas was concealed by his marvellous prose, which gave the ideas a veneer of clarity and a feeling of inevitability. Most cranks write badly. Moreover, his lunacy came from an unexpected angle: just like real science, analytical theory was difficult, technical, tough minded, and counterintuitive. His work also seemed at first to offer liberation-from prudishness, hypocrisy, and oppressive institutionalised religion, to 'which he gave a secular interpretation that put it in its place as a distorted expression of human desires. And, although his vision of humanity was not merely diminishing but also impoverishing, it was richly elaborated and wonderfully expressed. Freud had an untrammelled imagination (fuelled in the crucial years by cocaine) and a wonderful ability to connect the remotest corners of his intellectual world-to relate, as Webster puts it, "the sexual anatomy of prehistoric birds to the obstinacy of 2-year-old children and the organic evolution of crocodiles to the meanness of Viennese aristocrats". - MORE ON http://www.amazon.com/Moving-Beyond-Words-Breaking-Boundries/dp/0671510525 * A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein by John Kerr on 6 pages * Studies On Hysteria (Basic Books Classics) by Joseph Breuer on 4 pages * If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics by Marilyn Waring on 4 pages * Psychiatric Dictionary (Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary) by Robert Jean Campbell in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2) * In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development by Carol Gilligan on page 35, and Back Matter See all 99 books this book cites @ amazon (Comment on this)
6:09a	Bigoted jerk John Derbyshire '...Pinker puts Plato's cave at the center of his closing chapter, "Escaping the Cave," but as a starting point for a much more expansive view of human mental capability. We are not, he says, prisoners of some pre-set menu of thinkable thoughts. We can enlarge our understanding by the psycholinguistic tricks he has been describing—by dreaming up new metaphors and analogies. Our natural mental inclination regarding number, for example, is "one, two, many": yet we can educate children to manipulate numbers like 54,201. We can even, in higher mathematics, say nontrivial things about infinite numbers. Likewise in our social thinking: In the governance of institutions, openness and accountability can be reinforced by reminding people that the intuitions of truth they rely on in their private lives—their defense against being cheated or misinformed or deluded—also apply in the larger social arena. These reminders can militate against our natural inclinations towards taboo, polite consensus, and submission to authority. I am a great fan of Pinker's and I enjoyed this new book very much. Like his others, it breathes the spirit of good-natured, rational, humane inquiry. A few commentators—our own Steve Sailer, for instance—have criticized Pinker in the past for being excessively diplomatic about human group differences; but surely a scholar who has said in public that yes, men and women have different innate capabilities, and yes, Ashkenazi Jews have higher mean intelligence than the rest of us, and no, parenting styles have little effect on the maturation of personality, and a great many other things very shocking to the common sensibility of our times, is paying his dues. In any case, the only part of this new book likely to bring a blush to the cheek of a Chief Diversity Officer is one titled "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television," which is of course about swearing and taboo speech. If teenage boys still frequent bookstores, this chapter will be the best-thumbed one in shelf copies. - FROM http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Reviews/HumanSciences/thought.html (Comment on this)
6:23a	Second life solution Climate Policy Salad Published by dk.au LARVATUS PRODEO in Climate change, Energy, Environment, Policy and Technology . 18 Comments Fresh updates from the world of emissions trading: * GetUp has a new petition: Climate Need Not Corporate Greed. The premise is simple: call a spade a spade and make emissions trading actually impact emissions rather than just transfer $$$ to polluting industries. Also worth signing because it may be leverage against a tendency to overallocate that has been a consistent problem that previous cap and trade schemes such as US Markets in SO2, BP’s internal scheme and the EU ETS have had to come to terms with. * The BBC Reports that a plan for national Personal Carbon Trading for the UK, arguably one of the most ambitious, complex and comprehensive Neoliberal projects in recent times, has been shelved. DEFRA research into the proposals to give every adult in the UK a personal ‘allowance’ included interviews with 92 people. The money quote is one for all the national psycho-social historians, “Just straight away it reminds me of going back to the war and rationing.” * NSW Govt has announced it plans to join HSBC, NAB, Coldplay et al by becoming carbon neutral by 2020. The plan will include state-run operations like police, hospitals, schools, and power-stations. It looks like most of the emissions reductions will be made by eating koala buying carbon offsets rather than making significant changes to BAU. * PhD Comics has some sustainability tips. - END Water allocations didn't work out so well in the Murray darlings... but I still hold great hope for a rapid decline in air travel - a very high GG producer - this should come through the roll-out of ubiquitous broadband, better graphics cards and monitors and a steady increased quality of virtual worlds. Second life, GTA 4 and so on. Hurry up and wait. Newspapers and mail are both in rapid decline and this seems mainly due to the web so cancel that flight! (Comment on this)
7:02a	Richard Dawkins is god Dawkins work has come from a situation where religious fundamentalists in the US have undermined scientific research and education for their own religious ideological reasons, and frequently for political purposes. The “creationists” in the US have subverted scientific curricula, turned right-wing thought into dogma, and rational (ie based on reason) debate into a thing of the devil. Dawkins work “The Blind Watchmaker” directly attacked this type of unscientific thinking, “The God Delusion” is an attempt to critique the politics of it. Dawkins goes to great lengths to provide the very context Kevin is talking about in The God Delusion. It’s not Dawkins fault if his critics ignore the context and therefore misrepresent his argument. It should be noted that Mark has a poor understanding of Dawkin’s work and his underlying motivation. For example, Dawkins does not apriori dismiss tarot card reading or chinese medicine as outside the bounds of reason. He certainly does *not* limit “reason” to a subset of Western thought. He does, however, demand that if you make knowledge claims (eg. pinning a needle here will help relieve pain there) then the burden is on you to provide evidence in support. If you cannot provide evidence then your claims are not reasonable and we have every right to ignore them. If you *can* provide - and continue to provide - evidence (ie. the needle *did* relieve pain) then your claims are provisionally accepted until such time as counter-evidence presents itself. Kevin Brady May 9th, 2008 at 1:37 pm Mark: I agree with your implicit statement that political and economic power groups are the basis of the Christian Right in America. Furthermore, appeals to ‘reason’ are sometimes used to further the aims of these groups, and co-opt the disadvantaged at their own expense. I also agree with you that “the boundaries between irrationality and rationality are somewhat arbitrary”. This doesn’t mean, however, that there is no such thing as a ‘rational’ conclusion - a conclusion that most people (anywhere) would consider reasonable, or an irrational conclusion - a conclusion that most people would see as not reasonable. Now I know I assume a priveleged position here - the role of ‘most reasonbable people’ and who might or might not sit in such a group. But this is not a positivist, objectivist or an empiricist argument - I can hold any of these positions but still make the statement above. But the essential thing here is actually about addressing the mis-use of reason to, effectively, capture and enslave people to a cause. In my view, it is this that Dawkins is trying to do, which is why I have tried to come to his rescue. There is an entire industry in the US that attempts to use ‘reason’ to ‘prove’ the stories in the Bible. In my view - and as you have alluded to above - this is an industry that attempts to mould people’s thinking to the will of the existing power structures (consider the use of imlicit and sometimes explicit religious arguments in the invasion of Iraq, for example). In my opinion, Dawkins is asking people to see through religiously and politically inspired arguments to ask people to genuinely seek ‘evidence’. Again, I know it appears that I assume a privileged position for certain types of ‘evidence’ - this also need not be the case, and arguments based on a range of ‘evidence’ including spiritual and emotional can become part of the mix - so long as they are stated as such. MarkNo Gravatar May 9th, 2008 at 1:39 pm Thanks, Kevin. I’m happy to acknowledge Dawkins’ good faith and good intention I think some of them are indeed ideologically driven. The folk I was refering to were probably the latter. You mention the Discovery Institute, but this is only one of the multi-million dollar organisations that are involved in this chicanery. It is a massive industry in the US, with theme parks and assorted paraphernalia. My particular beef is its impact on education. As I said above, in my view it is a way to subvert critical thinking (or any sort of thinking really) in the population at large. - EXTRACTS FROM http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/05/07/distant-suns-iii-the-aristotelian-delusion/#more-6177 (Comment on this)
7:22a	Michael Gordon and Judith Miller are humans! The state of media ethics since the Jayson Blair scandal MarketWatch Observations from media critics and editors: * Ken Auletta: "I suspect that serious felons like Blair have been deterred. But cheating and cutting corners has not been." * Bill Keller: "Obviously there's no such thing as fail-safe in an institution run by human beings, but there is a pretty impressive list of safeguards we have put in place to protect against errant reporting and shore up our reliability." * Jacob Weisberg: "I think the print media's credibility issues have been largely overwhelmed by its economic issues." * Alicia Shepard: "Because of the Internet, media ethics have definitely improved in the last five years." Posted at 9:04:53 AM - ROMENESKO "Welcome to the age of all the news that's fit to predict" Variety Brian Lowry notes that reporting and analysis isn't enough for many news orgs these days; they're in the predictions business, too. LAT's "Movie Projector," for example, guesses at box office figures. "For 'Iron Man,' the paper pegged the opening weekend at $72 million, which was only off by a factor of 40%," writes Lowry. "Perfection can hardly be expected ...but when you study entertainment, sports or politics professionally, shouldn't there be a penalty for failing to be somewhere in the ballpark -- you know, plus or minus 40%?" "Gordon and Miller, Pray for the soles [sic] of whom you report & hope that tragedy never finds your door." (Comment on this)
