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Got .GOV? Are you sure about that?

An author hoping to spur sales of his book is facing a gigantic bill after an online publishing experiment went horribly awry. Last week, writer Glenn Fleishman offered his book, Real World Adobe GoLive 6, as a free download. But instead of the few hundred downloads Fleishman expected, the book was downloaded about 10,000 times in just 36 hours. And because he's charged incrementally for bandwidth, Fleishman estimates he could be billed $15,000 at the end of the month -- possibly a lot more.

"It's a financial catastrophe," said Fleishman. "I'm a working stiff with a mortgage ... I never suspected the penalty would be so high for giving something away.... It's like living in Singapore and getting 15 years in jail for chewing gum."

Democracy is under threat in the United States; anyone who objects to the conflict in Iraq is not allowed to say so


It's drive time with WABC's rightwing talkshow host, Curtis Sliwa, and Bill is on the line from the Poconos in Pennsylvania with a tale so funny he can hardly share it for giggling.
He was carrying an American flag and yelling support for the troops in a delayed St Patrick's Day parade over the weekend when he saw one woman carrying a sign saying: "No blood for oil".

"She was wearing black and she was an older lady," says Bill. "And then our sheriff saw her and she didn't have a permit. So they put her in the back of the truck car and hauled her away."

On its own, Bill's story would be aberrant - the tale of an overzealous legal official and an unfortunate woman in smalltown America. Increasingly though it is becoming consistent. The harassment, arrest, detention and frustration of those who are against the war is becoming routine. Relatives of victims who died on September 11, who are opposed to the war, have been prevented from speaking in schools. Last month Stephen Downs was handcuffed and arrested after refusing to take off a Give Peace a Chance T-shirt in a mall in Albany. He was told he would have been found guilty of trespass if the mall had not dropped the case because of the bad publicity.

Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Research Six Month Report

War Watch is a Web log of diverse news and commentary related to the war with Iraq. It is edited by John Murrell and John Paczkowski, who in peacetime are the senior editors of SiliconValley.com. Contributions from readers are strongly encouraged. Hosted by the San Jose Mercury News, the people who broke the Iran Contra story.

A stressed-out brain makes static sounds. A mildly concerned brain produces a noise that sounds like breakfast cereal melting in milk. An interested brain sounds like a jumpy cat emitting a steady, low-level purr interspersed with a few high-pitched squeals. Hook a whole bunch of brains up to a computer, capture and play the sounds they make, and you get, well, not quite music, but certainly some interesting noise.

mediak

Do I support the current military action in Iraq? No.
Do I support Saddam Hussein? No. I think he's a doofus. However, I feel the same about Bush, Cheney, Blair, et al. I do not play the game of "my enemy’s enemy is my friend". That is the way of weasels. Last time I checked I was a monkey, albeit a groomed and (questionably) domesticated one.

Do I support the troops? Of course I do. They’re fellow humans aren’t they? Well, most of them are, I’m sure. I’m no “Hanoi Jane” (or Jack, as it were). I feel for the troops. They are being used for something I’m sure most of them didn’t sign up for. If they wanted to work as mercenaries, they could have simply placed an ad in the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine. I hear that pays better.

For the record, I am not a pacifist nor am I anti-war, per se. I believe that, unfortunately, war is sometimes justified and necessary here on the planet of the apes, specifically when it is in service of defending life and liberty. Americans benefit, in the form of what’s left of our freedoms, from the legacy of an armed insurrection, staged by colonists that rose up against the British monarchy in the 1700s. Lucky for us those colonists were more like Tyler Durden than Mahatmas Gandhi in disposition. While we’re on the subject, let’s re-examine a few of the reasons for that insurrection, shall we? A monarch, named George (ahhh, bitter irony!) unduly taxing a citizenry (looked at your pay stub lately? That is assuming you HAVE one anymore…) while denying them the right to representation (the right to speak their mind).

Hmmm. What year is it again? And they scoff at time travel!

Do I think that the American system is the best possible system? No. We can do better. However, it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to advance to something better from point A (the original concept of the US) than some place 400 paces back from there. Isn’t that simple Euclidian geometry? Yes, great change comes gradually, slowly, and we have to remind ourselves to be patient sometimes, but it's easier if you're moving forward instead of backwards. Why give up ground? What a lot of Americans seem to be flat-lining on these days is the fact that with the outcome of the last (NON)election, we are, for all intents and purposes, no longer living in a democracy. Try that one on for size by saying it out loud a few times. The people currently squatting the executive government offices in Washington didn’t work the system to get there. They ignored it. Or maybe I should say, flagrantly disregarded it.

