Feds probe Blackwater weapons smuggling

WASHINGTON - Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Raleigh, N.C., is handling the investigation with help from Pentagon and State Department auditors, who have concluded there is enough evidence to file charges, the officials told The Associated Press. Blackwater is based in Moyock, N.C....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070922/ap_on_go_co/us_blackwater_probe_8;_ylt=AgDaYxCSuHn7_RIHtdf89BQE1vAI

Frequent cell phone use may slow brain function

....Differences in brain activity, as measured in terms of quantitative results of electroencephalographic (EEG) studies and assessments of neuropsychological functions such as attention, memory, executive function and personality, were examined. Among the results: Frequent users scored higher on ratings as extroverts and were found to be less open-minded.

The study also found that frequent users are better able than others to focus their attention. That result could be due to a learning effect that comes from making phone calls in busy places where people have to focus on a phone call while filtering out background noise and other distractions, according to the researchers.

Despite this improved focus and the findings about personality, the frequent users showed more instances of slowed activity as measured by delta and theta EEG power, as well as a slowdown in a measurement called alpha peak frequency....

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9037378&intsrc=hm_list

Kite Runner rape scene 'threatens actor's life'

Morning Edition, September 20, 2007 · Khaled Hosseini's best-selling
novel Kite Runner opens as a film in November. But it is already
causing concern in Afghanistan and in Hollywood for its depiction of
ethnic tensions in Afghanistan and harsh portrayal of life under the
Taliban.
Listen at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?
storyId=14556301

Kite Runner rape scene 'threatens actor's life'
Tuesday September 18, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

The forthcoming adaptation of The Kite Runner, the Afghanistan-set
bestseller by Khaled Hosseini, has run into controversy over fears
that the life of one of its child actors may be in danger.
The Kite Runner tells the story of Amir and Hassan, one a privileged
Afghan youth, the other a poor servant boy, growing up in Kabul. Amir
eventually emigrates to the West but, throughout his life, is wracked
by guilt over his failure to intervene when Hassan was raped during
their childhood.

A filmed adaptation of the novel, helmed by Finding Neverland's Marc
Forster, wrapped earlier this year and will be released in November.
But the father of Ahmad Khan, the Afghan boy who portrays Hassan in
the film, fears that he and his son's life are threatened because
rape is a taboo subject in Afghanistan.
"They [the film-makers] said they would not film this part," Mr Ahmad
told BBC Radio. "Of course I am worried about it. My own people from
my own tribe will turn against me because of the story. They may cut
my throat, they may kill me, they may torture me, anything could
happen to me."

Other cast members have reportedly demanded the scene be cut. But the
film's producers say these fears are misplaced. "The scene contains
no nudity; it's rendered in a very impressionistic way," Rebecca
Yeldham, a producer, told the BBC. "It's also important in being
faithful to the story that there's no confusion that the attack in
the alley was a sexual violation.

"We're working with various organisations on the ground to advise us.
We don't believe that kids' lives are at risk," she said.

The film will not be released in Afghanistan, but only because there
is no suitable distribution network in the country. It will be
released in the US on November 2 and in the UK on Boxing Day.

Trailer at
http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount_vantage/thekiterunner/

SAFER to Denver Council: Let's Make a Deal!

Proponents of a marijuana reform initiative that would make adult pot use the city’s lowest law enforcement priority have offered the Denver council and mayor – who are none too happy that the initiative earned enough signatures to make it on the November ballot – a chance to get the damn thing off the ballot.

In an Aug. 23 press release, Mason Tvert, director of the marijuana reform group Safer Alternatives for Enjoyable Recreation says that his organization would agree to nix the intiative if – and only if – the council and Mayor John Hickenlooper (owner of a local brewery) agree to a few – ahem – modest terms. First, SAFER wants the city leaders to officially “recognize” that adult marijuana use poses less harm to the user, and to the city, than does adult alcohol abuse. Second, based on that new awareness, SAFER is asking that the council “commit to exploring” what marijuana policy reforms the city can implement that reflect the fact that adult pot use poses less harm to user and city. And, third, SAFER is asking that the city impose a moratorium on all citations for possession of less than one ounce of pot by adults over 21 during the Democratic National Convention in August 2008.

