I've been so damn busy these days, writing anything interesting for good ol Hongpong.com has been pretty much set aside.

It's a really weird political season, hell, around here it's been a weird weather season. There was freezing rain all over my car on Friday night. It's already the end of April. It's probably a good thing that I haven't been puttering around blogging and obsessing over what's on the Internet. That shit gets tiresome!

Can't Mess With The Atmos: I got the new Atmosphere album, "When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That S*** Gold", and it's damn good. Slug dropped damn near all the bombast, now he's just trying to tell us kids to pay the bills and get it together... Be sure to check out their awesome "Paint it Gold" webcasts - they have been really excellent.

Visit the "not Google Killer Google Killer": Twine.com: Quite a while ago I mentioned the interesting Twine.com project, which lets you add all your own bookmarks/notes/videos/etc into a big online repository, kind of like Del.icio.us plus Facebook.
Basically you can cluster your areas of interest by setting up "Twines" of semantically tagged content. Most interestingly, you can upload huge chunks of text and PDFs, and it will automatically scan through and pull out the names and organizations involved.
Finally I got the 'beta invite' to join Twine, and of course I dumped in as much hard Iran-Contra conspiracy evidence text I had laying around. Add a few bookmarks, and Twine went crazy all over the stuff, indexing all the CIA drug dealers, locales and front companies of interest. Verdict: Fantastic conspiracy data mining!
Look at all the Conspiracy Entity Names it automatically spit out (in orange at right) when I put in the famed CIA Limited Hangout Frederick Hitz report on "Allegations of connections between CIA and Contras in cocaine trafficking to the United States." Contrary to popular belief, you can still read this report on the CIA's website (with some alterations).
If anyone else would like an invitation to try Twine, plz send me an email @ hongpong AT hongpong.com ! Use data mining to exp0se the stuff! Oh noooes!!

Or also, from the last several days...

Political Punch: Liberal bloggers sayin Clinton ads darken Obama. Some others say it is a YouTube artifact effect.

Atmosphere released a free MP3 from the next album.

Hillary, Obama and the Establishment Machine | The Agonist

Hm. Definitely interesting: The Man Between War and Peace, Admiral Fallon.

Cuban Cyber Rebels and their flash drives and blogs! Viva Cuba flashdriva!

Smashing Magazine has nice design and free fonts.

io9 has random sci fi stuff. cool design too.

When in doubt, check out the Gary Webb video @ Archive.org, late in his life reflecting on the whole Los Angeles CIA crack cocaine thingy.

Global Guerillas is pretty buzzwordy, but it's pretty good. For your daily dose of super-modern open source insurgent warfare, extortion through DDoS - both Russian and Botnet variants, the imminent insect techno-eschaton, and how one super-empowered individual guerilla Henry Okah has brought Nigeria into total chaos and propelled oil over $100 a barrel. This Robb guy is definitely paying attention. National security bureaucracies are doomed?! Not if they can hoard up their own very biggest bestest haystack!

Meanwhile the economic crash continues apace. Much hand-wringing at one of my favorite spots, the Agonist . Wheat is over $12/bushel.

Buffett: it's a recession, stupid.

Banks face systemic margin call, $325 billion hit: JP Morgan!

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street banks are facing a "systemic margin call" that may deplete banks of $325 billion of capital due to deteriorating subprime U.S. mortgages, JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N:Quote, Profile, Research), said in a report late on Friday.

JPMorgan, which sent a default notice to Thornburg Mortgage Inc. (TMA.N: Quote,Profile, Research) after the lender missed a $28 million margin call, said more default notices and margin calls were likely. The Carlyle Group's mortgage fund also failed to meet $37 million in margin calls this week.

"A systemic credit crunch is underway, driven primarily by bank writedowns for subprime mortgages," according to the report co-authored by analyst Christopher Flanagan. "We would characterize this situation as a systemic margin call."

The credit crisis that began about a year ago will likely intensify after Friday's weak February U.S. employment report "that most definitely signals recession," JPMorgan said.

Bush Family Piggy Bank Receives Default Notice! | The Agonist

The best news I have heard is the insane bastards in Florida who have taken advantage of the crashed system. They are sitting in their homes, paying nothing at all, waiting for the totally conked court system to struggle with the lost paperwork at every level of the mortgage. An awesome thing to behold!! The Big Picture | Foreclosure-proof Homeowners:

What is shocking, that in each and every case, I have been told by brokers and banks that the owners, have ceased paying their mortgages in some cases for nearly 2 years and have continued to occupy these homes. Now, these are homes in excess of $2,000,000 in the very best neighborhoods in South Florida. Brokers have added that these buyers further complicated things by putting huge home equity lines on top of their mortgages and now have no possibility of selling their homes for amounts needed to cover their accumulated debt.

America is amazing. Ok.

Bloomberg.com Citigroup needs Arab cash, fast!!!! Rlly fast!!!

Russians pissed off about American/Pakistani opium smuggling support in Afghanistan: (via cryptogon)

Narco Aggression: Russia accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking out of Afghanistan by Vladimir Radyuhin

Global Research, February 24, 2008: Global Research Editor's Note

The global proceeds of the Afghan drug trade is in excess of 150 billion dollars a year. There is mounting evidence that this illicit trade is protected by the US military.

