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Congress scuttled most of retired Adm. John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness research program yesterday, pulling the plug on the vast computerized terrorism surveillance project that aimed to identify terrorists by analyzing our personal data (see "Pentagon to FBI: mind if we borrow Carnivore for a weekend?"). A sound decision and one that would let us all rest a bit easier were it not for the fact that Congress also secretly transferred some of tools TIA was developing to other agencies. And just what those tools are they aren't saying.

'The human and dog are much more similar to each other at the genetic level than to the mouse.' This according to geneticists who've managed to complete the first rough draft of the dog genome. Some 18,473 dog genes have human equivalents and there could be more -- there are still 2 million fragments to piece together. Still, that's 161 more than the mouse. And that's great news for the medical research community, which hopes to use the genome to better understand human diseases such as cancer and epilepsy. 'It's quite fascinating to see how close our DNA sequence is to dogs,' Ewen Kirkness of The Institute for Genomic Research told Newsday. 'It was quite an eye-opener. You look at your dog a little differently.'

"A man may be objectively in the right, and nevertheless in the eyes of bystanders, and sometimes in his own, he may come off worst. For example, I may advance a proof of some assertion, and my adversary may refute the proof, and thus appear to have refuted the assertion, for which there may, nevertheless, be other proofs. In this case, of course, my adversary and I change places: he comes off best, although, as a matter of fact, he is in the wrong.

"... [I]n a dialectical contest we must put objective truth aside, or, rather, we must regard it as an accidental circumstance, and look only to the defence of our own position and the refutation of our opponent's."

Schopenhauer describes 38 methods of cheating, including straw men, speaking too quickly for an opponent to follow, and using biased language.

He suggests lumping an assertion into an odious category, by, for example, labelling it feminist, fascist, or a ridiculous liberal myth. Another method is to spout sesquipedalian nonsense and hope to inspire awe.

If you get tired of making even a cursory effort to argue properly, "[a] last trick is to become personal, insulting, rude" — make your opponent angry by "practising some kind of chicanery, and being generally insolent".

A study into p2p apps on government systems has revealed glaring security holes.

When a staff group experimented with Kazaa’s Find More from Same User feature, among other 'personal' files they found:

• Military information on chemical warfare
• Correspondence from the office of a state senator to constituents
• Internal correspondence on state political organization
• Sensitive business correspondence, including memos on board of directors decision making
• Navy medical records

In a hotly contested lawsuit before a federal appeals court, two peer-to-peer companies are about to gain a vast army of allies: America's librarians.

The five major U.S. library associations are planning to file a legal brief Friday siding with Streamcast Networks and Grokster in the California suit, brought by the major record labels and Hollywood studios. The development could complicate the Recording Industry Association of America's efforts to portray file-swapping services as rife with spam and illegal pornography.

The locals tell of the massive pirate ships sitting beyond the 12-mile limit, loaded to the bulkheads with millions of dollars of high-end disc stamping equipment. This is the source of the fabled DVD-9 brand of supposedly bootlegged DVD movie. You can get pristine first-run movies not yet released in the US. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Kuala Lumpur.

Yes, the same Diebold (hisssss) which forced BlackBoxVoting.org off the air.

Naturally, Talion.com takes up the slack. See also: BlackBoxVoting.com which is working.

Don't miss: Take Back The Media! presents: Vote Revolution (flash).

Now, this is what I'm guessing: Karl Rove has basically two parts to his strategy next year (to get Bush ELECTED, not RE-ELECTED ya parroting chumps!): above-board and below-board. Now, we know that above-board they are going to say "Remember 9-11" in every way they possibly know how: on paper plates, via skywriters, commemorative toilet seats, etc. and repeated ad infinitum until the very phrase becomes nothing more than white noise. They will stress their 'successes': namely, the so-called "war on terrorism."

But Karl Rove you know doesn't just work above-board; he's a highly-experienced below-the-board playa, a political dirty trick gaijin master. So I have no doubt that the manipulation of the electronic voting machines via his friends at Diebold and Co. are a big part of his below-board strategy for 'winning' the race in 2004. I am happy that this frightening possibility has become so widely-spread lately, but the question remains: what are we gonna do about it, huh?

