cRitterology

Knowledge Building Concept

2008-12-15T18:59:00.002-05:00

The concept of Knowledge Building begins with the first layer in a stack. Each layer contains different types of content. The first layer is commonly known as the Header. The Header contains specific information such as the Name of the Content or a Description. Successive layers below the Header are known as the Body. The Body contains general information such as a List of Content Recipients or Attachments. The last layer, known as the Details, contains the relevant information like a list of Authors, or the time of the last update.

A simple example of Knowledge Building can be found in an internet message. A message is defined by its Subject, and commonly contains a Body of text (though not necessarily as in the case of Twitter). Messages also contain other general details, such as a shared file or a list of recipients. Finally, the Details of a message include the date it was sent, the size of the message, and so forth. This model not only applies to email and "Tweets," but blogs and instant messages as well.

The process of Building Knowledge requires certain Controls like the ability to Create Content or Add and Edit existing types. Other Controls include the ability to Send Content, or Find Items within the Content. Permissions, defined in the Details, can also include the ability to Remove specific Content or Delete everything, including the Header -- effectively removing Knowledge from the System.

The final component of Knowledge Building, apart from the Header, Body, and Controls, is the Menu which displays each of the layers. These layers, or Sections, can be Grouped and Sorted in a variety of ways. The most common Menu identifies the individual Section types, though Content may also be sorted Alphabetically, by Rating, Popularity, or Revision Date.

Message from the Queen

2008-11-01T00:11:00.001-04:00

To the citizens of the United States of America from Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

In light of your failure in recent years to nominate competent candidates for President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately.

(You should look up 'revocation' in the Oxford English Dictionary.)

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths, and territories (except Kansas , which she does not fancy).

Your new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, will appoint a Governor for America without the need for further elections.

Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed.

To aid in the transition to a British Crown dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:

1. The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as 'colour,' 'favour,' 'labour' and 'neighbour.' Likewise, you will learn to spell 'doughnut' without skipping half the letters, and the suffix '-ize' will be replaced by the suffix '-ise.' Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels.&nbs p; (look up 'vocabulary').

2. Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises such as ''like' and 'you know' is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. There is no such thing as U.S.< /SPAN> English. We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take into account the reinstated letter 'u'' and the elimination of '-ize.'

3. July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday.

4. You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns, lawyers, or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and therapists shows that you're not quite ready to be independent. Guns should only be used for shooting grouse. If you can't sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist,then you 're not ready to shoot grouse.

5. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous than a vegetable peeler. Although a permit will be required if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.

6. All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will start driving on the left side with immediate effect. At the same time, you will go metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of conversion tables. Both roundabouts and metrication will help you understand the British sense of humour.

7. The former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol (which you have been calling gasoline) of roughly $10/US gallon. Get used to it.

8. You will learn to make real chips. Those things you call French fries are not real chips, and those things you insist on calling potato chips are properly called crisps. Real chips are thick cut, fried in animal fat, and dressed not with catsup but with vinegar.

9. The cold, tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actually beer at all. Henceforth, only proper British Bitter will be referred to as beer, and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be referred to as Lager. South African beer is also acceptable, as they are pound for pound the greatest sporting nati on on earth and it can only be due to the beer. They are also part of the British Commonwealth - see what it did for them. American brands will be referred to as Near-Frozen Gnat's Urine, so that all can be sold without risk of further confusion.

10. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as good guys. Hollywood will also be required to cast English actors to play English characters. Watching Andie Macdowell attempt English dialogue in Four Weddings and a Funeral was an experience akin to having one's ears removed with a cheese grater.

11. You will cease playing American football. There is only one kind of proper football; you call it soccer. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which has some similarities to American football, but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like a bunch of nancies).

12. Further, you will stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to host an event called the World Series for a game which is not played outside of America . Since only 2.1% of you are aware there is a world beyond your borders, your error is understandable. You will learn cricket, and we will let you face the South Africans first to take the sting out of their deliveries.

13. You must tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us mad.

14. An internal revenue agent (i.e. tax collector) from Her Majesty's Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all monies due (backdated to 1776).

15. Daily Tea Time begins promptly at 4 p.m. with proper cups, with saucers, and never mugs, with high quality biscuits (cookies) and cakes; plus strawberries (with cream) when in season.

Obama Hates White People

2008-10-09T23:27:00.003-04:00

Being an Independent is difficult in the upcoming elections. It seems like all of my Liberal friends have jumped on the Obama train, leaving the rest of us to feel like dirty Socialists who'd rather watch the world collapse than believe in something America desperately needs right now: Hope. But whenever I turn a phrase and tell them that Obama hates white people, their hope quickly turns to rage.

The funny thing is that I started off supporting Obama long before the primaries, and was easily the first one registered to his website on my block. My interests carried me to my regular haunts, such as MAPLight.org, which listed the top campaign contributors in the order they fell off the Presidential nominations: McCain, Clinton, and in the number one slot: Obama.

While the majority of Americans raged against the bailout, it seemed as though a thick fog blocked the news that Obama was urging his fellow Congressmen to sign the $700B+ bill at the taxpayers expense -- only to cheer him on as he railed against McCain for voting the exact same way! And now, every earmark that Obama added to the bailout becomes yet another symbol of Hope for America?

What I see most clearly are the events of 9/11 that inspired America to retaliate, at any and all cost to their education, their economy, or their overall well-being in a time of great adversity. I see the Democrats using the financial crisis as yet another reason to abandon our personal freedoms, without making mention of everything we lost during the previous administration.

I can only hope that others realize the same shock doctrines being used against us once more, and ask that anyone who believes in Democracy to vote Independently in 2008. If you're fiscally Conservative, vote Ron Paul. If you're a true Independent, vote Nader. There are other options, all you need to do is look outside the Two Party system and Vote Independent. Why? Because...

Obama Hates White People.

Ben Bernanke: Economic Terrorist

2008-10-04T01:16:00.003-04:00

It was a sunny morning in the White House. Soon after the President had his first sip of coffee a Courier entered the Oval Office. He sat an envelope down on the desk and promptly exited the room. The President opened it slowly and pulled out the letter inside, which read:

"Give us $700 Billion or we will destroy yr Governmentz."

At the top of the Hill stood Ben Bernanke, telling Congress of the Horrors should they fail to act. Come layoffs and unemployment, failing economies across the great oceans, and catastrophes much like those he has studied throughout his career -- SHOULD WE FAIL TO ACT: The American Way of Life, as we know it, will end.

And the moral of their story is that Barack Obama wants to protect Main Street from Wall Street. As the beloved Son of the Democratic Party, America will forgive his decision to place our children into indentured servitude, for our Generation will certainly not have the funds to support the bill.

But our story is much different, for we the people of the United States of America do not give in to Terrorism. Ben Bernake is an Economic Terrorist. He is guilty of Extorting the US Government out of $700 Billion taxpayer dollars.; he is guilty of Corporatism; he is guilty of Racketeering; he is Guilty and MUST BE CHARGED.

Civil Access

2008-09-10T01:35:00.004-04:00

Civil Access is as much a Human Right as Civil Rights are in a Civil Society. Civil Access is our ability to read and write our Civil Information such as our Social Security Number, our Contact Information, as well as the sum total of every detail our Government stores that pertains explicitly to us.

That is Civil Access, and it should be viewed not only as a Right, but as a Reality that you assumed you had all along. That is what makes the Internet Banking Challenge such a wonderful meme, as it illustrates specific limitations in our own government such as the ability to view my tax account.

The best part of the Internet Banking Challenge is that most if not all of it already exists on the web. By that I mean that the debates, decisions, and contact information of our city officials is already available on the Internet. Opening the doors between this information and the public is one of the accomplishments of the Great Ralph Nader.

As for my own accomplishments, I plan to squat on CivicAccess.us until I find the time to illustrate the framework for a Civic Access Portal. I see this not only as the first step in achieving a truly Open Government, but more importantly, a realistic step into our current form of Government. (Note the US on the back of the domain name. And please feel free to contact or comment to get the thoughts rolling!)

The Internet Banking Challenge

2008-09-10T00:19:00.007-04:00

Last night I drove down to see Ralph Nader speak in Cincinnati, Ohio. I had seen most of his motivational speech on the Internet when they webcast live from the RNC, but at the end of the question and answer session I had the opportunity to ask for his thoughts on Open Government. He called himself an Open Candidate. Looking back at his track record with the Freedom of Information Act, etc., I can see his point.

But I think Ralph Nader, a man who is certainly wise beyond his numerous years, missed the point about Open Government -- in much the same way that many of us miss the point about Open Government. What IS Open Government? Answer: A Government founded on the principles of Open Source software development. WTF does that mean? You want us to use Open Source software? Can do. VOTE FOR RALPH NADER!

My gf and I got home and dumb o'clock in the morning and talked until half past stupid about Open Government. Somehow our ramblings lead me to compare Open Government to Online Banking, as it not only made for a wonderful example of the online access, but connected to places in the real world through public centers, telephones, and snail mail. In short, it was something people were familiar with.

So here's a challenge to anyone with an Internet bank account: DO NOT ACCESS your online account for FOUR YEARS. Furthermore, do not enter a banking institution more than ONE PER YEAR. And finally, NO ATMS. If you've got an emergency? USE THE PHONE.

That should give you a glimpse into your level of Civil Access.

Open Intelligence

2008-08-19T12:14:00.004-04:00

I've got a hella long stretch ahead of me to convert an enormous folder full of Silverlight controls over to the new design scheme (due in 2 weeks, I might add). As a Designer, imagine the unbearable: measuring 26 pixels high, 20 pixels for the text (12pt user interface font regular), 6 pixels down, 2 pixels up -- and that's just to correct the header MULTIPLIED BY god knows how many subcontrols. And then, of course, there's the actual skinning of each element individually. In two weeks.

And two steps into the process (after measuring the block headers, apparently) I realized the simple effect reducing a block header size had on the overall appearance of the page: The content visually jumped out ahead of the headers! And when I saw the content jump out at me I realized that I was building a more "intelligent" interface. Not the kind to fear (as in the "Artificial Intelligence" sense), but in the "learning" sense of the word, as it shows you what you seek to know.

This is when I hit my tangent: Wondering how we have come to fear the intelligence of a machine? Shouldn't we simply look at our computers as something which extends our capabilities? To look towards a point in time at which the machines no longer need us is to imagine a human species that no longer needs its planet. Life without trees wouldn't necessitate a Google search for trees. They'd be more of a Wikipedia entry that rarely gets updated as little happens in a world that no longer exists.

In today's world, our technology is transforming into a global network. The corporations are enforcing "network policies" to enforce their restrictions on our rights. This mentality is the atom bomb of our generation -- with great power in the hands of a select few -- power that could begin vast global wars and end whole countries by shutting down their electrical grid, destroying their knowledge base, thus sending their civilizations back into the dark ages with one strike.

I'm glad to be doing my part to open this knowledge from the very beginning of the Web 2.0. While our software works to keep its content safe from those who haven't gained appropriate access, it also promotes sharing amongst its users, and a sense of community throughout the digital reflection of their work days. But I'm even more happy to see my interface shaping out to an "Open Intelligence" that will hopefully one day rule the world! :D

Checking Out Flock (Once Again)

2008-07-12T17:53:00.001-04:00

I remember hearing about the concept of a Social Browser more than a year ago when I discovered Flock. At that point it mainly felt like Firefox with a crazy looking skin, but that was what simply rumbled under the hood.

Flock's big idea was to integrate all of these "Web 2.0" tools into a common framework. In other words: when you wanted to post a blog you'd click the Post Blog button (a cool little quill on the toolbar). If you didn't have an account set up, Flock would direct you to a common list of blogs. The same would go for email, pictures, and even friends on your favorite social network. In theory, anyways.

The first few releases of Flock accomplish little more than a list of Firefox add-ons (along with a really cool skin). But the cool list of add-ons didn't include my personal list of add-ons, making it unnecessary to go through the hassle of learning another browser -- especially when Firefox already accomplished everything I required from my browser.

Just moments ago I noticed I noticed the link at the bottom of Digg that lead to the new version of Flock. After a quick installation I was up and running, and discovered that integrating all my favorite add-ons was easier than setting up Firefox. For example, to write this blog all I needed to do was hit the scribe button (described above) and here you have a very review of Flock that can be summarized in a word:

Noice.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Quest for the Holy Blue Ball

2008-05-01T00:28:00.006-04:00

My week began with a journey into another dimension that I've yet to fully escape. After scrawling some sigils on the whiteboard that barely represented an Internet profile I chanted for two hours about online relationships and game theory. At first it felt as though I had simply experienced a memory dump, but slowly I began to see the energy that we share amongst ourselves. It was then that I realized that I was on a Quest to find the Holy Blue Ball.

To be honest: I've already discovered the Holy Blue Ball. I say Holy because it looks like a loosely bound ball of brilliantly blue rubber bands of light -- or more precisely, the faint shadow of a Holy Blue Ball (heretofore referred to as the Ball). I have no idea where the Ball came from. What I do know is that when I visualize the Blue Ball and shape it into a thought, I can then attach the Ball to an email or a blog and share my experience with the viewer.

Note the key word above: Experience. Imagine reading a series of sentences exchanged between two people. Now, imagine the last argument in your relationship. This experience is what connects the ephemeral world of art and ideas with the tangible world we live in. Without the experience we simply have a list of words that have no meaning beyond their definition. This Experience is the Blue Ball of Light that we shape and share through communication. Or, at least, it used to.

As it happened, when the process of transmitting information required a recording device -- such as paper and pens, audio recordings, et al -- these records were then passed on to their respective recipients. Not much changed when computers came online. Documents were written and sent to the right people, who filed the paperwork until it was necessary to retrieve it. Then things got lost; others, stolen. And Bureaucracy set in and the world went to Hell because nobody loves paperwork.

What is missing from the equation above is that Ball of Light. There is no community; no network. There is simply lines of data processed by drones. The entire point of communicating, to share an experience, has been lost to a paradigm that favors efficiency over quality. Without sharing experiences with one another we have no quality to offer. Thankfully, we have social and peer-to-peer networking to thank for turning our old operating systems into new cooperating systems.

So here's the question: What is this Blue Ball of Light that I hold in my hands? I know that it can share experiences with others across a variety of mediums, and helps to create a bond of community between those who witness it. But what is it called, and how simply can it be described so that everyone says: "Of course I know what you're talking about! Why would anyone communicate without it?"

(Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated.)

Collaborative Documentation for Dummies

2008-02-28T23:06:00.003-05:00

Given the fact that our world largely remains dependent on the details written on pieces of paper, it is easy to see how this model was initially applied to the world of computing. When we received a piece of paper on our desk we immediately typed the information into a computer form and sent it to someone else for approval -- at first, by transferring them to a portable disk, ultimately relying upon the Internet to pass along the relevant data.

The problem is that this method of transferring documents not only runs contrary to the principles of the Internet, but creates countless points of inefficiency along the way. The originator could mistype the details written on the paper, the recipient could fail to see the message. With so many copies of the same information floating around the network it becomes difficult to track the end result, or to ensure that outside parties receive these results as accurately as possible.

Looking at the data in a stream of information is a more accurate depiction of the Internet as its creators intended it to be: a distributed network where every bit of knowledge flowed freely, so that if one node in the network collapsed, the others would pick up the slack. Some call it Socialism, while others call it the Electrical Grid. When you're talking about pieces of paper with bits of information that gets passed around the network: I call it Collaborative Documentation.

Unfortunately, Collaborative Documentation sounds very clinical, and hardly begins to capture the effect of sites such as YouTube, where "Collaborative Documentation" has produced an information and entertainment collective unlike no other. The same goes for Wikipedia, which has begun to transform both knowledge and education as we once perceived it in the hands of accomplished scholars. Collaborative Documentation is a major shift -- strangely enough -- in the most minor of ways.

I say 'minor' due to the size of the changes required to shift from the 'document transfer' perspective to collaborative documentation. The process is identical, as the same people are required to sign and pass the details as before, but instead of storing the document locally, you distribute it across the network so that anyone can access the information at any time, given the proper permissions.

The biggest changes would occur to the user, who is transformed from a single login name and password to a fully functioning entity on the network -- complete with a list of personalized responsibilities and an array of results, along with connections to others in the network. At once, it seems as if the simple act of acknowledging the actions of the user gives life to a network of 1's and 0's.

Which leads me to believe that if something so integral to all living matter exists in the activity of Collaborative Documentation, then a concept less clinical is necessary to capture its meaning. Just as blog and email have risen to the level of recognition as to be easily understood by the masses, so too must these documents and forms transform to become part of a shared experience.

(If you've got any ideas for a word or two better than Collaborative Documentation, please let me know!)

Draft Lessig for Congress!

2008-02-22T00:32:00.005-05:00

I phased out during one of the presidential updates on NPR while driving home from work, and dreamt about running for office under the banner of the Open Party. In my head I formulated the perfect website with American colors describing all the changes to the way our government works. I watched little videos showing voters how easy it was to see where there money was going and how to elect a change in the amounts. Everywhere the taglines read: "A vote for the Open Party is a vote for YOU!"

The plan was to run for a local post like a school board member or possibly the mayor of a small town who puts the open technology in place which allows the residents to directly control their laws and finances. Once that complicated little line becomes razor clear the media and Internet stardom would act as a catalyst to carry the Open Party into Congress, and then maybe -- just maybe, The President: The Man who would offer states complete control over their economies, and give the United States back to the American People. It's a mighty big plan.

But not for the likes of Lawrence Lessig: The Man who created Creative Commons, and sits on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Software Freedom Organization. A God of the Open Movement! Lately he's hit the news by exploring a bid for Congress -- thereby skipping the whole small town mayor route and diving directly into the major leagues. And while the Open Party may not have a shot at the Presidency in 2008, we might end up with a President who is very enthusiastic about modern technology.

The catch is the illustrious Dr. Lessig isn't sure if he wishes to run in the special election. In the true spirit of the Open Movement he is asking all of us to show our support for his campaign. This means that each of us have to blog about it, join the Facebook group, Digg the articles, and email the links to our friends. This is such an important moment for the Open Party -- even if the party is simply a figment of my imagination. The changes to our software is real, as are the changes to the spread of information and file sharing.

Isn't it time we change the Government?

Tell Lawrence Lessig you support the Open Party.

Am I Jaa or Nix?

2008-02-19T21:52:00.009-05:00

A short time ago I overheard that someone was looking to purchase the domain for Am I Hot or Not? Up until then I hadn't considered the site to be anything more than legendary. To be sure, the value of knowing whether one is hot or not was of little concern to the vast majority of us -- with the exception of AOL, who immediately began adding the feature all across their network. But the simple concept of 'yea or nay' became apparent on the Internet, thanks to a bunch of guys who liked looking at hot chicks.

This small step in the evolution of The Information Highway is an important one, as the ability to define a simple value of 'yes' or 'no' underlies the construction of all knowledge -- in our minds, in our debates, in our governance of societies. Connecting this process to simple thumbs up/down controls on the web extends the model beyond ourselves into the social wealth of the masses. But with all the examples of Am I Digg or Reddit? on the intertubes, none have clearly stated exactly how much that 'social wealth' is worth to the masses.

To put it more clearly: Google makes a certain amount of money every time you look at one of their ads. When you click on something, they make even more money. Your views hold a certain value to not only Google, but everyone in the advertising industry, including Rupert Murdoch who purchased MySpace for an obscene amount of billions. They came to that dollar amount by counting the number of times people looked at something on their website. Views have a value to everyone except the viewers themselves, who are typically subjected to more crap at their expense.

This is where a quote from the creator of Jaanix inspires me to believe that someone is on the right track: "Unlike predecessors [Jaanix] is not a democracy, but a marketplace where your attention is the new currency." For what is Democracy but a system of checks and balances controlled by a relative few who ultimately manipulate the system towards their own interests? But Jaanix, by contrast, tells you how much your views are worth, and compensates you accordingly. Or, at least, it could, should it follow the path of the "new currency."

One would do well to remember that we're living in the 21st Century, where knowledge is key and the value of the currency is fluctuating based on information: who values what, how many of us agree, et cetera. What you and I know is the monetary unit of 2008; it's how we earn wealth and who we trade it with. Converting our knowledge into cash is simply another step in turning our views into points. Scrap the dollar! There is no more gold backing our credit! All hail the mighty viewpoint!

Once the model makes sense it is easy to see how all of these points add up: I earn a certain amount every time I contribute, to varying degrees depending on my effort. Should I dig up something original I get a certain amount. Should I simply comment on it I get less, and for the easiest task of voting I get the smallest amount. All of this adds up to an account which offers even greater visibility of higher value to those submitting to the site.

All in all, I see this model providing the foundation for much of what the owners of Digg and Reddit (and even Pwnce) are attempting to accomplish: What are people talking about? What are they interested in learning more about? Websites? Products? You name it. You share it. You create communities of like-minded people to do it. That's the real magic of the Web 2.0. Now, let's hope that Jaanix can see the value, and present it clearly to the rest of the world.

The Cooperation Project

2008-02-13T10:57:00.001-05:00

Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action -- and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons.

Rheingold hopes to promote the Cooperation Project in an effort to transform the way we think about the problems we currently face in Health Care, etc. He released a paper titled the Technologies of Cooperation, along with the Institute for the Future, that discusses these ideas in further detail.

SIGNAL FIRE by Snow Patrol

2008-02-04T10:45:00.000-05:00

The perfect words never crossed my mind,
'cause there was nothing in there but you,
I felt every ounce of me screaming out,
But the sound was trapped deep in me,
All I wanted just sped right past me,
While I was rooted fast to the earth,
I could be stuck here for a thousand years,
Without your arms to drag me out,

There you are standing right in front of me (x2)
All this fear falls away to leave me naked,
Hold me close cause I need you to guide me to safety

No I won't wait forever(2x)

In the confusion and the aftermath,
You are my signal fire,
The only resolution and the only joy,
Is the faint spark of forgiveness in your eyes,

There you are standing right in front of me (x2)
All this fear falls away to leave me naked,
Hold me close cause I need you to guide me to safety,

There you are standing right in front of me (x2)
All this fear falls away to leave me naked,
Hold me close cause I need you to guide me to safety,

No I won't wait forever(x3)

Life on Terra

2008-01-22T23:16:00.000-05:00

A recent episode of Life on Terra, that focused on the islands of the South China Sea, ended with a powerful statement: "If we were to lose our biodiversity, we would lose our culture. If we were to lose our culture, we would lose our identity." While it is easy enough to imagine indigenous or rural cultures losing their identity with the loss off the natural environment, its more challenging to see how these effects would affect our own identity: the American identity, which has become merely a byproduct of Capitalism.

This, of course, is the real threat to the biodiversity of such cultures as those in the South China Sea, as well as mainland China, along with other continents such as Africa and South America, which houses the majority of biodiversity on planet Earth. To Capitalism, these are merely resources to manufacture and produce vast concrete structures to nurture the Economy. As the shipping lines expand around the globe, the life which once shared the environment increasingly becomes the property of the select few who profit at the expense of our world.

To save ourselves from the ultimate wars over the finite resources of our planet, we need to learn to see ourselves as something other than Capitalists. Ultimately, the goal of exchanging goods and services is not to profit, it is to accomplish the American dream, where every man and woman is afforded equal rights: to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Struggling to survive in order to finance and endless war on Terrorism is not the American way. It is the way of the Capitalist, and it is destroying our world.