A solution to my current dilemma is simple. I’d like to be told the REAL reasons behind this war. Ok, I can plainly see most of them for myself (and I don’t approve). I just want my elected (or in this case un-elected) officials to treat me like an adult and tell me why my friends lives are really being put at risk, why my tax dollars are really being squandered, and why I am really being asked to support something like this without question. Stop feeding me Orwellian Newspeak! It’s insulting!

Come on Colin Powell! I know you may be one of the very few people that want to tell us what’s really up! I can see it in your eyes. You were the only one who tried to convince little Georgie sock puppet that this war was a bad idea. Step up! Aren’t you pissed for being made to look like a fool after being sent to the UN with bogus documents? Or did you know? It’s ok. Just tell us. We’ll forgive you. Did you volunteer to be the foil in this routine lifted straight from Duck Soup? Ok, let me put on my Rufus T. Firefly hat for a moment and speak to you General to General. Do you really think that the spoils once pillaged are going to be distributed outside of a small circle of cronies? Do you really forsee any of it trickling down to the average person? Of course you don't. Neither do I. You can’t even buy me off by promising me a share in the spoils of war. (Not that I’m selling…)
Remind me again of the reasons that I should support this action, cause I’m a little fuzzy.

Terrorism? Oh really? By who?
Esprit de Corp? Oh really? For who?
Bolstering the economy? Oh really? Whose?
Blind obedience? Oh really? To what?

Hey, I’m just askin….

For once during this short and brutal thing I’ve come to call my life, I'd like to see the media live up to it's stated purpose, namely that of providing clear and unbiased information, free of any political or economic agendas.

Something a crazy uncle used to say to me just popped into my head. I’d say, “I wish…” and he’d say, “Wish in one hand and piss in another and tell me which one fills up first.”

But I digress. As I was saying, if I don’t start seeing some media parity soon, I'm going to have to assume that we humans really are nothing but a bunch of filthy little monkeys, slaves to the Darwinian rules, and headed back (once again) towards a more feudal state of existence. And I will act accordingly. Hey, paint me with Pirate colors at that point Bucko! “Yo-Ho-Ho! It’s a Pirates life fer me!” Let's just get clear on things. That's all I'm sayin'...

The war is on, here and there. Pick your battle. I for one am going to focus on defending our exposed flank, namely, the war on the home front. That’s the erosion of personal liberties and the implementation of a police state, going on right under your noses, for those of you still glued to American Idol and CNN. Also, do not be distracted by the decoy. When 9/11 went down who got thrust into the spotlight (sans speech writers apparently) and who went to a bunker with a "secret government"? In chess, that's called castling your king. I know Boy George is an easy mark (hey, I’m guilty…) but he’s not the real target. If he were, he wouldn’t be so obvious and visible. I bet HE even thinks he’s actually running shit.
Don't be distracted by the flickering pictures, like the sheople. “Oooo, pretty!”
Don't listen to what they say as if it were truth. Listen to it so as to divine what they want you to believe and then work outward from there. Study their chess moves. Those give them away every time. It's not what they're saying. It's what they're doing that you should be paying attention to.

As an aside: I suspect Michael Jackson of having a hand in all of this. The timing is just a little too convenient, if you ask me. One day it’s all “Mikey this and Mikey that” and the next day it’s “Shock and Awe, Shock and Awe.” Once again, I’m just sayin…

Oh, yeah.
The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent those of any or all of the fine, fine, folk who prop up this blog. Heh. Had to be said.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled deprogramming.

[This is an ACME Pryzall™ statement. It is placed here after the disclaimer for use by anyone who may get a bug, stick, cranium, or any other foreign object, lodged up his or her ass after reading this article. One size Pryzall™.]

In THE INVISIBLE GENERATION first published in IT and in the Los Angeles Free Press in 1966 and reprinted in THE JOB, I consider the potential of thousands of people with recorders, portable and stationary, messages passed along like signal drums, a parody of the President's speech up and down the balconies, in and out open windows, through walls, over courtyards, taken up by barking dogs, muttering bums, music, traffic down windy streets, across parks and soccer fields. Illusion is a revolutionary weapon:

Ummmmmm...ok. | Via Post Atomic

Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq’s nuclear program?

