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The Matrix Makers: Matrix Sequels the Cover Story on Newsweek

The Warner Brothers studio lot in Burbank, Calif., is frenetic on most days, but on a Thursday in early November it was really humming. The company’s box-office Bigfoot for 2002, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” was set to open in eight days, and nearly every division of the studio was working furiously to get it ready. Until 2:30 p.m. That’s when everything stopped. For the next half hour, the boy wizard had to make way for “The Matrix.” [MORE]

Also: See our Philosophy of the Matrix collection from a previous article

Yule log special burns up ratings (WTF?)

The Yule Log -- a TV broadcast of logs burning in Gracie Mansion's fireplace to a Christmas carol soundtrack -- burned up the ratings this year.

The uninterrupted two-hour Christmas morning broadcast of the "Yule Log Christmas Special," a holiday tradition for fireplace-less New Yorkers, returned to the air in 2001 after a 12-year hiatus.

Wednesday's showing, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., boasted 284,012 viewing households, a 26 percent boost in viewership compared with last year, WPIX Channel 11 said. It smoked the 1 p.m. airing of the 1951 classic film version of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," starring Alistair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge, by 29,000 households.

The rather bizarre Christmas tradition also burned up the airwaves every year from 1966 to 1989.

During the Yule Log's absence, WPIX, the local affiliate of the WB, was bombarded with letters and calls from viewers asking for the broadcast to be brought back.

For its triumphant return, the Yule Log tape was digitally remastered, but the soundtrack, including "Joy to the World" and "Winter Wonderland," was left unchanged.

Comment: If you're not thinking "Baudrillard on steroids" right now, you're simply not thinking!

Electric dreams infect waking memories
Black and white imagery makes dreams monochrome.

Spend too long watching old movies this holiday season, and your nightlife might seem a lot less colourful. When we are surrounded by black and white imagery, we think our dreams are monochrome, says a US philosopher.

In surveys from the 1950s - the golden age of black and white - most said that their dreams were never or rarely in colour, found Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California, Riverside1. Before and since, most have reported colourful dreams.

The finding shows how little we know our own senses, says Schwitzgebel. "This is one piece of a general picture - our knowledge of our stream of experience is very poor."

2002: The year in technology

The battle between copyright owners and internet file sharers raged, quantum cryptography went commercial and robo-rat was born.

2002: The year in medicine and biology

Human cloning claims abounded, stem cells flourished and mouse and malaria genomes arrived - as did replacement penises

Agents of Repression The FBI's greatest hits

They may not be on your college reading list, but Jim Vander Wall and his co-author Ward Churchill have written two of the most important books about civil rights in post-war America. In their first book, the now classic, "The COINTELPRO Papers" (South End Press), Ward and Vander Wall exposed the FBI's legendary counterintelligence programs, which targeted individuals and organizations FBI director J. Edgar Hoover believed to be "enemies of the state" for political, and sometimes literal, extermination.

Their second book, the recently re-released "Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement" (South End Press) offers an even more in-depth investigation of the FBI's black ops. Based on over 100,000 pages of documents, "Agents of Repression" is a harrowing look at the FBI's history of violence, intimidation and destruction.

In the wake of the recently passed Homeland Security Act, which greatly increases the power of the government to spy on everyday Americans, GNN's Anthony Lappé talked with Vander Wall about COINTELPRO's greatest hits, advances in new surveillance technology, and the implications of the newly passed anti-terror legistlation.

Just how paranoid should we be? Read on

U.S. Navy to prepare aircraft carriers for Gulf
Report: Ground forces authorized for Gulf deployment

The U.S. Navy has been told to prepare two aircraft carriers for deployment to the Persian Gulf after New Year's Day, naval officials told CNN.

A "prepare to deploy" order has been issued for a carrier to move from both the East Coast and the West Coast.

Under that type of order, a carrier, as well as its air wing and other battle group ships, would be required to be ready by a certain date; that date has not been publicly disclosed. The ships and planes must be ready to actually begin sailing within 96 hours of that date.