Disposable Heroes

2008-01-20T15:02:00.000-05:00

The PBS special on Yao Ming is an inspiring tale of a Chinese man who became a legend in American Basketball. The "dramamentary" follows him from a young boy living in a world where celebrity culture has yet to become the norm, and international sport stars are paid the same as everyone else. In Ming's rise to fame in the United States, he appeared in commercials for a variety of corporations, at times, selling laptops with the aid of a midget who barely made up it to his knees. In the end, it was Yao's translator who shed the most tears as the US watched one of their brothers return to China, the land of the Communists.

So captured by the story, I searched the web for any information to learn more about the plight of this wonderful icon. The top of the search results led me directly to the NBA, where I found a wall of statistics beside another brick of advertising, but nothing about his current situation in life. So I narrowed by search to include PBS, and found an old article from The Journal Editorial Report which preceded a second article on Star Wars entitled Excessive Use of the Force. (This is a funny coincidence as the CW showed a legal drama featuring Mark Hamill directly after the Yao Ming story. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.)

The brief article on PBS.org repeated many of the same points from the show, but ended on a different note: "I'd also like to give [an award] to the reformers in the Chinese economy who, like Yao Ming, are standing for individual efforts and, even in Communist China, the free market." Who better to serve as a poster boy for the free market than a Chinese basketball star -- the antithesis of the Communist worker who could never dream of earning $14 Million dollars a year. It's that very dream which drives the heart of this economy (even though it is an absolute lie to inspire the 80% who own 1% of their country).

It is wonderful to see the promise of Mark Hamill directly afterwards, showing us that fame indeed lasts but 15 minutes -- or five minutes should you rise to Internet stardom without a representative to keep you in the know. And in the meantime, the rest of us starve for temporary iconography extolling the battle of Good vs. Evil in the stars with massive wars against the Fascist regimes such as Soviet Russia and Socialist China. We see a better promise in the man who sells his soul to the Devil of temporary fortune and elusive fame -- at the low, low cost of $19.95 a month!

Bread and Circus indeed. We're paying for Products and Circuses this time around without realizing our contribution. Instead we sit on our asses in front of the television which was crafted by these terrible Socialists for ten pennies an hour (less for the jeans we're sitting in). We would challenge ourselves to find something created in the United States that we can actually afford -- apart from the images from the NBA which earns billions of dollars annually from our Free Market economy. Tell me this Democracy works anywhere else and I'll show you the modern definition of slavery in South America, in China -- everywhere that produces the American Dream.

Today Was a Really Good Day

2008-01-09T23:46:00.000-05:00

I'm excited to announce that I signed an offer letter today for a job that I'm really excited to do -- and nearly doubles my salary to boot! I'll be working for a medical software company which received a few million investment dollars; developing the front end for their bread-and-butter: an application that helps medical practitioners more effectively monitor their patients services "from the womb to the tomb" (so the C.E.O. sayeth).

What excites me most (apart from the salary and the opportunity) is the team that I'll be working with. I initially received the offer from an old manager of mine who had secured a position as their C.T.O. He told me that he was putting together a "Dream Team" composed of a developer I worked with in the past, along with a few other guys the developer knew. After meeting with some of them for lunch, I really felt that we clicked, and knew that the "Dream Team" would be able to knock the company's expectations out of the park.

All of this times so nicely as my current position was becoming a dreadful task. The company is securely set in their ISO-9000 ways that require every soul in their chairs for a regimented amount of time, with "Casual Fridays" and a vision that wasn't able to see past their 50 years of experience. Working to make the War Machine more effective in Iraq was a blow to my moral compass as well. It will be nice to actually help people live. Myself, included.

The greatest thing of all that made today a really good day is that I finally caught a glimpse of my future. I saw myself trapped in the same old house where the same old things happened over and over again. To change the outcome I needed to change. Within the next few months I will finally have the opportunity move down South, start working on the house to sell, and buy that little farm I've always dreamed about. Other things will change as well, but I won't tack that on at the end of the blog.

I will say this, however: Here's to a Really Good Year!

Lagest National Guard Deployment Since WWII

2008-01-08T09:18:00.000-05:00

While I watched the news last night a short story ran on Channel 2 wishing the Ohio National Guardsmen “Good Luck!” as they deployed to Kuwait. After researching the story online I found that the deployment of our National Guard is the largest since WWII, with 1,600 men and women headed to Texas for training, then on to Kuwait, with some continuing the journey to Iraq.

Here’s a link to the only report I was able to locate online.

I hope that I am merely overlooking the local news coverage of the enormous sacrifice made by so many of our local Guardsmen. For Ohio to simply send their children off to war without a single protest is lamentable. Without questioning their duty as National Guardsmen to the State of Ohio, it is doubtful that anyone has questioned the need for a record number of our own in Kuwait.

As it happens, Bush is headed over to the Middle East for another round of “Peace Talks,” because we all know Bush is a man of Peace. And just when the troops are secretly surging once more, with the President meeting with all of his Middle Eastern Allies, we learn from Reuters that Iran has made the first aggressive move towards the U.S. Navy.

Gulf of Tonkin, anyone?

The Open Party

2008-01-07T17:54:00.000-05:00

While watching a copy of Charlie Wilson's War (brought to me by the good folks at the Pirate Bay) I wondered if it were possible for a young man to simply drive a couple car loads o' Negroes down to the voting booth and steal an election, just by telling them the other guy had killed your dog. It's a nice racist tale about how ig'nunt them collard folks can be, but today's voting population -- as disparately finite as they can be, both amongst colored folk and The Man -- think the Democrats are gonna give it all away, and the Republicans are gonna keep it for themselves.

As far as the system being rigged: I do declare that we've done it to ourselves (Or more plainly put, they've branded the two concepts and sold it to us hook, line, and sinker). The consider a third alternative is to fear the depths of Fascism or Communism, or any other ism cooked up by intellectuals that don't know a damn thing about how life really works. But you do. And that's what really counts. When it comes to hot button issues like abortion and border security, they tell us what our options are and then sort them out between the two parties. At least that's what we're told.

In reality we end up with an idealist who works on the part of the Corporations -- not matter which party they come from. Conservatives and Liberals alike will admit that the system is being rigged by big money lobbyists that buy the fat bastards anything they want to pass their legislations. It's called Corruption, and we all know it is eating our Government from within. But what we don't all know about is 'Open Source' (aside from what we've heard of Linux or Firefox, that developers can download the code and use it for free).

The 'Open Source' methodology is more than a philosophy for programmers. 'Open Source' implies a system that enables everyone to contribute. The practice of opening your system and allowing others to participate affects more than software code. For example, Wikipedia is a type of 'Open Source' which pertains to information, and allows anyone to read and revise any article, assuming you have permission from the community at large. Digg.com is another aspect of 'Open Source' that allows the user -- not to download and edit the code, but to contribute their own stories, effectively editing the front page as a community.

Imagine the practice of Open Source being applied to our Government. Instead of going to the polls every few years to vote for another criminal to steal your money, you do away with the middle man and directly represent yourself. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call Democracy. Not Representative Democracy. (That is what we call a Republic.) Real Democracy. Now that we've reached the 21st Century the concepts created by our Roman Forefathers is within our reach! But first, we must replace our Republic with a Democracy by supporting the Open Party.

At the moment, the Open Party is simply an idea held by hundreds, if not thousands of people around the globe. Attempting to explain the idea leads us back to the same hot button issues: "What do you think about border patrol? Are you gonna raise my taxes?" The process of explaining how each and every American can participate directly in their city finances or other governing principles simply bores anyone to tears. But that's all part of the process. You have an idea -- simultaneously, as it happens, with hundreds of other people you've never met -- and eventually, figure out how to tell it.

Would you?

The Viewer's Strike of 2008

2007-12-30T23:08:00.000-05:00

As the Writer's Strike of 2007 enters the new year, Americans could be subjected to a wide assortment of alternatives from the network broadcasters. TIME magazine recommended BBC America replacements such as the British version of the Office, along with an alternate reality version of Desperate Housewives. Whatever the country is ultimately faced with, the television we once knew is bound to be affected as it was during the previous Writer's Strike of 1988.

Regardless of the fact that underdog shows such as Seinfeld received national attention, the reigns of "Entertainment Power" remained largely unaffected. Even with new formats of governmental criticism from the likes of the Daily Show, the same studios received even more money from the same "two party" system, resulting in the same Presidential Candidates from the previous elections. And the same people got rich while the same people got ignored, leading the same country down the same path it has been on for over half a century.

But the writers have realized something important in the Capitalistic experiments of Radiohead and the Talking Heads: that profits from Internet sales managed to rival those of the traditional system of selling their rights to the networks. Should the writer's decide to take their entertainment directly to the people through "Internet Channels," "webcasts" such as I am Ninja could become the norm (given that the latest season has managed to earn advertising dollars from Dorritos). The only missing component is the hardware.

This is where you and I come into play.

Consider for a moment that the Writer's Guild of America represents a 'mere' 12,000 writers. This means that 12,000 people could potentially affect the way you and I view our entertainment. Most of us realize that mainstream media (or 'MSM' for short) controls more than our entertainment; they control which products we choose from, and which candidates we elect to vote for at the poll booths. In simple terms, MSM limits our options to those who give them the most money. 12,000 people could turn our heads towards an entirely Democratic system of news and entertainment.

The problem is that a majority of Americans receive their edutainment through controlled set-top boxes that elect to broadcast a limited range of channels. Receiving the "new" Internet "channels" is only available to a limited number of broadband subscribers who actually take the time to watch their favorite shows online. Popular alternatives such as Apple TV elect to control the entertainment through their own privately held revenue system, while Open Source alternatives such as Democracy TV (now called Miro) lack a popular television component to satisfy the average viewer.

The next 12,000 of us need to find the simple solution which enables our grandparents setup and use a "set top device" that allows them to access shows of their own choosing. Once the hardware is in place, the ultimate increase in Writer's pay -- along with the inevitable affects to broadcast television -- will become irrelevant. Those who employ the new hardware will be able to receive their standard network broadcasts through websites such as Hulu (as well as from the dedicated YouTube rippers). In practical terms, the owners of the new devices will be able to explore a whole new world of news and entertainment.

But we must dedicate ourselves to this task, and spread this message so that the next 12,000 hardware and software developers might unite in a follow-up to the Writer's Strike of 2007. Let us call it the Viewer's Strike of 2008. Let us unify our skills to produce an Open Source product which will give the viewer's the final decision, and may the rest of us commit ourselves to their efforts by recommending or outright buying these devices and setting them up in the homes of our loved ones. Let them know that the Viewer's Strike is not about revenues, but the conscious act to restore Democracy to the United States of America.

(One final note to the underdogs of the upcoming elections: Consider the Viewer's Strike of 2008 to be a valuable part in your bid for the presidency. Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel have tasted the bitter rejection of mainstream media, and their supporters have given them millions of dollars to spread their message through traditional formats. Consider the alternative, and give those dollars back to the people by supporting the Viewer's Strike of 2008. Help us ensure that every American will have access to a "Fair and Balanced" news source that they can truly trust.)

ÆNIMA by Tool

2007-12-28T14:54:00.000-05:00

Some say the end is near.
Some say we'll see armageddon soon.
I certainly hope we will.
I sure could use a vacation from this

Bullshit three ring circus sideshow of
Freaks

Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call LA
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away.
Any fucking time. Any fucking day.
Learn to swim, I'll see you down in Arizona bay.

Fret for your figure and
Fret for your latte and
Fret for your hairpiece and
Fret for your lawsuit and
Fret for your prozac and
Fret for your pilot and
Fret for your contract and
Fret for your car.

It's a
Bullshit three ring circus sideshow of
Freaks

Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call LA
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away.
Any fucking time. Any fucking day.
Learn to swim, I'll see you down in Arizona bay.

Some say a comet will fall from the sky.
Followed by meteor showers and tidal waves.
Followed by faultlines that cannot sit still.
Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits.

Some say the end is near.
Some say we'll see armageddon soon.
I certainly hope we will cuz
I sure could use a vacation from this

Silly shit, stupid shit...

One great big festering neon distraction,
I've a suggestion to keep you all occupied.

Learn to swim.

Mom's gonna fix it all soon.
Mom's comin' round to put it back the way it ought to be.

Learn to swim.

Fuck L Ron Hubbard and
Fuck all his clones.
Fuck all those gun-toting
Hip gangster wannabes.

Learn to swim.

Fuck retro anything.
Fuck your tattoos.
Fuck all you junkies and
Fuck your short memory.

Learn to swim.

Fuck smiley glad-hands
With hidden agendas.
Fuck these dysfunctional,
Insecure actresses.

Learn to swim.

Cuz I'm praying for rain
And I'm praying for tidal waves
I wanna see the ground give way.
I wanna watch it all go down.
Mom please flush it all away.
I wanna watch it go right in and down.
I wanna watch it go right in.
Watch you flush it all away.

Time to bring it down again.
Don't just call me pessimist.
Try and read between the lines.

I can't imagine why you wouldn't
Welcome any change, my friend.

I wanna see it all come down.
suck it down.
flush it down.

A Short History of the U.S. Government's Respect for Human Life, Part III

2007-12-19T09:45:00.000-05:00

The following list comes from declassified documents, news reports, videos, the National Archives, and from the final report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.

1961: In response to the Nuremberg Trials, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram begins his famous Obedience to Authority Study in order to answer his question "Could it be that (Adolf) Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" Male test subjects, ranging in age from 20 to 40 and coming from all education backgrounds, are told to give "learners" electric shocks for every wrong answer the learners give in response to word pair questions. In reality, the learners are actors and are not receiving electric shocks, but what matters is that the test subjects do not know that. Astoundingly, they keep on following orders and continue to administer increasingly high levels of "shocks," even after the actor learners show obvious physical pain ("Milgram Experiment").

1962: Researchers at the Laurel Children's Center in Maryland test experimental acne antibiotics on children and continue their tests even after half of the young test subjects develop severe liver damage because of the experimental medication (Goliszek).

1962: The U.S. Army's Deseret Test Center begins Project 112. This includes SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense), which exposes U.S. Navy and Army personnel to live toxins and chemical poisons in order to determine naval ships' vulnerability to chemical and biological weapons. Military personnel are not test subjects; conducting the tests exposes them. Many of these participants complain of negative health effects at the time and, decades later, suffer from severe medical problems as a result of their exposure (Goliszek, Veterans Health Administration).

1962: The FDA begins requiring that a new pharmaceutical undergo three human clinical trials before it will approve it. From 1962 to 1980, pharmaceutical companies satisfy this requirement by running Phase I trials, which determine a drug's toxicity, on prison inmates, giving them small amounts of cash for compensation (Sharav).

1963: Chester M. Southam, who injected Ohio State Prison inmates with live cancer cells in 1952, performs the same procedure on 22 senile, African-American female patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in order to watch their immunological response. Southam tells the patients that they are receiving "some cells," but leaves out the fact that they are cancer cells. He claims he doesn't obtain informed consent from the patients because he does not want to frighten them by telling them what he is doing, but he nevertheless temporarily loses his medical license because of it. Ironically, he eventually becomes president of the American Cancer Society (Greger, Merritte, et al.).

1963: Researchers at the University of Washington directly irradiate the testes of 232 prison inmates in order to determine radiation's effects on testicular function. When these inmates later leave prison and have children, at least four have babies born with birth defects. The exact number is unknown because researchers never follow up on the men to see the long-term effects of their experiment (Goliszek).

1963: In a National Institutes of Health-sponsored (NIH) study, a researcher transplants a chimpanzee's kidney into a human. The experiment fails (Sharav).

1963 - 1966: New York University researcher Saul Krugman promises parents with mentally disabled children definite enrollment into the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, N.Y., a resident mental institution for mentally retarded children, in exchange for their signatures on a consent form for procedures presented as "vaccinations." In reality, the procedures involve deliberately infecting children with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of infected patients, so that Krugman can study the course of viral hepatitis as well the effectiveness of a hepatitis vaccine (Hammer Breslow).

1963 - 1971: Leading endocrinologist Dr. Carl Heller gives 67 prison inmates at Oregon State Prison in Salem $5 per month and $25 per testicular tissue biopsy in compensation for allowing him to perform irradiation experiments on their testes. If they receive vasectomies at the end of the study, the prisoners are given an extra $100 (Sharav, Goliszek).

1963: Researchers inject a genetic compound called radioactive thymidine into the testicles of more than 100 Oregon State Penitentiary inmates to learn whether sperm production is affected by exposure to steroid hormones (Greger).

1963: In a study published in Pediatrics, researchers at the University of California's Department of Pediatrics use 113 newborns ranging in age from one hour to three days old in a series of experiments used to study changes in blood pressure and blood flow. In one study, doctors insert a catheter through the newborns' umbilical arteries and into their aortas and then immerse the newborns' feet in ice water while recording aortic pressure. In another experiment, doctors strap 50 newborns to a circumcision board, tilt the table so that all the blood rushes to their heads and then measure their blood pressure (Goliszek).

1964 - 1968: The U.S. Army pays $386,486 (the largest sum ever paid for human experimentation) to University of Pennsylvania Professors Albert Kligman and Herbert W. Copelan to run medical experiments on 320 inmates of Holmesburg Prison to determine the effectiveness of seven mind-altering drugs. The researchers' objective is to determine the minimum effective dose of each drug needed to disable 50 percent of any given population (MED-50). Though Professors Kligman and Copelan claim that they are unaware of any long-term effects the mind-altering agents might have on prisoners, documents revealed later would prove otherwise (Kaye).

1964 - 1967: The Dow Chemical Company pays Professor Kligman $10,000 to learn how dioxin -- a highly toxic, carcinogenic component of Agent Orange -- and other herbicides affect human skin because workers at the chemical plant have been developing an acne-like condition called Chloracne and the company would like to know whether the chemicals they are handling are to blame. As part of the study, Professor Kligman applies roughly the amount of dioxin Dow employees are exposed to on the skin 60 prisoners, and is disappointed when the prisoners show no symptoms of Chloracne. In 1980 and 1981, the human guinea pigs used in this study would begin suing Professor Kligman for complications including lupus and psychological damage (Kaye).

1965: CIA and Department of Defense begin Project MKSEARCH, a program to develop a capability to manipulate human behavior through the use of mind-altering drugs.

1965: In a three year study, 70 volunteer prisoners at the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia were subjected to tests of dioxin, the highly toxic chemical contaminant in Agent Orange. Lesions which the men developed were not treated and remained for up to seven months. None of the subjects was informed that they would later be studied for the development of cancer. This was the second such experiment which Dow Chemical undertook on "volunteers" who did not receive the information which the world proclaimed was necessary for "informed consent" at Nuremberg.

Note: Dow/Corning manufactured and sold artificial breast implants even after the health risks of the implants became known. The massive class action lawsuit was only recently settled.

1965: The Department of Defense uses human test subjects wearing rubber clothing and M9A1 masks to conduct 35 trials near Fort Greely, Alaska, as part of the Elk Hunt tests, which are designed to measure the amount of VX nerve agent put on the clothing of people moving through VX-contaminated areas or touching contaminated vehicles, and the amount of VX vapor rising from these areas. After the tests, the subjects are decontaminated using wet steam and high-pressure cold water (Goliszek).

1965: As part of a test codenamed "Big Tom," the Department of Defense sprays Oahu, Hawaii's most heavily populated island, with Bacillus globigii in order to simulate an attack on an island complex. Bacillus globigii causes infections in people with weakened immune systems, but this was not known to scientists at the time (Goliszek, Martin).

1966: The CIA continues a limited number of MKULTRA plans by beginning Project MKSEARCH to develop and test ways of using biological, chemical and radioactive materials in intelligence operations, and also to develop and test drugs that are able to produce predictable changes in human behavior and physiology (Goliszek).

1966: Dr. Henry Beecher writes, "The well-being, the health, even the actual or potential life of all human beings, born or unborn, depend upon the continuing experimentation in man. Proceed it must; proceed it will. 'The proper study of mankind is man,'" in his "exposé" on human medical experimentation Research and the Individual ("Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After").

1966: The National Commission for the Protection of Research Subjects issues its Policies for the Protection of Human Subjects, which eventually creates what we now know as institutional review boards (IRBs) (Sharav).

1966: The U.S. Army dispensed Bacillus subtilis variant niger throughout the New York City subway system. More than a million civilians were exposed when army scientists drop lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto ventilation grates. Materials available on the incident noted the Army's justification for the experiment was the fact that there are many subways in the (former) Soviet Union, Europe, and South America. Although there are no harmful effects known for this release, details of the experiment are still classified.

1967: Continuing on his Dow Chemical Company-sponsored dioxin study without the company's knowledge or consent, University of Pennsylvania Professor Albert Kligman increases the dosage of dioxin he applies to 10 prisoners' skin to 7,500 micrograms, 468 times the dosage Dow official Gerald K. Rowe had authorized him to administer. As a result, the prisoners experience acne lesions that develop into inflammatory pustules and papules (Kaye).

1967: The CIA places a chemical in the drinking water supply of the FDA headquarters in Washington, D.C. to see whether it is possible to spike drinking water with LSD and other substances (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

1967: In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers inject pregnant women with radioactive cortisol to see if the radioactive material will cross the placentas and affect the fetuses (Goliszek).

1967: The U.S. Army pays Professor Kligman to apply skin-blistering chemicals to Holmesburg Prison inmates' faces and backs, so as to, in Professor Kligman's words, "learn how the skin protects itself against chronic assault from toxic chemicals, the so-called hardening process," information which would have both offensive and defensive applications for the U.S. military (Kaye).

1967: The CIA and Edgewood Arsenal Research Laboratories begin an extensive program for developing drugs that can influence human behavior. This program includes Project OFTEN -- which studies the toxicology, transmission and behavioral effects of drugs in animal and human subjects -- and Project CHICKWIT, which gathers European and Asian drug development information (Goliszek).

1967: Professor Kligman develops Retin-A as an acne cream (and eventually a wrinkle cream), turning him into a multi-millionaire (Kaye).

1967: Researchers paralyze 64 prison inmates in California with a neuromuscular compound called succinylcholine, which produces suppressed breathing that feels similar to drowning. When five prisoners refuse to participate in the medical experiment, the prison's special treatment board gives researchers permission to inject the prisoners with the drug against their will (Greger).

1967: CIA and Department of Defense implement Project MKNAOMI, successor to MKULTRA and designed to maintain, stockpile and test biological and chemical weapons.

1968: Planned Parenthood of San Antonio and South Central Texas and the Southwest Foundation for Research and Education begin an oral contraceptive study on 70 poverty-stricken Mexican-American women, giving only half the oral contraceptives they think they are receiving and the other half a placebo. When the results of this study are released a few years later, it stirs tremendous controversy among Mexican-Americans (Sharav, Sauter).

1968 - 1969: The CIA experimented with the possibility of poisoning drinking water by injecting a chemical substance into the water supply of the Food And Drug Administration in Washington, D.C.. There were no harmful effects noted from this experiment. However, none of the human subjects in the building were ever asked for their permission, nor was anyone provided with information on the nature or effects of the chemical used.