I mean, someone give it a deadline and if those receipt-systems aren't put in (look how fast Congress moved to reinstall the anti-phonespam initiative; having them mandate a 'democratic paper trail' by fall 2004 IS do-able, conceivably-speaking) by what? Six months before the vote? Then I am not suggesting or in any way recommending but it seems to me I wouldn't be unpleased to learn that some patriot(s) somewhere actually . . . hm, what images make themself available to my mind? Boston tea party for Diebold machines? An extraction and expert analysis of a Diebold machine with results to be given instantly to worldwide media (in old movies the hero/heroine would go the New York Times with their newly-gleaned info which was potentially damaging to higher-ups; now the New York Times would help smear you for it) . . . of course, I am thinking only in terms of fiction here, ya understand . . . I, Dr. Menlo, am an information warrior only.

Diebold, by the way: if you think that you are going to aid and abet this unelected fraud currently inhabiting the White House and his cheap gang of cronies to permanently take over the United States of America come 2004 . . . then you may be right. But you will get a goddamn fight for it.

Cue Blondie: "One Way or Another" . . .

the harvard business review of september 2003 features, in its case-study feature,
an article about blogging in corporate environments. the article, about a woman
who writes blogs about her job, and what her managers think about that, is
available for download at this URL for six bucks:

http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=R0309A

this article is worth the six bucks for the insight into the corporate no-mind.

one of the interesting parts of this article comes towards the end, where ray ozzie of groove networks
shares his company's CORPORATE BLOGGING POLICY:

www.groove.net/weblogpolicy/


if you click on the following link, you can see how corporate people blog:

http://www.groove.net/extras/weblogs/

another form created by the people has been appropriated by the suits.

It won't be long now. Say what you will, this looks like its going to be good.

The whole thing starts in Bologna on January 24th, 1996, when the Carabinieri arrest Marco Dimitri (33), Piergiorgio Bonora (21) and Gennaro Luongo (28), i.e. the top leaders of the Luciferian cult of the Bambini di Satana [Children of Satan]. This action is going to snowball into a big raid against Satanists and "paedophiles." The charge is: "abduction aimed a lechery and sexual violence."

Dimitri & Co. have been accused by Luongo's 16-year-old ex-girlfriend, whose real name cannot be mentioned in the media. From now on she will always be called 'Simonetta.' Simonetta charges Luongo and the others with having chloroformed and raped her during a black mass. In the USA, where everything becomes an acronym, they call it SRA, Satanic Ritual Abuse.

I found this article interesting for a couple of reasons: one, that the SRA phenomenon has spread to other countries, which I was not aware of before, and two, the author of this essay is one Luther Blissett, not a real person but in fact a fiction himself:

Luther Blissett doesn't begin to get interested in these events 'till July 1996. I think I must explain the reasons for this slowness of reflexes. In Bologna the trans-national collective pseudonym "Luther Blissett" is adopted by a large number of people coming from the "underground" "counterculture" and/or the "ultra-left" scene (squats, community radios etc.). Il Resto del Carlino [the newspaper which spearheaded the smear campaign on the Satanists--Tate] has often been the target of LB's actions; these were media pranks that would expose the reporters' racism, sexism and professional misery. We would use the competing newspapers in order to claim authorship of such hoaxes.

Navigation is kind of odd. Move through the article by clicking the links in the left-hand column, starting with "Children of Satan," down through "Satan & the Paedophiles Rave on the Net."

Dr. Michael Persinger, working at Laurentian University, in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, has pioneered a method for inducing the religious, spiritual experience of the shaman. Without drugs, herbs, hypnosis or invasive surgery, he can quite literally flip a switch and induce the experience of "god."

Using an ordinary striped yellow motorcycle helmet purchased at a sporting goods store, which he has modified with electromagnetic coils, he can place the helmet on your head, connect the wires to a device he has constructed that generates the proper signals, and when the magnetic fields produced by the coils penetrate the skull and into the temporal lobes of the brain, the result is the stimulation of those lobes and a religious experience results.

This paper has a very materialistic slant, but don't let that put you off. The fact that out-of-body experiences, religious experiences, and alien abduction experiences can be induced in the lab using nothing but electromagnetic fields does not disprove any aspect of spirituality.