Historically, starting in the early 1980s, the Afghan drug trade was used to finance CIA covert support of the Islamic brigades. The 2003 war on Afghanistan was launched following the Taliban government's 2000-2001 drug eradication program which led to a collapse in opium production in excess of 90 percent.

The following report, which accuses the United States of using military transport planes to ship narcotics out of Afghanistan confirms what is already known and documented regarding the Golden Crescent Drug Trade and its insiduous relationship to US intelligence.

February 23, 2008

Russia, facing a catastrophic rise in drug addiction, accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking from Afghanistan.....

....“Unfortunately, they [NATO] are doing nothing to reduce the narcotic threat from Afghanistan even a tiny bit,” Putin angrily remarked three years ago. He accused the coalition forces of “sitting back and watching caravans haul drugs across Afghanistan to the former Soviet Union and Europe.” As time went by, Russian suspicions regarding the U.S. role in the rise of a narco state in Afghanistan grew deeper, especially after reports from Iraq said that the cultivation of opium poppies was spreading rapidly there too.

“The Americans are working hard to keep narco business flourishing in both countries,” says Mikhail Khazin, president of the consultancy firm Niakon. “They consistently destroy the local infrastructure, pushing the local population to look for illegal means of subsistence. And the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] provides protection to drug trafficking.”

U.S. freelance writer Dave Gibson recalled in an article published in American Chronicle in December what a U.S. foreign intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told NewsMax.com in March 2002 of the CIA’s record of involvement with the international drug trade. The official said: “The CIA did almost the identical thing during the Vietnam War, which had catastrophic consequences – the increase in the heroin trade in the USA beginning in the 1970s is directly attributable to the CIA. The CIA has been complicit in the global drug trade for years, so I guess they just want to carry on their favourite business.”

AFP

(A USAF cargo plane takes off from the U.S. airbase in Incirlik in Turkey in March 2003. A Russian news channel reported that drugs from Afghanistan were hauled by American transport aircraft to the U.S. airbases in Kyrgyzstan and Turkey.)

Now Russia has joined the fray accusing the U.S. military of involvement in the heroin trafficking from Afghanistan to Europe. The Vesti channel’s report from Afghanistan said that drugs from Afghanistan were hauled by American transport aircraft to the U.S. airbases Ganci in Kyrgyzstan and Incirlik in Turkey.

The Ganci Air Force base at the Manas international airport in Kyrgyzstan was set up in late 2001 as a staging post for military operations inside Afghanistan. The Kyrgyz government threatened to close the base after neighbouring Uzbekistan shut down a similar U.S. airbase on its territory in 2005, but relented after Washington agreed to make a one-off payment of $150 million in the form of an assistance package and to pay $15 million a year for the use of the base.

One of the best-informed Russian journalists on Central Asia, Arkady Dubnov, recently quoted anonymous Afghan sources as saying that “85 per cent of all drugs produced in southern and southeastern provinces are shipped abroad by U.S. aviation.”

A well-informed source in Afghanistan’s security services told the Russian journalist that the American military acquired drugs through local Afghan officials who dealt with field commanders in charge of drug production.

Writing in the Vremya Novostei daily, Dubnov claimed that the pro-Western administration of President Hamid Karzai, including his two brothers, Kajum Karzai and Akhmed Vali Karzai, are head-to-heels involved in the narcotics trade.

The article quoted a leading U.S. expert on Afghanistan, Barnett Rubin, as telling an anti-narcotics conference in Kabul last October that “drug dealers had infiltrated Afghani state structures to the extent where they could easily paralyse the work of the government if decision to arrest one of them was ever made.”

Sure, they can say the Russians are grumbling like usual. But from Moscow's perspective, the U.S. is just trying to keep on top of all the Players in the Game. And they run the Wire all over the whole territory, so they know exactly who is doing what where, and can watch the opium caravans go cruising by. The fact that this doesn't track in American conventional wisdom is a monument to the intentional ignorance of Baby Boomers, regardless of how accurate the Russians are here.

The planes, the drugs, the detainees, it all seems to be part of a nexus of secret military/DHS contractor airlines. These guys are soooo 1980s. The ponzi scheme depends on information asymmetry, which can always be disrupted......

Good news from those underground mandarins around the corner: Atmosphere put out a free winter album dubbed "Strictly Leakage". Also interesting is that Ant, longtime Rhymesayers beat producer, is featured up front. He has been on stage a lot more as well, although once upon a time he seemed a very reclusive and mysterious figure, to be rarely sighted at First Ave like Waldo.

Download it from this page. And check out the funny fireside chess game video. The fire is a TV screen, i almost missed that. Very post-Minnesotan really.

The new Atmos EP "Sad Clown Bad Winter 11" also has some nice tracks but I haven't heard the whole thing yet.

As long as we are on the subject, Aesop Rock's None Shall Pass is... yet another Aesop Rock album. It will probably take about a year for me to get it.

A lot of stuff piled up on my computer over the last couple weeks. So here it is in a highly messy, condensed and frankly ugly fashion. Also I have to say, my Ecto is having a little trouble making clean links. This post is one of the more badly formatted ones I think I've ever made. *bow*

The war on drugs has been lost. Unless it was all fake to begin with... Hmmm: Smartest drug story of the year: Rolling Stone on the war on drugs. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine and Rolling Stone: How America Lost the War on Drugs.