FDA to Investigate if Clonaid Broke Law

The Food and Drug Administration will probe whether a sect claiming to have produced the world's first human clone illegally performed any of the alleged work in the United States, a senior agency official said Friday.

The nation has no specific law against human cloning. But the FDA, which regulates human experiments, has contended since 1998 that its regulations forbid human cloning without prior agency permission — permission it has no intention of giving.

Clonaid, a company formed by a group called the Raelians who claim aliens created all life on Earth, announced that it had produced a cloned baby girl born Thursday to a U.S. woman — although it provided no proof that the baby had indeed been cloned.

Nor would company head Brigitte Boisselier say where the human embryo allegedly was cloned or implanted into the mother, or even where the baby was born.

FDA investigators will promptly contact Clonaid to see "where did the implantation take place. That's the fundamental question," said a high-ranking agency official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The implantation of a cloned baby into a woman is, we think, illegal in the United States without FDA approval because of fundamental safety and ethical concerns." [more: includes slideshow]

Also: Matt Drudge goes crazy with this story

U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations
'Stress and Duress' Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret Overseas Facilities

Deep inside the forbidden zone at the U.S.-occupied Bagram air base in Afghanistan, around the corner from the detention center and beyond the segregated clandestine military units, sits a cluster of metal shipping containers protected by a triple layer of concertina wire. The containers hold the most valuable prizes in the war on terrorism -- captured al Qaeda operatives and Taliban commanders.

Those who refuse to cooperate inside this secret CIA interrogation center are sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles, according to intelligence specialists familiar with CIA interrogation methods. At times they are held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights -- subject to what are known as "stress and duress" techniques.

Sick? DNA Scanner Tells What Ails

Who doesn't worry about skeletons lurking in the gene closet? Soon, instant DNA mapping could ease those fears -- or deliver the cold, hard truth.

A prototype diagnostic tool under development by two London companies and set for rollout next year is an important step on the path to genotyping-while-you-wait. In the short term, it offers rapid genetic analysis of infectious diseases.

In development by biodiagnostics company LGC and startup Agile Technologies, the shoebox-size prototype essentially replaces the DNA lab and delivers results in a half-hour rather than the usual two weeks.

The device works as a "black box," that is, it requires no operator training. Technicians simply load the patient's saliva sample and wait for results to display onscreen or on a printout. LGC plans to sell the device, at a cost of £4,000 ($6,300), to family doctors, outpatient clinics and other medical specialists.

False dawns in the brave world of New Genetics

Gene science has the potential to transform the course of our lives, from 'designer babies' to slowing the ageing process. But how far advanced is it - and exactly where is it going? Mike Bygrave asked the scientists at its cutting edge to separate the hype from the reality.

Barney's X-Rated Surprise

Two young children who wanted to sing along with Barney the Dinosaur instead uncovered a surprise when they opened their music book -- a photograph of a man and woman in a naked embrace.

The photo, which ran under the words "Wilder Sex," was in a "Sing-Along Songs Barney" book that a Bergenfield, New Jersey couple bought for their children, ages 4 and 7. Rosemarie Arnold, an attorney for the unidentified family, said the photo came from a review of pornographic movies published in a German-language magazine.

The children found the photo when a plastic panel with buttons that play the tunes fell off the book, Arnold said. Along with the English-language "Wilder Sex," she said the page included other adult movie reviews -- written in German -- that were rated with pairs of lips instead of the more common stars.

Joy to the world a clone is born? - Group Claims Creation of First Human Clone

A company associated with a group that believes extraterrestrials created mankind claimed Friday that it had produced the first clone of a human being.

The company, Clonaid, announced it had created a healthy baby girl who was a clone of the 31-year-old American woman who gave birth to her. No proof was provided for the claim.

"I'm very very pleased to announce that the first baby clone is born," Clonaid director Brigitte Boisselier, a former research chemist in France, said at a news conference in Hollywood, north of Miami.

