Hitting the g-spot

A Gucci advertisement featuring a woman with her pubic hair cropped in the shape of a letter "G" got the go-ahead from Britain's tough advertising watchdog on Wednesday.
Sixteen outraged members of the public had complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) that the Italian fashion house's advert was indecent.
But the ASA, which has a reputation for taking a harder line than its counterparts in other European countries, judged the advertisement was targeted at sophisticated, adult fashion magazine readers who would not be offended.
"The image was intimate rather than aggressive and... although it was likely to be considered tasteless by some readers, it was unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence," the ASA said in a statement.
The advert, which is running in British fashion magazines, shows a woman wearing an open silk kimono and underwear which she has pulled part-way down to reveal the letter "G." A man kneels in front, staring at her pubic hair.
The advertisers aimed to provoke and viewed the image as "the ultimate ironic pun for a sexy brand in a logo-led age," the ASA said. Gucci believed "the image addressed today's reality that men and women's sexual roles were changing," the statement added. (Reuters)

Coalition of the willing (read 'war crims')

The United States has proposed a doctrine of "pre-emptive self-defence" (doesn'tall the NewSpeak make you shudder?) to use force against another country it suspects may attack it at some stage.
However, a pre-emptive strike on Iraq would constitute a crime against humanity, write 43 experts on international law and human rights.
The initiation of a war against Iraq by the self-styled "coalition of the willing" would be a fundamental violation of international law.

Ari laughed out of White House briefing room

Ari Fleischer drew himself up with imperious indignation and said to a reporter, "you're implying that the President is buying the votes of other nations, and that's just not a consideration".
The whole press corps, normally docile, broke out into derisive laughter, and kept on laughing as Ari turned on his heels and strode out of White House briefing room.
Follow the above link and go down to White House Press Briefing (Feb 25, 2003) and click on the video. After it buffers, play from about 28 minutes forward for context, 30 minutes forward to watch the press laugh at Ari's bullshit.
Visit C-Spanor The video

Concentration Camps in Okanagon County?

Okanogan County Commissioner Dave Schulz says he's convinced his county is a designated home for a ``concentration camp'' in case of civil unrest. Schulz says he has copies of documents, although he hasn't been able to confirm the rumor.
Federal officials say they have no idea where the commissioner got the notion of civilian detention camps.
A Federal Emergency Management Agency spokeswoman says it sounds like an urban legend and a Pentagon spokesman says he's not aware of any planned camps in Okanogan County or elsewhere.
Rumors of planned U.S. detention facilities appear on dozens of Web sites. Schulz says he thinks the plan has been written in the event of a national emergency where martial law is necessary, and hopes it never becomes necessary.

Rockefeller: Bush decided 'long time ago' to go to war

America will declare war against Iraq regardless of how the United Nations Security Council votes, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Tuesday.
Rockefeller, who returned to the country Saturday following a week-long visit to Pakistan, Kuwait and Afghanistan, said based on private conversations he's had with President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others in the administration, he believes war with Iraq is inevitable.
"I think the president has made up his mind, and whether we get the votes or don't get the votes, I think we're going to go to war," the senator said, adding Bush "made up his mind a long time ago ..."

Pulitzer-winning reporter Seymour Hersh: Rumsfeld authorized evac of al Qaeda

Seymour Hersh relays the story of how an evacuation of Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan into Pakistan was authorized by Rumsfeld as a favor to Pakistan. "Gee, really?" said Rumsfeld. "News to me."
Q: How high up was that evacuation authorized?
HERSH: I am here to tell you it was authorised ... at the White House. ... certainly at the Secretary of Defense level.

If you think the world is a violent place now, just wait

"A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it, is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated."
Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.

Adding insult to 9-11 injuries

A notorious liar, Kissinger has lied repeatedly to Congress, the press and the public; he is a toady to power and a lackey of the Establishment and for many years now the hireling of despotic regimes around the world. Old Cover-Up Kissinger, the man who double-crossed the Iraqi Kurds -- just the man to lead an independent inquiry into 9-11.
The cynicism of this insult to the families of those who died on 9-11 is just flabbergasting. We knew that the Bush administration opposed the whole idea of an independent inquiry, but this adds supreme insult to injury.

