The Campaign to Impeach George W. Bush
Click here for more information
CYBERsitter Examined - a site run by a group of teenagers protesting web blocking software, and CYBERSitter in particular. This sort of protest is to be expected and naturally enough you can now find pages on the net, such as the one they posted Peacefire.org: How to disable CYBERsitter ... Just posting this link is probably enough to get my site banned by CYBERSitter, if it hasn't been banned already. CYBERSitter has generated a great deal of criticism for blocking all sites promoting political dissent or left wing views. For example you can consult the following site on the web, where you will find a list of sites the previous version of the program was blocking. Universities (Rutgers University? protect your kids from the nations universities?) and sites with views not in agreement with right wing Christianity will all be found on the list of blocked sites (any site that even mentions the word 'gay' anywhere on the page is blocked - for example a site with a song lyric like 'Paris is gay in the springtime' would be blocked.) What does CYBERSitter block?
Phillip Morris apologizes for promiting the cost savings to the health system of early deaths by smokers- July 28, 2001 also see : The Village Voice: Nation: Press Clips: Dateline: 43rd Street by Cynthia Cotts
It's the Real Thing: Murder - murder and terror used by large multinationals in Central and South America to bust unions
SatireWire
Global Trade Watch - Survey of IMF Impact on African Countries
Multinational Monitor : Strangling Mozambique International Monetary Fund "Stabilization" in the World's Poorest Country by Joseph Hanlon
Russians Ruling Robber Barons : "Despite the outrages and inequities of their robber baron capitalism, self-help and prosperity are growing in ways our macroeconomic charts have no way of describing. Moscow and St. Petersburg are boomtowns ... It may seem strange, but as recently as last summer, such Goebbels-like inverses on the truth were the Party Line when it came to Western reporting on Russia."
Spin of the day
Spinning a war : "A few weeks into the Palestinian uprising, which flared up during the fall of 2000, Israeli officials concluded the "media war" wasn't going their way ... For most U.S. news organizations, "objective" has long meant "pro-Israeli." ... Most reporting on the uprising has implied that Israel is a peace-loving democracy that made generous concessions to the Palestinians at the Camp David negotiations in 2000. The unreasonable Palestinians rejected the offer and turned to terrorism ... "
A group of the most famous capitalists in America attempted a coup to overthrow Roosevelt in the thirties (and the whole business was swept under the rug). A bit of little known American history ... The White House Coup : "Few Americans know it, but during the Great Depression, a cabal of millionaire bankers and industrialistshatched a conspiracy to hijack the U.S. government and install a fascist dictatorship. It was, in the wordsof contemporary journalist John L. Spivak, "one of the most fantastic plots in American history." .... Coup d'Etat American Style : "consider a relatively recent case of coup in America documented in Trading Withthe Enemy (Dell, 1983). In his well researched and highly informative book investigating allied business dealings with the Nazisthroughout World War II, author Charles Higman includes an account of a 1934 plot by members of the Du Pont and Morganfamilies to finance the installation of a fascist dictatorship following the overthrow of the Roosevelt presidency." ... U.S. Corporations and the Nazis : "Irenee du Pont, "the most imposing and powerful member of the clan," according to biographer and historian Charles Higham, "was obsessed with Hitler's principles." "He keenly followed the career of the future Fuhrer in the 1920s, and on September 7, 1926, in a speech to the American Chemical Society, he advocated a race of supermen."
OffSite : The top Censored News Stories of 2000 ... At the top of the list World Bank and Mulitinational Corporations seek to privatize water
Independent Gay Forum: Consenting Adults and Sex Laws
KLU KLUX KLAN for Kids : A few words from their site - "If God wanted all the people in the world to mix all up and become one brown race than He would have made them that way in the beginning ... in some small islands in the Tropics where there was slavery - when there became to be so many black people - they all got together and murdered all the white people - moms, dads, and kids.They didn't want free black people and they didn't want enslaved black people. They wanted all the black people to go back to Africa. When there would start to be bigger groups of black people in the different towns instead of just a few neighbors, they would start to riot or steal and kill. The South said no more slaves could come - there was too many already. When there are only a few blacks in a town they act nicer to the white people. But when there begins to be more black people, they start complaining ..."
Physics 2000 from Colorado.edu
Tutorial find - Find tutorials on anything
Physics for everyone - scroll down the page for online Media presentations. For example see the program (2 hours) in Real Media format on The theory of Relativity (streaming Real media file)
Poor Magazine : "dedicated to reframing the news, issues and solutions from low and no income communities, as well as providing society with a perspective usually not heard or seen within the mainstream media."