1969: President Nixon ends the United States' offensive biowarfare program, including human experimentation done at Fort Detrick. By this time, tens of thousands of civilians and members of the U.S. armed forces have wittingly and unwittingly acted as participants in experiments involving exposure to dangerous biological agents (Goliszek).

1969: The U.S. military conducts DTC Test 69-12, which is an open-air test of VX and sarin nerve agents at the Army's Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, likely exposing military personnel (Goliszek, Martin).

1969: Experimental drugs are tested on mentally disabled children in Milledgeville, Ga., without any institutional approval whatsoever (Sharav).

1969: Judge Sam Steinfield's dissent in Strunk v. Strunk, 445 S.W.2d 145 marks the first time a judge has ever suggested that the Nuremberg Code be applied in American court cases (Sharav).

1969: On June 9, 1969, Dr. Dr. Donald M. MacArthur, then Deputy Director of Research and Technology for the Department of Defense, appeared before the House Subcommittee on Appropriations to request funding for a project to produce a synthetic biological agent for which humans have not yet acquired a natural immunity. Dr. McArtor asked for $10 million dollars to produce this agent over the next 5-10 years. The Congressional Record reveals that according to the plan for the development of this germ agent, the most important characteristic of the new disease would be "that it might be refractory [resistant] to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease". AIDS first appeared as a public health risk ten years later, appearing first in a population of gay men who had been subjects in a test of a new Hepatitas vaccine. In 1989, work by Alan Cantwell Jr., M.D. linking AIDS to the hepatitis B viral vaccine experiments was suppressed at the 1989 AIDS International Conference by officials of the World Health Organization.

1970: A year after his request, under H.R. 15090, Dr. MacArthur receives funding to begin CIA-supervised mycoplasma research with Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division, the army's top secret biological weapons facility. Speculation is raised that molecular biology techniques are used to produce AIDS-like retroviruses. Some experts believe that this research may have inadvertently created HIV, the virus that causes AIDS (Goliszek).

1970: Under order from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which also sponsored the Tuskegee Experiment, the free childcare program at Johns Hopkins University collects blood samples from 7,000 African-American youth, telling their parents that they are checking for anemia but actually checking for an extra Y chromosome (XYY), believed to be a biological predisposition to crime. The program director, Digamber Borganokar, does this experiment without Johns Hopkins University's permission (Greger, Merritte, et al.).

1970: United States intensifies its development of "ethnic weapons" (Military Review, Nov., 1970), designed to selectively target and eliminate specific ethnic groups who are susceptible due to genetic differences and variations in DNA.

1971: President Nixon converts Fort Detrick from an offensive biowarfare lab to the Frederick Cancer Research and Development Center, now known as the National Cancer Institute at Frederick. In addition to cancer research, scientists study virology, immunology and retrovirology (including HIV) there. Additionally, the site is home to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute, which researches drugs, vaccines and countermeasures for biological warfare, so the former Fort Detrick does not move far away from its biowarfare past (Goliszek).

1971: Stanford University conducts the Stanford Prison Experiment on a group of college students in order to learn the psychology of prison life. Some students are given the role as prison guards, while the others are given the role of prisoners. After only six days, the proposed two-week study has to end because of its psychological effects on the participants. The "guards" had begun to act sadistic, while the "prisoners" started to show signs of depression and severe psychological stress (University of New Hampshire).

1971: An article entitled "Viral Infections in Man Associated with Acquired Immunological Deficiency States" appears in Federation Proceedings. Dr. MacArthur and Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division have, at this point, been conducting mycoplasma research to create a synthetic immunosuppressive agent for about one year, again suggesting that this research may have produced HIV (Goliszek).

1972: In studies sponsored by the U.S. Air Force, Dr. Amedeo Marrazzi gives LSD to mental patients at the University of Missouri Institute of Psychiatry and the University of Minnesota Hospital to study "ego strength" (Barker).

1972: President Nixon announced a ban on the production and use of biological (but not chemical) warfare agents. However, as the Army's own experts reveal, this ban is meaningless because the studies required to protect against biological warfare weapons are generally indistinguishable from those to develop the actual chemical weapons. Research on offensive bio-war continued under the justification that such research was a necessary pre-cursor to defensive bio-war.

1974: Less publicized was National Security Study memorandum 200. This document declared that overpopulation of the world posed a grave threatto the nation and urged the imposition of population control measures wherever possible. While the media have reported the forced sterilizations in China, Canada, and Sweden, the abuses of the sterilization programs here in the United States remain concealed from public view. A class action suit in Los Angeles revealed that Chicano women were being sterilized immediatly after giving birth. The non-English speaking women had been given sterilization consent forms in English and were told the operation was to deal with the after-affects of the pregnancy. Similar abuses were reported on reservations, with estimates of coerced or covert sterilization
running as high as one woman out of every four. Yet another lawsuit in New York and a scandal in Puerto Rico led to the passage of laws requiring a standardized consent form printed in multiple languages in 1979.

More can be found in Michael Parenti's "Democracy for the Few" (St. Martin's Press 1995)

1975: The virus section of Fort Detrick's Center for Biological Warfare Research is renamed the Fredrick Cancer Research Facilities and placed under the supervision of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). It is here that a special virus cancer program is initiated by the U.S. Navy, purportedly to develop cancer-causing viruses. It is also here that retrovirologists isolate a virus to which no immunity exists. It is later named HTLV (Human T-cell Leukemia Virus).

1977: Senate hearings on Health and Scientific Research confirm that 239 populated areas had been contaminated with biological agents between 1949 and 1969. Some of the areas included San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Key West, Panama City, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.

1977: Ray Ravenhott, director of the population program of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), publicly announced the agency's goal to sterilize one quarter of the world's women. In reports by the St Louis Post-Dispatch, Ravenhott in essence cited the reasoning for this being U.S. corporate interests in avoiding the threat of revolutions which might be spawned by chronic unemployment. Since then, allegations have surfaced that free vaccinations being given by the World Health Organization include a "pregnancy anti-body" which fools a woman's body into treating a pregnancy as an infection.

1978: Experimental Hepatitis B vaccine trials, conducted by the CDC, begin in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Ads for research subjects specifically ask for promiscuous homosexual men.

Since 1979, population control in accordance with NSS 200 has become more covert. An organization in Belgium called the "World Federation Of Doctors who value life" claims to have discovered a sterilizing agent in the tetanus vaccines being used in third world nations by the World Health Organization. The claim is supported by the fact that only women were given the multi-injection tetanus shots (normal tetanus shots only require a single injection). Villagers in India were offered cash payments on the condition that 75 percent of all men in the village submit to vasectomy. In another Indian village, "100 percent of the eligible couples" were reported to have accepted family planning, mostly by means of vasectomy, in exchange for a new village well.

1980-1981: Within months of their incarceration in detention centers in Miami and Puerto Rico, many male Haitian refugees developed an unusual condition called "gynecomasia". This is a condition in which males develop full female breasts. A number of the internees at Ft. Allen in Puerto Rico claimed that they were forced to undergo a series of injections which they believed to be hormones. When "Inside Investigations" showed a prison video of serial killer Richard Speck engaging in drugs and sex, the female breasts were clearly visible on the man.

1981: More than 300,000 Cubans were stricken with dengue hemorrhagic fever. An investigation by the magazine 'Covert Action Information Bulletin', which tracks the workings of various intelligence agencies around the world, suggested that this outbreak was the result of a release of mosquitoes by Cuban counterrevolutionaries. The magazine tracked the activities of one CIA operative from a facility in Panama to the alleged Cuban connections. During the last 30 years, Cuba has been subjected to an enormous number of outbreaks of human and crop diseases which are difficult to attribute purely natural causes.

1981: First cases of AIDS are confirmed in homosexual men in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, triggering speculation that AIDS may have been introduced via the Hepatitis B vaccine.

1982: El Salvadoran trade unionists claimed that epidemics of many previously unknown diseases had cropped up in areas immediately after U.S. directed aerial bombings.

1985: An outbreak of Dengue fever strikes Managua Nicaragua shortly after an increase of U.S. aerial reconnaissance missions. Nearly half of the capital city's population was stricken with the disease, and several deaths have been attributed to the outbreak. It was the first such epidemic in the country and the outbreak was nearly identical to that which struck Cuba a few years earlier (1981). Dengue fever variations were the focus of much experimentation at the Army's Biological Warfare test facility at Ft. Dietrick, Maryland prior to the 'ban' on such research in 1972.

1985: In ruling on a case in which a former U.S. Army sergeant attempted to bring a lawsuit against the Army for using experimental drugs on him, without his knowledge, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that allowing such an action against the military would disrupt the chain of command. Thus, nearly all potential actions against the military for past, or future, misdeeds have been barred as have actions aimed at the release of classified documents on the subject.

In short, no matter what they do to you, nothing will happen to them. Dr. Mengala would have loved it here!

1986: According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (83:4007-4011), HIV and VISNA are highly similar and share all structural elements, except for a small segment which is nearly identical to HTLV. This leads to speculation that HTLV and VISNA may have been linked to produce a new retrovirus to which no natural immunity exists.

1986: A report to Congress reveals that the U.S. Government's current generation of biological agents includes: modified viruses, naturally occurring toxins, and agents that are altered through genetic engineering to change immunological character and prevent treatment by all existing vaccines.

1987: As the result of a lawsuit by a public interest group, the Department of Defense was forced to reveal that, despite a treaty banning research and development of biological agents, it still operated Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) research programs at 127 sites around the United States.

1990: More than 1500 six-month old black and hispanic babies in Los Angeles are given an "experimental" measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States. CDC later admits that parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected to their children was experimental.

1992: The Michigan Supreme Court rules that the state court has the right to order sterilizations "for the good of the ward".

1994: With a technique called "gene tracking," Dr. Garth Nicolson at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX discovers that many returning Desert Storm veterans are infected with an altered strain of Mycoplasma incognitus, a microbe commonly used in the production of biological weapons. Incorporated into its molecular structure is 40 percent of the HIV protein coat, indicating that it had been man-made.

1994: Senator John D. Rockefeller issues a report revealing that for at least 50 years the Department of Defense has used hundreds of thousands of military personnel in human experiments and for intentional exposure to dangerous substances. Materials included mustard and nerve gas, ionizing radiation, psychochemicals, hallucinogens, and drugs used during the Gulf War.

1994: Abuses of American sponsored population control agendas start to surface around the world.

1994: Mr. Leanardo Casco, a member of the Honduran delegation to the 1994 United Nations World Population Conference in Cairo said, "In our hospitals and in our health care system, we have a lot of problems getting basic medicines -- things like penicillin and antibiotics. There is a terrible shortage of basic medicines, but you can find the cabinets full of condoms, pills and IUDs."

1994: Dr. Stephen K. Karanja, an obstetrician/gynecologist from Kenya, writes, "[T]housands of the Kenyan people will die of Malaria whose treatment costs a few cents, in health facilities whose stores are stalked [sic] to the roof with millions of dollars worth of pills, IUDs, Norplant, Depo-provera, most of which are supplied with American money."

1995: U.S. Government admits that it had offered Japanese war criminals and scientists who had performed human medical experiments salaries and immunity from prosecution in exchange for data on biological warfare research.

1995: Dr. Garth Nicolson, uncovers evidence that the biological agents used during the Gulf War had been manufactured in Houston, TX and Boca Raton, Fl and tested on prisoners in the Texas Department of Corrections.

1996: Under pressure from Congress and the public, after a 60 Minutes segment, the U.S. Department of Defense finally admits that at least 20,000 U.S. servicemen "may" have been exposed to chemical weapons during operation 'Desert Storm'. This exposure is claimed to be the result of the destruction of a Iraqi weapons bunker. Similar illnesses of other troops, who were not in this area, suggest other means of exposure not yet admitted to. Veterans groups have released information that many of the problems may be a result of experimental vaccines and innoculations which were provided troops during the military buildup.

1996: In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June 1996, Christine de Vollmer, president of the Latin America Alliance for the Family, said that Latin America perceives Timothy Wirth, Undersecretary of State and top official in charge of U.S. population control policy, as "a ruthless population controller, unashamed of coercive measures and disrespectful" of the human rights of people, particularly women, in developing countries.

Brazilian senator Rosiska Darcy de Olivera condemned the United States for its population programs, which force Brazilian women to undergo sterilization, saying: "To say that women from the South who have many babies are responsible for the environmental crisis -- it's a scandal."

1997: The city of Minneapolis is sprayed with chemicals used to test germ warfare techniques over a period of several months, in 61 seperate operations. It is assumed that the checmicals are hamless, but there is an oncrease in the rates for respiratory illness in the sprayed areas.

1997: Students and faculty at the Jasper School in Arkansas are struck down by a mysterious malady on Jan 31st that sends many
of them to the hospital. Some of the paramedics and emergancy workers who arrive at the school later become ill, with the primary symptom being an incapacitating headache, which takes several weeks to subside. Despite constant monitoring of the kids by health workers, no cause is ever announced.

1997: Eighty-eight members of Congress sign a letter demanding an investigation into bioweapons use & Gulf War Syndrome.

A Short History of the U.S. Government's Respect for Human Life, Part II

2007-12-19T09:44:00.000-05:00

The following list comes from declassified documents, news reports, videos, the National Archives, and from the final report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.

1944: A captain in the medical corps addresses an April 1944 memo to Col. Stanford Warren, head of the Manhattan Project's Medical Section, expressing his concerns about atom bomb component fluoride's central nervous system (CNS) effects and asking for animal research to be done to determine the extent of these effects: "Clinical evidence suggests that uranium hexafluoride may have a rather marked central nervous system effect ... It seems most likely that the F [code for fluoride] component rather than the T [code for uranium] is the causative factor ... Since work with these compounds is essential, it will be necessary to know in advance what mental effects may occur after exposure." The following year, the Manhattan Project would begin human-based studies on fluoride's effects (Griffiths and Bryson).

1944: The Manhattan Project medical team, led by the now infamous University of Rochester radiologist Col. Safford Warren, injects plutonium into patients at the University's teaching hospital, Strong Memorial (Burton Report).

1945: Continuing the Manhattan Project, researchers inject plutonium into three patients at the University of Chicago's Billings Hospital (Sharav).

1945: The U.S. State Department, Army intelligence and the CIA begin Operation Paperclip, offering Nazi scientists immunity and secret identities in exchange for work on top-secret government projects on aerodynamics and chemical warfare medicine in the United States ("Project Paperclip").

1945: Researchers infect 800 prisoners in Atlanta with malaria to study the disease (Sharav).

1945: "Program F" is implemented by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). This is the most extensive U.S. study of the health effects of fluoride, which was the key chemical component in atomic bomb production. (Griffiths and Bryson) One of the most toxic chemicals known to man, fluoride, it is found, causes marked adverse effects to the central nervous system but much of the information is squelched in the name of national security because of fear that lawsuits would undermine full-scale production of atomic bombs.

1946: Gen. Douglas MacArthur strikes a secret deal with Japanese physician Dr. Shiro Ishii to turn over 10,000 pages of information gathered from human experimentation in exchange for granting Ishii immunity from prosecution for the horrific experiments he performed on Chinese, Russian and American war prisoners, including performing vivisections on live human beings (Goliszek, Sharav). Male and female test subjects at Chicago's Argonne National Laboratories are given intravenous injections of arsenic-76 so that researchers can study how the human body absorbs, distributes and excretes arsenic (Goliszek).

1946: Continuing the Newburg study of 1945, the Manhattan Project commissions the University of Rochester to study fluoride's effects on animals and humans in a project codenamed "Program F." With the help of the New York State Health Department, Program F researchers secretly collect and analyze blood and tissue samples from Newburg residents. The studies are sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission and take place at the University of Rochester Medical Center's Strong Memorial Hospital (Griffiths and Bryson).

1946 - 1947: University of Rochester researchers inject four male and two female human test subjects with uranium-234 and uranium-235 in dosages ranging from 6.4 to 70.7 micrograms per one kilogram of body weight in order to study how much uranium they could tolerate before their kidneys become damaged (Goliszek).

1946: Six male employees of a Chicago metallurgical laboratory are given water contaminated with plutonium-239 to drink so that researchers can learn how plutonium is absorbed into the digestive tract (Goliszek).

1946: Researchers begin using patients in VA hospitals as test subjects for human medical experiments, cleverly worded as "investigations" or "observations" in medical study reports to avoid negative connotations and bad publicity (Sharav).

1946: The American public finally learns of the biowarfare experiments being done at Fort Detrick from a report released by the War Department (Goliszek).

1946 - 1953: The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission sponsors studies in which researchers from Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and the Boston University School of Medicine feed mentally disabled students at Fernald State School Quaker Oats breakfast cereal spiked with radioactive tracers every morning so that nutritionists can study how preservatives move through the human body and if they block the absorption of vitamins and minerals. Later, MIT researchers conduct the same study at Wrentham State School (Sharav, Goliszek).

1946: Human test subjects are given one to four injections of arsenic-76 at the University of Chicago Department of Medicine. Researchers take tissue biopsies from the subjects before and after the injections (Goliszek).

1947: Col. E.E. Kirkpatrick of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) issues a top-secret document (707075) dated Jan. 8. In it, he writes that "certain radioactive substances are being prepared for intravenous administration to human subjects as a part of the work of the contract" (Goliszek).

1947: A secret AEC document dated April 17 reads, "It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans that might have an adverse reaction on public opinion or result in legal suits," revealing that the U.S. government was aware of the health risks its nuclear tests posed to military personnel conducting the tests or nearby civilians (Goliszek).

1947: The CIA begins studying LSD's potential as a weapon by using military and civilian test subjects for experiments without their consent or even knowledge. Eventually, these LSD studies will evolve into the MKULTRA program in 1953 (Sharav).

1947: (1947 - 1953) The U.S. Navy begins Project Chatter to identify and test so-called "truth serums," such as those used by the Soviet Union to interrogate spies. Mescaline and the central nervous system depressant scopolamine are among the many drugs tested on human subjects (Goliszek).

1948: Based on the secret studies performed on Newburgh, N.Y. residents beginning in 1945, Project F researchers publish a report in the August 1948 edition of the Journal of the American Dental Association, detailing fluoride's health dangers. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) quickly censors it for "national security" reasons (Griffiths and Bryson).

1950: The CIA and later the Office of Scientific Intelligence begin Project Bluebird (renamed Project Artichoke in 1951) in order to find ways to "extract" information from CIA agents, control individuals "through special interrogation techniques," "enhance memory" and use "unconventional techniques, including hypnosis and drugs" for offensive measures (Goliszek).

The third of Russ Kick's bestselling Disinformation Guides gathers another all-star line-up of exposes.

Juries have ruled in recent trials that Watergate was really about a Democratic Party... continues...
(Concept: CIA)

1950 - 1953: The U.S. Army releases chemical clouds over six American and Canadian cities. Residents in Winnipeg, Canada, where a highly toxic chemical called cadmium is dropped, subsequently experience high rates of respiratory illnesses (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

1950: In order to determine how susceptible an American city could be to biological attack, the U.S. Navy sprays a cloud of Bacillus globigii bacteria from ships over the San Francisco shoreline. According to monitoring devices situated throughout the city to test the extent of infection, the eight thousand residents of San Francisco inhale five thousand or more bacteria particles, many becoming sick with pneumonia-like symptoms (Goliszek). At least one death is known.

1950: Dr. Joseph Strokes of the University of Pennsylvania infects 200 female prisoners with viral hepatitis to study the disease (Sharav).

1950: Doctors at the Cleveland City Hospital study changes in cerebral blood flow by injecting test subjects with spinal anesthesia, inserting needles in their jugular veins and brachial arteries, tilting their heads down and, after massive blood loss causes paralysis and fainting, measuring their blood pressure. They often perform this experiment multiple times on the same subject (Goliszek).

1950: Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, later of MKULTRA infamy due to his 1957 to1964 experiments on Canadians, publishes an article in the British Journal of Physical Medicine, in which he describes experiments that entail forcing schizophrenic patients at Manitoba's Brandon Mental Hospital to lie naked under 15- to 200-watt red lamps for up to eight hours per day. His other experiments include placing mental patients in an electric cage that overheats their internal body temperatures to 103 degrees Fahrenheit, and inducing comas by giving patients large injections of insulin (Goliszek).

1950: Department of Defense begins plans to detonate nuclear weapons in desert areas and monitor downwind residents for medical problems and mortality rates.

1950 - 1953: An array of germ warfare weapons is allegedly used against North Korea. Accounts claim that there were releases of feathers infected with anthrax, fleas and mosquitoes dosed with Plague and Yellow Fever, and rodents infected with a variety of diseases. The Eisenhower administration later pressed Sedition Charges against three Americans who published charges of these activities. However, none of those charged were convicted.

1951: The U.S. Navy's Project Bluebird is renamed Project Artichoke and begins human medical experiments that test the effectiveness of LSD, sodium pentothal and hypnosis for the interrogative purposes described in Project Bluebird's objectives (1950) (Goliszek).

1951: The U.S. Army secretly contaminates the Norfolk Naval Supply Center in Virginia and Washington, D.C.'s National Airport with a strain of bacteria chosen because African-Americans were believed to be more susceptible to it than Caucasians. The experiment causes food poisoning, respiratory problems and blood poisoning (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

1951 - 1952: Researchers withhold insulin from diabetic patients for up to two days in order to observe the effects of diabetes; some test subjects go into diabetic comas (Goliszek).

1951 - 1956: Under contract with the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM), the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston begins studying the effects of radiation on cancer patients -- many of them members of minority groups or indigents, according to sources -- in order to determine both radiation's ability to treat cancer and the possible long-term radiation effects of pilots flying nuclear-powered planes. The study lasts until 1956, involving 263 cancer patients. Beginning in 1953, the subjects are required to sign a waiver form, but it still does not meet the informed consent guidelines established by the Wilson memo released that year. The TBI studies themselves would continue at four different institutions -- Baylor University College of Medicine, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine -- until 1971 (U.S. Department of Energy, Goliszek).

1951: American, Canadian and British military and intelligence officials gather a small group of eminent psychologists to a secret meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal about Communist "thought-control techniques." They proposed a top-secret research program on behavior modification -- involving testing drugs, hypnosis, electroshock and lobotomies on humans (Barker).

1951: Department of Defense begins open air tests using disease-producing bacteria and viruses. Tests last through 1969 and
there is concern that people in the surrounding areas have been exposed.

1952: Military scientists use the Dugway Proving Ground -- which is located 87 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah -- in a series of experiments to determine how Brucella suis and Brucella melitensis spread in human populations. Today, over a half-century later, some experts claim that we are all infected with these agents as a result of these experiments (Goliszek).

1952: In a U.S. Department of Denfense-sponsored experiment, Henry Blauer dies after he is injected with mescaline at Columbia University's New York State Psychiatric Institute (Sharav).

1952: At the famous Sloan-Kettering Institute, Chester M. Southam injects live cancer cells into prisoners at the Ohio State Prison to study the progression of the disease. Half of the prisoners in this National Institutes of Health-sponsored (NIH) study are black, awakening racial suspicions stemming from Tuskegee, which was also an NIH-sponsored study (Merritte, et al.).

