Edward S Herman's landmark essay, The Banality of Evil, has never seemed more apposite. "Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization'," wrote Herman. "There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable... It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public."

Normalizing colonial crimes like the attack on Fallujah requires such racism, linking our imagination to "the other". The thrust of the reporting is that the "insurgents" are led by sinister foreigners... No irony is noted that the foreigners in Iraq are overwhelmingly American...

Fallujah, The Us Elections And 9/11

Milosevic wants Clinton, Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Madeleine Albright, and Wesley Clark to testify

How the Media Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Rumsfeld

Green & Libertarian Presidential Candidates to Demand Ohio Recount
more...

"In 1998, for no special reason, Orrin Hatch decided that only one senator needed to object to a nomination. This made it easier for Republicans to obstruct Bill Clinton's nominees.

In 2001, when one of their own became president, Hatch suddenly reversed course and decided that it should take two objections after all. That made it harder for Democrats to obstruct George Bush's nominees..."

It gets worse

Building Progressive Media

"'All of the Middle East and indeed the whole world is now extremely suspicious that US Marine forces slaughtered civilians in Fallujah indiscriminately,' Joseph Arrieta wrote at the time. 'Not only that, it appears Marine snipers did a lot of killing. This is not some errant bomb or missile that created "collateral damage," it’s the alleged deliberate, careful sighting of civilian targets with spotters targeting men, women, children and ambulances,' all war crimes.

Now, 'A hospital has been razed to the ground in one of the heaviest US air raids in the Iraqi city of Falluja,' reports the BBC.

What Sort of Criminal Monsters Bomb Hospitals?

Flickr

More voting weirdness in Ohio

A call to action regarding the election fraud

Votergate 2004: We Don't Need Paper to Prove Fraud, But We Do Need Money and Leadership, NOW

More on the owners of the voting machine manufacturers

"one precinct in Youngstown, Ohio, recorded a negative 25 million votes, which was discarded from official results"

Tonight I'm going to party like it's 1999

John Ashcroft quits!

Media Black Out on Vote Fraud Allegations

Kerry Conceded But Did He Really Lose?
a DemocracyNow interview with Avi Rubin and Bev Harris

Analysis Of Exit Polls Vs. Supposed Ballot Counts

10,000 vote overcount in Nebraska

EFF on E-Voting

Conflict of interest in voting machine manufacturers

Phil Foster of Sequoia Systems (one of the largest electronic voting machine manufacturers) was indicted for money laundering and bribery in 2001

Tom Eschberger of BRC (now part of another very large electronic voting machine manufacturer, ES&S) was involved in a bribery and kickback case in 2002

Some embarrasing technical details about the electronic voting machines

British trying to impeach Blair over WMD claims that led to war

Citizens for Legitimate Government

Stolen Election 2004

The Numbers Don't Add Up: Nader supporters voting for Bush?

88,408 more votes than voters in Palm Beach county

"When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat."

Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked

Kerry won by Greg Palast
Interview with Greg Palast (starting at 00:06:00)

Was the Ohio Election Honest and Fair?

Election judge's experience

official Ohio Secretary of State web site on the 2004 elections

Global monitors find faults [in 2004 US elections]

Voter Suppression Rap Sheet

Discrepancies between electronic voting machine totals

Bug in electronic voting machines "subtracts votes after the absentee tally hit 32,500 -- a ceiling put in place by the software makers"

Exit polling discrepancies
Another take

How exit polling works

The Associated Press reports on electronic voting machine miscounts

North Carolina electronic voting machine tallies 11,283 too many votes for Bush

Voting irregularities in seven Southern states

Running tally of voting machine malfunctions

Florida numbers vs 2000

Voting in 2004 was more problematic than in 2000

Republican Senator and former Senate Ethics Director resigned after revelations that he owned the largest electronic voting machine company ES&S

Much more on voting fraud in 2004 election

Finally Democrats demand a little action

Nader challenges electronic voting machine counts in NH

"This chart makes the trend obvious. In states with paper ballots and audit trails, the exit polls accurately predicted the vote results. In states using electronic machines, the vote results were distorted in favor of Bush."

What really happened

Election results by population

"He didn’t give interviews, or write political essays... But he did want to get a school of students to see what he had seen: that Western liberalism led to nihilism, and had undergone a development at the end of which it could no longer define itself or defend itself. A development which took everything praiseworthy and admirable out of human beings, and made us into dwarf animals. Made us into herd animals—sick little dwarves, satisfied with a dangerous life in which nothing is true and everything is permitted...

Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people to question everything—all values, all moral truths. Instead, people were led by their own selfish desires. And this threatened to tear apart the shared values which held society together. But there was a way to stop this..."

The Power of Nightmares

The Economist endorses Kerry

Problems with pebble-bed nuclear reactors

Guantanamo prisoners sue

The New Yorker endorses a Presidential candidate for the first time in its history

Endangered languages (with fewer than 1000 speakers or with very fast decline)

SeatGuru: helps pick the best seat on a given airplane

Don't Buy Your International Tickets Online

"Unlike deregulated domestic USA airfares, international airfares are regulated both by international treaties and by an international airline price-fixing cartel, the International Air Transportation Association (IATA).