If their conditions are met, Tvert says SAFER would be happy to yank the lowest-priority initiative from the upcoming ballot. Whether that’ll work is entirely unclear, though seemingly unlikely since the city hasn’t exactly embraced pot policy reforms – including a successful 2005 ballot initiative that directed the city to remove criminal penalties for private pot use by adults. Still, Tvert remains forever optimistic: “Every objective study ever conducted on marijuana has concluded that it is a far safer recreational drug than alcohol,” he said in a press statement. “We hope our city officials will consider the relative harms of these two substances, as well as the potentially dangerous effects of a policy that pushes adults toward the more harmful of the two [substances]” – that is, alcohol use. “The city has every right to stop arresting adults for possessing small amounts of marijuana, and we hope they will stand up for the voters who elected them and exercise that right.”

Jordan Smith, Fri Aug 24

http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/News/?oid=oid:528637

Humor: Clinton Campaign Reaches Out to Other Fugitives

Attempt to Compensate for Loss of Hsu

One week after losing a major fundraiser when fugitive financier Norman Hsu was arrested in Colorado, the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) today attempted to compensate for the loss of Hsu by reaching out to other fugitives.

“Say what you will about Norman, the dude raised $850,000 for us,” said one Clinton aide. “It’s not going to be easy filling Hsu’s shoes.”

As part of her new push to sign up fugitive financiers for her campaign, Sen. Clinton abruptly cancelled campaign stops in Iowa today to attend a special town hall meeting in the Cayman Islands.

Speaking to an audience made up entirely of fugitive financiers, Sen. Clinton said, “I am running so that you don’t have to.”

Vying for his own share of the fugitive financiers’ support, former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) sounded a similar theme during a campaign stop at a fortified compound in the Bahamas.

“I have often said that my father was a mill worker,” Sen. Edwards told his audience, “but my mother was a fugitive financier.”

Davis Logsdon, head of the political science department at the University of Minnesota, said that fugitive financiers could be a key voting bloc in the 2008 election: “I think they are going to be what soccer moms were in 2000.”

But Mr. Logsdon warned that wooing this key demographic would not be without its challenges: “Direct mail campaigns don’t work well with them, because most of them don’t have an address.”

Elsewhere, President Bush refuted Alan Greenspan’s charge that he seemed “bored” by economics, telling reporters, “I’m much more bored by education, health care and the environment.”

http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=6771&srch=

 

 

 

NASA Scientists Challenge Security Rules

Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center are up in arms over a new requirement by NASA that they submit to detailed FBI scrutiny of their backgrounds in order to obtain clearance to go to work. They are claiming that the agency may be trying to control or silence them about issues like global warming.

The new security clearance requirement, which involves interviews of neighbors and checks into the distant background activities of scientists, many of whom have worked at JPL and Goddard for as long as thirty years, is puzzling because both locations have little or no involvement in secret or national security research. Indeed, by law, NASA's activities and the research its scientists engage in are required to be publicly available.

"Almost nobody at NASA does classified work," says Robert Nelson, a veteran scientist at JPL who heads up the photo analysis unit on the Cassini-Huygens space probe project exploring Saturn and its moons. "I think this is really all about NASA director [Michael] Griffin putting a security wrap around us."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070910/lindorff

Just Don't Call Them Communes

....These days, however, Loudoun County is also at the forefront of a very different if no less American vision: the commune.

 

The idea that like-minded individuals should forge a community is on something of a comeback tour. An online directory of "intentional communities" has more than doubled in the past two years to 1,295 in North America, and 20 new listings are added each month.

Past imperfect. But forget the term commune. Try "ecovillage," where residents live in Earth-friendly homes on communal land, or "cohousing," where a common house serves as a gathering place. Driven by a green ethos and discontent with impersonal suburbs, residents frequently dine together, share possessions, and baby-sit one another's children. But shared income is a thing of the past, and private homes are essential. Still, the old stereotypes of socialism, drugs, and rebellion dog these communities. "We've fought this for years," says Joani Blank, a cohousing advocate who lives in a divvied-up former market in Oakland, Calif. "Our ideology is about neighborhoods more than anything else."