On a related note: blow your mind with the rotating naked chick 3D mindfuck brain trick! The Right Brain vs Left Brain. More here.

ArmsControlWonk: Curveball! The Book!

Another great moment in Italian politics via Infowars: Ex-Italian President: Intel Agencies Know 9/11 An Inside Job, Man who set up Operation Gladio tells Italy's largest newspaper attacks were run by CIA, Mossad. On the other hand, these are machiavellians: tell the people what they want to hear?

"[Bin Laden supposedly confessed] to the Qaeda September [attack] to the two towers in New York [claiming to be] the author of the attack of the 11, while all the [intelligence services] of America and Europe ... now know well that the disastrous attack has been planned and realized from the CIA American and the Mossad with the aid of the Zionist world in order to put under accusation the Arabic Countries and in order to induce the western powers to take part ... in Iraq [and] Afghanistan."

Ah well. Also on Infowars: Yeah the North American Union exists. A classic: Texas To Track Emergency Evacuees Using RFID. w0w.

Wars to Watch Out For- by Justin Raimondo: 2008 will bring us an abundant crop of overseas crises. and What Antiwar Activists Have to Be Thankful For- by Justin Raimondo.

Mark Baard's Parallel Normal is a new one: World food supply will be rooted in India’s troubled soil. Apparently: "Watching those who watch the watchers: I am a technology reporter tracking the work of conspiracy and esoteric researchers, with an emphasis on brain-chipping, psyops, alternate realities and the apparatus of globalism." Sounds like a good idea there. Nifty site really.

Liberty Dollars wiped out. Take that, alternate currency! Federal Reserve again rules supreme in money printing department!!!1!

BBC: Lifespan link to depression drug.

Shit! Virtual furniture theft leads to real bust.

Why not? knowledgedrivenrevolution.com. Has the latest stuff on Information Warfare without Limits (PSYOPS for the American Consumer Brain). And Information Warfare Using Aggressive Psychological Operations .

More about the surfer dude with the new theory of reality: Penniless Surfer Devises Intriguing Cosmological Theory of Everything. BBC: 248-dimension maths puzzle solved, Upon further review, surfer's new Theory of Everything may be deficient.

The latest from the metal masters: Puscifer by Tool's Maynard James Keenan.

Packet Forgery By ISPs: A Report on the Comcast Affair | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Net neutrality to get new life in Congress | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

EFF study confirms Comcast's BitTorrent interference. Comcast Sued for Blocking P2P Sites - News and Analysis by PC Magazine

Comcast Using Malicious Hacker Technique Against Own Customers, New Report Says | Threat Level from Wired.com

Pakistan! NPQ: ANTI-AMERICAN ISLAMIC NATIONALISM IS BEHIND PAKISTAN CRISIS. A SMART REVIEW! Sic Semper Tyrannis 2007: Pakistan Was a Bad Idea. The Pakistani Democracy Chimera : NO QUARTER.

The Drone and the Falafel Watchlist : NO QUARTER

Amazon.com: What Orwell Didn't Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics: Books: Andras Szanto,Orville Schell

FCC: The Winds Blow and Blow and Blow … : NO QUARTER.

Another Meaningless Taser Death: Police Use Of Stun Guns Out Of Control at Infowars.

SPECIAL REPORT: Turning The Police State Apparatus Against Dissenters At infowars.

These Days, Everyone Dares Call Everything Treason. More about the "Internet Radicalization" Crush the Meddling Kids Act.

Today's economic crisis: More than "Sheets" Hitting the Fan. Yep. Taki's Top Drawer: Was it oil all along?

Economic Expert Says Global Crash Imminent via Infowars. Internet under attack.

Always good to look at Cryptogon: Subprime Mortgage Crisis: U.S. Takes Page from Banana Republic Playbook :

We should know better by now. We should know that They’re just not going to let the thing go off the rails and crash in a single, violent event. The purpose of the American Corporate State is to externalize the costs of unthinkable plunder onto the backs of people who are mostly too tired, dumb and angry to understand anything that’s happening to them. Americans, in general, are content to flush more of their children’s futures down the gurgler and thank Christ for their big screen TVs. Anyone who’s not behind the plan to save the criminal gangs on Wall Street must be with Bin Laden.

Al Martin Raw: Iran contra conspirator who keeps it real, with totally incomprehensible options trading. Amazing conspiracy book too: "The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider." See also: Recession – Inflation – Deflation – Depression – Stagflation - Global Collapse…?

The Bernanke Fed: Following the ‘Economic Collapse’ Script

(9-24-07) This is the long and broad view of what Bernanke is doing with the Fed. He is simply inheriting and following the script, as it were, from the Greenspan Fed. The Greenspan Fed has been roundly criticized for reducing interest rates, thus creating a lot of cheap money, which has fueled speculative bubbles worldwide. Then there are the reasons why nobody applauds him because it’s an area that no one dares talk about…

To defend himself, Greenspan says that he was simply lowering rates to prevent the onset of a recession in 2001 and 2002. On the surface, it makes sense to say that, because clearly the economy was headed to recession by the end of 2001.