7:47a	Red left hand The policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers was introduced by the previous ALP Government in 1992, under then Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, 'Red' Gerry Hand: I believe it is crucial that all persons who come to Australia without prior authorisation not be released into the community. Their release would undermine the Government’s strategy for determining their refugee claims or entry claims. Indeed, I believe it is vital to Australia that this be prevented as far as possible. The Government is determined that a clear signal be sent that migration to Australia may not be achieved by simply arriving in this country and expecting to be allowed into the community. Like quite a number of his former colleagues, since retiring from Parliament in 1993, Gerry has managed to avoid joining the dole queue and carried on protecting Australia’s vital interests by going into business. Currently, Gerry is Chairman of Great Earth Limited, “an Australian Public Company based in Australia with a prime objective to advance projects into income generating investment entities”. In December 2007, Great Earth secured its “prime objective to advance projects into income generating investment entities” by purchasing two coal tenements in Monto and Proserpine, Queensland, for the measly sum of $100 million. In fact, Great Earth has made a terrific video about its activities, which has a very pleasant soundtrack: In all likelihood, when he kicks his gold-and-diamond encrusted (Typical bourgeois Marxist ) bucket, Gerry will be remembered not only for his profiteering from coal exports — and crying crocodile tears when he voted in support of Gulf War I — but also for his sterling efforts in protecting the Australian community from undesirable elements, especially those fleeing from the tyrannical regimes in the Middle East which his party — via its support for Gulf Wars I and II — did so much to reshape into the New World Order of Iraqi Freedom. For example, at the Woomera Detention Centre: Since being bumped first into (1983) and then out of Parliament, Gerry has also managed to pursue his business interests outside of Australia, especially in East Timor and Indonesia. According to George Aditjondro, in 1996 “the Australian media publicised the close business partnership of Victorian Labour Left politician Gerry Hand, with the Indonesian Christmas Island casino baron, Robby Sumampouw. This Indonesian businessman has profited tremendously from his more than long association with General Benny Murdani and President Suharto’s youngest son, Tommy Suharto (Tony Wright, “How Labor’s Gerry Hand hit the jackpot in Jakarta,” Sydney Morning Herald, Dec 30, 1995; George Aditjondro, “Man with the right mates,” West Australian, Jan 3, 1996; David Jenkins, “Mr. Robby’s biggest bet,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 30, 1996; Lindsay Murdoch, “Mr Robby’s world,” The Melbourne Age, Feb 22, 1996). (On George Aditjondro, see GEORGE JUNUS ADITJONDRO: STANDING BY THE COUNTRY’S MARGINALIZED, Alpha Amirrachman, The Jakarta Post, January 9, 2007.) According to one record, Gerry still has his finger in the East Timorese pie, via Carrickmacross Holdings Pty. Ltd, a company of which he is also Chairman. (Comment on this)
8:24a	Set poison ADULT FYI - Porn Valley- Skeeter Kerkove has read the back and forth depositions concerning what happened the day Max Hardcore’s new girl Jenna James shot for him. Which was April 27, a Sunday. www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=27997 Skeeter’s now ready to add a few colorful anecdotes of his own, noting that a day or so prior to what happened, Max and Layla, who’s back and now with World Modeling, had been over his house. Max evidently got plastered more than a ceiling and Skeeter warned him about driving. “His fourth DUI last year cost him over 60 grand to avoid a mandatory prison term,” Skeeter reveals. Skeeter then digresses, as his wont to do, with a story about Roy Karch and how Karch supposedly fills old plastic water bottles with tap water, and serves them to talent, claiming they’re so dumb they wouldn’t know the difference and neither the porn company whose bill it was going on. Skeeter’s laughing his ass off. Skeeter’s also laughing because some edict went out that there’d be no press on the set the day he shot James for Sin City/Mayhem. And look what happened. Because everything was supposed to be on the Q.T., performer Jay Ashley was instructed not to open his yap to anyone. Except Ashley apparently did and thus it precipitated the cops coming to Skeeter’s house. Ashley in turn apologized to Skeeter that he fucked up. “Johnny [Thrust] got it out of me,” Ashley allegedly told Skeeter. “He needed me for two Gag Factors, $120 per scene. I told him I had to be at Skeeters. They asked what time are you going to be out of there.” “Jay didn’t know he was going to be working with a girl [James] who was in a state of mind [drugs], according to seven witnesses,” says Skeeter. “She’s going to the bathroom every ten minutes, ‘Skeeter I need some time alone upstairs so I can collect my thoughts,’” Skeeter continues. “I’m like, what? And the time is just passing. This new photographer I’m working with Mike Dee- phenomenal, somebody would have to be out of their mind not to pay him top dollar on their set- is going let’s go on, bro. We’ve been ready since a quarter to nine [in the morning].” “Lights are set up, everything’s ready,” Skeeter notes. “The makeup artist Lisa Marie is going, this girl’s jumping all over the place.” Skeeter goes on to note that he has a clear record of phone calls that went back and forth between him and Max Hardcore that day. In one of the first calls Skeeter’s on the phone telling Max he thought the girl was going to be at his house 8:30AM. Max told him she was “well on her way”. “That was at 9:26 AM,” Skeeter says. “My entire crew, everyone was there and ready. Then Jenna called me at 9:33. She’s like I can’t find your address.” Skeeter tells James who's right down the street, to make a right to find it, indicating that it was the passenger side of her car. “I got her there and introduced her to Lisa Marie,” Skeeter goes on to say. “So I’m explaining to everybody it’s a mellow day, I can’t have press and there’s going to be nothing exciting. I told the still photographer you are God today. Your stills are more important than my job. Whatever you want, you got. I am here to enhance anything for you. This is a mild movie. "So Max calls me up and tells me to throat fuck her and just make sure to warm up her pussy and blow out her asshole. He’s telling me all this stuff and I tell him it’s a mellow movie. As a matter of fact four of the five scenes are not directed in my name. This movie has nothing to do with me, just one scene does.” According to Skeeter, James then asked Ashley if there were going to be golden showers. “I found that interesting her using that word,” Skeeter observes. “I never heard talent use that expression. I go what are you doing talking that way on my set. Are you wearing a wire? Oh yeah, that guy you’re, living with. I realize he’s going to court in a few weeks.” “Then Jay Ashley is hanging out in the back yard and the girl, out of the blue- and yes, there is BTS on it, fucking Paul Little you piece of shit, trick; you fucking scumbag prostitute trick- there is so much BTS,” says Skeeter. “The girl goes on camera in front of Jay Ashley, and Jerry Van Nuys who used to be a police officer in Ventura for years, before that in the military- she’s twitching, she’s fidgeting. Then she goes she has to go upstairs again. "She comes back and starts bragging, oh my God, I’ve lost eight pounds since I got to Max’s house. She goes, I lost it in four days. And as much as he gives me, I’ll be as skinny as he wants me to be. Then I get my big boob job. Lisa’s, like, there’s no way that can be healthy or safe for you to lose eight pounds in four days.” “All this is on BTS,” attests Skeeter. “I go I’m really surprised you’re talking that way about Max when you’re on film. Then I tell, Lisa, no set poison. She asks me what is that. I go set poison is when a girl like you gives another girl advice, than everything goes wrong on a set. It’s called rescuing a ho when you’re a ho.” “I learned this from Johnny Thrust, Mr. Mark Hadley,” Skeeter explains. “And Mr. James Lane [Jim Powers] clearly told me and Bridgette, Nina Hartley is the worst set poison we have ever seen in our life, in our career. Always with her retarded voice telling girls you don’t have to do this and you don’t have to do that. Johnny gets all animated when he tells this story. "Johnny and Jim talk about how Nina was broke and got together with Ernest Green and how they got together and somehow bamboozled Adam & Eve into giving them the worthless movies they make money on. And Adam & Eve has been pretty easy to scam. Some of the directors they’ve hired is literally shocking. Especially when you find out the budgets. The only reason you didn't lose your ass on that movie was your fucking catalogue.” “Jim always said he hated shooting Nina Hartley, Skeeter continues. “But he said Bruce at Coast to Coast makes me film her in the MILF shit with young girls. ‘We can’t get Bruce mad because it’s a constant revenue stream for years.’ They said Nina Hartley was the worst set poison they ever met." “Then I told Lisa, let Max fuck up this girl’s life,” Skeeter says. “She’s a prostitute from Florida. He destroyed a couple of other women’s lives. He’ll probably destroy her. Jenna just looks at me with a vengeance. Later on we found out why. Then she goes upstairs and starts using drugs right in front of Jerry Van Nuys. She asks him if he wants any, he says no. "Jay comes back and says Jenna has a problem with anal but she’s doing it for the money. She doesn’t like it but wants to use toys on herself. I don’t give a fuck. As long as she crams toys up her butt, fine. “Then she did something I’ve never seen,” laughs Skeeter. “She did fake anal. Sleight of hand anal. It’s unbelievable. She’s going, oh yeah, in my ass! She’s moving a toy. Within seconds I realize her sphincter’s not moving and she’s exaggerating the movement of her wrist while poking her butt. I’ve heard several low dollar hookers tell me about this, how they work guys and give them fake blowjobs. This girl talked about them, too. And she’s doing so much drugs, it’s ridiculous. Every ten or twelve minutes. Everyone witnessed this.” “She keeps disappearing,” continues Skeeter. “If you think just because Max Hardcore’s newest trick who’s working him like the true trick that he is, is going to slow us down, then you got to listen to the Judas Priest album, You’ve Got Another Thing Coming. "I said fuck this tweaker bitch. The photographer started shooting the next girl, pretty girl. Then the third girl. One of the girls was an LA Direct girl who was beautiful, sober and polite. She witnessed this girl tweaked out of her fucking mind. “But it gets better,” says Skeeter. “The girl is still partying upstairs saying she needs more time to get ready. She tells Jerry, Max wants her to do drugs to get down to 80 pounds. Then Jay says that girl keeps offering me drugs.” Skeeter notes that the cops showed up in ten patrol cars. This is about 1:30 in the afternoon. “There were only ten cars,” he notes wryly. “I guess they were showing me some love. I thought that was sexy.” Skeeter says the number that called the cops came from the San Fernando Valley. “And there was only one reason why they were there,” says Skeeter. “They said it the moment the little spy door opened. Skeeter, we need to talk to you about reports from people in your business that you’re filming underage girls and supplying drugs in your kitchen. They were not there about permits. The same old story. And Jay Ashley fucked up by telling Johnny Thrust he was working for me. That is called circumstantial, likely evidence.” Skeeter’s putting two and two together and coming up with Johnny Thrust as the one who made the call. “Of course I refused them entry and my attorney was called,” says Skeeter. “I paid him $1,000 in cash with the promise that he could get from Brentwood to Tujunga within 30 minutes of the phone call. He made it in about 26. The moment the cops saw him they ran his license plate. He stopped and they looked at him. Within three minutes they started disappearing- bam, bam. Helicopter gone. Every fucking thing gone. They had the neighborhood blocked off. Ten patrol cars, two policemen per patrol car. I’m laughing, right. I’m having everything locked up and I’m explaining the rules." story in progress (Comment on this)
