"He who learns must suffer.
And even in our sleep
pain that cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom to us
by the awful grace of God."
Aeschylus, 525-456 BC

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Thought Police

"In ancient Greece it was a custom to break a slate of burned clay into several pieces and distribute them within the group. When the group reunited the pieces were fitted together (Greek symbollein). This confirmed the members belonging to the group."

Words of the day:
autocthonous - indigenous
quiddity - essence
telos - goal
threnody - mournful poem or song

"an outrageous attempt by the US to mislead": only 3,000 of 11,000 pages of Iraq report left uncensored

"The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users."

Neural Networks in Plain English

"While it may shock some to hear it, libertarians are philosophically opposed to both liberty and equality... The LP tends to politically support liberty on some issues, but never philosophically... While libertarians champion liberty in some arenas, such as free speech, they do so not for the sake of liberty as a coherent ideal; they do so for reasons of their own convenience." --Liberty and equality: a rebuke of libertarianism

Mathematics vs. Matter: The Philosophic Roots of the Rejection of Physical Causation in 20th Century Physics
1 2 3 4

Safeguards to be eliminated: "routine oversight; paper records of surveillance; internal reviews of investigations; and publicly available summaries of basic information, such as the number of new probes opened in a year." --NY State of Surveillance
More surveillance

GW unable to bear dissent

Extropy: Journal of Transhumanist Solutions

Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art

More on Henry Darger

Todd Schorr

Oil, oil, oil, oil, oil, and more oil politics in post-Saddam Iraq

A Brief History of the Apocalypse: Failed Doomsday Prophecies

The Rig Veda

The Torture Reporting Handbook

Learning about the Holocaust through art

CONTEXT's
Books everyone should read
Most influential
Favorite Latin American, Italian, Russian and French novels
Best since 1945
Best in 2000
Overlooked

"Bush was an excellent student at Yale, but many of his tests were graded down at his request to keep him as 'one of the people.'" --Whys and hows of anti-intellectualism in America

"For decades, [physics] students have been taught to avoid asking probing questions. An attitude of "shut-up-and-calculate" has dominated the field. The result is widespread confusion, and a strange unwillingness to ask clear and direct questions..." --When will we emerge from the quantum tunnel of obscurity?

"Hell is not the place of evil; rather, Hell is the absence of any standards at all." --Kenneth Tynan

The Edge Questions

"In The Creature from Jekyll Island, G. Edward Griffin formulates succinctly the financiers' compelling interest in war: 'All that is necessary ... to insure that a government will maintain or expand its debt is to involve it in war or the threat of war. The greater the threat and the more destructive the war, the greater the need for debt.'" --Nicholas Strakon

"We're now in a situation where you've got powerful newspaper executives like Al Neuharth, the former chairman of the Gannett chain making idiotic statements like, 'There are no more secrets in the world.' From the highest mountain to the lowest valley... Pete Williams is now a reporter -- the guy who lied again and again during the Gulf War and lied directly to me. I can honestly call him a liar and never lose a libel suit. He is now a reporter for NBC. Bob Woodward, the hero of Watergate, sits on stories" --An investigative journalist's take on media censorship in the first Gulf War (deja vu)

Former attorney general Ramsey Clark tears apart a Pentagon spokesman over America's ten-year bombing of Iraq

Hundred of billions of dollars are going towards doing things like this

If you're sick of hearing nothing but right-wing propaganda on mainstream radio listen to Democracy Now

What I've been listening to over the last few years, more or less in order, from newest to oldest... (mostly EBM)

How the British created Hinduism

Crime rate in the UK higher than US and most other developed countries.
more

The journalists "just hung around our base all day. Whenever we had some special operation, we'd offer the journalists some facility to go on patrol with our special forces and off they'd go – you know, 'we're on patrol with the special forces' – and they wouldn't realise we were stringing them along to get them out of the way." --What's really been going on in Afghanistan

America's influence on prospective EU members

"Searched 674 nearby stars, found nothing."
"Searched five closest galaxies, found nothing."
"Searched all sky, found nothing" yet...

