If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn't hesitate to do so.
André Gide

Before you make a friend, eat a bushel of salt with him.
                                    --Romanian Proverb

"You're the master. We're your tools." --Asp: Imbecile Anthem

The Literary Bad Sex Award

OpenNic - everybody who's anybody is using it. ;)

Rampant US wiretap abuse in the recent Israeli spy scandal.

Man banned from travelling in Europe for putting up an anti-EU poster.

A fascinating essay on political humor.

European Superstate debate, and the possibility of an EU President

US Army's recent involvement in creating Anthrax.

Bush administration drenched in Saudi oil money.

Bush hides information from Congress.
More...

Anti-germ-warfare conference displeases US, so they shut it down.

A voice of reason from the UN Human Rights Commission.

Ashcroft about to crush a few remaining civil liberties.

FBI to solidify its role as the secret police

The time is ripe to bring back the House Un-American Activities Commitee.
Look here for more on this travesty.

A taste of justice: Portland refuses to submit to Ashcroft's police state.

Millions of civilians deliberately slaughtered by the Allies during World War 2.

"When I saw the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of national security. God Bless America."
You can't say that in a West Virginia high school.

Sedition laws are to be used against suspected terrorists, and likely abused against dissenters. Yet another blow to the First Amendment.

Clinton says terrorist attacks against the US are paying a debt to the past.

Another sign that America's Executive Branch can evade checks and balances on a whim:
US Terrorism Czar snubs Congress.
Ridge spokespeople advise that Congress should just get in line.

Green Party USA Coordinator detained at airport. This is exactly the type of political oppression and abuse of power that the new "anti-terrorist" legislation is going to lead to.
Another report on the incident shows that what actually happened was even worse than originally reported.

Bush signs an executive ass-covering order designed to conceal Presidential crimes, lies and mistakes from the American public.

Civilian death toll in Afghanistan is being under-reported.

"Let the snake that does not bite me live for a thousand years"
US attitude towards terrorism and Turkey

Thank you for flying Air Paranoia!
A Sacramento journalist is taken into custody by police and forced to destroy photos

The Gandhi Nobody Knows by Richard Grenier
According to Grenier, Ghandi advocated collective suicide on the part of the Jews in response to the threat of the Nazi holocaust. He also advocated British surrender, and called Hitler "not a bad man".

An eminently educational speech by Noam Chomsky on the history of terror.

A little homegrown American terorism:

   Aug 6th, 1945 -  Hiroshima:
                                76,000 building destroyed
                                200,000 innocent civilians murdered in one day
   Aug 9th, 1945 -   Nagasaki:
                                140,000 innocent civilians murdered in one day

American reaction: Celebration

Kyoto, the beautiful ancient city of Japan, was originally scheduled to be destroyed. The decision to bomb Nagasaki instead saved at least 800,000 innocent people.

General Leslie Groves was dissapointed:

"I particularly wanted Kyoto as a target because, as I have said, it was large enough an area for us to gain complete knowledge of the effects of an atom bomb. Hiroshima was not nearly so satisfactory in this respect."

"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells."

"One picture taken shortly after the Taliban takeover says it all: a trembling woman covered in a head to toe veil, her face completely obscured, sobs as she speaks with a Western reporter. Who is she?  An impoverished peasant?  A homeless woman? No, she's the recently removed chief surgeon at the country's largest hospital!"
U.S. Policy Has Betrayed Afghan Women for 20 Years

Florida, home to Big Borther Bush, is the first state to propose moving to a secret government

"Jean Joseph Rive will have that a bibliophile is one who reads for pleasure; but he is opposed by Locker-Lampson, who maintains that 'your true bibliophile rarely reads anything: he contemplates, he examines bindings, criticizes illustrations, and scrutinizes title-pages or pagination.' Others, as G.H.Powell, have dilated upon the difference between reading and 'the refined curiosities of the bibliophile,' and Gleeson White, in express words, affirms that your book-lover must gaze at books 'mutely, with a satisfied joy in being near enough to caress or abstain.' A book need not even be 'in a particular language, nor on a particular subject, to be the book of a book-lover.' You love a book first because it is a book, however much you may particularize afterwards: 'He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odour, its form, its title.' You love it inwardly and outwardly, soul and body..."