1953 - 1970: The CIA begins project MKNAOMI to "stockpile incapacitating and lethal materials, to develop gadgetry for the disseminations of these materials, and to test the effects of certain drugs on animals and humans." As part of MKNAOMI, the CIA and the Special Operations Division of the Army Biological Laboratory at Fort Detrick try to develop two suicide pill alternatives to the standard cyanide suicide pill given to CIA agents and U-2 pilots. CIA agents and U-2 pilots are meant to take these pills when they find themselves in situations in which they (and all the information they hold in their brains) are in enemy hands. They also develop a "microbioinoculator" -- a device that agents can use to fire small darts coated with biological agents that can remain potent for weeks or even months. These darts can be fired through clothing and, most significantly, are undetectable during autopsy. Eventually, by the late 1960s, MKNAOMI enables the CIA to have a stockpile of biological toxins -- infectious viruses, paralytic shellfish toxin, lethal botulism toxin, snake venom and the severe skin disease-producing agent Mircosporum gypseum. Of course, the development of all of this "gadgetry" requires human experimentation (Goliszek).

1953 - 1974: CIA Director Allen Dulles authorizes the MKULTRA program to produce and test drugs and biological agents that the CIA could use for mind control and behavior modification. MKULTRA later becomes well known for its pioneering studies on LSD, which are often performed on prisoners or patrons of brothels set up and run by the CIA. The brothel experiments, known as "Operation Midnight Climax," feature two-way mirrors set up in the brothels so that CIA agents can observe LSD's effects on sexual behavior. Ironically, governmental figures sometimes slip LSD into each other's drinks as part of the program, resulting in the LSD psychosis-induced suicide of Dr. Frank Olson indirectly at the hands of MKULTRA's infamous key player Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Of all the hundreds of human test subjects used during MKULTRA, only 14 are ever notified of the involvement and only one is ever compensated ($15,000). Most of the MKULTRA files are eventually destroyed in 1973 (Elliston; Merritte, et al.; Barker).

1953: The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) sponsors iodine studies at the University of Iowa. In the first study, researchers give pregnant women 100 to 200 microcuries of iodine-131 and then study the women's aborted embryos in order to learn at what stage and to what extent radioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier. In the second study, researchers give 12 male and 13 female newborns under 36 hours old and weighing between 5.5 and 8.5 pounds iodine-131 either orally or via intramuscular injection, later measuring the concentration of iodine in the newborns' thyroid glands (Goliszek).

1953: Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson issues the Wilson memo, a top-secret document establishing the Nuremberg Code as Department of Defense policy on human experimentation. The Wilson memo requires voluntary, written consent from a human medical research subject after he or she has been informed of "the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment." It also insists that doctors only use experimental treatments when other methods have failed (Berdon).

1953: As part of an AEC study, researchers feed 28 healthy infants at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine iodine-131 through a gastric tube and then test concentration of iodine in the infants' thyroid glands 24 hours later (Goliszek).

1953 - 1957: Eleven patients at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston are injected with uranium as part of the Manhattan Project (Sharav).

1953: In an AEC-sponsored study at the University of Tennessee, researchers inject healthy two- to three-day-old newborns with approximately 60 rads of iodine-131 (Goliszek).

1953: Newborn Daniel Burton becomes blind when physicians at Brooklyn Doctors Hospital perform an experimental high oxygen treatment for Retrolental Fibroplasia, a retinal disorder affecting premature infants, on him and other premature babies. The physicians perform the experimental treatment despite earlier studies showing that high oxygen levels cause blindness. Testimony in Burton v. Brooklyn Doctors Hospital (452 N.Y.S.2d875) later reveals that researchers continued to give Burton and other infants excess oxygen even after their eyes had swelled to dangerous levels (Goliszek, Sharav).

1953: The CIA begins Project MKDELTA to study the use of biochemicals "for harassment, discrediting and disabling purposes" (Goliszek).

1953: A 1953 article in Clinical Science describes a medical experiment in which researchers purposely blister the abdomens of 41 children, ranging in age from eight to 14, with cantharide in order to study how severely the substance irritates the skin (Goliszek).

1953: The AEC performs a series of field tests known as "Green Run," dropping radiodine 131 and xenon 133 over the Hanford, Wash. site -- 500,000 acres encompassing three small towns (Hanford, White Bluffs and Richland) along the Columbia River (Sharav).

1953: In an AEC-sponsored study to learn whether radioactive iodine affects premature babies differently from full-term babies, researchers at Harper Hospital in Detroit give oral doses of iodine-131 to 65 premature and full-term infants weighing between 2.1 and 5.5 pounds (Goliszek).

1953: U.S. military releases clouds of zinc cadmium sulfide gas over Winnipeg, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Fort Wayne, the Monocacy River Valley in Maryland, and Leesburg, Virginia. Their intent is to determine how efficiently they could disperse chemical agents.

1953: Joint Army-Navy-CIA experiments are conducted in which tens of thousands of people in New York and San Francisco are exposed to the airborne germs Serratia marcescens and Bacillus glogigii.

1954: The CIA begins Project QKHILLTOP to study Chinese Communist Party brainwashing techniques and use them to further the CIA's own interrogative methods. Most experts speculate that the Cornell University Medical School Human Ecology Studies Program conducted Project QKHILLTOP's early experiments (Goliszek).

1954 - 1975: U.S. Air Force medical officers assigned to Fort Detrick's Chemical Corps Biological Laboratory begin Operation Whitecoat -- experiments involving exposing human test subjects to hepatitis A, plague, yellow fever, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, Rift Valley fever, rickettsia and intestinal microbes. These test subjects include 2,300 Seventh Day Adventist military personnel, who choose to become human guinea pigs rather than potentially kill others in combat. Only two of the 2,300 claim long-term medical complications from participating in the study ("Operation Whitecoat".)

1954: In a general memo to university researchers under contract with the military, the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army asserts the human experimentation guidelines -- including informed, written consent -- established in the classified Wilson memo (Goliszek).

1955: The Tampa Bay area of Florida experienced a sharp rise in Whooping Cough cases, including 12 deaths, after a CIA test where a bacteria withdrawn from the Army's Chemical and Biological Warfare arsenal was released into the environment. Details of the test are still classified.

1955: In U.S. Army-sponsored experiments performed at Tulane University, mental patients are given LSD and other drugs and then have electrodes implanted in their brain to measure the levels (Barker, "The Cold War Experiments").

1955 - 1957: In order to learn how cold weather affects human physiology, researchers give a total of 200 doses of iodine-131, a radioactive tracer that concentrates almost immediately in the thyroid gland, to 85 healthy Eskimos and 17 Athapascan Indians living in Alaska. They study the tracer within the body by blood, thyroid tissue, urine and saliva samples from the test subjects. Due to the language barrier, no one tells the test subjects what is being done to them, so there is no informed consent (Goliszek).

1955 - 1965: As a result of their work with the CIA's mind control experiments in Project QKHILLTOP, Cornell neurologists Harold Wolff and Lawrence Hinkle begin the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (later renamed the Human Ecology Fund) to study "man's relation to his social environment as perceived by him" (Goliszek).

1955: Army Chemical Corps continues LSD research, studying its potential use as a chemical incapacitating agent. More than 1,000
Americans participate in the tests, which continue until 1958.

1956 - 1958: In Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida, the Army carried out field tests in which mosquitoes infected with yellow fever and dengue fever were released into residential neighborhoods from both ground level and from aircraft. Many people were swarmed by Mosquitoes, and fell ill, some even died. After each test, U.S. Army personnel posing as public health officials photographed and tested the victims. It is theorized that the mosquitoes were infected with a strain of Yellow Fever. However, details of the testing remain classified. These experiments result in a high incidence of fevers, respiratory distress, stillbirths, encephalitis and typhoid among the two cities' residents, as well as several deaths (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

1957: The U.S. military conducts Operation Plumbbob at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Operation Pumbbob consists of 29 nuclear detonations, eventually creating radiation expected to result in a total 32,000 cases of thyroid cancer among civilians in the area. Around 18,000 members of the U.S. military participate in Operation Pumbbob's Desert Rock VII and VIII, which are designed to see how the average foot soldier physiologically and mentally responds to a nuclear battlefield ("Operation Plumbbob", Goliszek).

1957 - 1964: As part of MKULTRA, the CIA pays McGill University Department of Psychiatry founder Dr. D. Ewen Cameron $69,000 to perform LSD studies and potentially lethal experiments on Canadians being treated for minor disorders like post-partum depression and anxiety at the Allan Memorial Institute, which houses the Psychiatry Department of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. The CIA encourages Dr. Cameron to fully explore his "psychic driving" concept of correcting madness through completely erasing one's memory and rewriting the psyche. These "driving" experiments involve putting human test subjects into drug-, electroshock- and sensory deprivation-induced vegetative states for up to three months, and then playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements for weeks or months in order to "rewrite" the "erased" psyche. Dr. Cameron also gives human test subjects paralytic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy 30 to 40 times, as part of his experiments. Most of Dr. Cameron's test subjects suffer permanent damage as a result of his work (Goliszek, "Donald Ewan Cameron").

1957: In order to study how blood flows through children's brains, researchers at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia perform the following experiment on healthy children, ranging in age from three to 11: They insert needles into each child's femoral artery (thigh) and jugular vein (neck), bringing the blood down from the brain. Then, they force each child to inhale a special gas through a facemask. In their subsequent Journal of Clinical Investigation article on this study, the researchers note that, in order to perform the experiment, they had to restrain some of the child test subjects by bandaging them to boards (Goliszek).

1958: LSD is tested on 95 volunteers at the Army's Chemical Warfare Laboratories for its effect on intelligence.

1958: Approximately 300 members of the U.S. Navy are exposed to radiation when the Navy destroyer Mansfield detonates 30 nuclear bombs off the coasts of Pacific Islands during Operation Hardtack (Goliszek).

1958: The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) drops radioactive materials over Point Hope, Alaska, home to the Inupiats, in a field test known under the codename "Project Chariot" (Sharav).

1960: The Army Assistant Chief-of-Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) authorizes field testing of LSD in Europe and the Far East. Testing of the european population is code named Project THIRD CHANCE; testing of the Asian population is code named Project DERBY HAT.

A Short History of the U.S. Government's Respect for Human Life, Part I

2007-12-19T09:14:00.000-05:00

The following list comes from declassified documents, news reports, videos, the National Archives, and from the final report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.

1833: Dr. William Beaumont, an army surgeon physician, pioneers gastric medicine with his study of a patient with a permanently open gunshot wound to the abdomen and writes a human medical experimentation code that asserts the importance of experimental treatments, but also lists requirements stipulating that human subjects must give voluntary, informed consent and be able to end the experiment when they want. Beaumont's Code lists verbal, rather than just written, consent as permissible (Berdon).

1845: (1845 - 1849) J. Marion Sims, later hailed as the "father of gynecology," performs medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthesia. These women would usually die of infection soon after surgery. Based on his belief that the movement of newborns' skull bones during protracted births causes trismus, he also uses a shoemaker's awl, a pointed tool shoemakers use to make holes in leather, to practice moving the skull bones of babies born to enslaved mothers (Brinker).

1895: New York pediatrician Henry Heiman infects a 4-year-old boy whom he calls "an idiot with chronic epilepsy" with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment ("Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After").

1896: Dr. Arthur Wentworth turns 29 children at Boston's Children's Hospital into human guinea pigs when he performs spinal taps on them, just to test whether the procedure is harmful (Sharav).

1900: A U.S. doctor doing research in the Philippines infects a number of prisoners with the Plague. He continues his research by inducing Beriberi in another 29 prisoners. four test subjects die (Merritte, et al.; Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

Under commission from the U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Walter Reed goes to Cuba and uses 22 Spanish immigrant workers to prove that yellow fever is contracted through mosquito bites. Doing so, he introduces the practice of using healthy test subjects, and also the concept of a written contract to confirm informed consent of these subjects. While doing this study, Dr. Reed clearly tells the subjects that, though he will do everything he can to help them, they may die as a result of the experiment. He pays them $100 in gold for their participation, plus $100 extra if they contract yellow fever (Berdon, Sharav).

1906: Harvard professor Dr. Richard Strong infects prisoners in the Philippines with cholera to study the disease; 13 of them die. He compensates survivors with cigars and cigarettes. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors cite this study to justify their own medical experiments (Greger, Sharav).

1907: Indiana passes the world's first law authorizing the state to force the sterilization of those it deems unfit to reproduce. In Germany, Adolph Hitler is only 18 years old.

1911: Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research publishes data on injecting an inactive syphilis preparation into the skin of 146 hospital patients and normal children in an attempt to develop a skin test for syphilis. Later, in 1913, several of these children's parents sue Dr. Noguchi for allegedly infecting their children with syphilis ("Reviews and Notes: History of Medicine: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War").

1913: Medical experimenters "test" 15 children at the children's home St. Vincent's House in Philadelphia with tuberculin, resulting in permanent blindness in some of the children. Though the Pennsylvania House of Representatives records the incident, the researchers are not punished for the experiments ("Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After").

1915: Dr. Joseph Goldberger, under order of the U.S. Public Health Office, produces Pellagra, a debilitating disease that affects the central nervous system, in 12 Mississippi inmates to try to find a cure for the disease. One test subject later says that he had been through "a thousand hells." In 1935, after millions die from the disease, the director of the U.S Public Health Office would finally admit that officials had known that it was caused by a niacin deficiency for some time, but did nothing about it because it mostly affected poor African-Americans. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors used this study to try to justify their medical experiments on concentration camp inmates (Greger; Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

1918: In response to the Germans' use of chemical weapons during World War I, President Wilson creates the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) as a branch of the U.S. Army. Twenty-four years later, in 1942, the CWS would begin performing mustard gas and lewisite experiments on over 4,000 members of the armed forces (Global Security, Goliszek).

1919: (1919 - 1922) Researchers perform testicular transplant experiments on inmates at San Quentin State Prison in California, inserting the testicles of recently executed inmates and goats into the abdomens and scrotums of living prisoners (Greger).

1925: Margaret Mead publishes "Coming of Age in Samoa", an account of adolescent life in Samoa apparently devoid of the angst and stress of adolescence in more modern cultures. Liberals seize on this work as proof that by re-engineering the society, man himself can be re-engineered for the better; that environment only is what determines behavior. Being the provenance and justification of the liberal philosophy, Mead is elevated to a cultural heroine.

However, as Freemen pointed out in his critical analysis, Mead erred in using only two young women as her source of information. Samoans love a good joke, they love to "talk story" and during a later investigation by the government in Samoa, the women that Mead had talked to were not shy about admitting they had simply told Mead what Mead clearly wanted to hear, unaware of what Mead would do with the information, and Mead, dearly wishing to hear what she heard, never bothered to speak with any other Samoans. Had she done so, she would have found that Samoan children go through the same growing pains as children everywhere. The most obvious evidence that Mead was wrong was her assumption that Samoans were sexually promiscuous because the Hawaiians of the time were. In fact, the Samoan culture has never been a sexually promiscuous one.

Virtually the entire justification for government intrusion into private lives derived from Mead's work, and it should hardly come as a surprise that both the liberal and anthropological establishment have reacted to this controversy much as the Catholic Church
reacted to Galileo, and even though Mead's basic conclusion of environment over heredity has been called into question, public policy continues to be shaped by it's assumption.

1927: Carrie Buck of Charlottesville is legally sterilized against her will at the Virginia Colony Home for the Mentally Infirm. Carrie Buck was the mentally normal daughter of a mentally retarded mother, but under the Virginia law, she was declared potentially capable of having a "less than normal child" after having one normal child (by rape) and was forcibly sterilized.

The settlement of Poe v. Lynchburg Training School and Hospital (same institution, different name) in 1981 brought to an end the Virginia law. It is estimated that as many as 10,000 perfectly normal women were forcibly sterilized for "legal" reasons including alcoholism, prostitution, and criminal behavior in general.

1931: The Puerto Rican Cancer Experiment is undertaken by Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, a pathologist from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations, Rhoads purposely infected his subjects with cancer cells. Thirteen of the subjects died. Though a Puerto Rican doctor later discovers that Rhoads purposely covered up some of details of his experiment, and in spite of Rhoads' written opinions that the Puerto Rican population should be eradicated, Rhoads went on to establish U.S. Army Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah, and Panama. He later was named to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and was at the heart of the recently revealed radiation experiments on prisoners, hospital patients, and soldiers (Sharav; Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.). These are covered in the ACHE report. http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/radiation/

1930s: Seventeen U.S. states have laws permitting forced sterilization. German officials cite those laws as precedent for the forced sterilization of Jews under Nazi rule.

1931 - 1933: Mental patients at Elgin State Hospital in Illinois are injected with radium-266 as an experimental therapy for mental illness (Goliszek).

1932: The Tuskegee Syphilis Study begins. The U.S. Public Health Service in Tuskegee, Ala. diagnoses 400 poor, black sharecroppers with syphilis but never tells them of their illness nor treats them; instead researchers use the men as human guinea pigs to follow the symptoms and progression of the disease. They all eventually die from syphilis and their families are never told that they could have been treated (Goliszek, University of Virginia Health System Health Sciences Library). (The government office supervising the study was the predecessor to today's Centers for Disease Control (CDC)).

1932: Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote in "A Plan For Peace" that her aims were, "To give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation [concentration camps] or sterilization". Between 2000-4000 forced sterilizations per year were taking place in the United States. The following year, when Ernst Rudin established the Nazi system for forced sterilization of those it deemed unfit to reproduce, Rassenhygiene (Race hygiene), he chose as his inspiration and model the writings of William H. Tucker, associate professor of psychology at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, USA. When Rudin's forced
sterilization of Jews by irradiation with X-rays was revealed, Margaret Sanger refused to denounce him.

1932: Veterans from WW1, made homeless by the stock market crash of 1929, build a tent city near Washington D.C. while they try to collect on a promised combat bonus which the government has failed to pay (a situation the US troops in Bosnia and Iraq can identify with). Rather than pay the money, the government orders US Cavalry to destroy the tent city. The troops attack the camp on horseback with drawn sabers, against unarmed men, woman, & children.

If anyone doubts that our government would use it's own weapons against it's own troops, gaze upon this atrocity. These were not deserters. They were honorable soldiers, who had won the World War, been refused their promised pay, made homeless by the government's economic policies, then cut down.

1934: Leon Whitley, of the American Eugenics Society, receives a letter requesting a copy of his recent book,"The Case for Sterilization". He mails it off, and soon receives a personal letter of thanks ... from Adolph Hitler.

In his letter of thanks for American writer Madison Grant, Hitler declares Grant's book,"The Great Race" to be his "bible".

1935: The Pellagra Incident. After millions of individuals die from Pellagra over a span of two decades, the U.S. Public Health Service finally acts to stem the disease. The director of the agency admits it had known for at least 20 years that Pellagra is caused by a niacin deficiency but failed to act since most of the deaths occured within poverty-striken black populations.

1937: Scientists at Cornell University Medical School publish an angina drug study that uses both placebo and blind assessment techniques on human test subjects. They discover that the subjects given the placebo experienced more of an improvement in symptoms than those who were given the actual drug. This is first account of the placebo effect published in the United States ("Placebo Effect").

1939: In order to test his theory on the roots of stuttering, prominent speech pathologist Dr. Wendell Johnson performs his famous "Monster Experiment" on 22 children at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport. Dr. Johnson and his graduate students put the children under intense psychological pressure, causing them to switch from speaking normally to stuttering heavily. At the time, some of the students reportedly warn Dr. Johnson that, "in the aftermath of World War II, observers might draw comparisons to Nazi experiments on human subjects, which could destroy his career" (Alliance for Human Research Protection).

1940's: In a crash program to develop new drugs to fight Malaria during World War II, doctors in the Chicago area infect nearly 400 prisoners with the disease. Although the Chicago inmates were given general information that they were helping with the war effort, they were not provided adequate information in accordance with the later standards set by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. Nazi doctors on trial at Nuremberg cited the Chicago studies as precedents to defend their own behavior in aiding the German war effort.

1941: Dr. William C. Black infects a 12-month-old baby with herpes as part of a medical experiment. At the time, the editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Francis Payton Rous, calls it "an abuse of power, an infringement of the rights of an individual, and not excusable because the illness which followed had implications for science" (Sharav).

1941: An article in a 1941 issue of Archives of Pediatrics describes medical studies of the severe gum disease Vincent's angina in which doctors transmit the disease from sick children to healthy children with oral swabs (Goliszek).

1941: Drs. Francis and Salk and other researchers at the University of Michigan spray large amounts of wild influenza virus directly into the nasal passages of "volunteers" from mental institutions in Michigan. The test subjects develop influenza within a very short period of time (Meiklejohn).

1941: Researchers give 800 poverty-stricken pregnant women at a Vanderbilt University prenatal clinic "cocktails" including radioactive iron in order to determine the iron requirements of pregnant women (Pacchioli).

1942: The United States creates Fort Detrick, a 92-acre facility, employing nearly 500 scientists working to create biological weapons and develop defensive measures against them. Fort Detrick's main objectives include investigating whether diseases are transmitted by inhalation, digestion or through skin absorption; of course, these biological warfare experiments heavily relied on the use of human subjects (Goliszek).

1942: U.S. Army and Navy doctors infect 400 prison inmates in Chicago with malaria to study the disease and hopefully develop a treatment for it. The prisoners are told that they are helping the war effort, but not that they are going to be infected with malaria. During Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors later cite this American study to defend their own medical experiments in concentration camps like Auschwitz (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

1942: The Chemical Warfare Service begins mustard gas and lewisite experiments on 4,000 members of the U.S. military. Some test subjects don't realize they are volunteering for chemical exposure experiments, like 17-year-old Nathan Schnurman, who in 1944 thinks he is only volunteering to test "U.S. Navy summer clothes" (Goliszek). The experiments continue until 1945 and made use of Seventh Day Adventists who chose to become human guinea pigs rather than serve on active duty.

1943: In response to Japan's full-scale germ warfare program, the U.S. begins research on biological weapons at Fort Detrick, MD.

1943: In order to "study the effect of frigid temperature on mental disorders," researchers at University of Cincinnati Hospital keep 16 mentally disabled patients in refrigerated cabinets for 120 hours at 30 degrees Fahrenheit (Sharav).

1944: U.S. Navy uses human subjects to test gas masks and clothing. Individuals were locked in a gas chamber and exposed to mustard gas and lewisite.

1944: As part of the Manhattan Project that would eventually create the atomic bomb, researchers inject 4.7 micrograms of plutonium into soldiers at the Oak Ridge facility, 20 miles west of Knoxville, Tenn. ("Manhattan Project: Oak Ridge").

1944: Captain A. W. Frisch, an experienced microbiologist, begins experiments on four volunteers from the state prison at Dearborn, Mich., inoculating prisoners with hepatitis-infected specimens obtained in North Africa. One prisoner dies; two others develop hepatitis but live; the fourth develops symptoms but does not actually develop the disease (Meiklejohn).

1944: Laboratory workers at the University of Minnesota and University of Chicago inject human test subjects with phosphorus-32 to learn the metabolism of hemoglobin (Goliszek).

1944-1946: In order to quickly develop a cure for malaria -- a disease hindering Allied success in World War II -- University of Chicago Medical School professor Dr. Alf Alving infects psychotic patients at Illinois State Hospital with the disease through blood transfusions and then experiments malaria cures on them (Sharav).