A few words from Bush

As The New Yorker recently noted, if Bill Gates walked into a soup kitchen serving 60 bums, the average worth of the people in that room would be $1 billion each. But it would still be Bill Gates and 60 bums.
In his State of the Union address Bush claimed tax relief was for everyone who pays income taxes. … "Ninety-two million Americans will keep this year an average of almost $1,100 of their own money".
Molly Ivins points out however that a third of all Americans will never see a dime of that tax cut. Half of all taxpayers will get less than $100 from the Bush tax cut. Those who make more than $1 million a year will get an average cut of $92,000, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That may average out to $1,100, but it ain't going to the average family.

Let's ease up on the machismo

The president did an unfortunate disservice to the cause of reasonable debate when he said of the worldwide demonstration against the impending war: "Some in the world don't view Saddam Hussein as a risk to peace. I respectfully disagree."
Painting the anti-war movement as pro-Saddam gets us nowhere. What the Europeans are trying to say is not that they think Saddam is harmless. We've got near-universal agreement -- including, as near as one can tell, from most Iraqis -- that the man is a miserable SOB. The difference is over how to handle him, and the United States has put itself in the unfortunate position of looking as though we'd rather go to war, unprovoked, than work at a way to defang him peacefully.

A wee bit crazy? Science now has a name for you

I have good news. If you dress funny, talk funny, have no friends, believe in ghosts and communicate with UFOs, science finally has a name for you. You're a schizotypal.
The difference between a schizophrenic and a schizotypal is that the former has delusions while the latter has beliefs. A schizotypal realises his ideas might border on the bizarre, but feels that makes him smarter and better than everyone else because he bops along a mental road less travelled.

Professor in terror indictments was a Bush supporter

Sami Amin al-Arian, the University of South Florida professor charged with being the US leader of a Mideast terrorist group, was an influential figure in Tampa's small Muslim community whose political activism landed him in a photograph with President Bush during the 2000 campaign.
''He was a Bush supporter,'' said Robert McKee, an attorney who is representing Arian in a legal dispute with the university. ''As close as the election in Florida was, Sami may have put him over the top. He got out the vote in the Muslim community in Florida, and now Bush's attorney general is going after him.''

We Are Not The Enemy! - The Battle of Portland




Mr. Bush is protested wherever he goes these days, and the crowds which attend them are growing. These are not black-clad anarchists kicking in windows, however. The woman who was attacked by the police looked as ordinary as any small-town librarian, and anarchists are smart enough to leave their children at home if there is a riot in the offing. The streets of Portland were filled on August 22nd by average American citizens seeking to inform the President of their disfavor regarding the manner in which he is governing their country. They were rewarded with the business end of a billy club, a face-full of pepper spray, and the jarring impact of a rubber bullet.

CNN leaves 750 telling words out of Blix transcript.

US intelligence's de facto news organ CNN, offered what purported to be a full transcript of Hans Blix' address to the UN Security Council. But it left out nearly 750 words - the ones where Blix refutes Colin Powell's 'smoking gun' presentation.
CNN transcript
and BBC transcript.

Armageddon asteroids 'best kept secret'

A scientific adviser to the US government has suggested that secrecy might be the best option if scientists were ever to discover that a giant asteroid was on course to collide with Earth.
"If an extinction-type impact is inevitable, then ignorance for the populace is bliss. As a matter of common sense, if you can't intercept it and you can't move people out of the way in time, there's nothing you can do in terms of reducing the costs of the potential impact," said Geoffrey Sommer, of the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California.