Last September 24th, as Congress prepared to vote on the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq, a group of senior intelligence officials, including George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq’s weapons capability. It was an important presentation for the Bush Administration.

According to two of those present at the briefing, which was highly classified and took place in the committee’s secure hearing room, Tenet declared, as he had done before, that a shipment of high-strength aluminum tubes that was intercepted on its way to Iraq had been meant for the construction of centrifuges that could be used to produce enriched uranium. The suitability of the tubes for that purpose had been disputed, but this time the argument that Iraq had a nuclear program under way was buttressed by a new and striking fact: the C.I.A. had recently received intelligence showing that, between 1999 and 2001, Iraq had attempted to buy five hundred tons of uranium oxide from Niger, one of the world’s largest producers.

On the same day, in London, Tony Blair’s government made public a dossier containing much of the information that the Senate committee was being given in secret—that Iraq had sought to buy “significant quantities of uranium” from an unnamed African country, “despite having no active civil nuclear power programme that could require it.”

Two days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing before a closed hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also cited Iraq’s attempt to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of its persistent nuclear ambitions.

On December 19th, Washington, for the first time, publicly identified Niger as the alleged seller of the nuclear materials, in a State Department position paper that rhetorically asked, “Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?”

Then the story fell apart. On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes.

What went wrong? Did a poorly conceived propaganda effort by British intelligence, whose practices had been known for years to senior American officials, manage to move, without significant challenge, through the top layers of the American intelligence community and into the most sacrosanct of Presidential briefings? Who permitted it to go into the President’s State of the Union speech? Was the message—the threat posed by Iraq—more important than the integrity of the intelligence-vetting process? Was the Administration lying to itself? Or did it deliberately give Congress and the public what it knew to be bad information?

Would the real George Bush please stand down?

You may think the air of extreme witlessness impossible to mimic, but is the man on the podium the authentic Dubya, a trained stand-in or an animatronic lookalike? Tim Dowling investigates | Via CoC

Free peer-to-peer music file-sharing has become larger than the multibillion-dollar recording industry, with a growth trend that has become "fundamentally unstoppable," a state Senate committee exploring Internet piracy has been warned.

The free downloading habit among 61 million Americans and millions more worldwide is "cemented," with only 9 percent of U.S. downloaders believing they are doing anything wrong, media analyst Eric Garland told California lawmakers Thursday.

Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks' nightmare scenario--it's their plan.
In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints. In February, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq, the United States would "deal with" Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Meanwhile, neoconservative journalists have been channeling the administration's thinking. Late last month, The Weekly Standard's Jeffrey Bell reported that the administration has in mind a "world war between the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism ... a war of such reach and magnitude [that] the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders, should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well into the future."

Hackers wreaked electronic havoc Thursday on Internet sites operated by the Arab television network Al-Jazeera, diverting Web surfers to pornography and to a page with a U.S. flag and the message "Let Freedom Ring."

Hackers impersonating an Al-Jazeera employee tricked one of the Internet's most popular Web addressing companies, Network Solutions Inc., into making technical changes that effectively turned over temporary control of the network's Arabic and English Web sites.

The future of surveillance aircraft will take off next Saturday from a small hayfield in northern Florida, but observers will have to look hard to see it. The next generation of spy planes will be small--perhaps less than 6 inches in diameter--and agile as a hummingbird.

"Finally, I would like to suggest that an alliance between one or more universities and one or more major game-producing companies to create something like a game developer's version of XeroxPARC might be exactly what is needed to take the next step forward: a well-funded institute freed from the tyranny of deadlines and bleeding red ink, free to think about and tinker with the fundamental ideas underlying games."

What has our mutated little friend discovered?

If you highlight the left side (actually the right side works better) of the page in the NY Press article below, you get the hidden text in the page designed to be picked up by search engines.

An excerpt:
It was up to spiderman and shakira to stop that rotten scoundrel osama bin laden and his taliban.. First he brought down the world trade center, then he created napster‹what evil would be next? Studying the works of nostradamus, they figured the best place to catch him would either be at the world cup or the winter olympics, where he planned to unleash an envelope full of anthrax on the unsuspecting crowd. CNN caught morrowind of the plot, and predicted there would be neverwinter nights for years to come. It would be a dungeon siege when these forces came together. It would be like a battlefield 1942.