[link to another article as well]

My Own Private Canivore: CarnivorePE (Personal Edition)

Carnivore is a surveillance tool for data networks. At the heart of the project is CarnivorePE, a software application that listens to all Internet traffic (email, web surfing, etc.) on a specific local network. Next, CarnivorePE serves this data stream over the net to an unlimited number of creative interfaces called "clients." The clients are each designed to animate, diagnose, or interpret the network traffic in various ways.
CarnivorePE is inspired by DCS1000, a piece of software used by the FBI to perform electronic wiretaps. (Until recently, DCS1000 was known by its nickname "Carnivore.") Improving on the FBI software, CarnivorePE features exciting new functionality including: artist-made diagnosic clients, remote access, full subject targetting, full data targetting, volume buffering, transport protocol filtering, and an open source software license.

Beyond Couch Potatoes: From Consumers to Designers and Active Contributors

Abstract: The fundamental challenge for computational media is to contribute to the invention and design of cultures in which humans can express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities. Cultures are substantially defined by their media and tools for thinking, working, learning, and collaborating. New media change (1) the structure and contents of our interests; (2) the nature of our cognitive and collaborative tools; and, (3) the social environment in which thoughts originate and evolve, and mindsets develop.
Unfortunately, a large number of new media are designed from the perspective of seeing and treating humans primarily as consumers. In personally meaningful activities, the possibility for humans to be and to act as designers (in cases in which they desire to do so) should be accessible not only to a small group of "high-tech scribes," but rather to all interested individuals and groups. While the core message of the article applies to cultures, mindsets, media, technologies, and educational systems in general, my examples are mostly drawn from computational media, and more specifically from human computer interaction as a particular domain.

Posthuman Law: information Policy and the Machinic World

Abstract: It has been an unspoken assumption that the law is made by humans for humans. That assumption no longer holds: The subject of information policy is increasingly flows between machines, machinic rather than social values play ever-more important roles in decision-making, and information policy for human society is being supplemented, supplanted, and superceded by machinic decision-making. As the barrier between the human and machinic falls with implantation of chips within the body and other types of intimate relationships, and as dependence upon the information infrastructure continues to grow, the question of the rights of technological systems themselves is entering the legal system. This paper explores information technologies as the policy subject, as determinant of the values that inform information policy, and as policy-makers. All of these are manifestations of a transformation in the legal system so fundamental that it may be said that we are entering a period of posthuman law.

Robot Space Cowboys

A unique University of Southern California design for self-organizing robots controlled by "hormonal" software is moving toward space.
At the Robosphere 2002 conference held at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley November 14-15, Wei-Min Shen of the USC School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) presented an overview of an audacious project to have pieces of the proposed half-mile-long Space Solar Power System satellite put themselves together -- self-assemble -- without the help of astronauts.

Will Machines Become Conscious? A Collection at KurzweilAI.net

"Suppose we scan someone's brain and reinstate the resulting 'mind file' into a suitable computing medium," asks Raymond Kurzweil. "Will the entity that emerges from such an operation be conscious?" Asking that question is a good way to start an argument, which is exactly what we intend to do right here.

ACTIVIST NETWORK IN NY EVICTED FROM INTERNET BY DOW, VERIO

Because of a bit of web detournement by RTMark, its host, Thing.net, is losing its connectivity. Thing.net's upline provider, Verio, got a DMCA notice from Dow Chemical in reference to a political parody site an RTMark group called The Yes Men set up. The site, similar to this one at dowethics.com, was designed to look like an authentic Dow site but contained content critical of the Union Carbide and Dow handling of the 1984 Bhopal disaster. (There's also an article about the controversy in the New York Times.) Found on Weblogsky

The Bush Rape Story: Is the Media Ignoring Zippergate 2?

There is a story floating around the Internet that is being ignored by the mainstream press. Normally, this would be a good thing because, le's face it, information from the Internet is about as reliable as an airline's baggage handling department. For instance, just last week, I received another e-mail from someone claiming that Bill Gates would give me all of his money if I forwarded the e-mail to ten friends.