The recession was being driven by two factors. One of those factors gets overlooked because it’s not politically convenient – the collapse in the speculative bubble in equities beginning in March of 2000, which was a long unwinding process into the autumn of 2002, wherein equity prices fell consistently, combined with the installation of a fiscally reckless regime – i.e., a Bush Cheney Regime – and the reinstitution of Bushonomics, which we refer to as Bushonomics II, which had the effect of depleting all of the $158-billion fiscal surplus that the Bush Cheney Regime inherited from its fiscally prudent predecessor.

On the day the Bush Cheney Regime came to power (January 20, 2001), it inherited from its successor a $158-billion federal surplus. It had all of that surplus diminished, and indeed generated a deficit, by the end of its first year in power, which is part and parcel, as we’ve pointed out before, of Bushonomics.

So what are the differences between the terms referred to as recession and inflation? Inflation and inflationary periods invariably precede recessions.

The economic boom/bust cycle – that the United States has always had and will always have as long as it follows Smithsonian capitalism – has effectively been turned on its ear by the Bush Cheney Regime. How? Through cheap money and easy liquidity -- by creating a series of speculative bubbles in asset prices whose intent is more political than economic, from the regime’s point of view.......

America's Back Is About To Break | The Agonist

A Conservative View of Iran - by Philip Giraldi. This is pre-NIE news.

Giuliani's Culture of Corruption- by Justin Raimondo. Hooey-liani’s Best Bud Needs Our Help ($$$) : NO QUARTER.

Peter Hitchens definitely wrote a good one about North Korea: Prisoners in Camp Kim. WOW.

Philip Giraldi: The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act - Politics on The Huffington Post

Group claiming 2004 Ohio election fraud asks Dann to investigate

A little time with BradBlog, a good spot for voter suppression and miscellaneous whistleblower scandals: The BRAD BLOG : Chairman Waxman Asks Attorney General to Intercede in White House Obstruction in CIA Leak Case. The BRAD BLOG : 'Daily Voting News' For November 25 and 26, 2007

More about BradBlog and Sibel Edmonds below.

Think Progress » Bob Woodward Still Has Never Heard Of The Voter Suppression Tactic ‘Caging’

Old news: the GOP and Nazi affairs, operation paperclip and so forth. The Bush family and its work via Harriman Brothers to monetize the cash end of the economic alignments known as "the merger of state and corporate power." Siege Heil: The Bush-Rove-Schwarzenegger Nazi Nexus and the Destabilization of California.

Snotr : The ultimate place for great videos!

Old news from 2005: Why AIPAC Indictment Is Bad News for Rove. And also the stuff about Strategic Communication, per today's earlier post about the Orwellian Centers of Excellence: Psy-ops propaganda goes mainstream. - By Sharon Weinberger - Slate Magazine.

Let Sibel Edmonds Speak is the HQ for this stuff.

We are going to list a few nice links for the case: Sibel Edmonds in Let Sibel Edmonds Speak: What the heck is Sibel Edmonds' Case about? And why should I care?

"Essentially, there is only one investigation – a very big one, an all-inclusive one... But I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion-dollar drug-smuggling operations, black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it... You can start from the AIPAC angle. You can start from the Plame case. You can start from my case. They all end up going to the same place, and they revolve around the same nucleus of people."

That is the good stuff, folks. Here we go:

Wot Is It Good 4: Sibel Edmonds: America's Watergate

Wot Is It Good 4: Sibel, Giraldi, American Conservative Mag

The BRAD BLOG : EXCLUSIVE: Daniel Ellsberg Says Sibel Edmonds Case 'Far More Explosive Than Pentagon Papers'

The BRAD BLOG : What The Heck is the Sibel Edmonds Case Anyway? And Why Should You Care About It?

Daily Kos: State of the Nation on Sibel Edmonds Case: the untellable story of AIPAC which I posted here earlier, but this has a hearty 300+ comments of buzz too.

Wot Is It Good 4: David Swanson and Sibel

Stress » An Open Letter to Chris Matthews

Liberty Coalition & National Security Whistleblowers Coalition

Revaluing the Dollar | The Agonist

Ritalin proven defective: Drug Pushers Don't Care If Their Drugs Are Good For You Either | The Agonist

Related: The Immorality of Moral People | The Agonist.

Doing internet media? Lessons from Steve Outing's Enthusiast Group. and Specialized journalism, a partisan press, online journalism students and cheap laptops: More stuff to argue about.

Joe Klein is one of those lame mainstream media pundits. He told everyone that the new FISA bill would stop the mean ol' wiretapping. But he lied and won't correct himself. TIME is sticking with their man, and it's another fabulous lesson in shitty mainstream media affairs for Blog World. Glenn Greenwald on Salon. Center for Citizen Media: On Klein’s Errors, Time’s Semi-Stonewall and the Net’s Power. Everything that is rancid and corrupt with modern journalism: The Nutshell. Nicely done Mr. Greenwald.

Tom Toles cartoon on Obama smears. Jon Swift: Journalism 101.