Arms and legs sticking out of Gulf's past

'What I saw was a bunch of filled-in trenches with people's arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands'
Patrick J Sloyan on how, for 20 years, the mass slaughter of a group of Iraqis has gone unreported, Friday February 14, 2003,

President Salutes Sailors at Naval Station Mayport in Jacksonville

[When Bush got laughter and applause, a sinister little smile appeared on his face.]
The terrorists brought this war to us -- and now we're taking it back to them. (Applause.) We're on their trail, we're smoking them out, we've got them on the run. We're hunting them down one by one, all across the world. With our allies, we've arrested or otherwise dealt with -- (laughter) -- many of the key commanders of al Qaeda. And that includes the terrorist who planned the bombing of the USS Cole. (Applause.)
So far, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Just about that number met a different kind of fate. They're not a problem anymore. (Applause.)

CIA chief warns of possible al Qaeda attack in U.S.

[Warning: Leni Reifenstahl meets Fellini, with a dash of Monty Python]
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said he reviewed a transcript of the message, which he said was to air on the Al-Jazeera Arab news satellite television channel, which operates out of Qatar. "(Bin Laden) speaks to the people of Iraq and talks about their struggle and how he is in partnership with Iraq," Powell said.
Asked for reaction to Powell's claim, Al-Jazeera denied it had such a message from bin Laden, saying news of it was a rumor that has been circulating for several weeks.

Stifling the voice of reason and dissent (don't bother clicking this, the site has closed)

The campaign to stifle dissent and censor any questioning of current U.S. policies vis a vis the Middle East in general, and Iraq in particular, has reached new levels.
Websites which host alternative views, and/or views that contradict U.S. foreign policy are no longer tolerated on the Internet and are systematically coming under hacker attack and political pressures to "relocate."
The well known alternative news site YellowTimes.org was shut down by its hosting company. Such is the nature of "Free Speech" in America.

The New York Sun says war protest is act of treason

Since Sept. 11, 2001, we have documented many instances in which pundits and politicians have tried to demonize dissent, suggesting that it is unpatriotic and even that it aids the enemy. But none has gone so far as to suggest an actual prosecution for treason simply for voicing one's political views - until now.
The New York Sun editorial leader for February 6, 2003 objected to the organisation of an anti-war march saying, "the New York City police could do worse than to allow the protest and send two witnesses along for each participant, with an eye toward preserving at least the possibility of an eventual treason prosecution."
This was a reference to Article III of the constitution: ".No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.”

Women bare all in Australian anti-war protest

More than 700 women posed nude on Saturday to protest against Australia's likely involvement in a potential war against Iraq.
Lying naked end to end on a grassy knoll in the Australian beach town of Byron Bay, they formed a heart around the words "No War" for an aerial photograph.
Ananova has a story with picture at http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_748598.html?menu=

The UK Iraq dossier and its use of open sources, namely Jane's

The dossier on Iraq's concealment infrastructure published on 3 February 2002 used open sources to make much of its case. These sources included articles from Jane's Intelligence Review dating from 1997 and November 2002, as well as an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi published in the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA).
That open sources should be used to compile such a report is not in itself surprising - indeed, the use of open sources was acknowledged in the introduction to the document. However, the direct copying of entire paragraphs casts some doubt on the processes used to create dossiers of this type.

Strategic Defense Initiative scopes Columbia before disintegration

A telescope at the Starfire Optical Range at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque photographed the space shuttle Columbia in its last minutes using missile defense technology to capture stunningly acute images.
"For security reasons, we don't want people to know exactly how good we can do this," said Rich Garcia, a spokesman for Starfire, which is operated by the Air Force Research Laboratory.
Mr. Garcia said he could not say whether Starfire had been asked to monitor the Columbia or whether its equipment just happened to catch a glimpse of the shuttle before its breakup. The installation, based on technology developed as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative, is used for astronomical observation and tracking satellites.

Astronauts had '90 seconds of hell' as shuttle broke up

Investigators were focusing more closely on the desperate effort of Columbia's automatic control system to hold the speed of the spacecraft stable despite an increasing amount of wind resistance from the left wing.
Teams were intensifying efforts to recover the final data from the spacecraft. Pieces of debris have been found in Arizona and California, indicating that disintegration began before the shuttle reached east Texas, where most of the wreckage fell.