"'It does not follow at all that a person devoted to reading is fond of books. It is often the other way: the most learned men, the most gluttonous of readers, may not have the smallest love for books.' They know nothing of their value or how to treat them; using them for their 'selfish purpose' and casting them aside as useless: 'Ten people care for a book--but they are apostles. A thousand enjoy another book, but when they have sucked it on a hot afternoon, they have finished.'"

                                --The Book About Books,
                                  The Anatomy of Bibliomania
                                  Holbrook Jackson

"A Middle East fit for heroes"

Domestic censorship, deciet, and oppression. 1984, here we come.

A detailed account of American hypocracy in the face of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

"The Pentagon has spent millions of dollars to prevent western media from seeing highly accurate civilian satellite pictures of the effects of bombing in Afghanistan," possibly because "it would be possible to see bodies lying on the ground after last week's bombing attacks."

300,000 people marched for peace in Italy

BabySmasher

Living Dead Dolls
...because dead is better

Port Scan of the Month (DANGER: of interest to security geeks only)

The really big button that doesn't do anything.

Technology infrastructure disaster recovery logistics inadequate to deal with 9-11 fallout.

Ronald bin McLaden

Origami Underground
'erotic (and generally "objectionable") origami diagrams'

Chupacabras has a moment of clarity

Informative graphic of the NYC 9-11 damage.

People detained in the wake of 9-11 are suffering beatings and other violations of human and civil rights, while often being denied even minimal contact with their defense lawyers.

"As usual, the U.S. opposes the creation of a war crimes court; Now Congress threatens invasion of the Netherlands if the rest of the world goes ahead with the court."

"What could possibly motivate the propping up of repressive non-democracies like the Saudi and Kuwaiti royal families or murderous regimes like that of Reza Pahlevi, Shah of Iran? Or pouring billions into the coffers of Saddam Hussein in the '80s, or even creating the monster who is the mastermind of these attacks, Osama Bin Laden, beneficiary of CIA lucre and training?"
It's the oil, stupid

Oil War II: The Empire Strikes Back in the Caspian
Caspian Oil and Gas and the Afghanistan Pipeline Connection

If you're going to be pro-war, at least be sarcastic about it!

An excellent point-by-point comparison of the police-state legislation designed to demolish civil-liberties.

Disturbing portents for freedom from the US Supreme Court.

chequerboard of oil and minefields

The Empire Strikes Back

Metaphor and War makes explicit the myths and assumptions of the public perceptions of war.
It is the skillful manipulation of these myths and assumptions that makes for effective propaganda.

Oppressive regimes in the Middle East propped up by the US.

Doctors Without Borders calls US food drops "propaganda"

The Cave is a Lovecraftian story I wrote back in 1989, for a freshman college English class.

Is massive starvation and death in Afghanistan inevitable?

Into the valleys of death
Insight in to the roles of Pakistan and the United Front (Northern Alliance).

The US government had plans to commit terrorist acts against America itself and blame a politically convenient enemy.

On the use of the word "terrorist" in the media.

"It is a sobering thought, that better evidence is required to prosecute a shoplifter than is needed to commence a world war"
Tony Blair releases allegations against Bin Laden and calls them "evidence". Apparently the public isn't supposed to know the difference, or care.
Commentary, more commentary, and yet more commentary on the flimsy allegations.

Testimony of civil liberties defenders censored, and even the presense of censorship was censored.

"This may be the first war where an American reporter is killed or garroted by a Green Beret for getting in the way." --The Return of Censorship

'Mainstream journalists in the United States often function more like a fourth branch of government than a feisty fourth estate. If anything, the patterns of media bias that characterize sycophantic reporting in "peacetime" are amplified during a war or a national security crisis." --13 Questions for Bush about America's Anti-terrorism Crusade

Know Your Rights

"To maintain public support for a war... a government should sanitize the visual images of war; control media access to military theaters; censor information that could upset readers or viewers; and exclude journalists who would not write favorable stories." --Desert Storm Disinformation

Five arguments against the war.
(print as a flyer or a poster)

"As we hear talk about the United States engaging in diplomacy, we must remember this:. the U.S. conception of diplomacy does not mean seeking to avoid war, as the U.N. charter requires. It means coupling a 'principled' refusal to negotiate with threats and verbal provocations designed to stiffen the spine of an enemy, so that situations cannot be resolved peacefully. It means lining up allies -- sometimes by naked coercion, sometimes by bribes of debt-restructuring or trade favors -- so that military actions can begin." --No News is Bad News

Participate in LinkBack to keep track of what blogs link back to your blog, and to facilitate discussion.