Rather, it provides very significant clues as to what all this is about. Clues which I feel indicates that the notion of western dualism -- the notion that the spiritual and the physical are two different things -- is mistaken. This is a mistake that both the materialists and the spiritualists tend to make. This does not invalidate either spiritualism or materialism. Instead, it points to the tantalizing possibility that both camps have been talking about the same thing all this time. This is something that eastern mysticism has been saying for thousands of years.

i would like to say how my
experience validates lawrence lessig's
ideas about the internet as a commons
of innovation.

when i came on the net a long time ago it
was very loose and free. i posted whatever
i wanted to post however i wanted whenever i
wanted. people either liked it, hated it, or
didn't care. all of that is fine.

the freedom i felt made it possible for me
to play with ideas in a way that i could
not play with ideas in the context of my
job. in my job at that point, to keep faith
with the ettiquette and protocols, i could
not pick up my pen or open my mouth with
out a footnote. this inhibited me from
writing and thinking.

on the net, at that time, there were no
rules, no ability to register, everything
was text and there was no ability to thoughtfully
edit a post the way you can at a place like the WELL or
salon. the stuff i wrote was
1-shot, improvised, no look back. it was
a lot like jazz. there were no edwardian ladies
and gentlemen writing highly edited
freshman philosophical nonsense.

there was no strategy.

there were no profits to be made.

there were no consultants.

lessig suggests that when
berners-lee laid the graphic interface
on top of the net, it opened a pandora's box.
it accomplished exactly what it intended
to accomplish and that is that it brought
everybody to the web. he is right.

the web's graphical interface
brought or caused large corporate
entities to re-think the net, and it caused
them to begin strategizing about the net.

so people began to think about how to regularize
the net. they began to think about how to
profit from it. they began to think about how to control
it. they began to try to learn about who was
using the net, how they were using it, and why
they were using it. the 'predict and control'
pattern of thinking and response of the
dying renaissance/enlightenment cultural
pattern began to surface
on the net. net-strategy began. IT-strategy
relative to internet use began. the 'let's see
if we can do this for big bucks online' dream began. (there
used to be a joke about that running around:
it used go something like "oh look, a guy
came into my office today and he has an idea
for a killer app: he wants to make a thing like
a clock that you can use to tell time online...")


because of that work, a thing that used to empower people because
it had no rules, only a tradition of improvisation
and anonymity, quickly became a thing primarily
about buying stuff and hijacking, for profit,
information and ideas that once were simply shared.
it became a thing about exclusion and surveillence.

writing on the net, which at one time was
a kind of improvised "cutting contest" game
became something that posers carefully
cut and edited so that they could create
an image of being a capital w writer. writing
on the net became something that hustlers
became aware of and they came and signed
up and posed as Writers. they hustled
and harvested and consulted from the work
of others that originally was meant for
free sharing, and they wrote their books and collected their
royalties (may they all end in remainder bins)

the hustlers looked upon the sharers who were
playing as idiots waiting to be harvested.

we are not idiots, and we are not waiting.

control, registration, strategy,
regularization. all these things
are against the intent of the Founders.

This is from a year ago, but it's still interesting.

Neurologist Professor Olaf Blanke and colleagues at Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland were using electrodes to stimulate the brain.

They found that stimulating one spot - the angular gyrus in the right cortex - repeatedly caused out-of-body experiences (OBEs).

Initially, the stimulations caused the woman to feel she was "sinking" into the bed, or falling from a height.

When the current amplitude was increased, she reported leaving her body.

NINE Israeli nationals -- who[m] CSIS suspects are possible foreign agents -- were arrested by Immigration and Ottawa police tactical officers last Friday, blocks from Parliament Hill.

The nine have all been charged by Immigration for working in Canada illegally. All are in their 20s and were apparently selling art in Ottawa. The arrests follow similar takedowns of Israelis in Toronto and Calgary over the past few weeks.

An Ottawa police source said police were told members of the group were possible agents from Mossad, Israel's spy agency, but given no further information by CSIS. [more]

The soldiers had been drinking beer when they entered the zoo Thursday night after it closed, said the guard, Zuhair Abdul-Majeed.

"He was drunk," Abdul-Majeed said of the bitten soldier.

After the man was bit, the other American shot the tiger three times in the head and killed it, Abdul-Majeed told The Associated Press. [more]