Poverty and disillusionment drove many older communes to extinction, but the idea was reincarnated, particularly in Europe, in the post-Cold War era. By 1995, Danish activists Hildur and Ross Jackson had created the Global Ecovillage Network to promote sustainable living around the world. Even some of the most archetypal communes, such as the 1960s socialist experiment, the Farm in Tennessee, have reshaped themselves. In New York, the 175-acre EcoVillage at Ithaca boasts two 30-home neighborhoods, office space, and working farms....

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/070805/13commune.htm

Reality is overrated anyway

I May Have Gone Insane
By William Rivers Pitt
Wednesday 19 September 2007

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

- Robert Frost, "The Secret Sits"

    It is a legitimately demented phenomenon, all the more so because it all started with a joke. Not even a funny joke, either, but a sad and threadbare thing I told only to myself, and no one else. When the clustered elements of our collective national burden erupted in masterfully synchronized bedlam, as they so often seem to, I had that joke to tell myself, and it may not have helped much, but it was there.

    Every time another cacophony of freshly minted lunacy was unleashed - lunacy regarding Iraq, the NSA domestic surveillance program, White House defiance of subpoenas, timorously flaccid performances by the Congressional majority, or merely when enduring the repeated "nukyalur"-ized butchery of public political rhetoric was required by my employers, all of which emphatically pegged the needle on my Pandemoni-O-Meter - I had that joke to tell myself.

    The joke is spherically terrible, i.e. bad in every possible direction in three dimensions and across 360 rounded degrees. It isn't even a joke, really, which may be why it went so abruptly and bewilderingly sideways on me months ago. The joke, to be embarrassingly honest, is more like some half-bright mantra than anything else. As I came to discover, however, it managed to settle my mind when the needle was in the red. Perhaps the thing is best described as my self-generated Zen koan; though it did not actually stop my mind in proper koan fashion, it kept me from putting my head through the wall, and that made it valuable indeed.

    The joke: people say Bush and his people want to raze the core nature of the country itself by wrecking the Constitution, and they're correct. People say Bush and his people are enriching their friends beyond dreams of avarice at our actual expense, by way of war-inflated oil prices; war-captured Iraqi oil infrastructure; the orgiastic plunder of Treasury money through calamitously unsound tax cuts for Bush's pals; and through an Iraq war profiteering scam so unutterably corrupt that it bends the very light. That, and more besides, is what people say, and they're correct.

    But all that, along with everything else the Bush crew has done, just isn't enough for them. What Bush and his people really seek, at bottom, is to destroy the basic definition and literal existence of reality itself. They want to destroy reality, rebuild it according to their own blueprint, so the sum and substance of this new reality will accept as axiomatic the idea that lying, stealing and wholesale carnage are badges of integrity and moral clarity. In other words, our comprehensively understood reality today would be replaced by whatever madcap anti-reality currently exists within the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

    I warned you.

    As bad as that chaotically crossbred joke/rant/mantra thing is, it wasn't meant to be anything other than a harmless sliver of wordplay, something that settled my nerves and gave me a private little chuckle - that alone, and nothing more.

    Things are different now. It isn't a joke anymore, at least not to me. The premise that the Bush administration has literally been trying to shatter elemental reality on planet Earth has steadily gained traction in my mind. It started as that sort-of joke, then it became an idea, and then it became an actual hypothesis, a working theory requiring research and evidence and argument so that, someday, I can prove it to be an unassailable bone-basic truth.

    And yes, the fact that I'm quite serious about this has me quietly yet legitimately concerned for my own mental health. What worries me the most, however, is a freshly minted suspicion that it is already over, that the deal already went down, but almost nobody actually noticed when it happened. I think these Bush folks may have successfully pulled it off right in front of our noses over the course of this past August. I think they may have actually broken reality, cobbling together a chaotic replacement, and I think I can back up that supposition all the way down the block and back again.

    Bear with me.

    The process began in earnest more than a year ago with a publicity campaign that deliberately made no sense whatsoever. Day after day, statements and declarations came from all manner of White House officials that were little more than bags of over-the-moon nonsense - all patently inaccurate to nine decimals, yet spoken shamelessly into cameras with bare faces hanging out.

    With this, the Bush folks laid the mental foundation of the new reality to come; that foundation had to transmute lies into facts while still stuck in the old reality, but they had an edge that may have proven decisive: trust. If the American people hear the White House repeatedly claim that water is not wet and Godzilla is real, many of those Americans will believe it after a fashion.

