"One Book, One City", the latest American groupthink initiative:
"All Together Now" column at mobylives
"It's a novel idea..." from the Guardian
"Pick a book with depth..." from the Sentinel

Taxonomists are being driven to extinction

A bicycle chain the size of a grain of salt.

By the end of 1999 over 30 million people were infected with HIV and 12.7 had died from the disease.
Compare that with malaria which infects 300-500 million and kills over one million people every year.
Yet the funding for the the prevention of HIV is thirty times that of malaria (800 vs 3 million dollars).

Unconventional techniques for managing depression.

Eat poop you cat

US government censorship of scientific information.
More here.

"I am an intelligent, unsociable but adapatable person. I would like to dispel any untrue rumors about me. I am not edible. I cannot fly. I cannot use telekinesis. My brain is not large enough to destroy the entire world when unfolded. I did not teach my long- haired guinea pig Chronos to eat everything in sight (that is the nature of the long-haired guinea pig)." --An 11-year-old boy with Asperger's Syndrome describes himself in an excerpt from the American Journal of Psychiatry

From How to talk like Jacques Derrida (Guideline 4):
"Pun like crazy: The thought (which when taught, becomes taut, tight, tense, stretched to breaking, which is to say ever looser as it becomes tightened) is illuminated by the pun, which has been called the lowest form of wit (whereby the bun may be termed the lowest form of wheat), to wit, a pun is more like a pin, which bursts the taut (taught) surface of the meaning, freeing it to explode/ implode in all directions at once."

"Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it ? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we loved ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe." --Franz Kafka (1904)

Today's dilligent research of Everything2 has yielded these gems:
The Lovecraftian compulsion to keep writing even as one is being devoured
What would Cthulhu do?
the newly discovered erotic works of H. P. Lovecraft

Modern Mayan Slaughtercomb:
"...The most talented of the two-legged bipeds shall play in a field with chigger infested grass approximately 3 to 4 feet in height. The grass should be infested with copperhead snakes and deadly Indian scorpions, both of which should be properly taunted with hot, pointed sticks to the point of instant aggression. At mid-field, a bear cave should be constructed of tick-infested paper and fecal glue. The bear will serve as a clubbin' bastard of all approaching players. The players will be totally naked except for 45 pounds of recently killed fish strapped to strategic points on their bodies, including arms, legs, and the ever precious ankle of protection power. The bear beats all who approach -- except those who carry the glowing honeycomb which is obtained from crocodile moats at each teams goal lines. Before each game, if available, a human will be tossed in similar fashion to that of a coin. The tossed human shall be a child, preferably of ripe age and breeding, minimally moistened for maximum flippage...."

Anna Kavan, Thomas Bernhard, and Phillip K. Dick: three of my favorite authors.

"Code Optimization Using the GNU C Compiler" looks what simple optimizations are done by gcc and how it does them.

Bush and Blair have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize

"I side with PKD over Pynchon. In fact, I consider Dick to be the one genius, the one absolute genius in US literature since 1945. I find Pynchon to be kind of an Uncle Tom, as a representative of science fiction, making pointless and protracted Faulknerian noises in his prose to suck up to a New-Yorker- sensibility." --John Dolan (from an article on Victor Pelevin)

Linux Advanced Routing HOWTO (for those who thought they knew it all)

Chomsky's publisher prosecuted as a terrorist by the Turkish government for an essay on Kurds.

Mankind's "self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." --Walter Benjamin
(the above quote was stolen from an interesting interview with Mark Dery)

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.