8:28a	Cover up is 'live' Earlier this week, the White House disclosed that it could not recover lost e-mails from emergency backup tapes for the period covering the invasion of Iraq and the U.S. failure to find Iraq’s alleged WMD. ( CONSORTIUM NEWS ) This new gap – from March 1, 2003, to May 23, 2003 – also may have wiped out evidence of how George W. Bush and his top aides reacted to the emerging criticism from former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson that the White House had sold the war using false claims about Iraq seeking uranium from Niger in Africa. “It seems clear now that the e-mail backups are spotty and that there is no guarantee that there are backup tapes for all of [Executive Office of the President] during the period of concern, March 2003-October 2005,” said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of George Washington University’s National Security Archive, one of two organizations suing the White House in hopes of forcing the administration to preserve its e-mails. “There are no tapes from earlier than May 23, 2003,” Fuchs added, referring to an apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act. “So, anything deleted from the EOP network prior to May 23, 2003 (particularly between March 2003 and May 23, 2003) is missing from the backup tapes.” In a federal court filing this week, the White House confirmed the failure to recover lost e-mails from the emergency backup tapes. White House Chief Information Officer Teresa Payton and press secretary Dana Perino have blamed the loss of the e-mails on the administration’s transition from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook. Other e-mails are missing from a period of several weeks from late September to early October 2003, another key timeframe when the White House was caught up in a growing scandal over the leaking of Wilson’s wife’s status as a covert CIA officer in reaction to Wilson’s public criticism of the Niger claims. Senior administration officials disclosed Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity to several journalists in early summer 2003, leading to its publication in a July 14, 2003, article by right-wing columnist Robert Novak. However, it was not until September 2003 that a CIA complaint to the Justice Department sparked a criminal investigation into the identity of the leakers. At first, however, the probe was under the control of Attorney General John Ashcroft and did not appear likely to lead to a major scandal. The White House responded to press inquiries disingenuously, claiming Bush took the leak very seriously and would punish anyone involved. “The President has set high standards, the highest of standards, for people in his administration,” press secretary Scott McClellan said on Sept. 29, 2003. “If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration.” Bush personally announced his determination to get to the bottom of the matter. “If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is,” Bush said on Sept. 30, 2003. “I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true.” Hiding the White House Role Yet, even as Bush was professing his curiosity and calling for anyone with information to step forward, he was withholding the fact that he had authorized the declassification of some secrets about the Niger uranium issue and had ordered Vice President Dick Cheney to arrange for those secrets to be given to reporters to undermine Wilson’s criticism. In other words, though Bush knew a great deal about how the anti-Wilson scheme got started – since he was involved in starting it – he uttered misleading public statements to conceal the White House role. The missing e-mails from March 1, 2003, to May 23, 2003, cover another timeframe that is important to the “Plame-gate” affair. During this period, questions about the veracity of Bush’s Niger claims first surfaced. During his State of the Union Address on Jan. 28, 2003, President Bush had cited what are now called the “16 Words” – “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” However, on March 7, 2003, Mohammed ElBaradei, head of International Atomic Energy Agency, told the UN Security Council that the Niger documents were forgeries and could not be used to prove Iraq was a nuclear threat. The next day, Wilson appeared on CNN, commenting on Bush’s use of information that the IAEA had refuted. "Well, this particular case is outrageous,” Wilson said. “We know a lot about the uranium business in Niger, and for something like this to go unchallenged by U.S. – the U.S. government – is just simply stupid. “It would have taken a couple of phone calls. We have had an embassy there since the early '60s. All this stuff is open. It's a restricted market of buyers and sellers.” Wilson added: "For this to have gotten to the IAEA is on the face of it dumb, but more to the point, it taints the whole rest of the case that the government is trying to build against Iraq." What Wilson didn’t disclose at the time was that he had personally traveled to Niger a year earlier on behalf of the CIA – in response to an inquiry from Vice President Dick Cheney – to investigate whether Iraq had tried to buy uranium from the African country. Wilson had reported back to the CIA that the suspicions were almost certainly false. Wilson’s critical CNN comments apparently caught the attention of the Bush administration. A month-old Chicago Tribune op-ed by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley that had promoted the Niger allegations was redistributed by the State Department on March 10, two days after Wilson appeared on CNN. The column, "Two Potent Iraqi Weapons: Denial and Deception," repeated the suspicion that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger. On the Attack The Bush administration also went on the offensive against the IAEA. In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on March 16, Vice President Cheney rebutted ElBaradei’s debunking of the Niger documents as forgeries. “I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong," Cheney said. The IAEA “has consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past.” The next day – March 17 – Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, sent a letter to President Bush further challenging his use of the Niger suspicions and citing ElBaradei’s findings. “As subsequent media accounts indicated, the evidence contained ‘crude errors,’ such as a ‘childlike signature’ and the use of stationery from a military government in Niger that has been out of power for over a decade,” Waxman wrote. Waxman demanded “a full accounting of what you knew about the reliability of the evidence linking Iraq to uranium in Africa, when you knew this, and why you and senior officials in the Administration presented the evidence to the UN Security Council, the Congress, and the American people without disclosing the doubts of the CIA.” Bush didn’t respond to Waxman. Two days later – on March 19, 2003 – Bush ordered U.S. military forces to invade Iraq. Now, more than five years later, it appears internal White House e-mails that could shed light on what Bush and his circle knew about the unreliability of their evidence on Iraq’s WMD may have been lost in an electronic black hole. The black hole also may have swallowed internal e-mail traffic relating to the then-escalating conflict with former Ambassador Wilson as he edged toward going public with his inside knowledge about the unreliability of the Niger suspicions. The Early Plame-gate Affair On May 6, 2003, a New York Times column by Nicholas Kristoff used Wilson as an anonymous source to report that the administration may have knowingly used the phony Niger documents to win support for the war. “I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger,” Kristoff wrote. “In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the CIA and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted – except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.” Two months later, on July 6, 2003, Wilson attached his name to his Niger accusations in a New York Times op-ed. By then, the White House was working aggressively behind the scenes to cast doubt on Wilson’s credibility, including the suggestion that his CIA wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, had arranged Wilson’s trip to Niger as a junket. When Novak blew Plame’s cover 10 days later, CIA officials were outraged, leading to their demand for the leak investigation which began in September 2003. That, in turn, prompted misleading White House statements about the non-involvement of key figures, such as Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove and Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. However, the leak investigation took a surprise turn in December 2003 when Attorney General Ashcroft recused himself over a conflict of interest and Deputy Attorney General James Comey named U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald as a special prosecutor. Fitzgerald approached the investigation more aggressively and eventually secured the indictment and conviction of Libby on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. In the aftermath, Bush commuted Libby’s prison sentence, sparing him from 30 months in jail. Since then, the Plame-gate affair has faded from public attention, but it now appears that historians, too, will be denied anything approaching a full record of the scandal. Payton, the White House chief information officer, said any further attempt by U.S. Magistrate John M. Facciola to force the administration to retain all e-mails on the White House network would "yield marginal benefits at best, while imposing substantial burdens and disruptions." But David Gewirtz, an expert on e-mail, and the author of the book Where Have All the Emails Gone? believes the loss of e-mails covering the March to May 2003 period is suspicious. “Sadly, neither elected nor appointed officials in Washington are making the situation any better,” Gewirtz wrote in a technical column about the issue. “In fact, it's getting worse. I've reached the conclusion that it's time to call for a special prosecutor. We now have official White House statements that federal laws are being broken, and I don't see any way for this to be resolved without escalation.” Gewirtz said he contacted Judge Facciola to offer some technical advice on how to possibly uncover the lost e-mails but was told, “The judge is quite technical.” “White House e-mail is very problematic and, instead of productive action, we're seeing our Washington friends – even those charged with ultimate oversight – ignoring very practical solutions and instead spinning their wheels, at the expense of both present-day Americans and the historical record,” Gewirtz added. “What offends me as an IT professional is that none of these problems are insurmountable. In fact, most of them are easy to solve. What's worse: not a single private-sector CIO [chief information officer] would be allowed to get away with negligence on this massive scale.” Jason Leopold The roots of this scandal lie with the neocon bureaucratic list of reasons for starting a war. As public pressure mounted against the war while the Blair ( and Poppy Bush) induced delay took place during early 2002 the chief villains were plotting in plain sight. The WHIGs 'product' was rolled out in Sept with Judys little tubes of terror. Antiwar.com was reporting good progress in stopping the war drive cold...right up till the phoney baloney mushrooming lies about nukes. What tripped the criminals up then was the complexity of the lie relying as it did on two distinct 'Big Lies' Only one of these lies - the 16 words has been revoked, leaving the other hanging slowly twisting in the wind. The 21 words directly following should also have been retracted by now. The fact they haven't means the criminal cover up is ongoing. The cover-up is 'live' ,has legs...and a one-way ticket to Paraguay. If it talks like a lame duck... (Comment on this)