"Many people would never consider writing a prisoner. I would have never thought to do so when I was in the free world..."

Refusing military service in Israel

"May the Lord bless everyone who beats your children against the rocks!" --Psalm 137:9 Contemporary English Version of the Bible

Wacky Uses

"An amateur photographer... was arrested on Tuesday in his home city of Denver - for simply taking pictures of buildings in an area where Vice President Cheney was residing... The agent told Maginnis that his "suspicious activities" made him a threat to national security, and that he would be charged as a terrorist under the USA-PATRIOT act"

The FCC wants to eliminate rules that restrict companies from monopolizing markets.
--how to act--
(Thanks to Jesse)

"Thomas Pynchon on bad acid couldn't dream up the paranoid nightmares now pouring out of Washington..." --Why you should join the EFF right now, by John Perry Barlow

Because of a mistaken interpretation of a Supreme Court reporter's notes in an 1886 railroad tax case, corporations are now legally considered "persons," equal to humans and entitled to many of the same protections once guaranteed only to humans by the Bill of Rights - a clear contradiction of the intent of the Founders of the United States. The results of this corporate personhood have been:

Unequal taxes
Unequal privacy
Unequal wealth
Unequal trade
Unequal media
Unequal regulation
Unequal responsibility for crime
Unequal protection from risk
Unequal citizenship and access to the commons

Unequal Protection: The rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights

To Sell a War

“The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” - Herman Goering at the Nuremberg Trial

**************************************************
*********David Fincher is making Hard Boiled *********
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Info on the original here

A Telltale Heart in Italy

History of regime changes imposed by the US

US claims a "gap" in international law allowed them to bury alive thousands of Iraquis during the Gulf War

VeganErotica

"Look more closely, though, and the “us” and “them” distinction collapses. Right-wing Christian leaders like Franklin Graham may denounce Islam as a “wicked religion,” and Muslim fundamentalists may defame Jews, but in fact their visions are far closer than either camp would admit."

"Fox isn't in any conventional sense ideological media. It's just that being anti-Democrat, anti-Clinton, anti-yuppie, anti-wonk turns out to be great television"

"Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric; of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry." -- William Butler Yeats

It doesn't get geekier than this

"Networked minefields detect rude attempts to clear them, deduce which parts of themselves have been removed, and signals their remaining munitions to close the hole using best-fit mathematics"
"The mines, which can hop, then redistribute themselves, frustrating the enemy and quite probably terrifying him in the process."

GoogleCookin

christmas lights - WARNING: For indoor or outdoor use only.
mattress - WARNING: Do not attempt to swallow
Anti-Personal Mine - WARNING: DO NOT EAT
Blockbuster Rental DVD - "Be kind - rewind."
Dumb Warnings

The Grue Paradox, some implications, and my take on it

What started out as one article in an obscure journal turned in to a very deep and far-ranging debate, known as the Sokal Affair. I encourage a sequential reading through all of the articles. The debate gets deeper and more interesting as it goes on. Taken together, this is one of the most fascinating things I've read in months.

loop quantum gravity

"The young dolphin gives a quick flip of her head, and an undulating silver ring appears--as if by magic--in front of her. The ring is a solid, toroidal bubble two feet across--and yet it does not rise to the surface! It stands erect in the water like the rim of a magic mirror, or the doorway to an unseen dimension. For long seconds the dolphin regards its creation, from varying aspects and angles, with its vision and sonar..."

"In Ellul's conception, then, life is not happy in a civilization dominated by technique. Even the outward show of happiness is bought at the price of total acquiescence. The technological society requires men to be content with what they are required to like; for those who are not content, it provides distractions -- escape into absorption with the technically dominated media of popular culture and communication." --Robert K. Merton, 1964

Of Botflies and Men and a very icky picture

"There is, in a word, far less understanding at the top than successive leaders have claimed, and domestic politics and short-term factors play a much greater role than they will ever admit. The world and now the American people cannot afford U.S. foreign policy's opportunistic and ad hoc character, its wavering between the immoral and amoral in practice but which official speech writers portray as rational and principled" --Another Century of War? by Gabriel Kolko