The latest Bin Laden tape (if real) dissected by Michael Scheuer: Asia Times Online: Bin Laden talks of victory, not defeat

What Do Conservatives Spend Their Time Thinking About? | The Agonist. Answer: gay stuff. exclusively.

Well kids that was about 2 or 3 weeks worth of nifty links. I'm not too happy it's such an ugly post, but mainly I just wanted to float all those weird fragments of Un Reality to spice your day.

Coming soon: a truly crazy little project. :-)

How about this? A surprise from NYmag.com and being trumped around the UnderNet.

What do you think about OiNK being shut down?

Trent: I'll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world's greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted. If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn't the equivalent of that in the retail space right now. iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don't feel cool when I go there. I'm tired of seeing John Mayer's face pop up.

I feel like I'm being hustled when I visit there, and I don't think their product is that great. DRM, low bit rate, etc. Amazon has potential, but none of them get around the issue of pre-release leaks. And that's what's such a difficult puzzle at the moment.

If your favorite band in the world has a leaked record out, do you listen to it or do you not listen to it? People on those boards, they're grateful for the person that uploaded it — they're the hero.

They're not stealing it because they're going to make money off of it; they're stealing it because they love the band. I'm not saying that I think OiNK is morally correct, but I do know that it existed because it filled a void of what people want.

Cool new slice of music: I heard "MN Nice" by Maria Isa on the Current the other night. Hear it on MySpace though of course it's a little bit fuzzy, making it harder to catch all the local references.

A new concept album from Trent Reznor, "Year Zero," is an impressive 21st century take on dystopia, mechanization and the sense of the apocalypse. There's a story about a strange hand coming from the sky, monstrous militarization and so forth. The official site even has a GarageBand-compatible mix file for you to make your own remix of "Survivalism," which is a badass video of SWAT teams attacking a panopticon apartment building trying to kill the band. Nice! You can even listen to the whole album for free on the website! Here we see the Presence:

Along with this they put up a series of orwellian and surreal websites that wikipedia has deemed the Year Zero alternate reality game (and more here). First of all, the Church of Plano - I like Plano's Faithful Civil Patrol!

Then there's a website of some crazed assassin at BeTheHammer.net:



Paging General JT Ripper: For the X-files angle, IAmTryingToBelieve.com which has "Parepin information you need to know." In the future dystopia of bioterror attacks, Parepin is a government water additive that makes people dumb: Purity of Essence strikes again.....

AnotherVersionOfTheTruth.com says America is Born Again, brought to us by the Bureau of Morality!



Finally, the Price of Treason.net is a series of 1950s style admonishments updated into the near-future dystopia world.



It's kinda like The Wall on Prozac I guess. The CD itself had a thermal color-changing finish, which turned from dark to light in the player. A binary code on the CD leads to another site, exterminal.net. I used a cold beer to press dark circles in it, then light fingerprints. Physically the sweetest CD ever, so it's a good thing NIN's trying to kill the format at the same time.

The album is much like NIN's others, harsh and weird, with a lot of very interesting industrial sequences. If you're into NIN it's great, and if you can handle ominous industrial music you'll probably like it. Really well executed, and an impressive artistic turn that goes beyond the dead CD format.

Best political video I've seen this year! Brother Ali stomps around in Washington wearing a black fatigue... best lyrics!

what you talking bout you don't support a crack head

what you think happens with the money from your taxes

shit, the goverment's the addict

with a billion dollar a week kill brown people habit.

Fantastic!!

My ol buddy Tom from Macalester bails out of professional poker, he says on his blog. He's one of the low-key, calculating types of poker players, not a high-roller. And he made an impressive amount of cash in the process. I just don't know how anyone could put in that many hours. But hey, if it pays its easier than work, right? Best of luck all around. Tom wants to work on thebrewingnetwork project apparently. Best Luck, Aces high etc.

Brother Ali's album drops at midnight on Monday night. You can go to Fifth Element and pick it up along with bonus goodies. Oddly, today's Strib reported that Aaron Sorkin, the (pot enthusiast) guru who created and wrote most of the West Wing is working on a stage version of the Flaming Lips' album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Something about a rambling Martin Sheen and giant robots come to mind. Nice.

I just got a couple books from the writers behind CounterPunch in the mail: The new End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate and Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press are both excellent. They were only about $30 together, not bad! Speaking of the CIA and the media, one major element of both books is the crass manipulation of domestic press for the purposes of intelligence agencies. Wikipedia's entry on Operation Mockingbird is just a starting point.

The Panopticon cracks in London! It turns out that filling up your whole society with cameras won't actually work that well at catching criminals: it just swamps law enforcement with too much information. This means that the system doesn't cover its intended purpose, unless the real purpose is to spread fear and paranoia! 4.2 million British cameras aren't doing much, apparently. See also Social Fear and the Commodification of Terrorism, and London: The PhoboCity.

Minnesota U.S. Attorney case gets ugly and weird: The Paulose USA here in MN looks pretty shady, and the Star Tribune (and columnist Nick Coleman) are getting into the mix. TalkingPointsMemo is interested (earlier) as is Senate Judiciary in DC. Corporate squares proclaim: move along, nothing to see here...



Helvetica: The Movie! Yes there is a documentary coming out about the venerable Swiss font! via the pretty sweet blog 3quarksdaily.