NASA Reportedly Hacked Hours After Columbia Was Lost


A hacker group attacked and struck down servers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory just hours after the Columbia space shuttle was lost, according to a London-based security company. The attack, allegedly pulled off by a group calling itself the Trippin Smurfs, temporarily staggered nine servers running on the Sun Solaris operating system, according to a report issued by mi2g, a security firm based in England. The attack was fired off as a protest against the U.S.'s position on Iraq. The attack lasted for about an hour and a half, approximately seven hours after the Columbia exploded just 16 minutes before its scheduled landing. All seven crew members were killed. The hacker group defaced the organization's Web servers with political messages, according to mi2g. The report also points out that this is the third time the Trippin Smurfs have successfully compromised servers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They attacked two servers on Jan. 18 of this year and another three on Jan. 25. This last incident, mi2g reports, is the first time the group has uploaded politically charged content.

NASA explores whether space debris at fault as launch debris fades as culprit


The possibility That Columbia Was Fatally Wounded by space debris is growing.
"There have been many, many impacts," said Donald H. Emero, a former NASA shuttle manager who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that examined the danger of "orbital debris" for NASA in 1997.
Although the impacts force NASA to regularly replace pitted window panes and repair or replace damaged ceramic tiles that provide insulation from the heat of reentry, a shuttle had never suffered serious damage from debris.
The Pentagon's Space Control Center in Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado tracks more than 8,500 manmade objects and has warned NASA 12 times to move the shuttle out of the way of a potential collision. The space station has moved six times after a military warning.

Shuttle hit caught on video?

An amateur astronomer who watched the space shuttle cross the sky outside his Sparks home early Saturday picked up on videotape what might be signs of trouble for the doomed flight.
Jay Lawson, a volunteer at the Fleischmann Planetarium at the University of Nevada, Reno, said he didn?t see any apparent problems while watching the shuttle in the predawn sky a little before 6 a.m. But Lawson said he saw something unexpected while watching his tape a few minutes later.

Researchers translate DNA code as music

Imagine the human genome as music. Unravel DNA's double helix, picture its components lined up like piano keys and assign a note to each. Run your finger along the keys.
Spanish scientists did that just for fun and recorded what they call an audio version of the blueprint for life.

Pentagon adviser: France 'no longer ally'

France is no longer an ally of the United States and the NATO alliance "must develop a strategy to contain our erstwhile ally or we will not be talking about a NATO alliance" the head of the Pentagon's top advisory board said in Washington Tuesday.
Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and now chairman of the Pentagon's Policy Advisory Board, condemned French and German policy on Iraq in the strongest terms at a public seminar organized by a New York-based PR firm and attended by Iraqi exiles and American Middle East and security officials.
But while dismissing Germany's refusal to support military action against Iraq as an aberration by "a discredited chancellor," Perle warned that France's attitude was both more dangerous and more serious.

2/1/03 -- Hide your books, the principal is coming

"To Ms. Ehrenfeld: This morning I observed that during the morning news program, you and your students were engaged in activities other than watching television."
So began the official letter of reprimand placed in my personnel folder by the principal at the elementary school in Maryland where I was teaching 3rd grade at the time. Odd as the accusation was, it was made even odder by the fact that my students were reading when the principal caught them not watching television. She had walked in, and there they were, sitting as silently as a group of 3rd graders can, every one of them absorbed in a book. What they were supposed to be doing was watching our school's morning news show, an exercise in terminal boredom.

Nasa chiefs 'repeatedly ignored' safety warnings

Fears of a catastrophic shuttle accident were raised last summer with the White House by a former Nasa engineer who pleaded for a presidential order to halt all further shuttle flights until safety issues had been addressed.
In a letter to the White House, Don Nelson, who served with Nasa for 36 years until he retired in 1999, wrote to President George W. Bush warning that his 'intervention' was necessary to 'prevent another catastrophic space shuttle accident'.
During his last 11 years at Nasa, Nelson served as a mission operations evaluator for proposed advanced space transportation projects. He was on the initial design team for the space shuttle. He participated in every shuttle upgrade until his retirement.

