Quick Post

Be sure to check out the "50 most loathesome people in America" article on this blog. It's riotous.

posted by C-Mentat @ 00:46 4 comments

Time to Google a Better Place to Live

Batten down the hatches and lock up your daughters folks, because Uncle Sam is on the prowl. Not content with illegal wiretaps on unsuspecting citizens, now the good ol' U.S. government wants a look at what you're doing online. The Department of Justice has asked Google to hand over a weeks worth of records on what people are searching for, as well as a random sample of a million websites from their databases. Admittedly this would be a ton of information and a nightmare to sort through, but creating a shitstorm and then having to sit it out is sort of our specialty (Iraq anybody?).

Google, thankfully, appears to be resisting the DOJ's efforts acquire this data, but it's going to end up in court. Roberto Gonzales has already filed for a motion to compel to force Google to comply, but Google has said it will fight it out.

The official reason the government says it wants this information is because it's Child Online Protection Act has been blocked by the Supreme Court and to defend it they want info that says tons of people are being bombarded by porn online. They haven't been able to prove it so far, so they're just going to keep on trying and they think Google is the key. The problem with this is that it's a very slippery slope: today it's a random sample they want and tomorrow it's specific information. If this is allowed to happen unchallenged, there's no telling where it will lead. Combined with the aforemetioned wiretapping, I don't know what's more terrifying, the fact that the Bush administration has quietly begun to spy on its own citizens as part of a McCarthyesque "terrorist" witch-hunt, or the fact that nobody seems to care. Make no mistake - Big Brother is watching. I'm anti-bumper-sticker as a rule, but the one that springs to mind right now is:

The ACLU has stepped up and filed suit against the National Security Agency, which will presumably take a break from pretending not to exist to defend against the allegations of unconstitutional activity. The fact that the president himself authorized eavesdropping on Americans means that this problem goes right to the top. Not that any of us were under the impression that Bush wouldn't do such a thing, but I'm skeptical that he knew about this program at all. I find it very hard to believe that Cheney would risk telling G.W. about something so illegal and I'm guessing it was as much of a surprise to him as it was to everyone else. Let's hope the ACLU comes out on top in this one though, because I certainly don't want to find out the hard way at an airport that I'm not allowed to go abroad because I googled communism during class.

Google Refuses To Turn Over Records To Government

Internet search-engine giant Google is refusing to turn over their records to the Justice Department, raising major privacy concerns for Web users. What do you think?

Kevin Gander, Barber
"Man, the government is gonna feel dumb when they see my search for 'the+government+sucks+dick'"

posted by Der Staubsauger @ 11:42 1 comments

Mahlzeit: Der Menschenfresser kommt wieder

Armin Meiwes is back in the news again. You may remember him as the guy-who-ate-a-guy in Rotenburg. Herr Meiwes did what any sensible dude who's Jonesing a tasty mansnack would do, he put an add on the internet using his imaginary brother's name instead of his own. Surprisingly, he got a lot of responses and four guys actually came to visit him in Rotenburg. One of them actually got as far as being tied down on a bed and having himself divided up into butcher's cuts with a sharpie before he thought "hang on, maybe being an entree for this total psychopath was an imprudent thing to volunteer for." That guy just asked Armin to let him go, and sure enough, Armin obliged. Weird.
Eventually Herr Meiwes found his man however, when in March, 2001 Bernd-Juergen Brandes showed up on his doorstep. Brandes was all about being eaten (or so Charmin' Armin insists) and, being the accommodating fine young cannibal we all know him to be, Meiwes helped the guy out. Apparently they cut off Brandes' dong and gave that a taste between the two of them, but then Brandes got a little woosy from blood loss. That's when things got difficult though, because although Meiwes was all about a tasty severed penis lunch, he gets all squeemish when it comes to murder.

He waited until he thought Brandes was dead from blood loss and then stabbed him in the neck to start cutting him up and bagging him carefully for future consumption. (You have to wrap people-chunks extra carefully because freezer-burned he-meat is gross.) Although originally only convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight and a half years, prosecutors now want to nail him for murder, but his attorneys are saying it was simply an assisted suicide. Oh yeah, it also seems that the whole thing is on video and that Brandes was not actually completely dead when he was cut up. Videotaping this crime spree was the best idea we ever had...