Minnesota House Republican leader Marty Seifert emits the memorable:

...the war in Iraq was the dominant issue [in the election] and the President’s approval rating was so low that it rivaled that of gonorrhea...

CIA/Pentagon team up with video game distributor THQ: Pentagon and CIA enlist video games: Simulations developed for training and recruitment: photo of THQ army game at right:

“Full Spectrum Warrior” was created through the Institute for Creative Technologies in Marina Del Ray, Calif., a $45 million endeavor formed by the Army five years ago to connect academics with local entertainment and video game industries. The institute subcontracted game development work to Los Angeles-based Pandemic Studios.

The institute’s other training program, “Full Spectrum Command,” was released for military use in February...... The game the Institute for Creative Technologies has been working on with the CIA for about a year — at a cost of several million dollars — will let agency analysts assume the role of terror cell leaders, cell members and operatives.

“Our analysts would be accustomed to looking at the world from the perspective of the terrorists we are chasing, and learn to expect the unexpected,” CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said.

RECRUITMENT TOOL: Training aside, video games are increasingly viewed by top brass as a way to get teenagers interested in enlisting.

Yikes.

Antiwar bits: Raimondo hits back against Wall Street Journal squares who try to frame the upcoming AIPAC trial as an antisemitic exercise. Former CIA dude Philip Giraldi sez Democrats Earn Their Stripes in the War Party. Also The Waste of War and Kudos to Pelosi for Visiting Syria. The Ravings of James Woolsey. James Petras: Bush AIPAC and Palestine: The Political Economy of a Disaster. Uri Avnery: Condi in the Middle East.

More bits: Ridiculous White House spin about Pelosi in Syria. You Make Peace With Your Enemies, The Sadness of American Foreign Policy.

The Council For National Policy: the Council on Foreign Relations for fundamentalist lunatics! Check it out on DailyKos, Wikipedia, and a really lengthy two-part and rather oddly conspiratorial view of what the hell they are up to. The Deep Politics of God: The CNP, Dominionism, and the Ted Haggard Scandal, part 1 and two. While there is a ton of conspiracy fluff here, I found interesting the parts about a kind of eschaton-immanentizing neo-Gnosticism that underpins Christian Dominionism's claims to initiate the Kingdom of Christ on earth through political action on the Temporal Plane is really anti-Christian and crazy.

At the Manchester United/Roma game, Police escalation sparks soccer riots, not rival fans! Is corn safe these days, or adulterated?

Protesters try to arrest Karl Rove at American University! Bravo. Wapo on it.

Internal Crisis strikes Israel / Some of those leftists say the Palestinians lost a lot of land. What are they talking about? Bet you never saw this map before...



Naah... Continuing the last post, A bit more about Oded Yinon's schemes to break up the Arab states into mini-statelets. Is the US implementing this? A bit last year on it in Counterpunch. Neocon David Frum rambles on about how awesome Jewish espionage is.

The Israeli ambassador to El Salvador was recently found bound and gagged wearing sex toys down in Central America! In other random news, Russian-Israeli mobster-billionaire Arcadi Gaydamak was indicted by the French for selling nearly $800 million in arms to Angola's president during the civil war there. However Gaydamak is also starting an Israeli political party, the Tzedek Hevrati (Social justice) party. A poll indicated the Gaydamak-led party would receive 14 Knesset seats, drawing the vote of Haredim after Gaydamak has spend a good bit of cash there. This would skim off Shas' Knesset share to 10 seats, according to the poll, and Kadima would only get 11, Labor 14, and worst of all, Likud 27. The extreme right in NRP gets 10, and Yisrael Beitenu 7. Looks horrible!

With many recent indictments and resignations around the top of the government (including a Presidential sex scandal and the Chief of Staff's foolish Lebanon misconduct), this article by Dror Wahrman asks if Israel is falling apart internally:

Do these events really presage the collapse of the Israeli system of governance and democracy? There certainly has never been such a deep crisis of leadership in the country that touts itself as the only democracy in the Middle East. The leader of the ruling parliamentary coalition, Avigdor Yitzhaki, said so publicly a few days ago. And the Minister of Education has suggested that all schools devote special classes to the “government crisis”, so that children can speak out about what might well seem to them like a total collapse of all systems that control their lives. Suddenly the Palestinians and the Hizbullah, and even Iranian nukes, have taken a back seat: Israel does indeed seem in danger of imploding from within, at least as a viable democracy.

......The infinite variety of devices through which Israel has condoned and often actively encouraged the breaking of the rules in its drive to expropriate Palestinian occupied land against both Israeli and international law has been documented not only by journalists, scholars and observers on the left: it was also the subject of a thick government judicial document, known as the “Sasson Report,” which created something of a furore when it was handed to prime minister Ariel Sharon in March 2005. Within months, however, the Sasson Report joined the mounting pile of legal and normative documents that have been effortlessly side-stepped by the settlers and their supporters in multiple branches of the government. It was only a matter of time, inevitably, before the lawlessness of the occupied territories – and their support networks throughout the Israeli state apparatus – began infecting Israel proper.