Nevertheless, the story in question is 100% accurate. In fact, anyone with a computer and a modem can verify the story by downloading court documents. However, the accuracy of the story does not seem to be enough for the media. Apparently, this story does not meet its threshold of "responsible journalism." - Via NWD

Local Child Denies Being Naughty Requests presence of lawyer

Local mall Santa George Graham has issued a report which indicates that he and his staff of elves have made "no progress" in their interviews with alleged naughty boy, Ralph Carson.

Carson, six and three quarters going on seven, was brought to the mall on December 21 by his parents in a "last ditch" effort to get the boy to admit to the many instances of poor behavior that have caused chaos in his household for the better part of the year.

The release of the report comes one day after Amnesty International released it's own report blasting the interrogation of Carson. Amnesty says that "three days in a mall" is cruel and unusual at the very minimum and could possibly be considered torture under International Holiday rules.

Car takes to the water in Venice

When Venetian artist Livio De Marchi decided he needed a new set of wheels, nothing but the best would do.

So he turned to his favourite material, wood, and handcrafted a Ferrari.

He explained: "It's a sporty and spacious car. I needed the car's size for navigation. It's a beautiful thing that I transformed into a boat."

Since the city is famed for its waterways rather than its roads, his flashy Ferrari is fully equipped with rear motor, rudder and propellor.

It is not the first time his passion for wood sculpture has given birth to alife-size floating replica. He has already created a floating Volkswagen Beetle.

His other water-bound works include an origami-style hat and an eight-metre vase with flowers.

Livio claims working with wood gives him a special vitality that other materials could not.

For sale: a town in Northern California

It's not too late to snag the ultimate Christmas present for that hard-to-buy-for Silicon Valley mogul on your shopping list: an entire California town.

That's right. The hamlet of Bridgeville, deep in the northern redwoods, is up for auction on eBay. If you're the winning bidder Friday night, you'll get 82 acres of land, 1 1/2 miles of riverbank, an orchard, four cabins, 10 houses, a post office, a cemetery, a backhoe and the ultimate power accessory: your very own ZIP code.

Digital Angel signs with chain

PALM BEACH -- Digital Angel Corp. said Thursday it has signed a three-year agreement with Beverly Enterprises Inc. to sell its monitoring equipment to customers in its nursing facilities.

Digital Angel, whose majority owner is Palm Beach-based Applied Digital Solutions (Nasdaq: ADSX, 46 cents), said Beverly Enterprises will market the products to patients upon admission or discharge.

Also see:

• Philip K. Dick's Black Iron Subdermal Prison
  • Florida Firm Seeks to Microchip Americans
  • 'Digital Angel' lands in China
  • Applied to sell $9M in VeriChips to Mexican firm
  • Applied signs VeriChip distributor for South Korea
  • Applied Digital again in trouble with FDA
  • VeriChip Launches "Get Chipped'' Promotion
  • Digital Angel's Latest Partner: Microsoft MapPoint
  • FDA Ruling - VeriChip is Not a Regulated Medical Device
  • Verichip To Track Temp. of Potato Salad
  • Subdermal Microchip Propaganda Turns Ugly

G.W. Bush - Making sure the terrorists have won

We have been told that the terrorists want to take away our freedoms.

First of all, how could this possibly be done? As a friend recently pointed out: "What do they expect them to do? Come over here wielding swords, forcing everybody to grow beards?" The whole idea of a outside entity taking away the freedoms of the American people is ludicrous.

by valis - Originally published in my weekly column at PrisonPlanet.com
Also see: The LibertyThink Originals Archive

Hello. Ministry of Love, how may I direct your call?