Dr. Zoe D. Katze, Ph.D., C.Ht., DAPA

Using genetic programming to emulate the cooperative food collection behavior of ants

"There once was a man who feared his own shadow and who hated his footprints and tried to escape from them. The more he lifted his feet, the more tracks he made. As fast as he could go, his shadow remained with him. Thinking he was still going too slow, he streaked like an arrow until all his strength was spent, and he died. He didn't realize that sitting in the shade of a tree would do away with his shadow, and living quietly would leave his traces to fade away." --Chuang Tzu

The dangers and effects of nuclear, earth-penetrating weapons

Just fixed the blog archives. A lot were missing, but now they're back. Browse around... have fun.

Savagery, ignorance, and hypocracy in the persecution of Salamon Rushdie

World Food Program

What "Homeland Security" really means.

New cannabis study

Strange quark matter

"the United States [is] both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists... the US is the only state on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism (in Nicaragua) and has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on governments to observe international law."

MILITARY AND PARAMILITARY ACTIVITIES IN AND AGAINST NICARAGUA: (NICARAGUA v. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA)
Contains the full text of the judgement against the United States by the International Court of Justice, where the US is found guilty of conducting large-scale terrorist actions against Nicaragua and ordered to pay massive reparations.
The United States maintained the court had no jurisdiction in the matter and contemptously refused to even attend the trial. Of course, no reparations were ever paid.

"The young people of today love luxury. They have bad manners, they scoff at authority and lack respect for their elders. Children nowadays are really tyrants, they no longer stand up when their elders come into the room where they are sitting, they contradict their parents, chat together in the presence of adults, eat gluttonously and tyrannise their teachers." --Socrates, 470-399BC

The Campaign To End Genocide

Noam Chomsky interviewed in India

"Combat situations in Iraq will be lightning fast... with Special Forces coordinating aircraft. It's not going to be large divisions and brigades moving laboriously across the sands of Iraq. It will all be happening before we know where or when it's happening, and the reporters will all be mesmerized at the briefings, and that will be it. It will be total information management and the real reporting will be done in Washington, not on the ground."

"The Washington press corps is complicit... The game that's played in Washington—and it's always been played this way—is the trade- off of access for patronage. If you agree to sing their song, you'll be invited for an audience."

--The state of censorship in the coming Iraq war--

I took out the comment code. It was just slowing down the blog.

Zipf, Power-laws, and Pareto - a ranking tutorial

The murder of civilians on a massive scale during WW2, by the "good guys".

disk based caching library
cdb: a fast, reliable, simple package for creating and reading constant databases
freecdb
PureDB
QccPack: Quantization, Compression, and Coding Library
Shaman library provides - Portability, Resource management, Language support, Caching
Ubiqx: list, trees, arrays, db, caching libs
TLTools: large library of misc functions
BetterC: library to help debugging
Mark Malloc: more debugging help
More...

US fears World Court will prosecute Bush for war crimes

NJAMD: Not just another malloc debugger

Truly excellent talk on Iraq by Scott Ritter, former Chief UN Weapons Inspector

Mirror matter

Oranisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons

Everything you always wanted to know about why Microsoft sucks, but were afraid to ask.

Hackers

Raven Graphs: graphs of the first stanza of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven, made with txt2graph and GraphVis

"LZO implements the fastest compression and decompression algorithms around."

The Church of Euthanasia

"CONS is a replacement for MAKE. It is not compatible with make, but it has a number of powerful capabilities not found in other software construction systems, including make."
Opt "is a subroutine library which facilitates the convenient input of parameters to a C or C++ programs"
gitty-gitty "is able to generate an already compilable, very sophisticated "hello world" program, written in C or C++ and constituted by a main program, two internal modules (classes), one static and one shared library and one shellscript. All these sources exept the shellscript contain a full set of possible doxygen-comments. And this complex documented "Hello World" is already fully embedded into GNU autoconf/automake."
"Kazlib is a collection of program modules portably written in ANSI C. There is a dictionary module based on red-black trees, an extendible hashing module, and a system for emulating exception handling."