8:44a	Brazilian sex SWEET VENOM Raquel Pacheco, better known as “Bruna Surfistinha” is an ex-call girl from the state of São Paulo, Brazil who became famous for sharing stories about her life as a prostitute in the book The Scorpion's Sweet Venom: The Diary of a Brazilian Call Girl. The book quickly has become a tremendous success in Brazil, and in the US and in some European countries as well. At 23 years old, Bruna has found love and left behind her three-year prostitution and brief (but hot!) movie career. AEBN: How was the beginning of your life as a call girl Bruna: It was difficult because I was not used to having sex with strangers. I have always been able to feel pleasure though, and it helped me to relax. AEBN: Would you have done things differently if you could go back in time? Bruna: I really don’t have any regrets. I believe that everyone has the power to choose his or her own actions in life. The only thing that I would have done differently is the way I left my parents home. I simply ran away and left a goodbye letter to my mother. If I could go back, I would try harder to get along with them. AEBN: What do you say to couples interested in improving their sexual performance? Bruna: Sex is an important part of people’s lives. I think that men should always respect their partners, and women should try to compromise a little more when it comes to sex. Women need to try to overcome the fear of sex and try new stimulants- like sex toys, masturbation and anal sex, for their own pleasure – and not just to please their men. Women really need to get past the taboo of anal sex- especially if they are Brazilian- because Brazilian men are crazy for this practice! Believe me- if it wasn’t good, there would be no homosexuals! - MORE ON http://adultnewsflash.com/PressReleases/AEBN/Interview/RaquelPacecoInterview.html (Comment on this)
9:45a	How do you keep a neocon in suspense? Mandela or Mbeki I guess we'll know by this time next year if Obama will be a leader like Nelson Mandela ...or a worthless piece of Gramscian shit ...like Thabo Mbeki. President Bush has offered to help Myanmar. I guess it used to be called Burma. That's where they had that terrible cyclone, where thousands of people were killed as the country was hit by a devastating cyclone. In fact, Bush offered to help the country under one condition, 'Don't tell New Orleans." --Jay Leno This thing just grinds on and on. Barack Obama won in North Carolina. Hillary Clinton barely won in my home state in Indiana, and again, we're hearing that the Clinton campaign is in financial trouble. They need money, desperately need money. And as a matter of fact, to raise money, earlier today. Hillary Clinton entered a wet pantsuit contest." --David Letterman So here's what happened on Tuesday. Hillary Clinton barely won my home state of Indiana. And she lost in the state of North Carolina. But here is the good news. She has a substantial lead in the state of denial." --David Letterman "I was thinking about this, and I'm no political genius. I'm no pundit, but it occurred to me that Hillary Clinton has one thing in common with President Bush. Neither of them has an exit strategy." --David Letterman Well, you know what's interesting. The experts say, if you do the math, there's no way Hillary Clinton can win the nomination. And today, Hillary responded by saying, 'People who do math are elitist.'" --Jay Leno "You know, they use that word a lot in the election, 'elitist.' Here's my question. Didn't elite used to be a good thing? I mean, if you were elite, didn't that mean the best? 'Oh, no. We don't want anybody who's elitist. God forbid we should have decent people doing this.' And they say the Clinton campaign is out of money, and today, Republicans said, 'How much do you need?'" --Jay Leno As I'm sure you know by now, Hillary Clinton is not throwing in the pantsuit. No, siree Bob. In fact, the 'New York Times' reported the other night, while they were on stage, you know, Bill Clinton actually wiped away a tear. This is true. And when Hillary saw it, she said, 'Don't worry, Bill, I'll always be here with you.' And he said, 'Don't make it worse!'" --Jay Leno John McCain, remember him? No one talks about him much anymore. He won his side of this thing like four months ago. He's just wandering around. John McCain's wife was recently overheard saying that they own eight or nine homes. Eight or nine homes, yeah. Yeah, McCain's wife denied this, and stated, 'What I said is, I've tried to put him in a home eight or nine times.'" --Conan O'Brien Now here's what I don't understand about government and politics and stuff like that. ... Earlier today, President Bush asked Congress to okay ... an additional $50 billion for his daughter's wedding." --David Letterman "This weekend, in Crawford, Texas, at the Bush family ranch, one of president Bush's daughter, Jenna, will be getting married. As a matter of fact, tomorrow she is getting married. And I thought this was cute. Because the groom went to President Bush and he asked President Bush for his daughter's hand in marriage. And President Bush said, 'Well, it's okay with me, but you gotta run it by Cheney.'" --David Letterman Best wishes to President Bush's daughter, Jenna. She's getting married this weekend. I understand both John McCain and Dick Cheney will attend. That way they'll have something old and something blue." --Jay Leno Hey, you know who is getting married this weekend? One of the Bush sisters. Jenna Bush is getting married this weekend at her father's place in Crawford, Texas. And this is no surprise: the $2 billion ice sculpture contract went to Halliburton." --David Letterman "But it's a big deal. I mean, when there's a family wedding, I mean, it's great, isn't it? Everybody gets in the big family wedding spirit, and everybody is helping out with the big Jenna Bush wedding. As a matter of fact right now, right now, Dick Cheney is waterboarding the groom." --David Letterman (Comment on this)
10:09a	Home James THE Church of Scientology has lost its grip on James Packer. The billionaire's closest friends say he has quietly distanced himself from Scientology. Members of Mr Packer's inner circle have confirmed that the billionaire, Scientology's wealthiest member in the world, was no longer undertaking Scientology courses and had slowly moved away from the religion, telling his closest friends he no longer "needs it". Mr Packer's office did not respond to reporters' calls yesterday. Mr Packer was introduced to Scientology by his close friend Tom Cruise in 2002. Friends say they remain close, most recently photographed dining together with their wives in Germany. Scientology entered Mr Packer's realm at one of the lowest points in his personal and business life. He was overweight and depressed, his first marriage, to Jodhi Meares, had ended and he was reeling from the collapse of One.Tel. He has only spoken publicly of his involvement in Scientology once, telling The Australian Financial Review Magazine in 2006: "I think it has been very good for me. It has been helpful." But Scientology caused some discomfort within Mr Packer's old circle of Sydney friends. Some suggest Mr Packer's expanding casino empire has presented him with issues difficult to reconcile with Scientologist beliefs. END If this is true then its good news. Betfair has huge potential for assassination politics and is far better off not being linked to a crackpot, fascist, nutcase sect like Marxis...Scientology. Welcome back James. (Comment on this)
4:52p	Vulnerability in the Death Star The SS is low hanging fruit for a DDoS attack either covert or overt. It would be a simple matter to send mass threats to protected persons. By law the SS has to investigate every threat no matter how innocuous or distant. Anarchists could show some leadership here because the first group to knock down this upper echelon will gain enormous status as revolutionary visionaries. Another reason for taking them down is very practical - these racist sexist goons act as anti-egold cops. WASHINGTON — Secret Service supervisors shared crude sexual jokes and engaged in racially derogatory banter about blacks, and passed around an anecdote about a possible assassination of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, according to internal e-mail disclosed in a federal court filing on Friday by lawyers for black Secret Service agents. The filing includes 10 e-mail messages that were among documents the agency recently turned over to lawyers for the black agents as part of an increasingly bitter discrimination lawsuit. The messages were written mainly from 2003 through 2005, and were sent to and from e-mail accounts of at least 20 Secret Service supervisors. The messages offer a glimpse into the darker recesses of an agency known for protecting presidents and other dignitaries but whose culture is regarded as one of the most insular in federal law enforcement. The disclosure of the messages follows an incident last month in which a noose was found in a room used by a black instructor at a Secret Service training facility in Beltsville, Md. Agency officials said that episode was under internal investigation. Eric Zahren, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said he would not comment directly on the e-mail but said the agency deplored racially insensitive jokes. “We are deeply disappointed by any communication or action on the part of our employees that exhibits racial or other insensitivity,” Mr. Zahren said. Mr. Zahren said the messages were the result of a search of 20 million electronic documents over 16 years. He said that an internal inquiry had been opened and that the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, had been alerted. In some of the court documents, the senders of the e-mail messages are identified only by the jobs they currently occupy and the rank they held when the messages were sent. For example, an Oct. 9, 2003, message referring to a “Harlem Spelling Bee,” ridiculing black slang, was sent by Thomas Grupski, then assistant director for protective operations, who, according to the filing, now heads the Office of Government Liaison and Public Affairs. A March 3, 2003, message describing Mr. Jackson as the “Righteous Reverend” was passed among several Secret Service supervisors. The message, about a missile striking an airplane in which Mr. Jackson and his wife were traveling, concludes, it “certainly wouldn’t be a great loss and it probably wouldn’t be an accident either.” Another message contains what one Secret Service official said was a joke referring to interracial sex. The joke circulated in February and March 2003. It was sent, according to the lawsuit, by Donald White, who heads the Presidential Protective Detail, to Kurt Douglass, an agent in charge of the Secret Service office in Cincinnati. The legal skirmishing in the discrimination suit has heated up in recent months, with Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson rebuking the Secret Service for failing to produce documents and for destroying relevant records and e-mail. Judge Robinson had ordered the agency to turn over the documents by late March, but the e-mail disclosed in the court filing on Friday was not turned over to lawyers for the agents until late April. E. Desmond Hogan, a lawyer for the black agents, said the agents were “shocked but not surprised by the late production of significant evidence of racism at high levels in the Secret Service.” “The government’s delay,” Mr. Hogan said, “follows a pattern of the Secret Service stonewalling plaintiffs and ignoring court orders, depriving African-American agents of the fundamental evidence of race discrimination that is key to their claims.” The lawsuit, which has dragged on through years of litigation, was filed in 2000 by 10 black agents who charged that they were unfairly denied promotions. The agency employs about 3,200 agents, about 10 percent of whom are black. END The way to structure the action is to have an anonymizer deliver those threats those senders want while above ground activists volunteer overt threats with the promise of possible martyrdom. Either way is voluntary direct action naturally. I see this as terrain somewhere between the flood plains of pacifism and the high rugged peaks of spectacular propaganda-of-the-deed. So who is with me? Some have died e-deaths bringing you this knowledge - Jim Bell and Carl Johnson for example. (Comment on this)