Shuttle: costly, outmoded, impractical and deadly

The core problem that lay at the heart of the Challenger tragedy applies to the Columbia tragedy as well. That core problem is the space shuttle itself. For 20 years, the American space program has been wedded to a space-shuttle system that is too expensive, too risky, too big for most of the ways it is used, with budgets that suck up funds that could be invested in a modern system that would make space flight cheaper and safer. The space shuttle is impressive in technical terms, but in financial terms and safety terms no project has done more harm to space exploration. With hundreds of launches to date, the American and Russian manned space programs have suffered just three fatal losses in flight?and two were space-shuttle calamities. This simply must be the end of the program.

Engineering Detectives Start Piecing Together Evidence From Doomed Space Shuttle Columbia

The focus for now is whether insulation that broke loose from a fuel tank during the shuttle Columbia's ascent on Jan. 16 damaged heat-protecting tiles, ultimately dooming the shuttle's return to earth 16 days later.
The manufacturer of the fuel tank disclosed Sunday that NASA used an older version of the tank, which the space agency began phasing out in 2000.
NASA's preflight press information stated the shuttle was using one of the newer super-lightweight fuel tanks.
Harry Wadsworth, a spokesman for Lockheed, the tank maker, said most shuttle launches use the "super-lightweight" tank and the older version is no longer made. Wadsworth said he did not know if there was a difference in how insulation was installed on the two types of tanks.

Operation Sphinx

At a time when virtually the entire international community has come to a consensus against Pakistan 'crossing the line' and becoming a nuclear state, an attack on Pakistan's nuclear facility cannot be entirely ruled out. After all the world has witnessed the June 7, 1981 Israeli attack and destruction of the Iraqi nuclear complex Temuze 70 (Osirak), just outside Baghdad when US made Israeli fighter bomber carried out Operation Sphinx. For non-proliferation 'crusaders' this Operation must have qualified as Israel's contribution to global non-proliferation. (from May 27, 2000)

Photos show odd images near shuttle

An amateur astronomer has captured five strange and provocative images of the shuttle Columbia just before it disintegrated while re-entering the Earth's atmosphere before dawn Saturday.
The pictures, taken with a Nikon 8 camera on a tripod, reveal what appear to be bright electrical phenomena flashing around the track of the shuttle's passage, but the photographer, who asked not to be identified, will not make them public immediately.
"They clearly record an electrical discharge like a lightning bolt flashing past, and I was snapping the pictures almost exactly . . . when the Columbia may have begun breaking up during re-entry," he said.
They show a bright scraggly flash of orange light, tinged with pale purple, and shaped somewhat like a deformed L. The flash appears to cross the Columbia's dim contrail, and at that precise point, the contrail abruptly brightens and appears thicker and somewhat twisted as if it were wobbling.

Analog clocks are living fossils of the Sumerian base 60 counting

Musicians, following Plato, still project their tones into a circle that eliminates cyclic octave repetitions (Plato, in the Timaeus, insists that God makes only one model of anything). Thus today, using our modern, equal-tempered scale, we can identify any musical interval as some multiple of a standard semitone, to the envy of calendarmakers, who, having to deal with the irregularities of days, months, and years, are jealous of our perfect twelve-tone symmetry. But the nearest approximation of our twelve-tone, equal-tempered scale in small integers remains that provided by ancient base-60 arithmetic.
In ancient Mesopotamia, music, mathematics, art, science, religion, and poetic fantasy were fused. Around 3000 B.C., the Sumerians developed a base-60 number system. Their gods were assigned numbers that encoded the primary ratios of music, with the gods' functions corresponding to their numbers in acoustical theory. Thus the Sumerians created an extensive tonal/arithmetical model for the cosmos. In this far-reaching allegory, the physical world is known by analogy, and the gods give divinity not only to natural forces but also to a "supernatural," intuitive understanding of mathematical patterns and psychological forces.