Hidden text, or subliminal programming? You be the judge.

The Justice Department lifted a requirement Monday that the FBI ensure the accuracy and timeliness of information about criminals and crime victims before adding it to the country's most comprehensive law enforcement database.

Officials said the change, which immediately drew criticism from civil-liberties advocates, is necessary to ensure investigators have access to information that can't be confirmed but could take on new significance later, FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said. The change to the 1974 U.S. Privacy Act was disclosed with an announcement published in the Federal Register. The Privacy Act previously required the FBI to ensure information was "accurate, relevant, timely and complete" before it could be added to the system.

DARPA's Controlled Biological Systems (CBS) site is a treasure trove of research links concerning the use of biological systems for defense purposes. Or as they say "Exploit the capabilities of biological systems to locomote, sense, maneuver, analyze, and respond to complex environments through exploiting Vivisystems, Hybrid Biosystems, and mimicry of biological principles."

A sampling of subjects includes:

"Olfactory Control of Insect Flight Behavior: Strategic Exploitation of a Controlled Biological System"

"BioInspired Design of Smart Materials with Dynamically Controlled Stiffness"

"Bioartificial Muscles as Force Generators"

"Micromechanical Flying Insect" -chiaroscuro

NEW YORK -- Federal investigators have arrested an enigmatic Wall Street wiz on insider-trading charges -- and incredibly, he claims to be a time-traveler from the year 2256!

Sources at the Security and Exchange Commission confirm that 44-year-old Andrew Carlssin offered the bizarre explanation for his uncanny success in the stock market after being led off in handcuffs on January 28.

Carlssin declared that he had traveled back in time from over 200 years in the future, when it is common knowledge that our era experienced one of the worst stock plunges in history. Yet anyone armed with knowledge of the handful of stocks destined to go through the roof could make a fortune.

Officials are quite confident the "time-traveler's" claims are bogus. Yet the SEC source admits, "No one can find any record of any Andrew Carlssin existing anywhere before December 2002." FULL STORY>> | Via knoay weigh

Bush Administration Readying For 2004 Invasion Of Iran

Who's gonna stop this empire?

All of us. The world will stop this handful of evil men.

Researchers at the University of Rochester have managed to slow the speed of light in a vacuum from 300,000 kilometers per second to 57 meters per second .

Metamaterials were proposed in the 1968 and were immediately scorned because some physicists thought that if they existed, they would be a medium in which one could go faster than the speed of light. New calculations show that sorry, metamaterials aren't dilithium. "These calculations are an important confirmation that the speed of light is not violated by negative refraction," John Pendry, a theorist at Imperial College in London who did much of the early work on negative-index materials, told Physics Web. "It is time to move on and start making use of these amazing new materials." Starting in 2000, physicists have done just that.

Working with a Turkish colleague, a San Jose State University math professor has solved one of the most important problems in prime number theory -- a solution that took him 20 years.

"There wasn't any rush, you know,'' Dan Goldston said. "You just work away. And really, neither of us ever expected to get particularly good results by this method. It's actually completely amazing to me.''

Mathematicians described the advance -- announced at a conference in Germany -- as the most important breakthrough in the field in decades. Like many mathematical developments it has no immediate practical application but may open the door to a wealth of further advances.

Al-Jazeera is no longer welcome at the Nasdaq Stock Market, a decision that parallels a similar move by the New York Stock Exchange after the Arab network's decision to air footage of American prisoners of war and dead in Iraq.

The World's Smallest Film Festival, organized by BigDigit, Inc, a Los Angeles-based production company that merges cutting-edge mobile and wireless technologies with inspired made-for-mobile media," is "the first competitive showcase of digital video content for the new generation of mobile phones, PDAs, and other mobile devices."

Video-capable mobile phones are set to enter the U.S. market this year, and 3G (3rd generation) wireless is expected to become available nationwide in the next two years. But can mobile multimedia add enough value to be worth the investment? Will the content be compelling enough to attract consumers? And how does it really look on a cell phone?