"Anatomy of Your Enemy"

2007-12-06T13:51:00.000-05:00

ANTI-FLAG LYRICS

"Anatomy Of Your Enemy"

10 easy steps to create an enemy and start a war:
Listen closely because we will all see this weapon used in our lives.
It can be used on a society of the most ignorant to the most highly educated.
We need to see their tactics as a weapon against humanity and not as truth.

First step: create the enemy. Sometimes this will be done for you.

Second step: be sure the enemy you have chosen is nothing like you.
Find obvious differences like race, language, religion, dietary habits
fashion. Emphasize that their soldiers are not doing a job,
they are heartless murderers who enjoy killing!

Third step: Once these differences are established continue to reinforce them
with all disseminated information.

Fourth step: Have the media broadcast only the ruling party's information
this can be done through state run media.
Remember, in times of conflict all for-profit media repeats the ruling party's information.
Therefore all for-profit media becomes state-run.

Fifth step: show this enemy in actions that seem strange, militant, or different.
Always portray the enemy as non-human, evil, a killing machine.

[Chorus:]
THIS IS HOW TO CREATE AN ENEMY. THIS IS HOW TO START A WAR.
THIS IS HOW TO CREATE AN ENEMY.

Sixth step: Eliminate opposition to the ruling party.
Create an "Us versus Them" mentality. Leave no room for opinions in between.
One that does not support all actions of the ruling party should be considered a traitor.

Seventh step: Use nationalistic and/or religious symbols and rhetoric to define all actions.
This can be achieved by slogans such as "freedom loving people versus those who hate freedom."
This can also be achieved by the use of flags.

Eighth step: Align all actions with the dominant deity.
It is very effective to use terms like, "It is god's will" or "god bless our nation."

Ninth step: Design propaganda to show that your soldiers
have feelings, hopes, families, and loved ones.
Make it clear that your soldiers are doing a duty; they do not want or like to kill.

Tenth step: Create and atmosphere of fear, and instability
and then offer the ruling party as the only solutions to comfort the public's fears.
Remembering the fear of the unknown is always the strongest fear.

[Chorus (repeat)]

We are not countries. We are not nations. We are not religions.
We are not gods. We are not weapons. We are not ammunition. We are not killers.
We will NOT be tools.

Mother fuckers
I will not die
I will not kill
I will not be your slave
I will not fight your battle
I will not die on your battlefield
I will not fight for your wealth
I am not a fighter
I am a human being!!!

FEMA Eclipses the United States Constitution

2007-11-21T10:40:00.000-05:00

Quoted at length from a comment left on Digg.com in response to an article claiming that the U.S. Government considers the Constitution to be "Terrorist Literature." Click here for the full conversation.

Some people have referred to FEMA as the "secret government" of the United States. It is not an elected body, it does not involve itself in public disclosures, and it even has a quasi-secret budget in the billions of dollars. This government organization has more power than the President of the United States or the Congress, it has the power to suspend laws, move entire populations, arrest and detain citizens without a warrant and hold them without trial, it can seize property, food supplies, transportation systems, and can suspend the U.S. Constitution.

Is it any wonder why the U.S. government considers America's Constitution "terrorist literature."

Here are just a few Executive Orders associated with FEMA that would suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These Executive Orders have been on record for nearly 30 years and could be enacted by the stroke of a Presidential pen:

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10990
allows the government to take over all modes of transportation and control of highways and seaports.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10995
allows the government to seize and control the communication media.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10997
allows the government to take over all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10998
allows the government to take over all food resources and farms.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11000
allows the government to mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11001
allows the government to take over all health, education and welfare functions.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11002
designates the Postmaster General to operate a national registration of all persons.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11003
allows the government to take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11004
allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11005
allows the government to take over railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11051
specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11310
grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11049
assigns emergency preparedness function to federal departments and agencies, consolidating 21 operative Executive Orders issued over a fifteen year period.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11921
allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress cannot review the action for six months.

Viva la Revolucion!

2007-11-04T18:59:00.000-05:00

Just in case anyone missed it: We're currently in the midst of a Capitalist takeover. Each of the energies necessary to power our country has been handed over to private corporations to sell as a commodity for a profit. The schools that educate our children -- the roads that lead us to work -- are crumbling, while these same institutions continue to rise in the private sector. We own nothing; merely renting our property from their owners: from the money in our pockets to the songs in our head. And for all of our iPods and air conditioned cars, we do not pay the highest price. The tolls of our lifestyle are placed upon the backs of the poor.

In the course of our day we interact with any number of waiters and construction workers, taxi cab drivers and maids. These are but a small sample of the millions of jobs which were created in the economic boom of our country. Few realize that these jobs couldn't afford their workers the wages necessary to survive in the real world, that many had to take on two or three jobs simply to survive. The real benefactors were the Corporations whose profit margins soared. However, this wealth is nothing compared to the resources privatized in smaller nations. The dividing line between the poor who own nothing, and the rich who hold private agreements with the US Government, is much more pronounced across the entire South American continent.

The War On Democracy by John Pilger reveals the hidden agenda of the American Empire, to Capitalize on the wealth of smaller nations by privatizing their resources at the expense of the poor. While the film only covers a handful of military coups funded by the United States in South America, making mention of dozens more in passing, the reality should speak volumes of our current actions in the Middle East. Furthermore, this film should make it clear to every American that such a takeover by the people is necessary to oust the corrupt politicians, corporations, and military leaders that have stolen our country for their own profit. This film should stir the revolutionary in each of us, or at least offer a perspective of our country from our neighbor's point of view.

How to Rewrite History

2007-10-29T00:07:00.000-04:00

While the power to rewrite history is only available to a select few, the process is relatively simple. The first step is to create a foreign enemy; one that is hell bent on the destruction of life as we know it. Immediately after the moment has passed suspicions will arise in the direction of the enemy. In the after math, seemingly random and obscure facts will form the "official story," subsequently replacing the "original stories," reducing them to mere "conspiracies."

This is how you rewrite history.

A prime example can be found in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The subject has never really fueled my imagination beyond the Oliver Stone film. Like every good student of Civics I know the President was shot by Lee Oswald. Some of the details are a little hazy: his Communist ties, the type of rifle, his exact location. But in the end the assassin was killed by Jack Ruby, and America closed the book -- save a few "conspiracies" that persist to this day.

The "original stories" include dozens of rubber-neckers running to the "grassy knoll," with a barrage of film footage capturing the chaos. Nevertheless, Lee Oswald was picked up immediately after leaving the building he worked at. Of the many interviews that captured his statements, Mr. Oswald repeated that he had no idea why he was being held, and was refused any type of legal representation. He was abused by the police, and eventually murdered before any trial by his peers.

This is how you rewrite history.

But thankfully "we the people" now have access to the social control mechanisms of media, allowing us to capture the lost footage which was buried in the deluge of the official story. Such power in our hands help put an end to the demonization of foreign enemies, and block the hypnotic beat of the war drums as the "official stories" flood our media. This power is nothing less than Truth in the hands of the American people -- a power which must be wielded as a weapon to protect the values of our Democracy.

The World According to Dr. Tricky

2007-10-26T09:11:00.000-04:00

Here's an old site I stumbled across called Dr. Tricky's Kung Fu Lounge. He's got a handful of poorly illustrated maps of the world according to America, Texas, amongst others. Take a look at some of these below:

The World According to America

The UK According to America

The World According to Texas

And they call us Uneducated!

Declaration of War vs. The People

2007-10-25T19:46:00.000-04:00

On October 23, 2007 the U.S. Government declared War on the American People. By a vote of 404 to 6, the U.S. House of Representatives approved HR 1955: The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007. This act designates every American who acts -- OR PROMOTES ACTION -- against the U.S. Government to be a TERRORIST. Simply put: If you've ever said that George W. Bush should be hanged as a war criminal, you sir, are a Terrorist.

While the news has been unremarkably disinterested since the bill was introduced back in Mid-April of this year, the press has been provided with sound bytes where the lack of funding is quoted repeatedly, along with the intention to merely study the habits of would-be terrorists. Those who oppose such a bill would be assumed to have "something to hide," or considered a sympathizer for the Terrorists, without completely understanding the ramifications.

Up until now the Government has primarily focused on people who were directly connected to terrorist organizations. Those investigated and accused ranged from foreign aide organizations to a university professor in South Florida. Although the majority of cases have ended in mistrial, some speculate the total number of 'Black Listed' Americans to be somewhere in the ballpark of 770,000. That was before the Government considered its own Citizens to be Terrorists.

Once this bill passes through the Senate and is signed into Law by the President, it will no longer be safe to speak out against the Government. Any word spoken across telephone lines, or written and recorded on the Internet, could potentially be scrutinized by the Department of Homeland Security, and lead more innocent victims to secret prisons to be subjected to violent acts of torture.

I urge everyone reading this to contact members of the press, to call or write your local Senators, and beg them to protect your Constitutional Rights as Free Citizens. Our Democracy requires your action BEFORE the next election. The cost of failing to do so could be greater than any of us currently imagine. Help stop the Declaration of War Against the American People before it is too late.

Imagine the Possibilities on Television

2007-10-23T20:19:00.001-04:00

What if you could be anything you've ever wanted, just by turning on the television or surfing the web. Imagine if you could do whatever someone else is doing simply by watching them do it. Would you watch your favorite TV shows to socialize with the stars? Or turn on a karate flick and kick the crap out of your brother?

As strange as the question sounds, scientists are learning the phrase "Monkey See, Monkey Do" is a lot closer to how our brain functions than we originally thought. The act of watching a baseball game fires off the same areas of our brain than if we were actually swinging a bat or catching a ball. We learn to do by watching others do it.

But imagine if learning was as simple as Rainman counting toothpicks on the floor. By studying the brain activities of savants such as Kim Peek and Daniel Tammet, Scientists may one day learn how to simulate the effects in our own minds. In other words, you might seriously want to consider what you're watching!

Let's take a look at the latest National Nielsen ratings to see what Americans are learning to do:

1. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Flip on the switch and tune in the worst of human depravity. Whether by field examinations or intensive lab work, most Americans would choose to dissect human cadavers in an effort to uphold the law. Sounds pretty intense to imagine everyone taking samples everywhere they went.

2. Dancing with the Stars - Suddenly life explodes into a hot and sexy, twisting, turning parade of people dancing to and from work and school; to the dentist, at line in the bank; a slow waltz for funerals, and a Cha-Cha-Cha before dinner. This might just be a solution to the Obesity Epidemic!

3. Grey's Anatomy - Two things are apparent: America wants Drama, and America wants Health Care. While I admit the idea of a Nation of Doctors would come in handy, I'm not entire sure I understand the Soap Opera. It does make sense, however, for a healthy life to follow a life that is healthy.

4. Desperate Housewives - At this point we've fallen into the realms of pure decadence, where we are all free to live life like a Hollywood movie. The lights are bright, the pace is fun and exciting, with twists and turns around every bend. I'm just thankful to have an Off button on our current technology.

5. House - A final look at what American's are learning to do reveals more Doctors, more Drama, more Mystery, more Romance; more of a good story that takes you on an Adventure with a beginning, middle, and an end (with a whole lot of commercialism thrown in-between).

Unfortunately, it seems that relatively few of us are doing exactly what we'd rather be doing. Instead, we're staring into a television tube which promises the impossible, as if we are seeking comfort in the dreams we're being sold. Though ultimately unobtainable, the dream is so much better than reality.

Fortunately, along with the advances in technology comes an evolution in the way we think. As the old world showed us promises to lure us into buying the dream, the new world is built on our own dreams. Through user created content and direct audience participation, we're building a new world in our image.

This means that the next time you flip on your screen, and adjust your learning capabilities to maximum potential, you'll enter a world filled with guides to build green houses, and videos that show you how to nit. In no time at all you'll be a master of your world, with a single press of the button.

Ron Paul Round-Up

2007-10-18T12:31:00.000-04:00

Paul introduced The Sanctity of Life Act of 2005, a bill that would have defined human life to begin at conception, and removed challenges to prohibitions on abortion from federal court jurisdiction.

Defining embryos and fetuses as persons would make abortion murder and outlaw fetal stem cell research and some contraception and fertility treatments.

In 2005, Paul introduced the We the People Act, which would have removed "any claim based upon the right of privacy, including any such claim related to any issue of ... reproduction" from the jurisdiction of federal courts. If made law, either of these acts would allow states to PROHIBIT ABORTION.

Ron Paul's bill to provide that human life shall be deemed to exist from conception.
http://tinyurl.com/yuo3ta
Ron Paul's bill to prohibit any Federal official from expending any Federal funds for any population control or population planning program or any family planning activity.
http://tinyurl.com/2h6y7w
Ron Paul's bill to limit the jurisdiction of the Federal courts, and for other purposes.
http://tinyurl.com/2sts73
Ron Paul was the only member of congress to vote against a bill (HR 180) to prohibit spending federal tax dollars on companies doing business with genocidal warlords in Darfur.
http://tinyurl.com/2cazda
Ron Paul voted against establishing Bill HR 5252 Amendment 987(Jun 2006)[169], which would have legally protected network neutrality.
http://tinyurl.com/27xg44
Ron Paul failed to vote against the FISA amendment that legalized warrantless wiretapping of US citizens.
http://tinyurl.com/2p3t65
Ron Paul believes that all federal taxation should be eliminated.
http://tinyurl.com/yuvdk2
Ron Paul wants to eliminate the federal reserve and replace the U.S. dollar with a currency based on the gold standard.
http://tinyurl.com/2dhx28
Ron Paul wants to amend the constitution to eliminate birthright citizenship.
http://tinyurl.com/2gh52n
Ron Paul wants to end US membership in the UN
http://tinyurl.com/yoajxb
Ron Paul wants to build a 700 mile wall between the U.S and Mexico.
http://tinyurl.com/2yunzn
Ron Paul opposes universal health care.
Ron Paul is a fundamentalist born-again Christian who believes there is a war on Christmas being waged by the secular left.

Ron Paul supporters seem to be composed largely of people who oppose the war in Iraq, but for some reason believe they have no choice but to support a Republican over any Democrat (in addition to the smaller number of hard-core true believers). These casual supporters need to be aware that the vast majority of his views are bizarre and extreme.

Ron Paul is the candidate backed by the White Supremacists...
http://tinyurl.com/36k9rw
... to the point they even arranged to have supporters bussed to the straw polls in Iowa...
http://tinyurl.com/32kwtb
...and extensively cover anything Ron Paul, see e.g....
http://tinyurl.com/2mfyvq
Ron Paul has reciprocated the love from the White Supremacy groups by giving interviews to David Duke.
http://tinyurl.com/2jqhan
The 9/11 Truth movement also endorse Ron Paul, see e.g....
http://tinyurl.com/399wqb

He wants to ban abortion, legalise the teaching of creationism and remove the seperation between church and state. His politics stink of Christian fundamentalism and to believe otherwise is a fantasy.

A vote for Ron Paul endorses irrationality, dishonesty, bigotry, racism, fundamentalism, obscurationism and an incredibly retrograde and backwards worldview. If you vote for Ron Paul, you are voting for these things. You don't get to pick and choose and claim that your vote endorses a "balanced budget" and not "a 19th century style deportation project estimated to cause over a hundred thousand deaths".

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An Open Source Religion

2007-10-14T01:10:00.000-04:00

When I was a young teenager I snuck into the attic over our garage and dug through the old boxes filled with books and papers from my Father's college days. Being the good Dungeons & Dragons geek that I was as the time, I pocketed a small book of the world's religions -- seeing the opportunity to compare it to my copy of Gary Gygax's Demons and Deities. Reading through the book connected my imagination to the workings of the real world, opening the Christian beliefs that had been instilled in me to a world of possibilities, filled with a host of new gods and alien faiths.

I carried this book with me through my own college experiences, signing up for classes on comparative religions. By my early twenties I was snapping my fingers with the poets, bouncing back and forth between Buddhism and Taoism -- whichever proved more beneficial to my intellectual debates. However, neither choice resulted in the spark of Faith that believers carry through the darkness. Regardless of the number of conversations I won I never got to carry the title of Believer. After nearly twenty years of searching for the Truth I believe the light has finally been revealed.

The movie Zeitgeist begins with the idea that Jesus is an anthropomorphism of the Sun; and that he shares his story of a birth from a virgin mother, his crucification, his death and subsequent rebirth, etc., with numerous religions from around the globe, as far back as 10,000 years or longer. To make it even easier: If you're looking for the son of the Creator, you have no further to look than in the sky above your head. Just because the Christians have their own version of the story doesn't mean they own the rights to the original source.

The movie continues to point out the number of similarities to these religions -- but not to discount their truth. The fact that so many shared the same dates, used the same ideas, and told the same stories reveals a deeper connection to our world and the cosmos -- not some magical fantasy filled with Hells and redemptions. It shows the 12 disciples as the 12 segments of the sky defined by the twelve constellations, more commonly referred to as the Zodiac. The story of His birth and death, along with the subsequent celebrations, is a story of our lives through the seasons, along with our progression through the ages.

In that so many religions have sought to control this story shows us the power it has over us. The failure of Christianity is the lie it propagates in order to control its followers. However, the same could be said of Science in its dismissal of our connection to the planet and the stars as being merely circumstantial. The Truth revealed in the original source is known by the plants who turn their attentions, along with the animals that gather en masse, according to the rhythms of the sun and the stars. Our connection to the source is of great importance if we are to continue living on this planet.

I believe the first step in connecting to the Source is to start by reclaiming the code for ourselves. Much has been written by the ancients on the location of the stars and the effects their alignment had on our planet. Further writings reveal an even greater connection to our planet and its place the the cosmos -- another fact that is vital as we enter into a new age, one that leaves the fish of the Messiah behind us, and welcomes the water bearer as we enter the Age of Aquarius. The Mayans believe this will happen in the next decade so we might want to begin as quickly as possible!

So begins the world's first Open Source Religion.

Zeitgeist: Mother of All Conspiracies

2007-10-12T08:51:00.000-04:00

The Internet Age has produced a number of independent, high quality films that are primarily composed of numerous YouTube videos stitched together with dramatic narration. The latest is a film entitled Zeitgeist which could be described as the 'Mother of All Conspiracies,' as it begins with the foundations of Christianity, travels through the myths surrounding 9/11, and end with the New World Order directed the elite international banking community. What makes this film so important is the underlying call to act against the forces which currently seek to destroy our Democracy.

Hardly anything in the film is new, as we've seen such atrocities enacted on our Freedom before. When America provoked the Japanese trough trade embargoes and looked the other way after Australia warned us of their route towards Pearl Harbor; when America sent the Lusitania into German waters after their embassy took out an ad in 50 East Coast newspapers warning us it would be attacked; when an incident at the Gulf of Tonkin turned out to be the same ruse used against us time and time again -- our Freedoms have been attacked before.

But to question what is happening right before our eyes is an intentional act of stupidity. While the government was performing over five dozen anti-terrorist scenarios around 9/11 including one on the World Trade Center; while every single plane involved in the attack simply disappeared before our very eyes along with almost a hundred videos of the attack on the Pentagon; while every single news outlet reported explosions in the World Trade Center before and during the collapse; while we responded by destroying not one but TWO nations on the similar grounds of false pretense; while America sits back at watches television that AT ITS MOST LIBERAL exposes these atrocities then sends us to SLEEP: Goodnight America, and Good Luck.

Wake Up America, and Get Angry! These "Invisible Dictators" hi-jacked Democracy back in 1913 when they used the same scare tactics against our banking system to provoke a financial crisis which lead to the creation of the Federal Reserve -- a privately held, multi-national Corporation that is "no more Federal than Fed Ex," subsequently destroying the Gold Standard and coercing the American public into giving back their gold under the duress of incarceration. In that same year our Constitution was attacked through direct taxation of our income, which currently takes over a third of every American income to pay off the interest of the money borrowed from the Federal Reserve! We are slaves to the system through financial servitude -- for this reason alone WE SHOULD BE PISSED OFF!

But instead, we rely upon the upcoming elections between Pepsi or Coke? Will you elect the same mouth pieces that have been chanting the lies of the war to carry us into Iran, or will you elect the better half of the president who sat back and watched these same planned attacks on American soil ten years before September 11th -- that will also lead us into a war with Iran? Or will you wake up to the New World Order of Private Corporations who have "Unionized" the European banking institutions, and seek to do the same throughout North America with the creation of the Amero? Do you not see the violent "Unionization" happening in South America or throughout the Middle East?

If that doesn't piss you off to the point of a Revolution, what the HELL does the New World Order have to fear from your "attacks?" Allowing the Democrats to win the majorities means nothing to the minority who loan our monies to us with interest. Their term limits span those set by our puppet government, and if their actions weren't so obvious to those without their blinders pointed towards the media spectacle of bread and circus, I would say THAT is not only a "weird ass dictatorship" -- but the WORST Dictatorship our world has experienced.

Evolution of the Pledge

2007-10-11T13:32:00.000-04:00

Here's a quick history lesson on the evolution of the Pledge of Allegiance in the United States.

1892

“I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands: one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.”

1892 to 1923

"I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all."

1923 to 1954

"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all."

1954 to 1984

"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all."

1984 to Present

“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United Corporations of America, and to the Economy for which it stands: one Nation under Contract, with Terms and Conditions for all.”

America Hangs to the Right

2007-10-09T00:17:00.001-04:00

In a recent conversation someone snidely remarked: "Maybe you should explain the differences between Conservatives and Liberals in American politics." A variety of definitions were given, ranging from the Dixiecrats to the Neocons, and all the little Independents in between. The simplest explanation described an axis, where Conservative thought appeared on the Right and Liberal to the Left. All in all, I'd call the conversation a basic primer to American Politics.

But when the conversation came to include those from outside the American borders a different picture arose; one that showed our Left as a fairly Conservative notion. When you broadened the spectrum a little wider than our basic education you see alternatives such as Communism and Socialism. From our American perspective, these ideas are either outdated or completely Evil; or simply put, they're not American. We don't have "Commie Pink-o Fags" in our Government, and even the great Ron Paul: The Republican Hope of the Internet preaches against the tenets of Socialism.

What disturbs me about this picture is that America doesn't look as free as I used to believe. In fact, we seem more similar to the "Muslim Extremists" than I initially imagined. And while pictures and imaginations lend themselves well to Academia, in reality, our Government has been at war with these ideas since the Cold War. All the Wars and Conflicts have been a part of the same battle for control. Where the Left would hand control over to the greatest number of Citizens, the Right keeps the power in the hands of the Few. It seems that America wouldn't have it any other way.

When I imagine myself on this spectrum I consider the fact that an Open Democracy would fall to the Left -- possibly the most extreme form of Liberalism that one could imagine. But upon closer inspection the images drawn on an Open map reveal clusters of nodes that connect on a multi-dimensional plane. The very concept of our ideas lying somewhere in 2-Dimensional space sounds more like a Flat Earth philosophy. It appears that the idea of an Open Democracy might not fit in the minds of the people simply because we've never thought of the world in those dimensions.

Ultimately, when asked if I'm Conservative or Liberal, I'd rather answer that I'm Open to new ideas.