A personal diary of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Highly recommended.

Ten Things to Know About U.S. Policy in the Middle East

The newly created Office of Homeland Security can and has shut down websites without evidence or trial.

"Having decided that readers and viewers in post-Cold War America cared more about celebrities, scandals and local news, newspaper editors and television news executives have reduced the space and time devoted to foreign coverage by 70% to 80% during the past 15 to 20 years"... more here

The Fire This Time

Similarities between Operation Eternal Freedom and George Orwell's 1984.

Foreign Policy In Focus

FEMA: the most powerful organization in the United States

to anyone who is contemplating joining the american armed forces

"Fascism, which was not afraid to call itself reactionary... does not hesitate to call itself illiberal and anti-liberal." --Benito Mussolini

Who is Ramsey Clark and who are the IAC

Cops videotaping protestors at last week's peace rally in Berkeley. Why isn't this on the news?
more cops videotaping protestors

9-11 Peace Network
Independent Media Center

shocked and horrified

war dissenters punished and silenced

Interview with Noam Chomsky about the terrorist attacks and the war
Re: bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone age - written by an Afghani in the U.S.
The reason for all this...
Why this has happened
Violence doesn't work
A petition for peace
Michael Moore's views on the tragedy
nonviolence.org
antiwar.com
Background on Afghanistan from the NY Times

"He moved as slowly as an hour hand amidst a crowd of second hands" --Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Sinister Ducks
I always suspected ducks were evil, but now there's proof!

"The skin is a continuing caress, each pore a rung of thrills on the endless ladder of sensual pleasure." --Malcolm de Chazal
"If we resist our passions, it is more often because they are weak than because we are strong." --La Rochefoucauld

Come and see!
But, for your own safety, please don't stare directly in to the face of God, okay?

Hey, did you know there was a "real good" version of windows? Yes indeed! Check out WinRG

Close your eyes and step forward through the back door of the room. Where does it lead? To your cave. Step forward into your cave. That's right, you're moving deeper into your cave. And you're going to find your Power Animal... "slide."

I've never been so accurately insulted in my life!

Darren Aronofsky, director of "Pi" and the amazing "Requiem for a Dream" is working with Frank Miller on the next Batman

The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality and the Nazi Pary

I Gave My Cat An Enema

Flem comics
Many funny pages, but have to occasionally suffer through a bad streak.

A moody photograph with effective composition.

A stungun test to show how utterly ineffective stunguns are.

Batteries printed on paper

Textual analysis as a clue to suicide

Phillip K. Dick's letter to the FBI where he denounces Thomas Disch's "Camp Concentration" for containing coded neo-Nazi messages "to be read by the right people here and there" Curiously, in other correspondence he gave it the highest praise.

Look around you at the environment we live in. Carbon dioxide, flourocarbons, and methane have increased since 1968. Earth is being aclimatized. They are turning our atmosphere in to their atmosphere. We are like a natural resource to them. Deplete one planet, move on to another. They want benign indifference. They want us drugged. We could be pets. We could be food. But all we really are is livestock.
Our impulses are being redirected. We are living in an artificially induced state of consciousness that resembles sleep. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled in to a trance. They have made us indefferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.

--John Carpenter's "They Live"

This is hilarious. To be seen to the tune of the Transformers soundtrack only!

Deep-space probes are decelerating for no apparent reason.

The woes of Ultima Online
"Lord British wears a silver crown and a gray tunic with a silver serpent emblazoned on the chest. As the ruler of Britannia, he has been a frequent target of protest; at one point, hundreds of disgruntled citizens stripped down to their underwear, broke into his castle, and stood around shouting (well, typing) profanities."