The White House on Friday defended its plan to develop a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet, inisting it will be used only to detect terrorism and not to surveil the civilian population. "The administration is not considering a proposal to monitor what individuals do on the Internet," a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said. A forceful denial to be sure, but one that came as something of a shock to those Internet service providers (ISPs) who'd already seen a draft of the "The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace" -- a plan which calls for a consolidated version of ISPs' network monitoring centers, which allow ISPs to look at activity on their networks, down to the content being accessed by an individual user. "Am I analogizing this to Carnivore?" an official with a major data services company who has been briefed the government's plans told The New York Times. "Absolutely. But in fact, it's 10 times worse. Carnivore was working on much smaller feeds and could not scale. This is looking at the whole Internet."

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever." Public outcry over the The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace comes at a particularly inopportune time for the Bush administration, which in recent weeks has been suffering through the vast public relations nightmare inspired by John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project (TIA) -- an effort to establish a national surveillance system of Orwellian proportion. Still, widespread criticism of TIA has done little to thwart its progress. Already a prototype of the technology is in place and has been used in tests by military intelligence organizations. But how could such a system be deployed so speedily? Most of its components are already in place. E-mail, A.T.M. systems, cell-phone networks, electronic toll-collection systems, credit-card payment terminals -- all of these digital technologies have become part of our everyday lives, and all are sources of data that that TIA intends to weave into a vast electronic dragnet.

New Networks Institute: The Unauthorized Biography of the Baby Bells & Info-Scandal: FREE BOOK --- Read the Book the Bells Don't Want You to Read.

I never believed any of the hype of the last seven years, but then again, the story for me started on a cold day in 1992. At the time I was a telecom insider - a respected, high-paid telecommunications analyst, having started as a Senior Analyst for Link Resources, in 1985, and then served as President of Strategic Telemedia since 1987. I was traveling around the world discussing the wonderous new interactive telephone technologies, from Interactive 800 and 900 Services, Caller ID and voicemail, to interactive fax and online services. My clients were all of the Baby Bells, including BellSouth and Pacific Telesis, and the long distance companies, including AT&T, MCI, and Sprint, as well as numerous other non-phone companies, from American Express to The Weather Channel.

Then on a cold day in January 1992, I had a small epiphany over a 37¢ call, of all things. I was examining my company's telephone bills and found a one minute call for 37¢, a call from New York City to Montauk NY, approximately 75 miles away. We had just completed a large study for a long distance company and I knew that a call across America only cost 21¢, and this was almost 75% higher. And when long distance company prices were applied to the same calls, nationally, there was a whopping $6 billion dollars of overcharging, annually.

RIP Joe Strummer

London calling to the faraway towns
Now that war is declared-and battle come down
London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard, all you boys and girls
London calling, now don't look at us
All that phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust
London calling, see we ain't got no swing
'Cept for the ring of that truncheon thing
The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in
Engines stop running and the wheat is growing thin
A nuclear error, but I have no fear
London is drowning-and I live by the river
London calling to the imitation zone
Forget it, brother, an' go it alone
London calling upon the zombies of death
Quit holding out-and take another breath
London calling-and I don't wanna shout
But when we were talking-I saw you nodding out
London calling, swee we ain't got no highs
Except for that one with the yellowy eyes
London calling, yeah, I was there, too
An' you know what they said? Well, some of it was true!
London calling at the top of the dial
After all this, won't you give me a smile?

New Antiquities of the Illuminati 4.3 Online Now.

Attack of the Arachnoids

Wads of spider web float down from space, leaving their sticky threads in Texas, Oregon, Wyoming... Experts are saying it's literally spiderweb material, but ABC News carefully notes that Internet nuts suspect conspiracy. Yeah, that's right.

Surely, It's just a coincidence
• How was Steve Jackson, maker of the Illuminati game series, able to predict with such a startling degree of accuracy the events of 9/11? These playing cards were produced in 1995.

What does Snoop Dogg have to say about IncuBLOGula?
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LibertyThink Quiz: Who said it?

"An evil exists that threatens every man, woman and child of this great nation, We must take steps to insure our domestic security and protect our homeland."

a) George W. Bush

b) Adolf Hitler

Hint: The same person who said:

"Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death."