Middle East Quiz

2007-10-08T14:11:00.000-04:00

Question: Which country alone in the Middle East has nuclear weapons?
Answer: Israel

Question: Which country in the Middle East refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and bars international inspections?
Answer: Israel

Question: Which country in the Middle East seized the sovereign territory of other nations by military force and continues to occupy it in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions?
Answer: Israel

Question: Which country in the Middle East routinely violates the international borders of another sovereign state with warplanes and artillery and naval gunfire?
Answer: Israel

Question: What American ally in the Middle East has for years sent assassins into other countries to kill its political enemies (a practice sometimes called exporting terrorism)?
Answer: Israel

Question: In which country in the Middle East have high-ranking military officers admitted publicly that unarmed prisoners of war were executed?
Answer: Israel

Question: What country in the Middle East refuses to prosecute its soldiers who have acknowledged executing prisoners of war?
Answer: Israel

Question: What country in the Middle East created 762,000 refugees and refuses to allow them to return to their homes, farms and businesses?
Answer: Israel

Question: What country in the Middle East refuses to pay compensation to people whose land, bank accounts and businesses it confiscated?
Answer: Israel

Question: In what country in the Middle East was a high-ranking United Nations diplomat assassinated?
Answer: Israel

Question: In what country in the Middle East did the man who ordered the assassination of a high-ranking U.N. diplomat become prime minister?
Answer: Israel

Question: What country in the Middle East blew up an American diplomatic facility in Egypt and attacked a U.S. ship, the USS Liberty, in international waters, killing 34 and wounding 171 American sailors?
Answer: Israel

Question: What country in the Middle East employed a spy, Jonathan Pollard, to steal classified documents and then gave some of them to the Soviet Union?
Answer: Israel

Question: What country at first denied any official connection to Pollard, then voted to make him a citizen and has continuously demanded that the American president grant Pollard a full pardon?
Answer: Israel

Question: What Middle East country allows American Jewish murderers to flee to its country to escape punishment in the United States and refuses to extradite them once in their custody?
Answer: Israel

Question: What Middle East country preaches against hate yet builds a shrine and a memorial for a murderer who killed 29 Palestinians while they prayed in their Mosque.
Answer: Israel

Question: What country on Planet Earth has the second most powerful lobby in the United States, according to a recent Fortune magazine survey of Washington insiders?
Answer: Israel

Question: Which country in the Middle East deliberately targeted a U.N. Refugee Camp in Qana, Lebanon and killed 103 innocent men, women, and especially children?
Answer: Israel

Question: Which country in the Middle East is in defiance of 69 United Nations Security Council resolutions and has been protected from 29 more by U.S. vetoes?
Answer: Israel

Question: Which country in the Middle East receives more than one-third of all U.S. aid yet is the 16th richest country in the world?
Answer: Israel

Question: Which country in the Middle East receives U.S. weapons for free and then sells the technology to the Republic of China even at the objections of the U.S.?
Answer: Israel

Question: Which country in the Middle East routinely insults the American people by having its Prime Minister address the United States Congress and lecturing them like children on why they have no right to reduce foreign aid?
Answer: Israel

Question: Which country in the Middle East had its Prime Minister announce to his staff not to worry about what the United States says because "We control America?"
Answer: Israel

Question: What country in the Middle East was cited by Amnesty International for demolishing more than 4000 innocent Palestinian homes as a means of ethnic cleansing.
Answer: Israel

Question: Which country in the Middle East has just recently used a weapon of mass destruction, a one-ton smart bomb, dropping it in the center of a highly populated area killing 15 civilians including 9 children?
Answer: Israel

Question: Which country in the Middle East routinely kills young Palestinian children for no reason other than throwing stones at armored vehicles, bulldozers, or tanks?
Answer: Israel

Question: Which country in the Middle East signed the Oslo Accords promising to halt any new Jewish Settlement construction, but instead, has built more than 270 new settlements since the signing?
Answer: Israel

Question: Which country in the Middle East has assassinated more than 100 political officials of its opponent in the last 2 years while killing hundreds of civilians in the process, including dozens of children?
Answer: Israel

Question: Which country in the Middle East regularly violates the Geneva Convention by imposing collective punishment on entire towns, villages, and camps, for the acts of a few, and even goes as far as demolishing entire villages while people are still in their homes?
Answer: Israel

Question: What country in the Middle East is the United States threatening to attack because of fear that it may be a threat to us and to our allies?
Answer: Iran

Redefining our Corporate Economy

2007-10-07T19:15:00.001-04:00

The concept of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) didn't sell too well in the 90's, mostly because it wasn't for sale. The modern businessman carrying the manta that "you get what you pay for" didn't see much value in a product that didn't cost a dime. In response to these concerns, advocates dropped Free Software from the title, and Open Source was born. As the image of shoddy software developed by hobbiests faded, the reality of Linux and other Open Source projects revealed an affordable alternative.

At the same time, the Cold War had effectively put an end to all things Socialist, making the concepts of Free and Open particularly dangerous to an economy that had steadily been progressing towards privatization. In order to survive, the Corporate Economy had to reflect upon itself in this same light. The image of rich and powerful board members wielding the power of nations was described by enthusiasts as highly responsive Free Markets which promised higher qualities at lower prices.

The consequences of a Corporate Economy are apparent to most Americans. While the media describes the actions of Enron and Exxon Valdez as a few bad apples, few can deny the effects that McDonald's and Wal-Marts have had in transforming our communities into freeway exits and temporary strip malls. If left unchecked, the Free Market would stop at nothing to charge for every inch of life that can produce a profit, without any respect to the communities that depend on them.

The unabashed greed of many Corporations has escalated to the point of corrupting our government. But instead of rising against the Kings which have invaded our Democracy, most interpret this as a failure our government. This apathy has given support to a "Strict Constitutionalist" as a Presidential Candidate, who seeks to devolve the development of Democracy to its origins, and remove control over the Economy from the hands of the people and place it instead under private jurisdiction.

While the Free Market is an admirable spin to the truth behind Private Ownership, the answer (as always) can be found in the Open Source model. Even though the Marketing Department has found a majority willing to buy burgers with questionable content, the people must be free to choose if they wish to be subjugated to miles of cheap plastic crap, or instead to produce better walls around New Orleans, or reduce the number of troops in the Weapons and Arms Race.

In other words, the Free Market should not be free to do as it decides -- anymore than anyone of us should be able to do as we will, regardless of the consequences to our people our our environment. We should be held by the same regulations held by those in the highest seats of Corporate power. Their freedom is our freedom, and our freedom is Open Source. If that three second sound byte isn't enough to convince you, consider the following choice:

A Nation Powered by Microsoft vs. a Nation Empowered by Linux.

Four Liberals of the Apocalypse

2007-10-06T22:10:00.000-04:00

Ask any Liberal the number of catastrophes our world is currently facing and you're likely to get numerous stories, ranging from Global Warming to the newly popular Avian Bird Flu featured in the BBC's Pandemic. That's probably what makes the Republicans such lovable candidates as they generally tend to focus on just one: Terrorism. However, that leads to a relevant question: Are we focusing on the right threat? Or, are threats simply a form of "Shock Capitalism" intended to hold our attentions?

My fears are that most people have become so disenchanted by our current leaders that they're simply looking for a change. Some find solace in the nuance of a black or female leader, while others are willing to throw 200+ years of Democratic development out the window by supporting a "Strict Constitutionalist." The problem still remains that most of these candidates focus on the same hot button issue of the War in Iraq, with the exception of a few "non-candidates" who are running with the other hot button issue: Global Warming.

So we've got two hot button issues -- possibly three if you include Corporate Corruption -- but none of these reflect the fact that many local governments are preparing for a possible outbreak of the Avian Bird Flu. While the general public accepts it as news worthy, or at worst, another Liberal conspiracy to increase our tax dollars, the issue lags behind the tired discussions of Abortion Rights and Gay Marriage as quintessential planks in the two party platforms.

But there's something else we can take from the BBC's Pandemic Special. The model for a viral outbreak not only applies to biology and computer science, but to thoughts and ideas as well. When we tell someone an idea we have it carries from one person to the next -- assuming it has developed well enough to carry at the utterance of a few simple words. The hope we gain from watching the special is the possibility that Open Source will spread with greater ease than a possible mutation of the Bird Flu.

We also see two other Open Sources in the movie: the first being the physical connectivity of the planet, and the second: YouTube. When the military rolls in to lock down the town, allowing nothing but tight lipped doctors, with all the reporters kept behind the police lines. Thanks to the efforts of one little girl, people were able to experience the event and learn what to expect in advance. Such knowledge and reassurance is critical for any possible threat we face.

In this simple act we gain a glimpse at what might be the most important challenge we face: Open Communication. It is this type of communication that allows us share a medical solution to the outbreak, or a crystalline structure to gather sunlight more efficiently, or at best: the ability to decide for ourselves. This is the virus we must evolve in the minds of every life we touch, in order to transform our ideas of Democracy into a truly Open Source.

The Temptatious Dangers of Ron Paul

2007-10-06T13:09:00.000-04:00

Many months ago I fell under the allure of Ron Paul -- the Republican Hero of the Internet. With all the support coming from sites such as YouTube and Digg, it was difficult not to notice the sensation which was taking American apathy by storm. People who once saw the government as a breeding ground for corruption and perversion began waving the Republican flag in opposition to the Totalitarian ruler at the helm of our Executive Branch. It wasn't until his appearance on the Colbert Report that I began to question the wisdom of a "Strict Constitutionalist."

Steven ended by naming a variety of organizations which Ron Paul responded to by raising his hand in support of their abolishment. Department of Education? Tear it down! Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, the IRS: ABSOLUTELY! (Raising his hand even higher to the amusement of the crowd.) UNICEF? Well, he would tear that one down last. Apparently the rights and well being of our children aren't so high on Ron Paul's list as to warrant their destruction right from the start. Really shows the compassion he shows for America's future.

In the immortally misquoted words of Bill Hicks: "The Anti-Marketing Market is a Huge Market!" So many Americans have become so overwhelmingly disenchanted by the corruption of the American Government that they've adopted a "Tear It All Down" mentality. Furthermore, the rising prices of every aspect of our lives have left many without the ability to keep up with all the new iPod models. These two attitudes have created an "Anti-Government" market which seeks to destroy any regulations that carry the stink of Socialism, selling the country instead on the benefits of Capitalism.

What surprises me is the fact that so many have failed to recognize the effects of Privatization -- what Noam Chomsky and the Bolivarian Revolution refers to as NeoLiberalism. Once our Oil and Energy were sold to private institutions the prices began to soar. As the country continues to decline we see the rise in Privatization in our roads, our schools, our medicine -- everything a society needs to both survive and prosper. Instead of control over these vital organs resting in the hands of the people, Ron Paul advocates issuing command to the Corporations, depending on the power of the dollar as the great equalizer.

To entrust the Almighty Dollar in place of our vote is to welcome a class division unlike any we've seen in this country, where the wealthy wield the power of governments (with enormous economies and privately funded militaries). While your dollar may carry enormous influence over McDonald's Dollar Menu, it won't mean squat when you go to fill up your gas tank, or pay your electricity bill, or post on the Internet where usage requirements prohibit the slander of your service provider, assuming you're able to afford them.

In order to get past the temptatious dangers of Ron Paul, you need something that he clearly rails again: A Plan. The Founders had a plan when they Drafted the Constitution. They knew that a single document would not protect our Democracy alone, that its Citizens would be required to be vigilant, and make the necessary amendments to protect them from the rich and the powerful who wield enough influence to shackle the people in the shadow of the Kings they fought so hard to overthrow. Tearing everything down is not the answer. Building a better tomorrow is.

Recognize that the Cold War has evolved into a War against the People. Every Democratic state our government has overthrown was an attempt to keep control over the resources out of the People's hands. Time and time again the Military Industrial Corporations have funded military dictators by supplying them with weapons and money, only to turn around around "free" the people by unleashing the American Government. We're currently caught in this same war, with the same players fighting for the same resources.

Allow me set the record straight by highlighting the fact that a Democracy is "by the people, for the people." This huge conspiracy that the eradication of Government is the only path to Freedom is a myth. The Government is Our Voice! We must be vigilant to make our vote count. Relying on the dollar to represent us is absolute insanity! The same Government you fear meddling in all your personal affairs would be replaced by a Corporation which dictates your rights to you. Such a choice would effectively mean the end of Democracy as we know it.

The solution is Open Source. Do NOT vote to silence your voice in Government, but instead: Show your support for the system that replaced the backbone of the Internet, the Internet Browser, the corrupt channels of media, the music and entertainment industry with Open Source. This is our revolution: The Open Source Revolution. We must carry this to the highest levels of Government in order to ensure that the People are in control, NOT the Corporations. We must be strong and enact the Open Source philosophy on our Constitution in order to ensure that Democracy remains "by the people, for the people."

The Secret Government of Bill Moyers

2007-10-06T12:38:00.000-04:00

This is the full length 90 min. version of Bill Moyer's 1987 scathing critique of the criminal subterfuge carried out by the Executive Branch of the United States Government to carry out operations which are clearly contrary to the wishes and values of the American people. The ability to exercise this power with impunity is facilitated by the National Security Act of 1947.

The thrust of the exposé is the Iran-Contra arms and drug-running operations which flooded the streets of our nation with crack cocaine. The significance of the documentary is probably greater today in 2007 than it was when it was made.

We now have a situation in which these same forces have committed the most egregious terrorist attack on US soil and have declared a fraudulent so-called "War on Terror". The ruling regime in the US who have conducted the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, are now banging the war drum against Iran. We have the PATRIOT act which has stripped us of many of our basic civil rights justified by the terror of 9/11 which is their own doing.

In Rememberance of Bill Hicks

2007-10-05T21:57:00.000-04:00

Thirteen years ago, on this very day, Bill Hicks wasn't doing a fucking thing because he was dead. This underground, dark poet of comedy was virtually unknown in the United States, but a sensation the world over. During the 31 years he spent tearing the world a new asshole, Bill Hicks underwent a variety of transformations from a cocky little teenager doing stand-up about his parents, to a dark guru of mystical knowledge on the subject of human evolution. While much of his comedy was pointed at the ultra right-wing conservative class, his intentions were simply to open the eyes of his fellow Americans.

So why take the time to remember another mostly forgotten Lenny Bruce? If not for the magic of the Internet we'd certainly succumb to the same temporary punchlines spewed out by the same late night talk shows that censored Bill Hicks the first time around. Why is this more important than the War in Iraq, or perhaps, the identity of the female nerd in Beauty and the Geek? Because Bill Hicks dedicated the last few weeks of his life, while battling with Pancreatic Cancer, to show America the comedy act that The David Letterman Show refused to air, and instead, destroyed the film entirely.

The video above is an hour long documentary on Bill Hicks which ends with the act that he wanted America to see. It isn't his best work. You'll not see any impressions of the Devil or hear any revelations about feeding the hungry and exploring outer space as a unified planet. He wasn't out to break any more boundaries than he already had, but instead, offer the country a new perspective than they were used to. When the Corporate Executives decided that it wasn't up the standards of selling alcohol with half naked women, he dedicated himself to performing the act until his final performance, so that you could use your brain to decide for yourself.

If you're still curious to know why we should remember Bill Hicks today, it's because he provides a well-needed remedy to the ignorance and violence which is leading the American Nation down the same path of greed and destruction which existed longer than thirteen years ago. The situation has worsened to the point that our entire nation is engulfed in sheer stupidity, whereby the destruction of a couple buildings could inspire such a bloodlust as to unify the nation on a mission of revenge. And if you think that we're beginning to uncover the truth, you need to go back to Dane Cook bitching about his boy friends. Bill Hicks pushed an entirely different envelope.

He believed in the corruption which held a stranglehold on everything we think or feel. There wasn't any room for the RIAA or the Department of Homeland Security. This was seen by Hicks as another way the system commanded your servitude. He wasn't afraid to point out Corporate Slavery, but most importantly, he didn't believe in tearing it all down in the name of Destruction. He saw a light at the end of the tunnel that was brighter than most could conceive -- a world of infinite possibilities where every human was in touch with the Creator which would lead to eternal life if we could manage to get over ourselves.

So today we remember Bill Hicks, sitting up in Heaven with Saint Peter, laughing at all the prudish non-smokers bitching about abortion in Hell. We remember Bill Hicks in hopes of finding that same brutish voice in our own souls which tells us to get the fuck out of Iraq. Maybe we'll find the strength to shrug off the shackles of our Corporate masters, stop building bombs, and focus on those without food, education, or health care. If we can hear this voice of reason and learn to respect the ideas and nuance of our fellow man, maybe then we'll be able to evolve into the beings of Light that so many of us hope to achieve.

14 Defining Characteristics of Fascism

2007-10-04T16:35:00.000-04:00

Dr. Lawrence Britt, a political scientist, published research on fascism in which he examined the fascist regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each fascist State:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarceration of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists; terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military are glamorized.

5. Rampant sexism - The government of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are intertwined - Government in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation are often the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated, or are severely restricted.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassinations of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Benito Mussolini - who knew something about fascism - had a more straightforward definition: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

Abraham Lincoln stated, “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me, and causes me to tremble for the safety of our country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed.”

Freedom from Choice

2007-09-26T11:13:00.000-04:00

In ancient rome
There was a poem
About a dog
Who found two bones
He picked at one
He licked the other
He went in circles
He dropped dead

Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want

"Freedom of Choice"
by Devo

The Meaning of 21st Century Socialism for Venezuela

2007-08-16T11:39:00.001-04:00

[1] Linking Alternatives II Conference, Vienna, May 13, 2006 (www.gobiernoenlinea.gob.ve)

[2] Ibid.

Is Venezuela Moving towards a 21st Century Socialism?

2007-08-16T11:26:00.001-04:00

The following article written by Gregory Wilpert originally appeared on the VenezuelAnalysis.com website, July 11, 2006. This is a revised version of a paper that was presented at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Havens Center, April 11, 2006.

With these general definitions of capitalism and 21st century socialism, we can now see how the policies of the Chavez government compare to these.

Changing Ownership of the Material and Intellectual Means of Production

Taking each of the three elements of capitalism one at a time, one can first focus on the ways in which the Chavez government’s policies affect or transform the ownership of the relations of material (as opposed to intellectual) production. While the vast majority of Venezuela’s productive capacity is still either owned privately or by the state, one of the government’s main areas of emphasis has been to expand non-private forms of ownership and control, such as via cooperatives, co-management, and expanded state management/ownership.

For example, during the Chavez presidency the number of cooperatives in Venezuela has increased from about 800 in 1998 to over 100,000 in 2005 – an over 100-fold increase in seven years. Over 1.5 million Venezuelans are thus now involved in cooperatives, which represents about 10% of the country’s adult population.[3] The government has been actively supporting the creation of cooperatives in all sectors, mostly via credit, preferential purchasing from cooperatives, and training programs.

With regard to co-management, the government has been experimenting with several state-owned enterprises in this regard, such as the electricity company CADAFE and the aluminum production plant Alcasa. Depending on how these experiments go, the government is considering turning over more state-owned enterprises to co-management. These businesses will not be turned over to complete worker control, however, because, according to the government, they are too important for Venezuela to be governed only by the people that work there. That is, they have an impact for the entire society and thus, according to the principle of subsidiarity, the society, through its representatives in the state, should also have a say in how the enterprise is run.

Another strategy for changing the ownership and control over the means of production has been the expropriation of idle factories. Currently at least four production plants, which produce paper, valves, and agricultural products, have been expropriated and turned over to worker control. Working together with the national union federation UNT, the government is evaluating 700 other idle production facilities that could also be expropriated and turned over to former workers of these plants.

Finally, with regard to expanding state management, the Chavez government has created several new state-owned enterprises, such as in the areas of telecommunications, air travel, and petrochemicals. Also, it reined-in the previously semi-autonomous state oil company PDVSA and brought it under direct government control.

Of course, just because there are more enterprises that go against the logic of capitalism, that are in essence anti-capitalist endeavors, such as cooperatives, co-managed enterprises, and state-owned enterprises does not mean that Venezuela is now a post-capitalist society with regard to the ownership of the means of production. However, there is a definite movement in this direction. Whether such forms of ownership will become predominant within the Venezuelan economy it is too early to tell. The real test of the extent to which the government is willing to go in this direction will come if and when private capital is forced to become marginal in the overall economy. Whether such a direct confrontation will take place and how it will play out is impossible to say at this point.

However, creating a sphere of non-privately owned or controlled means of production by itself is not much of a change if such ownership and control follows the same principles as private ownership does, of maximizing profit above all else and of funneling non-reinvested profits towards elite consumption. Thus, so as to ensure that the cooperative, co-managed, and state managed enterprises follow a new set of principles, the Chavez government has created a new type of economic production unit, which is known as social production enterprise (EPS, in Spanish).

Social Production Enterprises are, “economic entities dedicated to the production of goods or services in which work has its own meaning, without social discrimination nor privileges associated with one’s position in a hierarchy, in which there is substantive equality between its members, planning is participatory and operate under either state, collective, or mixed ownership.”[4] In order to qualify as an EPS and thus for preferential treatment for low-interest credits and state contracts, companies must fulfill a list of requirements, such as to, “privilege the values of solidarity, cooperation, complementarity, reciprocity, equity, and sustainability, ahead of the value of profitability.”[5] If these values are indeed fulfilled, then one can say that with regard to ownership and control over the means of production Venezuela is moving away from capitalism and towards 21st century socialism.

Moves Away from Market Exchange

With regard to moving beyond market exchange for regulating production and distribution of goods and services, the Chavez government has mainly focused on using the state as a non-market based mechanism. That is, the state has been very active in redistributing wealth during the Chavez presidency, whether through its rural and urban land reform program, its oil revenue-funded social programs for free health care, education, and subsidized food markets, or the provision of subsidies and other support for key sectors, such as cooperatives and “endogenous development nucleuses.” Of course, while state redistribution mechanisms go against a basic principle of capitalism, these do not break the logic of capital as long as most exchange still occurs in a free market context, as is still the case in Venezuela. As such, such policies are more social democratic than socialist.

The principle of moving away from market-based distribution has also been valid in international trade for Venezuela. Not only has the Chavez government vehemently opposed the free trade agreements the U.S. has been promoting, but it is also involved in a large number of trade deals that are based on principles of solidarity instead of competition. For example, the Petrocaribe agreement provides for discounted financing of Venezuelan oil for Caribbean nations and also allows them to pay for oil with in-kind payments. In the most prominent case Cuba has been providing Venezuela with 20,000 doctors and medical assistants in exchange for Venezuelan oil shipments. Similar agreements exist with Argentina, Uruguay, and Ecuador.

Again, this kind of non-market based trade, which emphasizes cooperation, complementarity, and solidarity over competition is still far smaller than traditional market exchange. How and if the Chavez government can find ways to increase non-market based exchange mechanisms remains to be seen, especially since exactly how cooperative (instead of competitive) exchange could function on a large scale is still quite unclear in Venezuela.

Governance No Longer Guided by Private Interests

With regard breaking away from the third important element of capitalism—a system of governance that is under the sway of powerful private interests—Venezuela has advanced the most. There are at least three ways in which the Chavez government has done this over the past few years. First, it has had the opportunity to break free from the sway of private capital, due to the combination of massive oil revenues and the complete delegitimation of the old regime. Second, it has instituted forms of direct democracy and increased citizen participation in the state. Third, it has weakened the possibility that the military could be used to repress the civilian population, via what it calls civil-military union.