5:22p	Fortress empire Sealed Borders Work Both Ways by Jacob G. Hornberger Apparently not having enough to do to keep illegal immigrants from entering the country, U.S. officials are now also spending their time looking for illegal immigrants leaving the country. According to an article entitled “Border Busts Coming and Going in the Los Angeles Times, federal customs and immigration officials are setting up random checkpoints 500 yards from the Mexican border to search vehicles leaving the United States for illegal immigrants, drugs, and other contraband. People who cannot produce their papers are taken into custody and then turned over to the Border Patrol, which then deports them a few hours later. Apparently the idea is to send a message to illegal immigrants that the U.S. government is serious about cracking down on illegal immigration. (The message being sent to drug dealers, apparently, is: Don’t even think of removing illicit drugs from the United States.) Pardon me for asking a discomforting question, but isn’t it likely that, like other government interventions, this measure will have an unintended consequence that is opposite to what government officials want? Once illegal immigrants realize that there is a strong likelihood of being caught returning home, wouldn’t that encourage them to remain permanently in the United States rather than return home after making some money? And wouldn’t that, in turn, induce them to smuggle their wife and children into the United States? And isn’t that the exact opposite of what U.S. officials wish to accomplish with their immigration-enforcement measures? The U.S. checkpoints for people leaving the country should also remind Americans of something that Germans and Koreans learned long ago: a government that is sufficiently powerful to keep people out is sufficient powerful to keep people in. In a national emergency, people soon discover that enforcement measures that were previously applied to people trying to illegally enter a country can be quickly converted to apply to citizens trying to quickly get themselves, their families, and their capital out of the country. Sealed borders can seal people in as effectively as they seal people out. Jacob Hornberger http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2008-05-08.asp (Comment on this)
5:25p	Quantum Gravatar A new unified field theory I would like to transcend partisanship. For example, if the Republican Party were reduced to the size that it could be drowned in a bathtub, there would be no partisanship. Gravatar "...i know this seems harsh, but i'm just trying to put into practice the exemplary behavior of grover norquist, karl rove, lee atwater and other fine, upstanding patriots." Not harsh enough. How about rounding up registered republicans and putting them in concentration camps until the country is out of debt? with any luck, bush's tax cuts will keep them there for the rest of our lives. And televised pay-per-view executions of the aforementioned PNAC war criminals might bring in a little infrastructure money. This is nothing more than a fight between good and evil, right and wrong. Nothing will matter until such time as we can understand that the Republican elite sought nothing less than the domination of the United States turning it into a one party state such as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy. The attempts of the Republican party, through King George, to turn all government into an extension of the Republican party merely proves the point. The Democratic party is ill prepared to understand or to respond to the type of fight that is currently being waged. It is necessary to understand that only the destruction of the Republican party leadership and a reforming of the party into a democratic institution will make this country safe. Frankly, it will probably take the arrest, trial and imprisonment/execution of top Republican officials to make this country safe again. This may sound extreme, however, it is not. We tried playing nice with Nixon. Now we see many of the same crowd in power having learned to burn the tapes (OK - emails) this time. We saw Ollie North and his merry band of scum treated as heroes with no punishment for their felonious activities. No, this is exactly how a country is turned from a democracy to a fascist state. We will be as guilty as the Democratic party as were the domestic democratic parties in Germany by attempting to mollify fascism in assisting Hitler to his rise. We have seen a president and a Republican party willing to risk the literal destruction of a functioning government to force compromise with obviously undemocratic actions. (Spying, the war, Patriot Act, investigations into politicizing DoJ and so forth.) Any enemy who will go so far can not be negotiated with. They can only be brought to the bar of justice, tried and made to pay for their crimes. Anything else perpetuates evil. - JMOHR (Comment on this)
5:36p	No dogface Grunts Pet sematary, Whispering Glades The U.S. military has, since 2001, cremated some of the remains of American service members killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere at a Delaware facility that also cremates pets, a practice that ended yesterday when the Pentagon banned the arrangement. The facility, located in an industrial park near Dover Air Force Base, has cremated about 200 service members, manager David A. Bose estimated last night. It uses separate crematories a few feet apart to cremate humans and animals, he added, insisting that there had "not been any people gone through the pet crematory." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/09/AR2008050902334_pf.html Neocon chickenhawks - join the army. Officials said they do not know the number of service members cremated at the Kent County facility, which is identified on a billboard as Friends Forever Pet Cremation Service. ( Or 'The Corner'? ) (Comment on this)
6:00p	The anti-war Right '...There is no anti-war right constituency. Those who identify as “conservatives” or Republicans are all for the war in Iraq, greater wars throughout the Middle East, and have no quibble with the security state measures enacted after September 11th. Anti-war Conservatives are basically nothing more than a few egg head intellectual types who enjoy reading the works of forgotten conservative thinkers. But it isn’t a demographic that has any power or significance in American politics...' FROM http://www.takimag.com/site/article/come_home_conservatives_the_antiwar_conservative_movement/ I disagree with this because of the palpable Paultard crusade. Surely the issue most associated with the Do Ron-Ron was anti-war. A bloc of voters like this ( and even Ross Perot's years ago) can be very effective in American politics. ( Even in a 'negative' sense ) Much like the African-American bloc on the Democrats side. There remains the tantalizing possibility of combining these blocs in a tactical united front party that could potentially persuade enough of the procrastinators in the middle to form the new 'FDR coalition'. Obama hints that he gets this strategy... but he needs to work on it. Oh and beef up his own personal security. ' A strong people don't need a leader' - Ella Baker Zapata She believed that rather than depend upon one person for leadership, a group-centered style of leadership should be implemented. Maybe even the Alternative Liberal Party down here could learn from this? Maybe pig commissioners can fly? (Comment on this)
6:15p	Ella! “The major job was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use, and it could only be used if they understood what was happening and how group action could counter violence . . .” Ella Baker quote “I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed peoples to depend so largely upon a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight. . .” Ella Baker quote “There is also the danger in our culture that because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement.” Ella Baker quote “In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed... It means facing a system that does not lend its self to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.” Ella Baker quote (Comment on this)
7:12p	Battle hymm of corporal Ramirez After the shooting is over in Haditha, a Marine corporal named Ramirez takes a few seconds' break behind a Humvee to vomit copiously on the unpaved road where his unit has just been ambushed by an "improvised explosive device" (IED), or homemade bomb. He comes back out into the roadway, where another Marine seems briefly worried about him. "You OK, Ramirez?" he asks. "I'm good," says Ramirez, a handsome Latino kid with almost feminine eyes and a fragile, uncertain charisma. He's got his profane, angry game face back on. His Marine face. His comrade nods appreciatively. "You look good." Everything about this momentary scene -- the nausea and puking, the nervous macho camaraderie that can't quite mask fear, the sense that these guys aren't talking about what they need to talk about, but can't possibly talk about -- is utterly convincing. The film they're in looks and feels like a documentary, and was directed by Nick Broomfield, who's known for making such sensation-seeking documentaries as "Kurt and Courtney" and "Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer." But it's a narrative feature called "Battle for Haditha," which was largely improvised, cast with ex-Marines and Iraqi refugees and shot in Jordan. It might just be the movie this war has been waiting for. I know, I know; we've been down this road before. Odds are excellent that hardly anyone in America wants to pay money to see this film. When you think about it, why would they? Most Americans are heartily sick of the Iraq war and all its sordid events, and even the minority of our fellow citizens who still support the Iraq war don't want to know much about it. Moreover, "Battle for Haditha" is about the most notorious of the alleged war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Iraq. On Nov. 19, 2005, after a roadside bomb attack that killed one Marine and severely injured several others, members of a Marine convoy apparently ran amok in the Iraqi city of Haditha, barging into several houses and killing 24 unarmed civilians, among them seven children