Orwellian Creep - Normally in order to tap a phone, for example, a court order is required, but unprecendented and unchecked powers are being used to monitor internet connections, with even more such powers being sought...link from NetSurfer Digest
Fingered by the movie cops : "Under today's copyright laws, you are guilty until proven innocent. I know -- it happened to me.After a hacker uses IP spoofing (using another users computer address) to upload a copyrighted file to the net, a users Internet access is suspended and then he is forced to sign a legal document promising not to upload files to the net as part of the deal in getting his access to the net restored... The moral of the story is that the DMCA allows you to be tried and judged guilty before you even know what has happened. The MPAA could have my account shut down immediately -– or yours -– and there’s nothing any of us could do to stop it. " Normally one is innocent until proven guilty, but under the terms of the new Millenium Copyright Act, you are guilty until proven innocent as the author discovered...
The Galileo Space Probe
Scumware.com : 'Free' Software that inserts ads into web pages, or that 'spies' on users and reports back to central servers...
Tech-Report on the Intel Pentium 4
Virus Myths : Over the last month I have been sent the Sircam virus a number of times (you are invited to 'give your opinion' on an attached file, with the virus email ending with the line 'thanks a lot'), and my error log file on my website is constantly swelling with attempted attacks by that Code Red Virus (maybe we will never get rid of that thing) and I have also encountered a password/credit card theiving trojan horse (no passwords of CU number worth stealing) and my computer is constantly being scanned by hacker programs, so it is certainly the case that viruses are real, and do impact us at times, but the Virus Myth site both debunks urban legends surrounding computer viruses and also keeps a close (and sometimes critical) watch on the Antivirus companies (who have a vested interest, after all, in virus scares)...
Relief Web : a central clearing house for International Humanitarian emergencies and Disaster /Humanitarian Situation Reports (I like to know what is going on in the world, and there is only so much you can find out in the media)
In keeping with my keen personal interest in mountain drought I have paid a visit to the U.S. Forest Fire Activity page as well as
Yellow/Brown=High/Extreme Fire Risk, Red=Very Extreme
The Soil Moisture Index
White=normal, browns=dry, greens=wet
is another pit stop, as well as Stream Flows in the Pacific Northwest (they are below average, as you would expect from the drought taking place in the region)
Christian Aid is an organization that left me pleasantly surprised. I was very dubious about reading anything on that site, expecting such 'social commentary' as I find on some Christian sites which would 'analyze' poverty by saying such nonsense as 'poor nations are poor because they do not follow Christianity' (poverty is a punishment of God, and ignoring colonialism we can insist that the West is rich because it has a 'Christian heritage' which 'is under threat', implying then that if we want to stay rich we better stay 'Christian'. This type of 'analysis' leaves unexplained why such strong Catholic nations as those we find in Central and South America, for example, are poor now and have been poor for some time (and have been kept poor through constant invasion and foreign intervention, hardly Christian conduct, but like I said, 'Christian' sites are not highly regarded by me as sources of 'social analysis' but rather are sources for traditional dogmatic ax grinding). However Christian Aid turned out to be a very interesting site and not at all what I expected, which is a really refreshing change of pace...
Drought and instability in Central Asia : "Afghanistan is one of the hungriest countries in the world, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation’s annual food security report, released this week. It is one of the few non-African countries facing difficulty feeding its people, and ranks with Somalia and Haiti as one of the world’s “hungriest” countries. 70 percent of Afghans are undernourished. The drought affecting large parts of Central Asia continues to bite, and while some governments have committed support donor promises have been made, investment is also needed for medium and long-term development. The UN’s 2000 appeal to governments for aid for Afghanistan received only 8.5 percent of the money requested ... The Taliban forces are struggling to take hold of the last ten percent of Afghanistan which remains outside their control, on the northern borders with Tajikistan. Intense fighting continues near Taloqan, and international agencies and the UN are preparing for the worst – a mass exodus of refugees into Tajikistan. The UN is preparing for up to 100,000 people.Drought continues in Tajikistan."
A protest against the G8 summit AIDS proposal from Christian Aid : A few quotes - "two decades of World Bank/IMF structural adjustment programmes in developing countries have made matters worse, not least because such programmes were not focused on poverty eradication. National systems need to be built up, not undermined ... poor people become even poorer when they use up their already scarce money in order to buy medicines (assuming that these are available at all) ... Fear of stigma and its consequences leads to secrecy and denial, which increase the risk of further transmission and preclude access to treatment and care which could prolong full and productive lives. To address stigma requires strong leadership at national and community levels, and Uganda provides a striking example of how effective the destigmatising of the virus can be in reducing infection rates ... (woman are disproportionately infected with the AIDs virus) ... culturally women are rarely able to negotiate their sexual relationships and certain practices such as wife inheritance render them even more vulnerable, while national laws often reflect and reinforce women's culturally-created vulnerabilities. Gender relations are fundamental in the fight against HIV/AIDS: the rights of women and girls must be actively promoted ... Because poverty both exacerbates the HIV/AIDS crisis, and is itself exacerbated by it, poverty alleviation with all its multi-faceted perspectives is at the core of Christian Aid's approach. Christian Aid calls on the G8 governments to address themselves seriously to the real issues, rather than appearing to indulge in public relations exercises in an attempt to convince the world that something is being done."