The first aspect is perhaps the most important because it has enabled practically all other anti-capitalist measures of the Chavez government. That is, Venezuela’s oil revenues, which increased, on a per-capita basis, from $226 in 1998 to $728 in 2005,[6] has been a bonanza that has given the Chavez government a tremendous amount of freedom from private capital’s ability to threaten with investment strikes. Also, the institution of capital controls in early 2003 further expanded the government’s independence from private capital. While most leftist governments, such as that of President Lula of Brazil, are constantly faced with the choice of pursuing progressive policies and alienating capital and thereby economic well-being or abandoning progressive policies and encouraging private investment, the Chavez government is by and large freed from this dilemma. Enormous oil revenues allow the government to invest, to pursue progressive tax policies and regulations, and to spend freely, without having to worry much about capital flight or disinvestment.

This freedom, combined with the opposition’s recurring self-destruction (via the coup attempt, the oil industry shutdown, the failed recall referendum, and the boycott of the December 2005 National Assembly elections) is perhaps the main reason why the Chavez government has been able to pursue increasingly more anti-capitalist policies with every passing year in office. This stands in stark contrast to the history of most progressive governments, which time and again start out with radical rhetoric, only to eventually succumb to the demands of private capital.

The second way in which the government is shaking loose the influence of private capital is by introducing participatory democracy in numerous areas of the state. This is happening through local planning councils, citizen participation in social programs, and a variety of other institutionalized mechanisms for civil society involvement in government (referenda, selection of high-level state officials, and citizen audits of state institutions).

One of the most important forms of citizen participation are the local planning councils, which were launched in Venezuela in 2001, but were at first stillborn due to a variety of limitations in the local planning council law, such as creating councils that were too large to be manageable or participatory. A new effort was launched in early 2006 with the communal council law, which bases councils on units of 200 to 400 families and which practice direct democracy in their communities, allocating financial resources and creating local ordinances.

Participatory democracy in Venezuela also takes the form of citizen participation in the recently created “missions,” which provide education, health care, subsidized food, social services, land reform, and environmental protection. These missions, rather than being just imposed from above are largely directed by the citizens in any given community, in the form of health committees, land committees, and educational task forces.

Finally, there are the constitutionally guaranteed rights to participatory democracy, in the form of four different types of citizen-initiated referenda (recall, approbatory, abrogatory, and consultative), the right to conduct citizen-initiated audits of state institutions (contraloria social), and the right of civil society organizations to co-nominate candidates to the Supreme Court, the National Electoral Council, and the Moral Republican Council (consisting of Attorney General, Comptroller General, and Human Rights Defender).

Citizen involvement in all levels of government like this increases accountability and weakens the sway of powerful private interests. While citizens might still succumb to threats of disinvestment from private capital, at least they have more influence over decision-making than when elected representatives decide matters mainly under the influence of powerful private groups that are constantly lobbying them and paying for their electoral campaigns.

The third area where the Chavez government has made a conscious effort to enable a more direct democracy has to do with transforming one of the traditional means for suppressing citizen involvement and discontent: the military. Historically, the military in Latin America was used to repress the citizenry and to keep it from resisting the imposition of government policies it did not like. For Chavez and for most poor Venezuelans, the 1989 riots against IMF-imposed economic policies, which dramatically increased the price for public transportation and for many food staples, was an expression of discontent with the relatively undemocratic[7] government of Carlos Andrés Perez. This outburst of discontent was immediately suppressed with massive military force, which ended up killing anywhere between 300 and 3,000 poor Venezuelans.

According to Chavez, the reason Venezuela’s and Latin America’s military forces were able to repress their own populace so often and so easily was because the military was always kept separate from the population. That is, their lack of contact with civilians, their sequestration, made it easier for them to act without sympathy or remorse against their own people. In contrast, Chavez, following a Maoist maxim, argues that “the military should be to the people like the fish is to water.” The application of this principle is called “civil-military union,” and means, in practice, that the military should be as integrated as possible with the civilian population, being in constant contact with them and even taking on civilian tasks in the process. The military has thus become heavily involved in the various “missions,” often providing services such as food distribution, construction help, and transportation, for example. Furthermore, the civilian population is being asked to sign up for Venezuela’s military reserves, to learn to fight a guerilla war, should an outside force such as the U.S. ever invade. This, according to Chavez, is supposed to further strengthen the civil-military union.

Critics of this re-conceptualization of Venezuela’s military argue that it has militarized civilian society and could become a means for doing precisely what Chavez says it is supposed to ward against, of repressing the population. However, there is no concrete evidence for this. As any visitor to Venezuela can attest, the military in Venezuela has a far less militaristic presence in the general population than it did in countries where the military was indeed used for repression, such as in Argentina in the 1970’s or in El Salvador in the 1980’s. No one in Venezuela fears the military and its activity in the general population is limited to fulfilling the civilian functions mentioned above, but not to repress. Human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch do not cite the military as being perpetrators of human rights violations. Rather, in Venezuela, the main culprit in this regard remains (since long before Chavez’s coming into office) the notoriously corrupt and local government controlled police force. In other words, it would appear that rather than militarizing civil society, the civil-military union has served to “civilize” the military.

These three factors, the tremendous oil revenues, the creation of a more participatory democracy, and the “civilizing” of the military, have meant that the Chavez government is far freer to pursue policies that are independent of the powerful private interests that normally shape government policy in capitalist countries. The freedom the Chavez government enjoys to pursue leftist policies is unique in comparison to most of the rest of world in many ways. While there are other countries that enjoy such a freedom due to their wealth in natural resources (such as a state-owned national oil industry), these other countries tend to be in the hands of extremely conservative authoritarian regimes (such as in the Middle East) and have no interest in pursuing progressive policies.

This freedom has allowed the Chavez government to pursue policies that clearly move away from private ownership and control over the means of production, away from market-determined allocation and distribution, and towards what could be called more socialist economic and governance forms. However, this is clearly not the state-socialism of the 20th century, as was practiced in Eastern Europe and China and still is in Cuba. Rather, it is a more libertarian form of socialism, in that it actively seeks citizen participation and even forms of direct democracy.

[3] SUNACOOP (National Superintendency of Cooperatives), www.sunacoop.gob.ve

[4] “Empresas de Producción Social,” article in PDVSA’s corporate magazine, Siembra Petrolera, Issue, No. 1, Jan.-Mar. 2006, p.55

[5] Article 3 of Decree No. 3,895, of September 13, 2005, published in Gaceta Oficial No. 38,271

[6] Author’s own calculation, based on data from Venezuela’s finance ministry, the national statistics institute, and the Central Bank of Venezuela.

[7] Chavez’s Bolivarian movement, as well as many outside analysts, considered the period of 1958-1993 to be a fairly undemocratic period because state repression and an elite pact (Pacto de Punto Fijo) between the two main political parties prevented challengers from coming to power in this period.

Obstacles for 21st Century Socialism in Venezuela

2007-08-16T11:26:00.000-04:00

[8] These sanctions are the result of putting Venezuela on a variety of lists, such as one of countries that are not doing enough in fighting terrorism, fighting drug trafficking, and in fighting human trafficking.

[9] These failures include the April 2002 coup attempt, the December 2002 oil industry shutdown, the August 2004 recall referendum, and the December 2005 boycott of the National Assembly elections.

[10] There are probably nearly as many accounts of opposition employers using this list to weed out Chavez supporters. However, this does not excuse the practice, especially not for a government that originally campaigned against patronage systems.

[11] An example of such a wrong-headed policy is the recent passage of changes to the penal code, which slightly broadened penalties for insulting government officials. The law has been on the books for decades, but an increase of the maximum penalty for such offenses is anti-civil rights and did not serve any useful purpose.

[12] One of the main theorists of this thesis was Claus Offe, in his book, The Contradictions of the Welfare State, 1984, MIT Press

Web 3.0 : The Semantic Web

2007-08-08T09:39:00.000-04:00

The following commment by Rod Petrovic appeared in a discussion on Digg.com regarding Google CEO Eric Schmidt's comment on the Web 3.0:

Web 3.0 is the Semantic Web and I believe it was correctly described by Schmidt: a "cloud" of data, which can be used by a large number of small, ubiquitous applications.

I have nothing against describing clearly identifiable trends on the web by version numbers, pet names or any other ID. I totally understand it: Web 1.0 was a web with few content providers and many users. Web 2.0 is a web where users are content providers, too. This was made possible by an evolving technology (AJAX, RSS, web services and APIs) and, consequently, application providers who use that technology (blog engines, social networks, etc.).

On the current web, application providers use RSS and APIs to occasionally "open doors" to their data, while they still keep it inside . On the Web 3.0 - the Semantic Web, data will be outside - distributed (see RDF and OWL W3C standards, for example).

I know this concept might be hard to grasp at first, so let me give you an example: If I have a friend in my LinkedIn social network and I open a Facebook account, as well, I'll have to add that same friend again, since LinkedIn's data is owned by LinkedIn and Facebook's by Facebook. On the Semantic Web, the data about me, my friends and our relationships will be distributed - open for all applications. It will be somewhere on the web in a form of RDF/XML and all applications will be able to access it. Application providers, like LinkedIn or Facebook, will then offer me innovative ways to use this omnipresent data. I can use one, two or all applications, on different platforms and for different types of services - it doesn't matter. What matters is that I have access to the same data from any application and I'm not being blackmailed into using any of them just because "all my friends are there" or "all my data is there".

Web 3.0 will be a mother of all mashups and a father of all social networks.

US vs. THEM Part III

2007-05-24T02:58:00.000-04:00

While the facts behind 9/11 are so far obscured by American Patriotism that one must simply accept it as a tragedy which demanded justice, the WMD hunt in Iraq which ended an execution raised enough eyebrows for people to look at what the United States is actually doing in the Middle East. In the third act of the War Against Terrorism, we see the US preparing to do battle in Iran, starting with an obfuscation of the facts, illegal wire tapping, along with other signature maneuvers of the Bush Administration.

Recently, Democracy Now! reported the head of the UN Nuclear Watchdog Committee and Nobel Peace Prize winner ElBaradei had stated that the International Atomic Energy Agency has "no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq." Some may recall that his similar findings regarding nuclear capabilities of Iraq resulted in the United States illegally wiretapping his conversations with foreign diplomats in an attempt to force him from the head of the IAEA.

Four years later we find that nothing has changed, as today the United States rolled up several war ships filled with tens of thousands of soldiers off the coast of Iraq in an attempt to place even more pressure to comply with UN sanctions. As for the lies, the United States has stated that the IAEA has compiled "a laundry list of Iran's continued defiance of the international community," a statement which plainly contradicts the findings of the agency.

ElBaradei did, however, warn of nuclear proliferation throughout the Middle East due to the secret activities of the Israeli government -- a fact that has been omitted from the American press, along with the incredible amount foreign aide we give to the one country which actually has a nuclear program which is developing warheads. Figures show that one third of all foreign aide goes to Israel, along with additional loans from the US Military, in a staggering figure which simplifies down to the fact that Israel receives more support per person than the average American citizen. Strange considering that Israel is on technological and economic par with the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, the majority of Americans have become entranced by American Idol, focusing instead on the trials of Paris Hilton without seeing their government boldly ignoring the Geneva convents with the illegal torture and imprisonment of suspected terrorists. The fact that the Bush administration is clearly ignoring the United States Constitution with illegal wiretapping while pushing an unsupported war into its third stage of conflict is of little concern to a cowboy nation which is thrilled by the blood-thirsty prospects of kicking even more Middle Eastern ass.

Thanks for All the Vacuums

2007-05-23T02:29:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend I decided to take the first step towards getting my house ready to sell. While the notion of buying a vacuum would certainly be small to most -- it was a great undertaking for me to personally find the perfect vacuum. Until then I had gathered three our four rundown cleaners that were stacked up in the basement. Some of them had only lasted a year before they were rendered useless. I pulled out my handy mobile phone and browsed the reviews on Amazon.com. As it turned out, the returned unit which was out of the box and missing a few pieces had the highest user rating, and cost a 1/3 less than the competition.

While one could fascinate on the "make believe" pennies earned through Amazon.com, you'd be missing the point of the power of the people. The largest corporations spend billions on marketing -- at times, a full 60% of the manpower. This means that image is everything to a corporation. We control that image and reward them for gaining it by buying what they're selling. The mobile Amazon.com model shows us that we can share our knowledge and thus control the industry with a higher degree of accuracy. Imagine simultaneous support of products & services with real-time impacts on massive corporations.

The larger they are, as they say.

And therein lies the problem: Where many would cry the failure of Socialism is the ability of one man to persecute a nation. We could argue this of our current president, but I believe there are larger forces -- forces which naturally grow in the fertile soil of Capitalism. The Corporations. Growing larger than countries with virtual borders that extend across the great oceans. And like their Fatherlands the private institutions will break away from the governance of the State. This will begin the end of Government and the rise of the United Corporations of North America.

From our immediate past we also see the fall and rise of the Church. With Science and Reason taking a stab at its last leg, Religion is moving to overtake the rule of Government. However, this is little more than two left wings flapping for control, ultimately strengthening the grip of the right. In our case, big business controls the food, big business controls the medicine. Big business is degrading the quality of public services and will soon control the education as it does all the other services: electricity, water, gasoline. We already see the signs as today's fragments of Democracy are simply the bureaucratic machinery behind the wheels of the Corporations.

This is why I sincerely say "Thanks for all the vacuums." No matter how large the Church or Government, no matter how All Powerful the Corporation, WE are ultimately IT. IT is OUR Faith, OUR Beliefs, OUR Support that drives those forces towards success or failure. WE have a tool that allows us to speak with one another directly, in order to form the first True Democracy ever witnessed in the History of Man. We can now connect into one cohesive body which truly represents each and every individual through the power of their own voice. This is where we take a stand. This is where we claim the throne. This is when it all begins:

Standing in the Mall buying a used vacuum.

Thanks, again, for all the vacuums.

America: Empire or Republic?

2007-05-18T14:48:00.000-04:00

Future of Freedom Foundation
May 17, 2007
by Jacob G. Hornberger

We now live in a country in which the president wields the power to send the entire nation into war on his own initiative, without the congressional declaration of war required by the Constitution.

We live in a country in which the president and the military wield the power to arrest an American citizen and incarcerate him in a military installation for the rest of his life on suspicion of being a terrorist, denying him due process of law, trial by jury, and other procedural rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

We live in a country in which the president wields the power to conduct warrantless searches and seizures, regardless of the provisions of the Fourth Amendment.

We live in a country in which the president wields the power to ignore any law passed by Congress simply by signing a statement, in his military capacity as a commander in chief, indicating an intention to ignore the law.

In fact, we live in a country in which the president effectively wields the same power here in the United States that he wields in Iraq, given his belief that the entire world, including the United States, is a battlefield in the "war on terror."

How did it all come to this? How did a country that once prided itself on being the freest nation in history end up with a ruler who wields such omnipotent powers?

Read the full article!

What is Free in America?

2007-05-04T17:31:00.000-04:00

My grandfather once asked, "America: Land of the Free? What's free in America?" While my passion for this country dwindles each day I try to remember that it isn't as bad as it obviously is elsewhere. In fact, whenever I voice my distaste for America the Pride and Glory's tell me I'm an idiot. Apparently, there is no greater place on Earth than the United States of America.

In reality, this country is in the middle of most charts that include key concerns such as health, welfare, and education. The only statistics we really top are waste and pollution -- that is why most of the globe actually view us as greedy, capitalistic pigs. Imagine all of our grandparents mending their own clothes, or their parents actually making them from cloth! Now picture our parents buying our clothes at the department store. Our generation currently buys two to three times more clothing than them.

So we are greedy and wasteful. That's Capitalism. But that's also the reason why we all get to live our cozy iPod lifestyles, buying middle classed houses which cost a quarter million on the low end -- half million in the middle. But consider that a shell that paints a separate reality from what exists in the core. Our inner cities are war torn countrysides. Don't consider it to be a race issue: it's a class struggle -- something else we painted as a problem "somewhere else."

Few of these realities actually pierce the Power Ranger veil we place around ourselves and our children. In response to the governor of Ohio putting an end to school vouchers which give state money to send students to private schools, one woman got on the radio crying her heart out. She called for the governor to look her little girl in the eyes and tell her she had to go back to all the guns and violence in the public school system. Her greatest desire was to have her little girl get a privately funded education.

This woman is obviously aware of the war in our country, but she missed the fact that these class struggles exist because of our lack of social welfare. Most of us are aware that the rich are getting richer but we believe this is happening evenly across the board. We call it inflation. We also call corporations people. That means your middle class, fifty thousand paycheck somehow compares to the billions corporations earn each year. Millions in the country live under the poverty line. I'm sure they want to know: "What is free in the Land of the Free."

If we are to believe that our voices are free then we've missed the riots in L.A. where millions of Latinos were shot at by the local authorities. Those thirteen million illegal aliens have come here looking for the milk and honey and instead found themselves being rounded up in concentration camps as possible threats to our National Security. Our conversations are recorded, our actions monitored by satellite technology, and our rights to eat and live sold to the corporations. What is Free in the Land of the Free? Why do so many want to live desperately in a place which sickens me?

I believe it has something to do with the image we're selling on television. When you look at the world through the eyes of American media you'd see Russia as a cold, desolate wasteland; South America as a hot bed for blood-thirsty revolutionaries; Canada as a bunch of moose-huggers; Europe as the Dark Ages; Asia as a gigantic sweat shop; and of course the Middle East. That goes without saying. Apparently the only civilization worthy of First World status is the U.S.A. Everybody else is obviously second class citizens.

And yet, the more I see of the Green Revolution taking place in Europe, the more I wonder why we would allow all the solar energy technology to be shipped over seas instead of over-hauling the corporate grip on our basic necessities -- food, energy, transportation. Realize that we're developing nanotechnology in this country which can be painted on our rooftops and siding. This means that your entire house can generate enough electricity to power your cars and appliances, and have enough left over to SELL BACK to the electric country at the end of the day!

Nothing is Free! We don't even own our property -- the BANKS do! While I do have issues with calling us Wage Slaves (being that it lessens the experience of actual SLAVES) I know that I cannot live without a job. Furthermore, I cannot live WELL without a corporate job. This country is a rich tapestry of farms woven together and yet we have few choices other than factory food and livestock? And yet after decades we are still blind to these truths because of the reality they're selling us on television!

So if nothing is Free in America, I want a revolution before things get any worse. I tell myself that the buildings aren't on fire without realizing that they're rotting from the inside instead. I see the progress on the fringes and know it to be a lie. I want the truth. I want the truth to be heard. I want what our forefathers promised: I want freedom. I want what they're selling to Iraq: I want Democracy. And I'm not alone. This is what America wants -- what America believes in.

If we're fighting for it in other countries, shouldn't we be brave enough to fight for it at home?

Back in the Summer of '96

2007-05-01T02:41:00.000-04:00

My recollection of the past is sketchy at best. What I do remember is that sometime after I entered into college I began learning how to publish my writing on the Internet. Before long I had a couple dozen stories hosted on a free server, tied together with a personal biography along with a list of authors that inspired my writing. As the story goes, the traffic started to travel towards the information I gathered about Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, with little attention paid to my writing. Shortly after, I gathered the list of authors onto their own site and called it the Bohemian Ink.

Over a decade later I find myself on a similar path. "The Collected Works of Christopher D. Ritter" -- also known as Corduroy's Coffeehouse -- has long been forgotten, and in it's place, this blog; while the Ink has added a few letters and become Impresto. I've even met a couple great people from a start-up right before entering an awesome job at a big design firm. I'm hoping that history continues to repeat itself and offers a great position at a company that I truly have my heart in. Of course, being bought out by corporation after corporation did suck the first time around.

And all the while life moves as wildly as it pleases. I continue to hold on to each passing cloud, hoping someday that the rain will cause the crops to grow. I plant this seed of insanity in hopes that it will blossom into a dream -- one empowered by the social web, bringing this fully connected world back home to reality. I see so many problems all around and I realize that it is time to bring about the rise of an Open Society, allowing each individual to contribute their ideas, and evolve, as a species, into One.

Let's just hope I don't go crazy in the process!

Livn Flickr '06

2007-04-29T15:42:00.000-04:00

Saturday morning at the newly renovated Golden Nugget begins by standing in a long line waiting to be seated. My recent conquest over checking my gMail account using an old crappy phone made me curious to see if Flickr worked just as well. My thoughts were that capturing the moment on "mobile film" would help tighten the gap between technology and life. Unfortunately the amount of time it took to sign-in and eventually fail at uploading my picture proved the opposite; the bright side being that I essentially got to blank out during the line standing experience.

The only reason why I thought to do this over breakfast was that most of yesterday and today has been spent learning the Flickr way. A couple weeks ago I uploaded a bunch of my designs but lost my hard drive in the process. I can't begin to count the amount of music, writing, and old design examples I lost in that crash. Getting back on Flickr was frankly too depressing until I got a call from Ning.com with a request to see my design portfolio. Thanks to FactoryJoe for showing me the way! (And thanks to Anton Barbeau for chanting "I'm gonna live forever 'till the day I die!")

So back on the Flickr trail I managed to scour the web in search of my old designs that managed to permeate the web. The bulk, of course, coming from both McAfee.com and NeoWorx, as Cybertrust (and their high security corporate policies) never released anything to the public but their earnings report. I uploaded these along with a couple screen shots I took from the Web and uploaded an incredibly professional portfolio on Flickr. Really makes me regret all the hours I sunk into web and PDF portfolios in previous lifetimes.

Standing in line at the Golden Corral I thought of all those moments that had come and gone; how the technology of paper and trinkets is so temporary as to be lost in a moment of forgetfulness; that the social web is an evolution in our thoughts as a species; how mobile connects our minds more substantially than quick conversations and instant messages. Livn Flickr '06 was an expansion of consciousness if not for the fact that the technology hadn't quite caught up to Dayton, Ohio 2007. None of it, really, worked.

Back at the homestead on my decade old PC I managed to meander down memory lane recalling all the old sites I uploaded to Flickr. It was great to include a line or two about the politics at play with the work, as well as locate the position of the contract on a Google map. Unfortunately, as websites tends to do, this pushed me out of my immediate contacts to deal with those far and wide. Doesn't quite feel as advanced as I had hoped -- but BOY does my portfolio look fantastic! Stop on by and leave some comments. Help me look good for my future employer!

(You know who you are.)

A Message to MoveOn.org

2007-04-27T00:13:00.000-04:00

I find it most unfortunate that your organization removed access to the public forum so far in advance of the elections. It seems as if the moment people begin selecting the right candidate that one of the strongest tools on the Internet would be taken away for "bandwidth" reasons.

This decision seems to follow an underlying contradiction to your message. While I see the promises of working with the Christian Coalition on Internet Freedom along with the opportunity to discuss our ideas in a public forum, I also see that you strongly oppose electronic voting machines in favor of paper ballots.

While I am still young I remember recent examples where paper trails consistently followed the lies which continue to lead this country around in circles. The answer is simple: Open Source Voting. But before this is possible, we require machines which would allow anyone to vote -- regardless of them owning a personal computer.