ages 1 to 14. Broomfield fictionalizes this event in the most devastating way possible, as a natural consequence of war, a massacre conducted not by Satanic imperialists or desensitized video-game robots but by ordinary young men in a dreadful situation. In fact, "Battle for Haditha" is a relentlessly exciting war film, unafflicted by moralism or finger-pointing, that leaves all the judgment to us. Which only makes it harder to bear. Cpl. Ramirez (played magnificently by Elliot Ruiz, himself a former Marine corporal who was badly injured in Tikrit) is not the only protagonist in the film, but for American viewers he is unquestionably the focal point. He's an immensely likable hothead, a little wet behind the ears but fiercely loyal to the men under him. In an ordinary war movie, he'd be either the guy who gets tragically killed or the one who learns painful lessons and comes home as a sobered-up grown man. In this movie, he's a guy who barely notices crossing the line that separates soldier from murderer. You can put the blame lots of other places, as Broomfield's film makes clear -- the political and military machine that sent him there, the connivance of his superiors, the ruthlessness of "standard operating procedure" in Iraq and the nature of counterinsurgency warfare -- but this sympathetic, attractive young man commits unforgivable crimes. We meet another likable character named Ahmad (Falah Abraheem Flayeh), as a burly, middle-aged pedestrian in the streets of Haditha, who goes home after seeing a body on the ground and tells his wife, "Those al-Qaida idiots just shot the English teacher." But Ahmad has mouths to feed, no means of legal employment and his own injured masculine pride to deal with; he was an Iraqi soldier when the U.S. occupiers disbanded Saddam Hussein's defeated military. As we gradually discover, he works for those al-Qaida idiots, even though he thinks their religious and moral crusade is bullshit, and he will detonate the IED as the Marine convoy passes. Ahmad is left horrified by the consequences of his actions, and you can't avoid reflecting that in an alternative history of recent years, he and Ramirez could have ended up working together on rebuilding Iraq. His contacts among the Islamic militants are presented as narrow-minded boobs on one hand or shrewd tactical opportunists on the other. Some are obsessed with driving away alcohol merchants, but others see the Marines' debacle in Haditha less as a human tragedy than as a golden opportunity to win the populace to their side. As one imam notes contentedly near the end of the film, "The United States has lost the battle for Haditha." When Ahmad's and Ramirez's destinies collide, the collateral damage will fall heavily on a large, extended family that lives in several interlocking houses on a ridge overlooking the main road through Haditha. A boy has recently been born, and the family has gathered, infants to great-grandparents, to celebrate his ritual circumcision. A beautiful young couple, Hiba (Yasmine Hanani) and Rashied (Duraid A. Ghaieb), sneak off for private liaisons, dreaming of escaping the small-town Muslim Puritanism of Haditha for life in Cairo, Egypt; Damascus, Syria; or the West. Some family members have noticed men burying a bomb by the roadside; they don't support the insurgents, especially, but they know better than to get involved in these things. Before the movie is over, most of them will be dead. No doubt there will be complaints from various quarters about "Battle for Haditha." Some people may suggest that Broomfield is apologizing for the Marines' behavior by humanizing them, while others will say he is prejudging them unfairly. But his film is based on extensive research; he sticks closely to the known circumstances of the Haditha incident, and his inventions, such as the character of Ahmad, are entirely plausible. Cpl. Ramirez is a composite character; the principal Marine who faces murder charges for the Haditha killings is named Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich. (Charges against various other enlisted men and officers have been dropped.) With its documentary-style hand-held camerawork, clipped and oblique dialogue, and nervous-making death-metal soundtrack, "Battle for Haditha" builds tremendous tension with hardly any moments of exposition or self-conscious character building. When the violence starts, it seems terrible but impersonal, deadly without being climactic or cathartic, an inevitable and natural occurrence for these men in this place. As the Marines ritualistically tell one another, they're doing exactly what they trained for. Broomfield allows Ramirez only one brief scene of emotional release, and frankly it's a scene that should have ended up on the cutting-room floor. He doesn't need it. If "Battle for Haditha" is the closest thing to "Paths of Glory" or "Full Metal Jacket" that the Iraq war has yet produced, it's because it doesn't try to explain anything, because it captures the schizophrenic body language, glazed-over expressions and motherfucker-laden, hip-hop-era slang of the men who've been there doing the killing in your name and mine. To prove that war is inhuman, and that it drags every human life it touches down into filth, we don't need to hear Cpl. Ramirez deliver a monologue into his shaving mirror. Losing his breakfast behind the Humvee is enough. "Battle for Haditha" is now playing at Film Forum in New York, with national release to follow. ― Andrew O'Hehir - SALON (Comment on this)
7:22p	Teacher I heart you In spite of her needing strict discipline and a good flogging for laziness THE NSW Government is ducking for cover after it dismissed a popular primary school teacher for appearing nude with her husband in a magazine interview in which the couple described their sex life. Dozens of parents of students at Narraweena Public School on Sydney's northern beaches have signed a petition demanding the reinstatement of Lynne Tziolas. Ms Tziolas was summarily dismissed from her full-time job teaching her Year 1 class of six- and seven-year-olds after the article appeared in this month's issue of Cleo, a magazine aimed at women in their 20s and 30s. Ms Tziolas, 24, appeared with her husband of four years, Antonios, in a discreet nude image. In the interview Ms Tziolas said her favourite bit of her husband was "his chest". Asked if they ever brought "toys" into the bedroom, Ms Tziolas said, "Yes, the usual stuff -- dildos, clitoral stimulators, whips and cuffs". Her favourite position, she told Cleo, was "missionary, because I'm lazy". NSW Department of Education spokesman Liam Thorpe said Ms Tziolas was "employed at the school on a temporary basis" and several Narraweena parents had complained about the article. "The teacher's engagement has been ceased and the Department of Education and Training's Employee Performance and Conduct Branch is investigating," he said in a statement. Asked why the department had dismissed Ms Tziolas and then held an investigation rather than the other way around, Mr Thorpe was unable to answer. He later said Ms Tziolas had not been sacked and that she was on full pay for the next four weeks. But he was unable to say whether she could be re-employed, or contradict her claim she has a contract until the end of the school year. Most Narraweena parents who spoke to The Weekend Australian yesterday were outraged that Ms Tziolas had lost her job. Lisa Pulham said: "It's her personal life and it's got nothing to do with the children at the school and her performance." Another parent, Kylie Easton, said: "It's an adult magazine and the children are not going to view it. She is a fantastic teacher and an inspiration for the choir." But Michelle Carroll, whose nine-year-old daughter Sasha is at the school, said it was inappropriate for Ms Tziolas to have done the interview. "It's definitely an overstepping of teaching ethics," she said. Ms Tziolas said she never discussed sex with her students. She told The Weekend Australian that Cleo paid $200 for the interview, but the couple had not done it for the money. "We chose to speak out about something that is very dear to us." Ms Tziolas said her union, the Teachers Federation, would mount a wrongful dismissal case. A spokesman for NSW Education Minister John Della Bosca did not return calls. (Comment on this)
8:05p	Jah biofuel In recent years, Myanmar's reclusive military rulers have plowed large tracts of rice- and vegetable-growing land to plant jatropha -- an inedible plant used for making biodiesel. Soldiers in the country's 400,000-strong army are routinely instructed to be self-sufficient and do so by simply seizing food from farmers. And villagers in the highland regions are often given rice strains requiring expensive fertilizers that they can't afford, according to academic researchers and nongovernment organizations. AND Now, the folly of such policies is becoming apparent in the wake of the cyclone that devastated the country last weekend. The most notorious example of errant policy making reflects the fascination of 75-year-old junta leader Senior-Gen. Than Shwe with biodiesel as a way to break the country's dependence on expensive imported oil. In December 2005, the battle-hardened commander kicked off a nationwide campaign to grow jatropha, a squat, hardy bush that yields golf-ball-sized fruit containing a sticky, yellow liquid that can be made into fuel. His drive was similar to initiatives in other parts of the world, including the U.S., which encouraged farmers to grow corn, palm oil or other crops for biofuel and which are now facing criticism for driving up the price of food. India, China and other countries grow jatropha on scrubby land where food crops can't survive. But researchers say that in Myanmar, some of the country's most fertile land has been converted to cultivating the shrub. AND In 2006, the chief research officer at state-run Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise said Myanmar hoped to completely replace the country's oil imports of 40,000 barrels a day with home-brewed, jatropha-derived biofuel. Other government officials declared Myanmar would soon start exporting jatropha oil. - WSJ Exporting? Where? Most countries won't deal with Myanmar...except red-fascist Vietnam... (Comment on this)
8:47p	The big snooze Nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy. The atmosphere of the film is dark and paranoic - full of suspicion, dread, and intrigue. The film's title, The Big Sleep, refers to death. Blackmailers and murderers commit their ill deeds (gambling, pornography, vice, perversion) while the world continues on its course, almost asleep. Marlowe's single-handed pursuit and investigation of pervasive corruption and treachery is met with deception, threats of extermination, and violence (although most of the killings are discreetly committed off-screen). - FROM http://www.filmsite.org/bigs.html Too hot in here for any man who has any blood in his veins. (Comment on this)