The creative entries you'll see here fit not only the small screen size, but the on-the-go nature of wireless mobile use. Entries run up to 7 minutes. All are sized and purposed to look great in small handheld formats. | Via Smart Mobs

Another leaked memo from a media company... (source)

Timely Studios
Location shooting for Codename Courage
TO: Anita Lavine, Sr. VP Production
FROM: Taylor Donahue, VP Production
SUBJECT: Location shooting for Codename Courage

Anita,
Assuming the current situation with Iraq leads to combat activity by US troops, I suggest we get a small film crew credentialed as press to shoot over there. This will solve some of the budget vs. production value problems we?ve discussed. In the best case scenario we can also get one or two of our leads over there in costume to do a scene with the mayhem of real war as a backdrop. [Take a look at pages 65, 72-74, and 96 for examples that lend themselves.]
Failing this, we can have the war as a back plate to use with blue screen of our actors or to add CGI on.
We?ll be the only movie with a multi billion dollar effects budget.

Tay

With a sci-fi plot suggesting that current unrest can be blamed on space aliens who live under U.S. atomic test sites, the film illustrates its lurid comic drama with images culled from everyting from newsreels to Mexican horror flicks. This nutty little item suggests that conspiracy thinking is a Frankenstein monster which inevitably destroys its creator (First you have the conspiracy theory, and then the conspiracy theory has you). | Via Post Atomic

This is a projection of the most likely outcome of a new war in the Gulf. I used sophisticated temporal algorithms and historical semiotic analysis to achieve an accuracy rating of 99.999%. If you like this, try out John Ashcroft's new ISP, "Ashcroft Online"...it's almost as scary as AOL! | Via LowGradePanic

In real life, many guys like to quote reel life

It was the Saturday afternoon semifinals of golf's Match Play Championship earlier this month. As hotshot Australian rookie Adam Scott lined up the short putt that could give him the distinction of beating Tiger Woods, Steve DePaepe teed off with a running commentary from his Evanston living room:" 'The crowd has gone deadly silent . . . a Cinderella story out of nowhere . . . former greenskeeper . . . and now about to become the Masters champion. . . . ' "OK, so you had to be there.

First it was 1-Click purchasing, then it was affiliate programs, then retailing chat technology. Now Amazon is seeking a patent for a method of auctioning advertising space on a Web site. Just what Amazon intends to do with such a patent, should it be granted, is not yet clear. Some analysts suggest the company plans to enter the cost-per-click advertising markets. Others speculate that it simply wants to secure the patent in hopes it can profit from it later should other ventures begin offering such a service. "Now when people come up with new ideas, they're more apt to try to create a patent and wait for things to evolve," analyst David Halprin told News.com. "It may be something that they want to do or (that they want to) sell later." | Via John Paczkowski

Windows Media

Welcome to the newest Reality TV Show, Fink Nation!
The sign above the highway leading into the nation's capital advised motorists to "Report Suspicious Activity" and gave an 800 number for the Office of Homeland Security. As a reporter, I figured this was right up my alley and set out yesterday to report on things that struck me as suspicious.

For instance, near the Jefferson Memorial, I saw a five-foot-tall metal box that was hooked up to an electrical outlet and equipped with a high-tech antenna and chrome-dome receptor. What was it?

I asked a couple of National Park Service workers and some Cherry Blossom Festival organizers whose tent was set up next to the thing if they knew. Little did I know that my inquiry would become a suspicious activity in itself. | Via Post Atomic

The information barrage is being driven by Web logs, commonly known as blogs, the term for constantly updated personal Web sites that are much like online journals. An inexpensive and relatively simple form of technology, they have been a growing phenomenon in the U.S. for several years, and first cropped up in the military during the battle in Afghanistan. However, because many of their authors are anonymous, it's difficult to verify the information they supply. | Via BB

OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE
25 March 2003 c.e.
Greetings: this is to inform you that a completely new section has been added to the Antiquities of the Illuminati™ family© of Websites:
For Immediate Release
The Antiquities of the Illuminati's War Page is a page to counter the propaganda, to control the Massage, as it were::::

To give people access to info censored by the US/UK media/govs.etc (and to tie together certain info)... [AntiqIllum™ NOTE: And you all should see the CNN Australia banner ads. We must stop these protesters, etc. As Bugs Bunny once Said, What a bunch of Maroons!]

