Letter Never Sent

The Israeli military continues to kill civilians, including women and children, with impunity. They’ve killed children with sniper fire, women with high-caliber rounds packed with hundreds of tiny sharp steel darts known as flechettes, and they’ve riddled people with multiple rounds leaving them in the street to bleed to death. There needs to be a zero-tolerance policy towards violence of any sort. It is ridiculous that while we wage a war on ‘terror’ murderous goons in uniforms chew up human life with technological efficiency and such uniform pitilessness. In the case of Israeli, these murderers are our closest allies.

• Argentina: Another IMF debacle. Buchanan makes some excellent points here.
• Crime’s newest cash of choice? — on the appeal of the Euro
• Corporate money-laundering
• Machinations of the secret government: “With the accusations that have accumulated, the spectre of European law has been tormenting MI6 for over a year now. On top of that there is the rising scandal of Echelon. The British secret government, dominated by MI6 and the CIA head of station in Grosvenor Square, is incompatible with the modus operandi of the European Union, and legal bust-ups with Europe are looming on the horizon.

  It was therefore no surprise that a Republican delegation led by Senator Phil Gramm slipped into London last summer to visit the ‘unelectable’ William Haig and propose British membership of NAFTA. The secret government was hoping to solve its problems by getting Blair out and reversing Britain out of Europe and into NAFTA. Master cooks themselves, they will have no qualms about cohabiting with the Bush administration (which is run by shysters who have cooked everything from the Florida electoral rolls to the US Supreme Court).
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• The global elite are extremely vulnerable to attack. Hence the recent crackdown on terrorism and the obsession with RMA and assymetric warfare. They are like the giant spiders in The Hobbit with their soft underbellies. The war on terror is a necessary consequence of the intersection of their growing power and influence while technological innovation speeds communication and information.
• Media consolidation: Views from Ani Difranco, Phil Donahue, and others.

The corporate mofos are screwing up the internet again. I hope we don’t look back ten years from now and see the freedom of the internet as a distant memory. That would be a tragedy.

The Architecture of Modern Political Power

Although it can make you feel deterministic about your personality, personality tests such as the Myers-Briggs can provide you with interesting insights into characteristics of your personality. It’s also fun to see how you compare to people you know. You can take an online version of this test here.

I just got back in town from a funeral. I will be updating the site as soon as I get up to speed. Happy New Year!

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Worth reading:

The freedom of the internet is making some important and high-placed people very, very unhappy. The government, on a high-stakes, high-tech witch hunt to catch online freeloaders (ie regular Americans), is expanding its war on warez. The current situation reflects a watershed moment. The battle for the future of the internet is being waged. Will it retain its libertarian/anarchistic nature or will it be subverted and turned into a plaything of big business? What can we really do if the coporate slave-masters of our country decide they want the internet to be a certain way? A place where intellectual property czars can sell their music and video with little or no cost of production/distribution while diminishing the concept of personal consumer ownership of purchased goods. Patent and copyright law is being used to strangle culture and to enslave the very people who collectively produce it. Its also a problem of power. They have it and we don’t. Content producers are twisting arms in Washington and writing legislation for their lapdogs like Sen. Fritz Hollings to increase their control and to criminalize any behavior that presents a threat to their business.

What can be done to fight it? That’s what I’ve been thinking about for a while. I have thought of a few obvious ideas. For one thing, don’t buy anything from these companies if you can help it. They get their money from you and me. Through movie tickets, media purchases like dvds and cds, and advertising. I keep the television off for all but about 30 minutes a day when I want to catch my favorite show on TV Land and I try to never rent or buy dvds and only cds when I really want them. Instead of buying something try to share and borrow with your friends. This works for everything, books, music, video. You can even try pooling the funds of many people if you want to buy things. I think there must also be an emphasis on making information free by using strategies like a reverse copyright such as the Gnu General Public License which expressly protects the right to copy and distribute. This idea could be used for all cultural products. Books, songs or movies that anyone could freely copy.

If the internet gets the hammer dropped on it we could always build tiny island networks where we share and collaborate without fear from the government.

George Kelly, a new friend of mine, emailed me a link to an article in the NY Times about Bush pushing through two controversial appointees essentially bypassing the Democratic-controlled senate, essentially bypassing the idea that we have in this country of the separation of powers, checks and balances. The NY Times fails to mention the corruption and abuse of power that the Bush administration is displaying with this move. On this point they are utterly spineless and state only the barest necessary factual details rather than making the appropriate connections dictated by journalistic integrity. At issue, are the appointments of Otto J. Reich and Eugene Scalia, son of Antonin Scalia. Otto Reich is a criminal leftover from the Iran-Contra scandal during which time he engaged in prohibited acts of domestic propaganda. Yes, in other words, he engaged in a campaign to manipulate American public opinion by writing editorials under the name of a contra leader. He is a criminal, a propagandist, and a liar. This is only what we know about. All of this would not have been a problem for our government except that he was doing this in our country to our own people. The NY Times makes a very bland statement with regards to his culpability:

“A government investigation concluded that Mr. Reich’s office engaged in prohibited acts of domestic propaganda, like writing letters to the op-ed pages of American newspapers to appear as if they came from a contra leader.”

So the investigation concluded that he committed these crimes? Why not just say he did? The connection to ‘Cuban exiles’ is also weakly stated. Apparently, this is a bone thrown to the Cuban-Americans because of the excellent job they did making sure Bush won Florida. What kind of message does this send about the nature of this administration? Placing a convicted criminal, arguably a fascist anti-communist, and propagandist in a high-profile foreign policy position. The paragraph on Otto Reich ends happily with this oblique and unnecessary statement: “Republicans in support of the Reich nomination say he is well qualified for the job.” Of course to them he is well qualified. When’s Ollie North getting his appointment?

The second appointment is the son of Antonin Scalia, ‘labor’ lawyer Eugene Scalia. The NY Times fails to mention what sort of labor lawyer he is, namely one who fights against organized labor. They also fail to mention how Eugene Scalia’s law firm helped Bush win in Florida and how his father, the arch-conservative Antonin Scalia, played his part in Florida by helping to stop the vote recount. It’s typical how out in the open Republicans are with their corruption. I also have to give them credit for their sense of irony and humor in supporting the appointment of an anti-unionist to the Department of Labor. This whole story barely warranted a page and was barely mentioned on the front page.