.......So if Sharon’s reign was the epitome of success for the activism of both 1948 and 1967, the reign of his successors has been the time of collapse and of reckoning. With Sharon’s departure Israel has been left with a weak cadre of second-rate politicians, who seem even more puny in the shadow of Sharon’s towering figure and tragic exit. The corrupt practices are all there, but no higher motives can be claimed for them, and no protection from public outrage can be afforded to their perpetrators. They are simply as petty and ugly as they look. Even when Dan Chaluz, the Army Chief of Staff, resigned for reasons ostensibly linked to the failed war in Lebanon, the one act of his that will be remembered with particular public disgust is that even as he ordered the bombing of Southern Lebanon on the 12th of July 2006, he paused to instruct his stock broker to sell his portfolio; a callous, greedy mistake Sharon would never have committed.

This article also places the shady Gaydamak's public image in context. Also: Benny Morris: From Israeli ‘New Historian’ to Hardline Rightist on the leftist Tikkun Olam blog. Many of these links come from the xymphora blog, which has a lot of stuff I don't agree with (including some generalizations I find offensive), but is still interesting with some good leads.

Bolvian resistance pays off, spreading discord and native unity in South America: Check out Oil, Water and Resistance in Bolivia: The Price of Fire!

Iraq Slog: The Under-reported story of millions of Iraqi refugees. How much can Syria and Jordan handle? More on McCain shadiness. From the Guardian: In Iraq, public anger is at last translating into unity:

The success of the occupation's divide-and-rule tactics and their insistence on basing the new political and military structures on sects, religions, and ethnicities is threatening the communal cohesion that was once the country's hallmark. This is a factor in the absence of a united movement, capable of leading the struggle to end the occupation. The occupation has sown divisions where there were none and transformed existing differences into open warfare.

And is it any wonder that the long-suffering Iraqi people find themselves at an impasse. Try catching your breath after decades of brutal dictatorship, 13 years of economic sanctions and four years of an obscene war.

But even in the absence of a unified anti-occupation front, the resistance of the Iraqi people has managed to thwart the world's greatest military empire. And there are signs of a mass rejection of these sectarian forces, and the possibility that public anger will translate into the very unity that is so desperately needed. Rage against corruption and the collapse of public services is sweeping the country, including Kurdistan. Similarly, the proposed corporate occupation of Iraq, disguised as a legal document to tie the country to the oil companies for decades to come, has reminded the population of one of the main reasons for the US-led invasion. It has also reminded them what a self-respecting, sovereign Iraq looked like in 1961, when the government nationalised Iraq's lands for future oil production.

Agent Provocateur accusations against U.S. in sparking sectarian conflict: There were a couple weird stories about random Iraqis getting set up as "suicide bombers" by the U.S. It's an odd tale but interesting from the odd and kind of inscrutable site Roads to Iraq. (I would be more impressed if they got rid of the Wordpress default theme!) Also: Robert Fisk in Egypt: The US and the West want to divide you, invade you and control your oil! How about that! Here is more accusing the U.S. of agent provocateur bombings in Iraq to incite sectarian conflict. Also "The Provocateur State: Is the CIA Behind the Iraqi "Insurgents"--and Global Terrorism?" by Frank Morales and this collection of articles.

Central/South America bits: Check out NarcoNews including stuff on Oaxaca, Low-intensity war in Chiapas, the Return of La Otra ("the other"). Fidel Castro rambles on about Ethanol.

Sibel Edmonds bit on FISA: NarcoSphere had info about the Sibel Edmonds case recently published and ignored by the media - check the comments:

Edmonds’ complaint included allegations of illegal activities by Turkish organizations and their agents in the United States, and the involvement of certain elected and appointed U.S. officials in the Department of State, Pentagon, and the U.S. Congress in these activities. In its September 2005 issue, Vanity Fair ran a comprehensive piece on Edmonds’ case by reporter David Rose, in which several former and current congressional and Justice Department officials identified former House Speaker Dennis Hastert as being involved in illegal activities with the Turkish organizations and personnel targeted in FBI investigations. In addition, Rose reported: “…much of what Edmonds reportedly heard seemed to concern not state espionage but criminal activity. There was talk, she told investigators, of laundering the profits of large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder.” In January 2005, DOJ-OIG released an unclassified summary of its investigation into Edmonds' termination. The report concluded that Edmonds was fired for reporting serious security breaches and misconduct in the agency's translation program, and that many of her allegations were supported by convincing evidence.

Another Former Veteran FBI Counterintelligence and Espionage Specialist at FBI Headquarters in Washington DC also filed similar reports with DOJ-OIG and several congressional offices regarding violations of FISA implementation and the covering up of several espionage cases involving FBI Language Specialists and public corruption cases by the Bureau. The cases reported by this whistleblower corroborate those reported by SA Graham and Sibel Edmonds. In an interview with NSWBC investigators the former FBI Specialist, who wished to remain anonymous, stated: “…you are looking at covering up massive public corruption and espionage cases; to top that off you have major violations of FISA by the FBI Washington Field Office and HQ targeting these cases. Everyone involved has motive to cover up these reports and prevent investigation and public disclosure. No wonder they invoked the state secrets privilege in Edmonds’ case.”