Christian Aid on the crisis in the Sudan : This is a Christian organization not focused exclusively on the slave trading issue, or siding with the Christians in the conflict, but rather focused on the role of multinational corporations in the conflict. "The revenue from the oil operations is being used by government forces to pursue their war efforts. The only way for oil companies to prevent being implicated in further human rights abuses in Southern Sudan is to suspend oil operations until a just and lasting peace settlement has been reached.' ‘Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed and displaced by a systematic policy of depopulating the oil-rich areas,’ says Dan Silvey. ‘Each time an oil concession is developed, it is accompanied by massive human rights violations. ' ... Sudan has become a net oil exporter – earning enough to pay for the estimated $1 million a day it spends on the war. Sudan’s 18-year civil war, in which two million people have died, is now fuelled by oil revenues ... The Scorched Earth examines the evidence of direct company complicity, including the use of company airstrips and oilroads by the government forces in the pursuit of the war. It looks at the pattern of atrocities in three oil concessions, the most recent being the clearing of villages along the oil road ..."
Christian Aid on the debt problem in Tanzania : "The Olissa family live in Tanzania, one of the world's poorest countries. Its economy is in crisis, largely thanks to the high levels of debt repayments it is forced to make ... It's a hand to mouth existence, and they often go hungry ... "
Christian Aid - Palestinians at point of no return : "Palestinian communities are under severe economic strain – some 64 per cent of Palestinian households now live below the poverty line. An estimated 74 per cent of the population have qualified for emergency food assistance from the United Nations ..."
http://www.dropthedebt.org/ : They have a counter on their site that counts off the number of babies dying because of the debt of the world's poorest nations while you surf the site. A few quotes from their site : "the only people who suffer as a result are the poorest people in the world. Some of the money got spent badly. Some was wasted. Some went into the pockets of dictators. Some went straight back to the West through corrupt lending. Some simply acted as a subsidy to Western companies. Very little of it actually helped ordinary people. But it is ordinary people who suffer now because of the debt - people who were probably not even born when the loans were made ... The poorest countries are forced to take out new loans and divert aid just to try and keep up with interest payments. Any accountant knows this is bad financial practice - but these countries have no choice. If they were individuals or companies, they would be declared bankrupt, and a line would be written under the debts ... Germany received massive debt relief after the Second World War. The Allies realised it made sense - rebuilding a stable Germany meant peace and prosperity in Europe. It also meant Germans had enough money to buy American, British and Japanese goods ... The Group of Seven (G7) richest nations are the main bilateral creditors ... the G7 countries also hold half the votes on the Boards of the IMF and World Bank. (The US alone holds 15% of the votes - compared to Mozambique which holds 0.08%). This means that ultimately, the G7 have the power to cancel the debts of the poorest countries not only to their own governments, but also to the multilateral development banks ... Live Aid raised $200 million for sub-Saharan Africa. Each week, sub-Saharan Africa pays $250 million in debt repayments to the west."
U.S. condemned for quitting anti-racism conference : A few of the more interesting quotes in the article : "UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was clear on one thing: "We cannot expect Palestinians to accept [the Holocaust] as a reason for the wrongs done to them through displacement, occupation, blockade, and now extra-judicial killings". ... The US and Israeli withdrawal was condemned by the National Lawyers Guild of the US which said US Administrations, over the past two years, had "failed to grapple" with the issues of racism and intolerance and had "impeded" the build-up to the conference. The Guild called for an end to "apartheid in Palestine", arguing for human rights to be put before "property interests". ... While he questioned certain methods, he told the Irish Times (September 5), he fully supported their aims. "(President) Mugabe and the people of Zimbabwe are entitled to control their land ... Let me tell you that 4500 commercial white farmers own 75 per cent of the viable land in Zimbabwe." ... Leading US civil rights campaigner Jesse Jackson told the BBC that the failure of countries to apologise meant they ought to declare they must be proud of slavery and colonialism. If they were sincere, he said, "they would apologise ... "slavery, colonialism and apartheid have resulted in gross and lasting economic, political, social and cultural damage to the African peoples". ... "
Media Monitors - a start up site wanting to counter 'spin' in the media...
Galaxy NGC 3310 - interesting because it shows new star formation as well as a corresponding unusual jet and halo effect called 'the bow and arrow' (as gases from the active galatic core shoot out of the galaxy into space) ...