Apple says "Think Different", but Not Too Different

Evolving soccerbots
NOTE: The good stuff (pictures and captions) is near the bottom of the page.
The evolved soccerbot problem is an order of magnitude more interesting than something like evolving CoreWars bots, because the individual bots that make up a successful robotic soccer team have to cooperate without any direct communication (that would be mind-reading).

A brief overview of the role of military funding in artificial intelligence research.
And here is another look

An interview with John Koza, inventor of genetic programming
'There was incredible hostility to genetic programming,' Koza remembers. 'And most of it was centred in the genetic algorithm community - which is curious because the GA community on the whole has been excluded from the mainstream AI and machine learning community'

A cool Linux MPEG player

Clueless journalist's attempt to prove Why OpenBSD Will Never Be as Secure as Linux and his flaming death
flaming death
flaming death
flaming death
flaming death

It turns out that the aforementioned journalist had died the death of a thousand flames before, when he announced The End of SSL and SSH

Checkpoint Firewall 1 vs IPFilter
The message is somewhat dated, but I'd be a lot of the criticism still applies.

Zark for the Thing King! in The Paging Game

Dennis Ritchie, a creator of C and UNIX, interviewed in LinuxWorld.

Another interview with him is available in RealAudio format.

The ANSI C99 standard is the latest C language standard.

What if "The Matrix" was about real hackers?

A new study shows the German public was fully aware of the Holocaust as it happened.

A testament to the efficacy of the US Patent system:

Smucker's sues over infringement of its peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich patent

U.S. Patent 6,004,596 contains such gems as: "first bread layer having a first perimeter surface coplanar to a contact surface" and its careful legalistic delineation "wherein said first filling" is "comprised of peanut butter" and a "second filling is comprised of a jelly."

A funny, odd, and frequently disturbing series of Japanese comic characters. More here.

European Art Brut

An interesting international argument over the International Space Station.
Science in space... Russian vodka... Mexican TRUCK nuclear weapon delivery systems... and a good time for all.

Asian Spider Wrestling

Who ever thought there were so many ways to bake a potato? www.bigspud.com has lots of Usenet threads on baking, boiling, roasting, microwaving, and pretty much anything else you can do to a potato. Oh, and then there are all of the potato types. Truely a great find.

Kung-fu action like you've never seen it before!
(Thanks to Joel for this one)

Have a happy Easter onion!

Interactive Fiction is alive and well. Read the FAQ, then look at how a game is made, in any of ten authoring systems.

Call of Chtulhu, will soon become a computer game, with a sanity system... As your character witnesses horror after horror, he slowly goes insane, in the true Lovecraftian tradition. "This can have subtle effects--perhaps you start hearing voices in your ears, perhaps every shadow looks like a horrific creature, or maybe you start hallucinating too."

"The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity" -- A.E.Newton

Check out the cool robots at Robomenu.
(Note: Click on "sorted by robot" or "sorted by builder" in the left frame.)

Ask questions of a real librarian in real-time here.

Although television violence has never been shown to cause hostile behavior, its sinister reputation lives on.

American society has created for itself a Mobius-like reality by privileging capital, or property rights, above all else

Tips for effective lucid dreaming (bottom of page), and a dream machine (top of page).

A nice collection of comparisons to fuel flamewars:

Linux vs FreeBSD vs NetBSD vs OpenBSD vs Hurd
Debian vs Slackware vs RedHat
Monolithic kernel vs microkernel
Microsoft Windows NT vs Unix
Java vs LISP vs Scheme vs C vs C++
Perl vs TCL vs Python vs AWK vs Ksh
Qt vs Gtk vs Tk vs Xt vs Xlib vs GNUstep
Apple II vs Atari 800 vs C=64 vs TRS-80
Atari ST vs Commodore Amiga vs Apple Macintosh
Motorola vs Intel
Unix vs VMS vs MVS
Microsoft Windows vs Macintosh
USR Pilot vs Apple Newton vs WinCE
RMS vs Bill Gates

From Christopher Browne's fascinating Internet Data Filtering Talk

Forget "When Worlds Collide" (do you even remember it?)... see what happens when galaxies collide.

Check out the vital stats and compare and contrast various IRC networks such as EFNet, DALNet, Undernet, etc...