9:37p	Kahlo the lamer, leftist loser '...Kahlo wasn't an "outsider" artist in the sense that her pictures were not made during a period when she was institutionalized, nor were they the product of a person who suffered severe emotional or social incapacities. But she is kin to outsider artists in that art-making for her was, as Hayden Herrera has noted in her groundbreaking and authoritative Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (1983), a solace. It was a way to say to herself and to her world, in the face of literally crushing blows, "I am still here." She was visited by bad news already at age six, when she was attacked by polio, leaving her with a withered right leg. The main catastrophe arrived when she was eighteen, in 1925, and riding on a bus in Mexico City with her boyfriend. When a tram slammed into the bus, the wreckage resulted in damage to her spinal column and right leg that, although initially she had many years of relative freedom of movement, never healed. In time she would endure over thirty surgical operations, in Mexico and the States. She would undergo lengthy periods in traction, become dependent on painkillers and alcohol, need to be outfitted in large plaster corsets, and eventually lose her right leg below the knee. Perhaps the most devastating effect of the crash was that it left her unable to bear children. The early years of her marriage were gruesomely marked by miscarriages and abortions. Yet the particular spirit of Kahlo the person—and to a lesser extent of her art—derived from the vivacity with which she resisted her fate. The daughter of a Mexican mother and a German father, an immigrant to Mexico who became a photographer to support his family, Kahlo was, as every writer about her eventually points out, a bundle of contradictions. She played them out dramatically, beginning with her very appearance. If her face had unsettling traces of masculinity, her complexly twined, often ribbon-bedecked hair, her goodly amount of jewelry, and her floor-length, sweeping skirts and shawls, based on the traditional clothing style of the women of the Tehuana region of Mexico, were almost militantly feminine. According to legend, Tehuana women were the real figures of authority in their society, and Kahlo's wearing of such outfits was a demonstration of strength and will. Appearing this way in Mexico meant that she was continuously announcing her leftist identification with the underclass (she was in fact an ardent Communist at times), while the same clothes, when she was abroad, might be more purely a hassle or an embarrassment. (In New York, kids ran up to her on the street and asked where the circus was.) Yet Kahlo took to wearing long skirts in the first place to hide her withered leg; and her wearing clothes that symbolized women being in control was belied by her slavish and often bruised relationship with her husband, Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist painter who was twenty years older and almost comically taller and heavier than his wife. Rivera's love for Kahlo was unquestioned, as was his admiration for her work. But his refusal to be monogamous was flattening. (His low point was the affair he conducted with Frida's youngest sister, Cristina, around 1934, causing one of the Riveras' bigger dustups.) Kahlo seemingly thought of her husband as her mainstay no matter what, yet she herself had many lovers, of both sexes, including women who had slept with Rivera. She had affairs with Isamu Noguchi and the art dealer Heinz Berggruen when both were young and even, during the spring of 1937, with Leon Trotsky, who had been given asylum in Mexico not long before, in part through the intercession of Rivera, a member of the Mexican Trotskyite Party. Reading Kahlo's flowingly opinionated, cajoling, sarcastic, and slangy letters (they form a highlight of Herrera's biography), one can see how she made an enormous number of people, of many ages and backgrounds, believe they had a special—a lover's—relationship with her. Self-obsessed as she may be, she often makes us see and feel the person she writes to, and she can train her wiseacre's style on herself, as when she wrote from the States to a friend back home, "Some of the gringachas even imitate me and want to dress as 'Mexicans,' but the poor things look like turnips and the honest truth [is] they just look absolutely dreadful, which doesn't mean I look good myself, but at least I get by." In the early 1930s, when she was in her mid-twenties, Kahlo began making paintings about her own experiences using the small sizes and miniaturist detailing of Mexican retablos, or ex-voto images. Often painted on tin, these pictures show saints, say, performing miracles or the Virgin Mary answering a prayer. Retablos, which go back in date to the eighteenth century, generally present the tiny actors of the scene in rather bare places, and the pleasingly awkward and abstract nature of the pieces is enhanced by the written commentary that is often part of the images, words that describe what is happening in the scene. Kahlo's insight was to see that she could take this folk art form in any direction. In the crisp and lovely My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree) (1936), where she is a chubby child towering over a toy version of the house she grew up in, and her forebears float in the sky, painted as they would appear in stiff studio photographs, her subject is both memory in itself and the jumbled process by which we create a past for ourselves. In A Few Small Nips (1935), she used the crude, stageset-like properties of ex-voto images to present a shocking news story of the moment about the murder of a prostitute...' - FROM http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21350 The Suicide of Dorothy Hale was begun when Kahlo was in New York for her 1938 show at the Julien Levy Gallery, her first solo exhibition anywhere. (Comment on this)
10:28p	Social Darwinism for dummies The exception thats proves the rule A WOMAN has risked her own life to rescue a man who was attacked by a four metre great white shark this morning off a popular beach at Albany, Western Australia. The shark tore two chunks from 37-year-old Jason Cull's left leg, leaving him flailing and yelling for help at Middleton Beach at 7.30am, Perth Now reports. Joanne Lucas, a mother of one, grabbed Mr Cull and dragged him to safety as the shark loitered just three metres away. A spokesperson for Albany Hospital said Mr Cull had undergone surgery and was in a stable condition. "Instinct just kicked in,'' Mrs Lucas said. "I didn't even have to think about it, which is amazing really. It all just happened.'' The shark was described as having a "belly the size of a 44 gallon drum". This sort of thing has happened before and has always been found due to human solidarity error. (Comment on this)
10:51p	Burma appealing Burma donation appeal at Troppo Published by Robert Merkel In Developing world, Disasters and Donation challenge The exact magnitude of the effects of Cyclone Nargis on the people of Bruma remain unclear, and will likely be so for some time. But what we do know already is it’s the biggest natural disaster in the region since the Boxing Day tsunami, and without sufficient and timely aid it will get far worse. In the aftermath of that earlier disaster, the blogosphere did its bit to help out, notably through the efforts of the good Professor Quiggin, who matched his readers’ donations one-for-one, raising nearly $5000. This time around, Club Troppo and the Professor are trying their hand again: He is doing the same thing again, this time in collaboration with Club Troppo. We are hoping to persuade readers to give generously in the knowledge that every dollar of disposable income sacrificed translates to nearly four dollars of aid. John will donate fifty cents for every dollar pledged in the comments threads for this post, the comments thread for the twin post at his own site, or by email to John or me. Club Troppo contributors will put in another fifty cents. Go over to Troppo to find out how to donate. I’m going to put in $100. How about you? http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/05/10/burma-donation-appeal-at-troppo/ (Comment on this)
11:06p	Juliet of the spirits This film by Fellini is basically the female version of 8 1/2. Instead of delving into the mind of a middle-aged Italian man dealing with problems with his wife and trying to figure out who he really is, it is about a middle-aged Italian woman dealing with problems with her cheating husband and trying to figure out who she really is. (I still can't decide who I like more as a lead in a Fellini film... Masina or Mastroianni.) The film is very enjoyable, and is definitely one of the films I would classify as a work of art. The one thing that really stands out to me, however, is this: It could only exist as a film. Most films are adapted from previously written novels, or at the very least can suffer the indignation of a "novelization" without losing the quality of the story. But I cannot fathom any way a writer could capture this film with words. It is very visual, but could not be painted or drawn either. I think this is one of the few films I've seen that is completely unique to the medium of film. Towards the end of the film, there is a scene where she is trying to avoid voices and images around her while hosting a party. It was at this point that I realized how perfectly every shot was set-up, and that there would be no way anyone could capture the feeling or the images with words. (Comment on this)
11:29p	A query of everything Throwing Einstein for a Loop By Amanda Gefter – Scientific American December 2002 She talks about physics like it's cooking. "My strength is to put things together out of nothing," she says, "to take this ingredient and another one there and stick something together." The art is figuring out which ones to use and how to combine them so that when the oven bell dings, the universe comes out just right. At 31 years old, Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara is hailed as one of the world's most promising young physicists. She recently accepted a position at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario (Canada's answer to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.). There she works alongside such prominent physicists as Robert Myers and Lee Smolin, hoping to blend Einstein's general relativity with quantum theory to explain the nature of space and time. This unification is probably the single greatest challenge of modern physics. String theory has been the predominant contender. It proposes that the building blocks of matter are tiny, one-dimensional strings and that various vibrations of strings play the familiar medley of particles as if they were musical notes. MORE http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=346 (Comment on this)