It's worth noting that every USA-based airline operating scheduled international passenger flights has voluntarily joined IATA. USA airlines' invocations of "open markets", "free trade", and "open skies" can be dismissed as completely hypocritical and self-serving drivel until such time as they exercise their right to withdraw from IATA, as any of them could at any time. USA airlines are allowed to participate in IATA "traffic conferences" only because of a special exemption granted them from USA anti-trust laws which normally forbid such industry-wide collusion on prices..."

But there's a loophole in the system: travel agents can sell tickets at a discount from the "official" (overinflated) prices. However, electronic ticketing systems like Travelocity can't:

"All official fares are "published" either in hardcopy in the Official Airline Guides (OAG) or the Air Tariff, or electronically in the computerized reservation systems (CRS's) such as Sabre, Apollo, Amadeus, Worldspan, and Gabriel. By the very nature of the IATA price-fixing system, airlines cannot admit any knowledge of the fact that agents are selling tickets for less than the official fares. So only published fares are shown in any CRS."

"The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals, and then cloaks them with a phony moral authority..."

Al Gore's latest attack on Bush

I'm going to school very hard these days

International election observers' pre-election report

World's most expensive cities.

Surrealist techniques

"We are at risk of becoming an autocracy in three key respects.

First, Republican parliamentary gimmickry has emasculated legislative opposition in the House of Representatives...

Second, electoral rules have been rigged to make it increasingly difficult for the incumbent party to be ejected by the voters...

Third, the federal courts, which have slowed some executive-branch efforts to destroy liberties, will be a complete rubber stamp if the right wins one more presidential election."

America as a One Party State

"President Bush and his administration have embarked on a reckless and extreme course that endangers the long-term economic health of our nation ... The differences between President Bush and John Kerry with respect to leadership on the economy are wider than in any other presidential election in our experience. President Bush believes that tax cuts benefiting the most wealthy Americans are the answer to almost every economic problem... Here, as elsewhere, Bush is dead wrong, and too dogmatic to admit it." --Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University and Nobel prize winner

Selective Service System: What happens in a draft

Some PATRIOT Act provisions temporarily defeated in US District court. The ruling is subject to appeal.

Carnival of Chaos: a collection of collages inspired by the violent response of George W Bush to the suicide attacks on the twin towers in New York on September 11th 2001, and his increasingly megalomaniacal behaviour since that event.

Paintings of the Soviet gulags

A word on the artist

Ereignis: Articles on Heidegger

The Campaign for Reader Privacy - Fighting Ashcroft's PATRIOT Act provisions which allow the government to spy on your library records and bookstore purchases

How do the Democrats and Republicans fare on economic policy?

"...The Clinton administration presided over the longest peacetime economic expansion in U.S. history. The national debt fell dramatically, the industrial sector boomed, wages grew and more Americans found jobs. In contrast, the Bush administration has presided over the weakest job-creation cycle since the Great Depression, record household debt, the highest-ever bankruptcy rate and a substantial increase of those who live in poverty..."

Some pretty amazing fractal animations

More evidence Bush approved torture at Guantanamo

"Despite consistent efforts to turn Ronald Reagan in to a minor deity, the philosophical progenitor of our current conservative government is Barry Goldwater... who energized fledgling conservative Republican cadres and began the march toward political dominance.

But it was a grassroots evangelical Christian campaign that made that dominance possible..."

Evangelism in Social, Domestic and Foreign Policy

More details on the underground cinema in the catacombs of Paris

Timeline of the Holocaust

Created some new debs: one for obpager another for qlogtools, and another for xhkeys

To get them just add these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list

For Debian stable add:

deb http://debian.shyper.com/debian stable/
deb-src http://debian.shyper.com/debian stable/

or

For Debian unstable add:

deb http://debian.shyper.com/debian unstable/
deb-src http://debian.shyper.com/debian unstable/

And then run

apt-get update

Then you should be able to use apt-get as usual to install obpager, qlogtools, libblowfish, and zebedee.

3 books and 35 movies:

Fahrenheit 9/11

Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War

Unprecedented - 2000 Presidential Election

House of Bush, House of Saud: The secret relationship between the world's two most powerful dynasties

The Iron Triangle: Inside the secret world of The Carlyle Group

The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money

The Great Unraveling: Losing our way in the new century

Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron

Rise of the Vulcans: The history of Bush's war cabinet

Bushwomen: Tales of a cynical species

The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a national disorder

Crude Politics: How Bush's oil cronies hijacked the war on terrorism

Worse than Watergate: The secret presidency of George W. Bush

The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity -- A Diplomat's Memoir

Battle Ready by Tom Clancy, with General Tony Zinni

The President of Good & Evil: The ethics of George W. Bush

The Book on Bush: How George W. (mis)leads America

Fraud: The strategy behind the Bush lies and why the media didn't tell you

and 19 others in Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government

"the most visible -- overwhelming and intimidating -- presence on the street was the police... To "march," that is, actually meant to step from pen to pen, hemmed in everywhere, your protest at the mercy of the timing, tactics, and desires of the police..."