William Weaver, NSWBC Senior Advisor noted that: ”These abuses of power are precisely why we must pay attention to whistleblowers. Preservation of the balance of powers between the branches of government increasingly relies on information provided by whistleblowers, especially in the face of aggressive and expanding executive power. Through illegal surveillance members of Congress and other officials may be controlled by the executive branch, thereby dissolving the matrix of our democracy. The abuse of two powers of secrecy, FISA and the state secrets privilege, are working hand in hand to subvert the Constitution. In an abominably perverse arrangement, the abuse of FISA is being covered up by abuse of the state secrets privilege. Only whistleblowers and the congressional and judicial oversight their revelations spawn can bring our system back into balance.”

See also the ACLU on the case - but its old.

All right then... I just want to note that I'm not some believer in all these theories, but I think there should be a fresh and complete investigation of the whole thing. It's funny how much material you find - and how many famous people just don't quite buy what the President sold us. While 9/11 skeptics see an approaching 'tipping point' of general public awareness, despite the increasing buzz I'm not optimistic that the Baby Boomer establishment is going to put themselves through such an examination. It's still fun to watch the media leap to barrages of personal attacks.

We all have to keep in mind that rational minds are inclined to invent explanations connecting disparate and unrelated events, and that's the basic seed of conspiracy theories. But at the same time, the Establishment has never been more eager to feed their own conspiracy theories to the public (WMDs in Iraq, Syrian machinations, etc...).

San Diego State University is holding a "Citizen's Grand Jury" about 9/11 on April 14.

Nashville songwriter and performer Dan Tyler has decided that 9/11 was shady! That page on PatriotsQuestion911.com has tons of comments from many notables who are at least skeptical of the official story, including indie rapper Immortal Technique, Ministry, Eminem, Ed Asner, Woody Harrelson, Mos Def, Robert Baer, Minnesota politicians Jesse Ventura and Mark Dayton, James Brolin, David Lynch, Richard Linklater, Antoine Fuqua, Aaron Russo, Sam Seder, Matthew Bellamy, Blink 182's Tom DeLonge, Slipknot's Corey Taylor, Gore Vidal, Robert Scheer, Ralph Nader, Jadakiss, and even CNN's Lou Dobbs and A.J. Hammer! That's quite a list!

Teh Lol For Conspiratorial country music - I am just waiting for the song version of this from songsmith Tyler:

"The importance of the 9/11 truth movement cannot be overstated. Like me, millions of patriotic Americans question the official explanation of the attacks. The questions and the number of citizens asking them will increase until a tipping point is reached and a new, aggressive investigation initiated.

From this new inquiry truths will emerge which will shake this country to its foundations and, hopefully, restore our constitutional democracy. Until that happy day arrives, however, the powerful forces aligned against 9/11 truth will fight with fury and abandon. We must be strong and resolute and take inspiration from apostles of peace like Gandhi and King. At the most basic level, the struggle is love versus fear.

As a Christian, I pray we are witnessing the last days of the corporate imperial war machine, which, desperate for new battles and the energy resources to power itself, finally went too far and self-destructed in an orgy of lies, chaos and death. This monster’s dying throes will be terrible to behold, but do not doubt the historical significance of the events playing out before us. Future generations will thank those who had the courage to face the dragon and slay it with the sword of truth.

As a songwriter, I turn phrases for a living. I’ll leave you with this one: From seeds of doubt, flowers of truth will sprout. Be strong, brothers and sisters. We shall prevail!"

Prof. Steven Jones, one of the 9/11 conspiracy physicists, may appear with Rosie O'Donnell on The View to talk about World Trade Center 7.

After Rosie's unexpected advocacy of 9/11 conspiracy theories, (or the even worse offense of Asking Questions) a barrage of ad hominem attacks has come from the mainstream media. For example the creepy FOX moron John Gibson went on about it. The Alex Jones crew responded accurately:

Rosie O'Donnell has never publicly stated that 9/11 was an inside job, which underscores the abhorrent climate that we are in - that she is being castigated, threatened with a campaign to have her fired and even executed for simply asking questions about 9/11!

Yep. Of course the attacks actually undermine the Establishment's interest in burying the story: they're just calling more and more attention to it, which they usually studiously avoid altogether. Rosie asked her queries about WTC7, which of course remains the weirdest anomaly in the events of September 11. As yet no one in the mainstream media has been willing to actually examine WTC7 on its merits, and Bill O'Reilly for example always reins in his guests when they start discussing the actual questions, rather than ad hominem attacks.



Stop Rosie.com has a big petition against Disney-ABC with many cheesy fake names on the petition.

Bill O'Reilly, surprisingly accurate JFK conspiracy theorist! I thought this was funny, a letter from a 9/11 Truthinator to BillO pointing out this marvelous old clip from Inside Edition, wherein O'Reilly dwells right in the middle of the JFK case! Watch this for serious cognitive dissonance! (Peter Dale Scott on the fruits of comparing 9/11 and JFK)



BillO sez Rosie is a big deal, but her claims - or questions - aren't. Recently Dennis Miller had to admit Charlie Sheen and O'Donnell's career's wouldn't be seriously damaged by their venture into the Tinfoil arena, because the country is split down the middle on 9/11, Miller said!



The latest activist plan: Rallies are planned around the 11th of every month as this funny video indicates (more here):