    The rumored totality of America's cynical scorn for politics and leaders notwithstanding, this country has many citizens who still believe, even after what has happened, that if the president of the United States says it, then it must be true. This isn't a conscious thing; it happens way back in the slushy part of the brain, where unpleasant facts or disquieting fears are submerged and drowned like rats in an applesauce vat. Bush and his crew counted on that, using TV news messaging to furrow the field in preparation for seeding time, and their trust in the trust of Americans was shown to be well-placed.

    When the serious push came, it came fast and furious. Dick Cheney declared that the Vice President's office no longer existed within the Executive branch because he didn't want to give any of his documents to the National Archives as is required by law, and actually went on to defend the legitimacy of his astonishing, arrogant, galactically mistaken declaration, and he got away with it.

    Bush's lawyers put forth a claim of Executive Privilege that was the very living essence of overheated hubris run amok - a claim that for all intents and purposes declared Bush and his people to be fully and completely above the rule of law, and he got away with it. Subpoenas issued by Congress were either utterly ignored or smugly slapped aside, and the lawyers got away with it.

    Another piece of draconian surveillance legislation aimed at shattering our remaining rights arrived in Congress, so the Bush folks brazenly bullied the majority into passing it by threatening to blame them for the next terrorist attack to come, whereupon the majority instantly wilted like orchids in a snowbank, the bill passed with room to spare, and once again they got away with it.

    Cheney's chief of staff was convicted for lying about lying about lying about outing a deep-cover CIA agent and sentenced to federal prison, initiating the single most observably crooked bag-job in modern political history: Libby took the bullet for his boss, got rewarded for his service with a presidential get-out-of-jail-free card, and they all got away with it.

    All of this was deployed in rapid succession, presenting the American people with a sudden feast of gibberish that has redefined incoherence across the board: the VP is not in the executive branch, and the executive branch is above the law, and the majority in Congress is actually the minority, and obstructing justice to protect Cheney from being prosecuted for annihilating a CIA operative isn't anything to get in a snit about. If that is not prima facie evidence that a new reality has been imposed upon us, then I don't know what is.

    After all that came August, and if I'm right, the process was brought to a successful conclusion. In a way, this was the greatest challenge for Bush and his people, because they all had to argue time and again that Iraq was doing fine, that the whole thing was about freedom, that there was no civil war, that the "surge" worked, that the American people truly supported the whole bloody carnivorous process, and be damned with poll numbers and pundits and contradictory facts. General Petraeus was rolled out on cue, he hummed his bars and faked it at the same time, and as far as the mainstream press was concerned, the White House won the argument and that's that.

    Think about it. The weapons of mass destruction were not there, connections to 9/11 and Osama bin Laden were not there, the hearts and flowers were not there, thousands upon thousands have been killed, billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars have been translated into the bank accounts of administration allies, a civil war is raging beyond any semblance of control there, Iraq's much-ballyhooed democracy is almost as chaotic as the streets outside Parliament, and the entire disaster has become a Quantico training ground for scores of bomb-makers looking to ply their trade in the wider world beyond.

    And they got away with it. If that is reality, I want no part of it.

    It must be clearly understood, however, that I do not discount the very real possibility that I have, finally and for all time, gone insane because of all this. My theory is not proven beyond doubt; my suspicions grow stronger by the hour, but I could simply be this barking madman no longer able to recognize reality even when it is staring me in the eye. I'm pretty sure of my footing, but the truth is that if I did go over the high side somewhere along the line, I'd be the last person to figure that out.

    Therefore, I'm going to wrap myself in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, if only to replace what once was my comforting little joke before the metamorphosis flipped everything upside down on me. "The test of a first-rate intelligence," said Fitzgerald, "is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

    I make no claim to any sort of first-rate intelligence, but I'm going to try to hold these two thoughts in my mind for as long as possible. One thought says reality itself has been detonated with calculated premeditation by Bush and his people. The other thought remembers what it was like before anything like the first thought was even remotely conceived of. Each thought, I think, will nurture and protect the other once the three of us are all settled in, and I will continue to retain the ability to function.

    Meh. Reality is overrated anyway.

 

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091907R.shtml