Nick Turse reports from the RNC in NY.

I've created some Debian packages for Zebedee and libblowfish

You can ignore this link if you're a human... Not for humans either... Nor this... Ignore this like the rest blah, blah

"What does the government of the United States do when faced with a choice between supporting: (a) a group of totalitarian military thugs guilty of murdering thousands, systematic torture, widespread rape, and leaving severely mutilated corpses in the streets ... or (b) a non-violent priest, legally elected to the presidency by a landslide, whom the thugs have overthrown in a coup? ... But what if the priest is a "leftist"?"

Killing Hope: American atrocities around the world

"When the party Mr. Bush is hosting in his world ends, you'll be left picking shrimp toast out of the carpet." --Ronald Reagan's son speaks out against Bush

This is your President on drugs.

Spam Filtering for Mail Exchangers: blocking junk mail in incoming SMTP transactions

SEC: Simple Event Correlator (replacement for swatch and logsurfer)

cryptcat: encrypted netcat

socketlock is a dynamic library that wraps libc's bind() and connect() functions. Its purpose is to force bad programs to bind to specific IP's on multihomed machines.

DNS flood detector

Zebedee:Secure IP Tunnel via blowfish and friends

Metalog: a modern alternative to syslog

Just wrote a program that converts email stored in MH directories to maildir directories.

LFTP: ncftp on steroids

Useless Use of Cat Award

Neat Image: noise filter for digital cameras

A serious critique of Farenheit 9/11

Know your rights if you're stopped by the police: read the ACLU's bustcard

I've collected a number of useful patches to qmail and made them easy to apply to a Debian system. Get the tarball here

This space intentionally left blank.

The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives by Zbigniew Brzezinski

End-to-End Arguments in System Design

Help to millions obstructed by petty politics

The reasoning behind the torture

Journalists harrassed by American INS

Staying Found in the Wilderness
How to use a compass
Magnetic declination FAQ

More evidence that fingerprint identification is pseudoscience

The abortion debate from a logical standpoint

Phrase of the day: begging the question

Secure your UNIX logs

"In March 2003, a teenage girl named Courtney presented one of her poems before an audience at Barnes & Noble bookstore in Albuquerque, then read the poem live on the school's closed-circuit television channel. A school military liaison and the high school principal accused the girl of being 'un-American' because she criticized the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's failure to give substance to its 'No Child Left Behind' education policy. The girl's mother, also a teacher, was ordered by the principal to destroy the child's poetry. The mother refused and may lose her job..." Roses are red...

Codex Seraphinianus, Hallucinatory Encyclopedia

Doublethink in the Republican Party

"At the Camp War Horse detention centre in Baguba, north of Baghdad, it is a surreal scene: US soldiers handing out cash to freed prisoners along with a note saying 'You have not been mistreated.'

'Have you been mistreated?' the governor asks the detainees, dressed in orange boilersuits. 'No. We have never been tortured,' chorused those behind bars as some 50 soldiers stood nearby...

One interrogator explained his methods for getting prisoners to talk.

"I try to build a relationship and get their view point, and make them comfortable... I try to be friendly and open-minded," he said.

Bring in... the comfy chair!

Cultural Theorist Trading Cards

A leftist intellectual defends the war in Iraq

Very interesting and informative article on the systematic causes of the torture of Iraqi prisoners, written by the man who first published the torture photos in the New Yorker (and, incidentally, who also exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam), Seymour Hersh.

Revealing blacked-out documents (such as those released under the Freedom of Information Act)

Meet Anton Chekov

America and the Nazi Book Burnings

Transcript of Bush and Cheney's testimony before the 911 Commission, obtained from a secret recording of the meeting.

"Military intelligence has encouraged and told us 'Great job.'

They usually don't allow others to watch them interrogate. But since they like the way I run the prison, they have made an exception."

Torture of Iraqi prisoners

UN Human Rights Norms for Businesses

"Compassionate Coercion"

Diary of a Real American

Hitler vs Stalin

Word of the day:

perseveration: Uncontrollable repetition of a particular response, such as a word, phrase, or gesture, despite the absence or cessation of a stimulus, usually caused by brain injury or other organic disorder.

Who was Georges Bataille?

A Structured Approach to Hard Disk Encryption

"With the ratification of HR 3077... professors whose ideological principles may not support U.S. practices abroad can have their appointments terminated, any part of a course's curriculum containing criticisms of U.S. foreign policy can be censored, and any course deemed entirely anti-American can be barred from ever being taught."

They're Made Out of Meat

"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong" --Voltaire

UNESCO Red Book on Endagered Languages

"Evola charges American society with creating a totally vacuous kind of human being, whose terms of reference are exclusively related to personal enrichment, whether financial or 'psychological'; one incapable of autonomous choice, an abject conformist; someone who has been made crass and incapable by a materially easy life which is without idealist impulse. Far from being the acme of human progress, American society is in fact at the most advanced stage of disintegration of modern civilisation..."