Before that happens it seems quite obvious that further education is required of those who begin online democratic forums without realizing that the Internet is evolving into a Social Web. We are coming together as human beings for the first time since we sat foot in this world.

Denying the technology which is enabling the Social Web only goes further to build a wall between those who have -- in this case, access to the paper trails -- and those who have not. Open Source voting is transparent enough for everyone to count.

Please stop campaigning for paper trails and help support the Open Source and Free Culture Movement.

The Free Culture Movement

2007-04-26T01:40:00.000-04:00

Noam Chomsky has seriously impaired by ability to appreciate NPR. On the worst day of civilian casualties in Iraq the American Media was overtaken by a crack pot with a gun. My image of NPR as a "fair and balanced" news source was flooded every fifteen minutes with an update on Virginia Tech. The media has sensationalized the tragedy to the point that we overlooked our President sending even more of our children off to die. The simple bait and switch routine gets us every time.

But the trick of it is that you've got to have a big enough flash to get our attention. The easiest way to accomplish this is to have us all watching the same show. This is how we lost control of our Freedom. This is also how we have arrived at a turning point in our culture. The shows they once controlled on our televisions and radios are being replaced by an open source: shared videos on YouTube, free software on Linux, public audio through podcasts, along with an overwhelming explosion of social networks.

This is the beginnings of the Free Culture Movement.

Elsewhere on NPR I was disappointed with an interview on Fresh Air where the host repeatedly attempted to shred the creator of Wikipedia. For those of you yet to be addicted to knowledge please know that everyone from my grandmother to my daughter has fallen in love with learning thanks to his site. The interviewer's constant criticisms of the accuracy of Open Knowledge felt like Fear to me. The fires she doused on his Free Culture Movement made it difficult to understand what he was talking about. Thankfully, he's got a website!

The Free Culture Foundation

After the interview I caught PRI blending the two subjects together on a discussion on Open Source Terrorism. The idea being that terrorist cells are evolving along an open source frameworks. This means that structures, which once had a core that could be attacked, are now composed of individual nodes which work in conjunction with one another towards a common goal. The common goal, in their case, being to overthrow the Capitalist Empire of the United States -- their words, not mine.

And like a perfectly organic, open source, social web, the jihad is spreading from the Middle East, across Europe, into Africa; connecting the strong network in Cuba, and the whole of South America. In plain terms, we're fighting a war using 1950 military tactics, relying on our superior technology to overwhelm the enemy in their home territory. Just like Vietnam all over again. What you don't see is a bunch of long haired hippie types tied up naked to a tree.

This generation is tied to their keyboard, putting the words of Karl Marx into action by providing software which is free and open to everyone to use and benefit from. But that is barely the tip of the iceberg. Free Culture seeks to explore the furthest reaches of what a Free and Open Society truly means. Please sign up and show your support by using free software such as FireFox and OpenOffice, and building social networks on Blogger, Wordpress, and Ning.

The future is happening now. Get involved!

The Next Mimsy

2007-04-19T00:47:00.000-04:00

At approximately 3pm this afternoon I leaned against the sunny side of my office enjoying a cigarette when my body began to buzz. My initial thoughts raced around the crazy lines of logic I followed last summer -- imagining that the resonance of my body was operating at a different frequency, as if the electricity which was racing through my cells was evolving my DNA and all that nonsense. I stomped out my smoke and passed through the security checkpoint, walked up the stairs and sat in the middle of a complex filled with cubicles as far as the eye can see.

Currently I'm involved in the redesign of a major corporate website. My job is to switch outdated code with the current trends. Typically I entertain myself by listening to podcasts such as Democracy Now! Since Monday they've been interviewing Noam Chomsky along with his friend and fellow philosopher Howard Zinn -- who just so happened to author a book I'd love to get the Cliff Notes for: The People's History of the United States. (I say Cliff Notes but actually I would prefer a YouTube video. I am the child of the media culture for Your sake!

To illustrate my point: On the car ride to the movies with my two little ladies I was attempting to interest my daughter on The People's History of the United States. I said that "I'd trade something to get you to read that book in tandem with your lessons at school." Undoubtedly she's forgotten the proposal and the name of the book by now. Still, I feel it is my duty to come up with something tempting enough to get her to read the book.)

In the last series of interviews, Noam Chomsky told a story about listening to NPR and becoming so angry that he didn't notice he was speeding -- apparently an unacceptable excuse to the cop that wrote him the ticket. The story on the radio told all about the "Great Black Hope," Mr. Barak Obama. "He got a really good response from the crowd. Everybody seemed to love him. There was a lot of energy amongst the crowd on such a cold and rainy day."

And I heard the sales pitch that Mr. Chomsky pointed out when he said that "the same people who sell you toothpaste sell you the next President of the United States." And I knew that I wanted to vote for Mr. Obama in the next election but I didn't know why until then. But when the show on the radio suddenly started talking about an actor on a popular television show considering his name for the Republican ticket, I knew every mention of the word Reagan was intentional (from a radio station I considered to be unbiased).

At the age of 33 my interest in politics absolutely astound me. What I'm piecing together about the process of information being filtered from the AP newswire to appease the advertisers -- I realized that it took me too long to begin to see the world around me for what it really is. And I wondered how my little girl would ever see past the bright lights of the millionaires to see what she was put here to do; or if she would have to wait until her thirties just like her old man.

When I heard Noam mention that "if the War in Vietnam was actually taught in schools the War in Iraq would have never been fought." What little manages to make it to the media struggles to make a mark in the publishing world. As far as the history books which our children study are concerned, the war was fought and America left, with a bunch of hippies doing things kids shouldn't do in between. Thankfully I had He-Man and G.I. Joe to teach me right from wrong. That's more than I can say for my daughter now that the Powerpuff Girls are off the air.

After the three of us managed to inhale a bag full of burritos we bought our tickets to see The Last Mimsy. Up until this point I was assuming we were watching a movie about time traveling bunny rabbits. The plot sounded a lot safer than the rash of Mexican PETA porn we've been watching. By the time we got to the real toys I was amazed. I felt as if I was watching my daughter's generation's Neverending Story; her Dark Crystal, or Labrynth. The crazy part was that the movie inspired every interest I had last Summer -- of the Mayan maps of the universe and the Evolution of our Species.

Every reason why I write this blog is stuffed inside The Last Mimsy. What's more is that those same voices which help guide me through the packaged products my government is selling to me, my daughter now has the most important thing of all to give to our youth: Hope. If my crazy theories are correct, that resonance carries outward and shapes the world around us. The message of the Bush Administration is Terror, which leads to fear -- shaping the very fabric of our DNA and destroying our race.

Bug whispering sounds a hell of a lot cooler.

Resistance to Civil Government

2007-04-17T18:46:00.000-04:00

While Walden can be applied to almost anyone's life, "Civil Disobedience" is like a venerated architectural landmark: it is preserved and admired, and sometimes visited, but for most of us there are not many occasions when it can actually be used. Still, although it is seldom mentioned without references to Gandhi and King, "Civil Disobedience" has more history than many suspect. In the 1940's it was read by the Danish resistance, in the 1950's it was cherished by people who opposed McCarthyism, in the 1960's it was influential in the struggle against South African apartheid, and in the 1970's it was discovered by a new generation of anti-war activists. The lesson learned from all this experience is that Thoreau's ideas really do work, just as he imagined they would.

"Civil Disobedience"
by Henry David Thoreau (1849)

Part One - Part Two - Part Three

The Healthy Americans Act

2007-04-16T14:42:00.000-04:00

It’s time to fix health care and provide universal coverage to all. After decades of talk and study, it’s time for action. Fixing health care is not as complicated as one might think. Start by eliminating the inefficiency, beginning with when a person signs up for coverage. Get citizens good outpatient health care so they don’t go to hospital emergency rooms when it is preventable. Reward prevention – health care, not sick care. Beef up the quality of care by reducing medical errors in our hospitals. The Healthy Americans Act does this. The legislation provides a guarantee: Private coverage—at least as good as Members of Congress receive—is a right of all Americans that can never be taken away. With this guarantee, there will be universal coverage for no more than America spends as a nation today on health care.

THE HEALTHY AMERICANS ACT

…guarantees universal, private health insurance for ALL Americans.

Under the new system, every American will have the power to choose a comprehensive health insurance plan, and—with individuals, employers and government each investing something into the system—insurance will be guaranteed to be affordable for every American.

The Healthy Americans Act will match insurers with health care consumers in an environment designed for competition. Each state, with financial support from the Federal government and insurance companies, will establish a Health Help Agency. Health Help Agencies will lower administrative costs by coordinating payments from employers, individuals and government. These agencies will also provide consumers with unbiased information about competing private health plans and determine premim reductions that will ensure every American can afford their health plan. With the resources to compare plans based on quality, cost and service, individuals—rather than their employers—will be empowered to choose the health plan that works best for them and their families.

Government will be responsible for ensuring that every American has and can afford health insurance. Every time an individual interacts with state, local and federal government—registering their car, enrolling their children in school, applying for a driver’s license or paying their taxes—they can be required to verify their enrollment in a private health insurance plan. Government will in turn ensure that every American can afford health care by working through the Health Help Agencies to lowe premiums and by providing standard health care tax deductions for individuals and families.

Read the full PDF by clicking here.

Fast Food Renationalization Project

2007-04-15T03:50:00.000-04:00

Every now and then you find a movie on the wall of the video store that you were one excited to see but had somehow forgotten. The title alone is enough to evoke an instant guarantee of a night of pure entertainment; such that on the way home you would practice your interviews for when they asked how you got involved with the film. I would tell the press that I knew /Fast Food Nation/ was another quick investment from someone in Hollywood looking to make a couple bucks -- but /Fast Food Nation/-- the Opportunity to work on a movie adaptation of such an important book is a rare chance in a lifetime.

What really sold me on picking up the movie was a conversation my daughter and I had the day before. Apparently she has reached the point in a young girl's life where the consumption of meat is called into question. The stories of animal parts and other crap falling into the low quality meat served as the foundation to her wanting to explore the vegetable side of the plate. Her only reservation was the fact that, aside from pickles and potato chips, she didn't really know what other options were available. My hopes were that providing an all-star cast of Hollywood liberalism was a good way to help her begin to explore.

When we finally got situated we started by watching some of the cartoons in the DVD extras. These were wonderful little PETA-lite commercials with cows and pigs acting out roles from the Matrix. They called it /The Meatrix/ and tied the three shorts together with a website to help kids learn more about where the meat comes from. The last cartoon didn't have so much to do with Morpheus but did involve a lot more intestines being pulled out of cute little animals than I would have preferred my little girl watching. Then we got to the movie and I realized that those little critters didn't hold a candle to what was in store.

** WARNING : SPOILERS FOLLOW **

/Fast Food Nation/ can best be described as Mexican PETA Porn filled with plenty of blood and drugs and hamburgers. The wonderful little tidbits of liberal one-liners were drowned out by the cameras attention to the lusty little immigrants. The big names like Bruce Willis and Kris Kristofferson were but momentary flashes of greatness before a grand slaughterhouse finale which led to the main character going right back to working for the man. Ultimately I would have thought the entire movie to be a complete loss until I saw the making of the film.

I believe that the real film may actually be on the cutting room floor of an underpaid editor who decided he wasn't making enough money to finish the job. If this is the case we might have the opportunity to petition Richard Linklater to post the full movie on BitTorrent. Movie editors from around the country could submit different variations of the final movie -- some dry, witty humor or bloody gory mutilation -- whatever the director feels represents his message to the audience. A certain 911 exposure film did the same thing recently. It's the least he could do after introducing my daughter to the wilder side of Mexico.

The Fall of MySpace.com

2007-01-16T23:43:00.000-05:00

A couple days ago an alter ego of mine whispered the headline of an article in my ear from a magazine that I've forgotten. The words on the psychonet state that MySpace.com is a fad lead by the youth who have been hopping from one social network to the next for the last several years. Each year the snowball effect gets larger and larger, as the hundreds of thousands on DiaryLand turned into millions on Friendster. A couple years later and we've gathered tens of millions on MySpace.com, and before long the migratory digital herd will follow the next trend while the steadily growing older take a little longer to catch on.

Fascinate yourself awhile on the subject of human evolution in cyberspace. Information is at a tipping point about to spill every fact we know. Less than a decade ago this idea would have terrified us. Imagining every action to be filmed, our transactions recorded. We painted a Big Brother looming over our heads with the sign of the Beast microchipped below the surface of his skin. And then something changed. We gave them the technology and they recorded everything for us. They unlocked the doors to their lives and shared it on their profiles and recorded it in their blogs. Then they started sharing their songs on podcasts, and have just begun to take over the television stations through YouTube.

Something is happening, and people smarter than you are starting to realize that the world is rapidly changing into something very different from what we already know. The blind have been lead to believe that the Al-qaeda are the masterminds behind global terrorism, and those asleep have been fed the dream of Democracy from a country which blatenly practices Global Domination. The lazy have resigned to the fact that renewable resources will be replaced by something different which solves all the problems of Global Warming. The cynics and the Saints preach to us that this is simply the end of our species, while the bankers pay the marketing department to sedate us through entertainment literally designed for morons in order to make a profit from it all.

Take another step back and look at all of it as possibilities. The Internet Culture is about to grow mainstream and take control of our consumer spending, along with our prime time viewer interests, target markets, and focus groups. This means instant messaging, file sharing, and video streams. The individual is about to become a part of the whole through the power of the Internet. They are about to become One, and lose grasp of any boundaries between languages or religions. They would be the Internet Culture if they weren't already in our schools evolving the way we educate our children. The Internet Culture is already here. And by the way: They're big on sharing.

The fact that MySpace.com is being farmed by Rupert Murdoch for fame and fortune condemns News Corp for spending billions on the ownership without sharing a penny of the profit with his followers. Websites such as SecondLife has made millionaires of its members simply for playing the game. MySpace.com makes millions simply for advertising on the front page. YouTube joins with other companies to offer prize money to video makers while the guy that owns practically a third of the world media promotes his movies and television shows. Once something better comes along the cracks in the system will spring a leak, and all the traffic will flow somewhere else.

The future as I see it looks a lot like MySpace.com. Every man and woman of every race, color, and creed will have a profile that represents every side of their emtions. They will contain a beautiful movie with blogged narration, and generate demand for a free and open source government. The resources of the world will be distributed where necessary by the agreements of everyone involved. The value of the dollar will disappear to the value of life, and they will share world with everyone. You read their words right and you'll feel a little song deep inside your chest. You already know all if this is happening now. We need to recognize the Truth and plan accordingly.

MySpace.com is about to fall.

The OregonDistrict.com is open for business!

The Origin of Feces

2007-01-13T23:46:00.000-05:00

As I continue to discover the Truth of our time
I consistently find myself at the base of Darwin's mountain
looking high into the clouds for a peak at the fittest
and wondering which of us were meant to survive.

Meanwhile Dante's simplist vision of Hell plays out repeatedly
as billions of humans push a rock up the side
only to watch it fall back down on payday
when the tax men collect their dues.

For whatever reason could this illusion exist
than in the metaphor of a promised land filled
with all the weath promised by our movie stars?

And so we work as individuals to collect our fair share
only to find ourselves divided against each other
racing towards the top of the mountain.

Boycott Holiday Spending

2006-12-17T23:45:00.000-05:00

This holiday season -- when you gather the children round the Christmas yule -- instead of filling their eager little ears with a story about reindeers, do a little research on the Father of Christmas. Skip past the propaganda you've been telling them about a pagan ritual celebrating the end of winter. It doesn't involve a 4th Century bishop of Asia Minor riding around on ten tiny little reindeer to remind us of the birth of Christ. The Real Father of Christmas also happens to be the nephew of Sigmund Freud. His name is name is Edward Bernays.

Take a look at the beginning of the Christmas Season that starts the day after Thanksgiving, also known as Black Friday. Think about how American's celebrate this day -- by getting up at 5 am to catch the early bird specials, flocking to catch the sale of a century generated by advertising in the early part of the year. The day is called Black Friday because a majority of businesses run at a loss until the holiday season when they earn nearly 40% of their yearly earnings. They're counting on us to shop, and every year we buy into the dream at a price that few of us can hardly afford.

Edward Bernays took a close look at Uncle Freud's work and found a way to manipulate large groups of people through their primal instincts. He founded the field of Public Relations and made a fortune selling big business the secrets to getting people to buy their products. Before Bernays the manufatures worried what would happen when everyone owned one of their products. Afterwards they learned how to hook us into next year's model, and eventually taught our children how to influence our purchasing decisions.

My favorite story is best shared while walking around the shopping malls. Should luck lead you to a Banana Republic, take a moment to consider where the retail outlet got their name. The Ghost of Christmas Past is at it again in Honduras, working with the United Fruit Company to provide millions of Americans their daily potassium. The company set the wages for pratically the whole of the country which inspired the citizens to rise up against the government. Bernays reponded with anti-Socialist propaganda and turned the country back around to the control of Capitalist leaders.

The truth is that these same Capitalist leaders have hijacked the sleigh and taken us on a debt-ridden ride through long lines filled with angry people fighting over worthless trash that will be obsolete in a year. The spirit of giving is a flimsey excuse to spend so much money over the holiday season, which is why I recommend highly that everyone reading this BOYCOTT HOLIDAY SPENDING. We have final control over the system, and can easily enact the TRUE spirit of the season by following these three easy steps.

1. Visit with your friends and family and bring them good holiday cheer that can typically be communicated with a smile. Some holiday phrases which might come in handy include: "Happy Holidays," or "Merry Christmas!"

2. If you're gathering for a festive occasion which involves food, bring over a dish that you've made yourself -- even if you can't cook! The spirit of giving involves a bit of self-expression, which is most certainly rewarded around the holidays.

3. When children are involved, satiate their hunger for consumerism with something fun that everyone can enjoy. That way everyone can have a good time catching up with family members they haven't seen in a year.

If you must purchase something to put under the tree: Shop Local. The businesses in the district include silver shops and antique dealers, hair salons and music stores. There's a story to be had when you buy something unique from a business in your local neighborhood. Get the folks a gift card to a popular local restaurant, or get the kids a new whiney new Emo tattoo. The community becomes tighter when you show your support and sees more success than the stress filled months typically produce, resulting in everyone shopping happily ever after.

Isn't that a better story than the one's you've been telling your children?

The Dumbest Common Denomonator

2006-12-08T23:43:00.000-05:00

Picture yourself on the television sofa with a dry, pasty taste in your mouth. Looking down you see the crumbs of something or another spread across your shirt. You notice that a body part has gone numb, then realize that you've been staring at the television for an indeterminable amount of time. Might have been ten or fifteen minutes. Maybe an hour or two. For whatever length of time you've been in a state of mind which allowed all of their messages to slip in unchallenged by your logic. That's why they call it "Television Programming." You come back hungry for a snack, itching to buy the latest edition, completely unsatisfied with your life until you obtain the dream they're selling you.

The truth is that the majority of television and radio broadcasts, as well as film and print media, are designed for a 10th grader. You're junior and senior year were a waste according to the news and entertainment industrys. To be honest, that's the average. The vast majority of media that Americans are exposed to are intented for even lower grades -- 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th. My daughter is 11 years old. Next year she will have reached the pinnacle of human acheivement -- or at least the dumbest common denomonater. What they define as the average American viewer. Scary when you put it into the context of an actual 12 year old. Imagine telling them to step learing, that everything from this point on will be superfluous to what you actually need to know.

When you look at the actual development cycle of a human you'll begin to see why the news and entertainment are developed for such an "incomplete" level of understanding. At that point in our lives we're just beginning to break away from the mold our parents have set for us. We're making our own choices about what we want out of our lives. It's at that point when we're most susceptable to the desires they put before us. Picking an age group isn't nearly as effective as dumbing down the content to appeal to that age group within all of us. You might think that to be a conspiracy until you wake up one day to realize the chips on your belly aren't even satisfying. They're just something you inexlicably feel as if you need.

These compulsory needs obviously extend to the flat screen televisions and flip phones that all of us desire. But they also reach deep into our illusory Freedoms and obscure many of the inalienable rights we have as a species. No human should be forced to earn the right to live. Air, water, food, and shelter should be provided to every member of the human race regardless of the profits involved. The fact that an entire nation strives towards a wealthy existance while an entire continent loses tens of thousands of children each day exposes a deep and disturbing foundation to our way of life. What's more is that many of us have been programmed to believe that the trillions of dollars we instead speand on War is intended to protect our way of life.

Here's a handy story to tell your children late at night. The IRS is an extortion racket run by the Federal Reserve -- a private organization lead by international banks which exists as a separate entity from the government. We don't actually own anything. They do. They own the land that we rent for our buildings -- if any of us are actually lucky enough to own a home. The majority of "home owners" are actually in debt to the bank, paying off interests to a twenty-year loan. Look at your next pay stub and count off the third which is taken out for taxes. This is Unconstitutional. There are no laws which allow the government to take a percentage of our money earned through employment. We're just too afraid to tell them no.

It doesn't matter that thousands are living free from the threat of the IRS, or that those who have tried and failed have gone to prison for attempting to do so. We simply roll our eyes as we're programmed to do without seriously considering doing the same. In fact we typically resent those who have succeeded and seek to tear them down from their position of privelidge, effectively doing the work of the extortioners to promote fear and resentment from your collegues. If that doesn't work they throw out the Socialist argument when in reality we exist in the very definition of a Fascist state, all the while believing that we not only live in a true Democracy, but are justified by the will of God in spreading our way of life throughout the globe.

Speaking of God, I just saw the worst piece of propaganda on Google Video for a film that I will not mention by name. The movie contatins the EXACT SAME PROPAGANDA that the government spread during the Cold War with Russia. Instead of all terrorist activity being centralized in Russia through advanced technology that we've yet to develop, the enemy is now working out of the "Axis of Evil" with smart bombs that could hardly be detected with today's security devices. Our government gave them a punchy name -- they never called themselves Al-qaeda -- and turned a bunch of underfunded desert rebels into a global force of domination. The hatred we've generated through Western Expansionism has generated a deep hatred of America, which we capture of film and spin to generate more terror in our homeland.

If you're not offended by now let me remind you that "technically" you're all a bunch of morons. That is "a person having the mental age of 8 to 12 years old who is capable of doing routine work under supervision." You're a slave to the system, lead by the ropes of your own desires, worshiping a false ideal of fame and fortune, without a clue of a possible alternative. We're clearly involved in a game of Monopoly where an elite 5% get to change to rules when it suits them. The solution to this problem is clear. If the evolution of our species is something you've lost hope in thanks to the system they've nurtured you to believe, take a look at our technology. Each of us are connected to the other through the Internet.

We're standing on the precipice of the future.

But unfortunately there are many futures which lie before us. The possibility exists for a Totalitarian state to emerge from the direction this country is currently headed. We also have the rare opprotunity to share our ideas with one another and bond together as a whole. A complete entity that one might refer to as the "human organism." Those who tell you that humans are instinctively self-serving are urging to you focus on the evolutionary ground we've already covered. They want you to submit to the system and join the ranks amongst the dumbest common denomonator. I would rather you not submit. Instead, find that part of you that is uniquely you, and strive towards your individual greatness in the service of others.

The rewards will be much greater than the million dollar image they're selling you.