To inform that there is a movement against the "war", and that it is not as small as they want us to believe. And, perhaps, it's a page on the (probable) fall of an empire. [The International Peace Research Institute (Note from the AntiqIllum™ Links Manager: http://www.prio.no/research/default.asp the paper is there somewhere I can't find it now..) made, some years ago, a list of indicators of the fall of empires (based on the fall of all the empires in the past). The tendency is that if an empire meets just a few of the indicators it will fall. America meets 13! The 2 most important being that of the constant waging of war that always costs more than any nation can afford, so the empire's economy collapses, the second being the breakdown of the "line" between terror and state-action/terror to a point where there's no distinction between them.) The other side of this, I guess, is that the war-page covers the installment of a global dictatorship.[AntiqIllum™ takes a swig off his cocktail, and exclaims, "YIKES!" And they all thought we were the Illuminati, well, that is, after all... a secret!]

New features..fACMEnews... provides links to news/articles censored by corp.media/govs. (?) ...And a news-ticker with live feeds. And there's links to news about the movements/demonstrations and to news-stories/articles they don't want us to read and links to news-sources, and material of interest (under dis-in-forma-tion and decoding).

A NUDE protest for peace will greet a crisp dawn in a bushland clearing at South Hobart tomorrow.

Disrobe for Disarmament spokeswoman Linda Seaborn said about 35 women would spell out "No War" with their naked bodies in the hope of encouraging others to continue their opposition to the war in Iraq.

Conyers Seeks Impeachment Tally
House Representative Congressman John Conyers on the Judicial Committee is asking you to, through his legislative assistant Alexia, fax or email if you want Bush impeached.

Message from Alexia:
The phones are currently ringing off the hook, so please send a brief message stating whether you are for or against impeachment via email or fax.

To Send an e-mail: john.conyers@mail.house.gov
To Send a fax the number is: (313) 226-2085

Dan Gillmor

In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the American public was fed a homogenized version of reality. The news consisted of the same sound bites, presidential declarations, Pentagon briefings, etc. -- essentially identical information no matter what the media source.

In the first 24 hours of the latest gulf war, the same situation prevailed for the vast majority of Americans. This time around, however, a minority -- but a growing one -- had learned a lesson from the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. They had a robust online alternative. The Web, e-mail lists and other online sources offered content with context and nuance.

Maybe you didn't have time at the start of this war to check out the alternatives. In coming weeks and months, please make the time.

A microchip that uses chemicals instead of pulses of electricity to stimulate neurons has been created. It could open the way to implants that interact with our nervous system in a far more subtle way than is possible now.

While electrical pulses convey impulses along neurons, the cells communicate with each other and with other cells such as muscles by releasing chemical messengers. These neurotransmitters are released from one side of a cell junction, or synapse, and picked up by receptors on the other side, triggering another electrical pulse.

Network analysis maps companies' informal structure.

Want to know how your organization really works - who speaks to whom, who holds the power? Then study the flow of internal e-mail, say scientists at global technology firm Hewlett-Packard.

The researchers have developed a way to use e-mail exchanges to build a map of the structure of an organization. The map shows the teams in which people actually work, as opposed to those they are assigned to.

Iridescent nanospheres may deliver full-colour electronic newspaper.

A new ink changes colour at the flick of a switch. It could give rise to newspapers that show shifting images, or chemical sensors that display different hues depending on what substance they detect.

The substance is called P-Ink or 'photonic ink', and is being developed by Geoffrey Ozin, Ian Manners and their colleagues at the University of Toronto, Canada.

A kind of order may be buried in the occurrence of indivisible numbers.

A team of physicists may have stumbled upon a surprising discovery about one of the deepest and best-studied questions in pure mathematics: whether or not prime numbers appear randomly in the sequence of whole numbers.

A standing ovation and a handful of jeers from Hollywood's elite greeted filmmaker Michael Moore when he criticized President Bush and the U.S.-led war in Iraq during his acceptance speech Sunday after winning the documentary feature Oscar for "Bowling for Columbine."

"We live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man who's sending us to war for fictitious reasons, whether it's the fiction of duct tape or the fiction of orange alerts," Moore said.

Applause gave way to some boos, as the orchestra began to play the filmmaker off the stage.

"We are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush. Shame on you," Moore shouted, surrounded onstage by his fellow nominees in a show of solidarity.