11:43p	Mastery of statistics needed Instant Expert: Quantum World If successful scientific theories can be thought of as cures for stubborn problems, quantum physics was the wonder drug of the 20th century. It successfully explained phenomena such as radioactivity and antimatter, and no other theory can match its description of how light and particles behave on small scales. But it can also be mind-bending. Quantum objects can exist in multiple states and places at the same time, requiring a mastery of statistics to describe them. Rife with uncertainty and riddled with paradoxes, the theory has been criticised for casting doubt on the notion of an objective reality - a concept many physicists, including Albert Einstein, have found hard to swallow. more... ARTICLES Quantum camera snaps objects it cannot 'see' "Ghost imaging" can photograph an object using light that didn't touch it - but physicists can't agree on the effect that makes it possible Breaking News - 02 May 2008 Four radical routes to a theory of everything Want an ultimate theory of the universe? There's no shortage of weird and wonderful ideas, as Amanda Gefter discovers Features - 02 May 2008 Quantum effects may explain water's weirdness Water's properties still defy explanation – now it seems some of the uncertainty about H2O can be addressed by considering uncertainty of the quantum kind News - 30 April 2008 Do birds see with quantum eyes? A quantum trick might be behind birds' ability to navigate using Earth's magnetic field lines, say researchers News - 03 May 2008 Comment: Hunting the elusive Higgs Finding the Higgs particle would be great, but not finding it could be even better Comment and Analysis - 19 April 2008 The great antimatter mystery When the universe was born antimatter was just as plentiful as matter. What happened to change that? Physicists Helen Quinn and Yossi Nir investigate Features - 11 April 2008 Quantum effects could shed light on hazy images The way that entangled photons are linked could be used to screen out noise from scientific images of things like microscopic structures News - 29 March 2008 Quantum randomness may not be random The quantum universe may seem random, but a closer look may reveal that it is actually predictable, says Mark Buchanan Features - 22 March 2008 Japanese particle accelerator hints at 'new physics' The accelerator detected differences in how various particles decay that might help explain why the universe has more matter than antimatter Breaking News - 19 March 2008 Flipping particle could explain missing antimatter The way that a particle jumps between matter and antimatter in collider experiments could point to new physics News - 18 March 2008 Interview: Beyond the BlackBerry Mike Lazaridis, the man behind the top-selling BlackBerry, is pumping his millions into blue-sky quantum physics research. He tells Paul Marks why quantum physics is essential to the future of consumer electronics Interview - 12 March 2008 How to 'see' quantum entanglement A standard experiment could allow humans to "see" quantum entanglement without any aids News - 23 February 2008 Black hole event horizon created in the lab Scientists claim to have sent lasers through an optical fibre and simulated conditions inside a black hole, a development that could allow previously impossible experiments News - 16 February 2008 Was life forged in a quantum crucible? The notion that quantum processes kick-started life may not be so far fetched after all News - 08 December 2007 Histories: Einstein's convenient untruths Before physicist Emil Rupp was finally exposed as a cheat in the 1930s, Einstein's letters reveal his suspicions - and why he collaborated with Rupp regardless Histories - 17 November 2007 Watchful eye keeps quantum computing on the boil Particles must stay entangled in a quantum computer or its computing power evaporates – observation could be the solution News - 11 November 2007 'Quantum ATM' rules out fraudulent web purchases A "quantum key" passed from the ATM to a cellphone could make it impossible for someone to use your credit card to make fraudulent transactions online Technology - 10 November 2007 China special: Quantum revolution The computers that will leave today's PCs in their dust are being dreamed up in China Features - 07 November 2007 'Light trap' is a step towards quantum memory Two teams manage to place a cloud of cold gas within a tiny optical cavity – a combination that has potential for storing quantum data Breaking News - 07 November 2007 Quantum untanglement: Is spookiness under threat? Quantum mechanics without the weirdness? Traditional physics restored to glory? It all sounds too good to be true Features - 02 November 2007 Could quantum effects explain consciousness? Quantum mechanics could underpin conscious experience in the brain – and explain why dreams are dream-like News - 23 October 2007 'Half-quantum' cryptography promises total security Sharing an encryption key securely is possible even if one party remains firmly rooted in the world of classical physics Technology - 21 October 2007 Universe explained by quantum randomness The immense amount of information in the universe today arose as a result of quantum fluctuations, says a US researcher News - 08 October 2007 Quantum transport poses a dilemma for philosophers Physicists find a way to get quantum particles to jump from A to C without passing through B in the middle News - 02 October 2007 Superconducting bus heralds quantum chip Factory lines that churn out quantum computers move a step closer with entangled qubits exchanging data on a chip Technology - 29 September 2007 Parallel universes make quantum sense Key equations of quantum mechanics arise from the mathematics of parallel universes, supporting a theory of the 'multiverse' News - 21 September 2007 Blueprints drawn up for quantum computer RAM Physicists have come up with a method for retrieving quantum information that they say will make total recall more reliable Breaking News - 21 August 2007 Spooks in space The possibility of conscious beings popping up in space has cosmologists rethinking the fate of the universe Features - 17 August 2007 Photons flout the light speed limit A quantum tunnelling experiment has apparently propelled photons faster than the speed of light News - 17 August 2007 Fermilab hot on Higgs trail Rumours that the elusive Higgs boson has finally been spotted remain as tantalising as ever News - 15 August 2007 Trick of light advances quantum computing By harnessing the spin of laser light, pairs of atoms have been controllably entangled into a shared quantum state News - 26 July 2007 Quantum states undergo natural selection Darwin's ideas are being used to resolve how an objective reality emerges from the quantum world News - 25 July 2007 The word: Zitterbewebung We don't generally think of electrons as nervous, yet observe one closely enough and that is exactly how it might appear The Word - 07 July 2007 Particle smasher aims for May 2008 switch-on The Large Hadron Collider can still make its scheduled start-up date, despite the string of mishaps News - 29 June 2007 The second quantum revolution To track down a theory of everything, we might have to accept that the universe only exists when we're looking at it Features - 20 June 2007 Atom trap is a step towards a quantum computer A device that can hold hundreds of atoms in a 3D array, and image each one individually, has been developed by scientists in the US Breaking News - 17 June 2007 String theory: it's not dead yet Despite its triumphs, string theory has begun to lose the public battle for hearts and minds. It's time to fight back, says Sean Carroll Comment and Analysis - 19 May 2007 Curiosity doesn't have to kill the quantum cat Exclusive A landmark experiment hopes to bring Schrödinger's cat back from the brink of death - it could rewrite our understanding of reality Features - 09 May 2007 Impossible things for breakfast, at the Logic Café Our rigid notions of true and false just don't work for a quantum world. It's time to dish up a new logic Features - 14 April 2007 Superconductors inspire quantum test for dark energy Below a certain frequency threshold, the quantum fluctuations of empty space may contribute to dark energy, as some materials become superconductors below a critical temperature News - 07 April 2007 Electrons caught tunnelling out of atoms For the first time scientists measure the quantum phenomenon on the atomic scale – each electron-escape happened mind-bogglingly fast Breaking News - 04 April 2007 Outside of time: The quantum gravity computer Want to know the answer to a problem before you even try to solve it? New Scientist has the computer for you Features - 31 March 2007 The illusion of reality in a quantum world If you want to be in two places at once, walk with New Scientist along the line between the quantum and classical worlds Features - 17 March 2007 Quantum rebel wins over doubters It rocked quantum theory when it was first proposed in 2004, but now the controversial experiment is published News - 17 February 2007 New particle accelerator could rule out string theory The Large Hadron Collider could provide a crucial test of string theory when it starts operating at the end of the year, new research suggests Breaking News - 01 February 2007 Atomic 'transistor' may switch using quantum clouds Bose-Einstein condensate – a super-cold gas cloud of atoms – could construct atomic transistors with more complex capabilities than electronics Breaking News - 30 January 2007 The Large Hadron Collider: Bring it on! The world's most powerful atom smasher turns on this year. New Scientist foresees some breakthroughs - and more than a few tricky problems Features - 27 January 2007 Sending Einstein into a spin If we want a theory of everything, we might have to break a few rules along the way, New Scientist discovers Features - 18 January 2007 Gravity gets a quantum boost Despite its 300-year history, Newton's gravitational constant, G, is the least well-measured of all the fundamental constants, but quantum mechanics may help News - 13 January 2007 Engaging photons in light conversation Photons are notoriously antisocial, but if you can get them to chat, they turn into a material made of light Features - 11 January 2007 Lone voices special: At play in the multiverse David Deutsch is a pioneer in the field of quantum information science. He explains how it relates to notions of truth and reality Opinion - 09 December 2006 Quantum computers? Don't hold your breath Quantum computing will never work, says one physicist who thinks that unavoidable noise will always stand in its way News - 05 December 2006 The quantum world is about to get bigger A new technique will allow objects big enough to be seen with the naked eye to exist in two places at once News - 01 November 2006 Spooky steps to a quantum network Quantum entanglement, a strange property that links particles however far apart they are, may be used to "teleport" information, new research reveals News - 07 October 2006 Review: The Trouble With Physics Should we be worried that other unifying theories are getting pushed aside in favour of string theory. Not yet, says Sean Carroll Review - 30 September 2006 What's done is done… or is it? New Scientist sets out to discover if the future can change the past - welcome to "retrocausality" Features - 28 September 2006 Adjustable 'ion trap' boosts quantum computing The first adjustable "ion trap" increases scientists' understanding of the challenges in building practical quantum computers Breaking News - 27 September 2006 Do the laws of nature last forever? Headphones The universe might make more sense if they don't, argues leading theorist Lee Smolin Features - 21 September 2006 Ancient Greeks invented 'quantum dot' dye One of their hairdressers' dyes produced lead sulphide crystals just 5 nanometres wide, which could have useful quantum properties News - 18 September 2006 Tracing the limits of quantum weirdness Heisenberg's uncertainly principle is being harnessed to see if it is possible to identify a point at which matter begins to exhibit quantum behaviour News - 13 September 2006 Atomic jitters hint at quantum spume It seems that certain properties of space-time predicted by "theories of everything" may have already influenced experiments without anyone noticing News - 06 September 2006 Speed boost helps quantum codes on their way After all the talk of quantum cryptography providing us with impregnable communications, only now is the realistic possibility truly emerging News - 26 August 2006 Where mind meets quantum matter Marcus Chown is intrigued by a new take on what quantum theory really means - something we still don't understand despite its success Review - 19 August 2006 'Electron-spin' trick boosts quantum computing A chip that manipulates the spin of a single electron could make the construction of quantum computers simpler Breaking News - 16 August 2006 You are made of space-time Physical particles may seem very different from the space-time they inhabit, but what if the two are one and the same thing? New Scientist investigates Features - 12 August 2006 Quantum tool kits could transform archaeology For decades, mapping objects hidden in the ground prior to digging has been a laborious process, but it is poised to get better and faster Technology - 21 July 2006 http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/quantum-world (Comment on this)

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