An oldie but goodie: Recursive Make Considered Harmful
"Symptoms that the UNIX community have long accepted as a fact of life, but which need not be endured any longer..." "...recursive makes which take ``forever'' to work out that they need to do nothing, recursive makes which do too much, or too little, recursive makes which are overly sensitive"

One good thing about all the attention the demise of the Mir space sation is getting is that it gets people interested in science who otherwise would not have been interested in it at all. Another good thing is the popularization of cool satelite tracking Java applets like this one. Its particularly convenient because you can use it from within your browser. You can rotate the globe in 3D, zoom in and out, and track various sattelites, like Mir and the ISS.

Michael Abrash's classic Graphics Programming Black Book is now available free online at Dr.Dobbs. Beware, the graphics stuff itself is obsolete, but the optimization and general assembly programming info is still relevant.

An excellent resource for finding rare books.

Recently laid-off tech sector emloyees should not forget to fill out their 1040.com forms!

CoreWars, the antediluvian, abstract, assembly language version of RobotWars (for software nerds instead of hardware jocks) got more interesting when warriors were evolved instead of written. More here and here. Perhaps CoreWars@home will be next. :)

A computer language genealogy, in PDF format, and others.

"...the US law system has allowed for a decade the filing of patents for elementary software processes. The 30.000 software patents filed every year are now used to attack and eliminate independant software publishers or free software authors."
From: www.freepatents.org
Its aimed at Europeans, but is still very interesting and relevant.

Using Genetic Algorithms for Game AI

The One True Programming Editor wars continue... this time its settled in a paintball match! Guess which editor wins?

A rant about privacy.

Letting computers evolve a language.. Is this a step towards spontaneous development of an AI ?

See what happened on any particular day in Dr. Mac's Cultural Calendar.

How Power Shapes the News from FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting). Lots of blatant manipulation of the press is exposed here... as if the mainstream media weren't good enough lapdogs as it is... I guess the dogs have to get whipped in to shape sometimes. Check out the article to see which carots and sticks are being used on whom.

Things my girlfriend and I have argued about. Well, no, not me personally, but someone has... specifically the someone who wrote that web page.

"BlöödHag ... are dedicated to the promotion of literacy in a Heavy Metal format. All their songs are short speed metal bios of some of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. With songs such as "J.R.R. Tolkein and "Michael Moorcock" they will blow your illiterate ass right back to the library.."

NASA is secretly developing a Death Star underground!

The real-world problems of managing 40,000 bitmaps and textures to 3D models, sounds and music, and source code files for Age of Empires 2. I blame it on Microsoft! :) Seriously, though, they should have used Perforce.

A trackball designed for manipulating objects in a 3D virtual-reality space.

A trackball that scans your hand in infra-red for biometrics applications such as credit-card transactions. It seems to be an interesting alternative to fingerprints or retina scans.

Who wouldn't love a site dedicated to philosophical humor?

A talented artist's comic depiction of his obsession with chess.

Microsoft's assertion that Open Souce stifiles innovation has sparked a huge thread on Slashdot. Although interesting, I hesitate to call it a discussion, as all the high-rated posts are of one oppinion. I hope some more effective alternative forms of moderation become popular soon. It would be nice to see well-thought-through oppinions come from all sides of an issue, rather than hear the party line endlessly repeated.

How much journalistic integrity does the news media have? Grade the News brings some of the issues to light. (thanks to Sean for this one)

Parasites and Parasitalogical Resources

What religious/political group is responsible for most of the "30 Worst Atrocities of the 20th Century" ?

Burned remains of the "greatest classical library" are now readable using new digital imaging techniques. Lost classics from Aristotle to Epicurus to Sappho to Euclid may be available for scholarly study for the first time in hundreds if not thousands of years. Here is another fascinating article about the applications of the technology.

The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric S. Raymond (of the annoying "The Cathedral and the Bazzar") seems to be worth looking at.

Quantum mechanics meets information theory.

Amputation set collecting. Need I say more?

Someone called the Humor Police AKA the FBI on the parody site www.bonsaikitten.com

After the Singularity, will we still be human? Does it matter? And will we still know the difference? Look here to find out.

Help Mars researchers by cataloging craters. Its sort of like SETI@home. But you do the gruntwork that computers are too stupid to do, and real researchers are too busy to do.