"It was so sweet backstage, the teamsters are helping Michael Moore into the trunk of his limo," host Steve Martin joked later.

Excellent post and pointers on information about the relationships between madness and art on CoC today.

Hello, Dr. Menlo here. I am both saddened and happy to announce that the New World Disorder weblog, alas, is leaving--but it won't be far! Hey, hey, it'll be here now!:
http://www.newworlddisorder.ca/blog

Saddened, of course, that this ultrafine weblog is leaving our domain, and happy, of course, for Jason and his new and spiffy domain. So adjust yer monitors ya nutty neuronauts!

Updates to 8march2003.

Crimes of War was conceived as a handbook for reporters. But just as war is too important to be left to the generals, war coverage is too important to be left uncritically to the news media. The general public, too, should know the moral and legal benchmarks contained in the law. One reason for a commonality of interest is that coverage of contemporary conflicts increasingly is available to the public without a filter or a framework or context. A second is that every close observer has a restricted field of vision.

Journalists who cover wars and humanitarian emergencies of the post- Cold War world know far better than their audiences or their critics how much they are operating in uncharted territory. Understanding what is going on in the midst of all the havoc, confusion, and disinformation is anything but simple. And almost nothing in their training prepares reporters to be able make the necessary distinctions between legal, illegal, and criminal acts. | Via Electronic Iraq

Presented in a 1996 Pentagon paper, has implications far beyond, and prior to, the current situation.
"Despite the pledges of the two major American political parties to maintain or expand the current level of defense capability, both the force structure and defense infrastructure are too large to be maintained at even the present levels and within the defense budgets that are likely to be approved. Unless a new menace materializes, defense is headed for "less of the same." Such reductions may have no strategic consequences. However, that is an outcome that we believe should not be left to chance." | Via abuddhas memes

Yale's most notorious secret society, Skull and Bones, counts among its members both Presidents Bush, President Taft, William F. Buckley, Henry Luce, Senator John Kerry, and other such types. Literary journalist Ron Rosenbaum—who has been one of the most dogged investigators of the S&B—led a team who secretly filmed one of the shadowy club's initiation ceremonies on 14 April 2001. Not only is this the first and only footage of an S&B ritual, it's also the first one ever to be witnessed by outsiders. | Via CoC

In their press about their new Michael Savage TV show, MSNBC proudly tells you his radio show airs nationally on the Talk Radio Network.

Yet, MSNBC, an investigative and news gathering organization, WAS NOT SAVVY ENOUGH to research the Talk Radio Network and find out that it was owned and operated by a dangerous religious cult in Southern Oregon, which is using Savage as a mouthpiece for their agenda.

Book of Revelation's references to Babylon, Euphrates cited as basis

Since Jesus said that only God knows the hour or day of the Second Coming, preachers and self-appointed doomsayers have been trying to predict when it will happen -- and watching the sun rise on another generation.

Now the prophetic interpreters have been citing a new reason they believe the end is coming: the U.S.-led war with Iraq. Anxious discussions have arisen recently on prophecy Web sites, in Bible study groups and churches, and at such gatherings as last month's 20th International Prophecy Conference in Tampa, Fla. | Via Orlin Grabbe

I have been reading some of Qutb's other books, and I think that ''Milestones'' may have misled the journalists. ''Milestones'' is a fairly shallow book, judged in isolation. But ''Milestones'' was drawn from his vast commentary on the Koran called ''In the Shade of the Qur'an.''

Qutb is not shallow. Qutb is deep. ''In the Shade of the Qur'an'' is, in its fashion, a masterwork. Al Qaeda and its sister organizations are not merely popular, wealthy, global, well connected and institutionally sophisticated. These groups stand on a set of ideas too, and some of those ideas may be pathological, which is an old story in modern politics; yet even so, the ideas are powerful. We should have known that, of course. But we should have known many things.

FriendsOfLiberty: For the next significant period, this site will concentrate its efforts on a single individual: the late Alfred M. Hubbard and his work, via U.S. and Canadian Governments, with psychedelic drugs from the late 1940s to his death in 1982.

This is a ground-breaking effort toward exposing heretofore hidden aspects of the CIA's Project MK-ULTRA and other skunkworks. We encourage you to spread the news throughout your lists of contacts and allies, and to tune into FriendsOfLiberty for the duration of this campaign.
| Via LibertyThink