posted by Der Staubsauger @ 14:33 2 comments

Sport Diplomacy

Diplomatic backchannels have long included unlikely ambassadors such as musicians, celebrities and sports stars. These figures have the international recognition necessary to attract attention to a cause, movement or plight, but their most attractive quality (from a diplomatic perspective) is that their actions carry no official weight. It's all of the bacon with none of the fat - they're free to improve things as much as they'd like, and the moment they do something politically unfortunate they're instantly transformed from ambassador back into the wacky star that nobody can control.
Or at least that's how it used to be done. Now however, these "ambassadors," are being taken to task in a way that I think is highly inappropriate. Last week as you may have read, Bayern Munich played an international friendly match against Iran's Persepolis Tehran, and now they're being dragged over the coals for supposedly showing support for Iran's hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We can all agree that Ahmadinejad is world-class pillock and no more deserves to be running a country than everyone's favourite Texan reject. The issue as I see it however, is that although soccer or any other sport can certainly be used to build informal ties between countries with even the most politically distant regimes, it is also vitally important that such events be treated as actual political acts. Not only would this rob them of their positive behind-the-scenes bridge-building ability, but it would turn them into highly politically contentious events. Again, I think we can agree that one thing soccer in particular doesn't need is additional contention.
There's also talk of excluding Iran from the World Cup because of Ahmadinejad's holocaust denying comments. This would also be a mistake. I only know one Iranian, but he's good shit and I don't see the point of punishing a populace because of their administration. I know, I know, "but that works so well" is what you're thinking, "I mean just look at Iraq, we disliked the regime, pounded the shit out of the population, and voila - one piping-hot cup of petroleum-fueled shitstorm." Despite that very compelling argument, maybe we should try a different route with this one, you know, just for shits and giggles. See what happens.

posted by Der Staubsauger @ 13:06 0 comments

It ain't Spiderman, but he's jumping buildings in a single bound...

I always thought that freestyle walking was a funny thing one did after a night of copius drinking. A heel grab here, a 360 there, and so forth...but during my latest travails in England at the Rodriguez-Casado household, I was informed by Marco (Cristo's brother) that there exists a much less humorous (if not more impressive) form of freestyle Bewegung. Apparently, it has gained in popularity following a handful of television spots in Britain and beyond by various sports companies such as Nike. As the founders were most likely not drunk at the time like we freestyle walkers, they came up with the much more creative moniker Parkour.
The French founders of Parkour, or 'free running', Sebastien Foucan and David Belle, are actually phenomenal athletes, and their sport consists less of heel grabs and spins, and more of jumping massive gaps between tall buildings, climbing seemingly unclimbable walls, and generally making like Captain Picard and going places in the city and in the country where no man has gone before. When I watched the first video I pretty much thought it was fake, because its no longer necessary for people to take these kinds of risks when we have computer animation and all that other new-fangled technology stuff to wow unsuspecting audiences. But, in fact, Parkour is about fitness and a philosophy of fluid movement, and the kind of mastery of the body that these guys achieve allows them to do things that seem completely impossible. What makes Parkour even more interesting is its philosophical connection with eastern thought and fluidity. On his website, Foucan has yin yang symbols and various quotes relating to harmony and other for-me-incomprehensible metaphysical whatnot. When looking at the videos it looks like, as with the monks of Tibet, the pro-Parkour fellas have managed to become superhuman in some respects. Now, I'm sure that they injure themselves like any athlete, but it's clear that the level of flexibility and strength they have limits these injuries in comparison to, say, a 400 pound NFL lineman who has a heart attack when he has to run a few laps.
Parkour is based upon a rather limited number of 'moves', which when mastered allow the runner to pretty much go anywhere. The 'cat leap', for example, is used for gaps where the goal cannot be reached with the feet. The runner jumps, catches and holds his body weight by the edge of the wall, then pulls himself up onto the other side. If anyone has ever played Prince of Persia or Tomb Raider on the computer, you already know this one. When jumping gaps with drops in height (sometimes exceeding 15m horizontally and 3 to 5m vertically!) the runner transfers any downward momentum into forward momentum by dropping into a roll. In general, all of these moves demand a combination of gymnastic ability and raw athleticism and strength (not to mention some diamond-hard cajones).
In a way these free runners sound like a sort of transcendental, overachieving and more ambitious form of skateboarding street punks. You can be sure that they're not slipping off into the alley after a hard day of cat-leaps for a doobie, and they've exchanged the loose-crotched trousers of their cousin street punks for sweat-wicking, high-freedom-of-movement sport pants. There is no question that these guys do some pretty amazing stuff, and I'm interested to see if, and how rapidly, this movement finds a larger audience. The best Parkour videos can be found at the following website. Check 'em out: Parkour Videos.

posted by der Mistfink @ 04:02 3 comments

a little of this and a little of that, simmer and voila!! you have a terrorist.

Hello, Tag! and Gruess Euch or something...my German is at this point, vestigial...this is Todd's state-side school-pal and fellow quasi-antipatriot. Here goes my attempt to prove that A is A. Also, that a terrorist is whoever "they" are. And that we, are "counter-terrorist"...which is to me the same damn thing but with bigger guns.

U.S. says bomb hit wrong house in Iraq

Dependability of verity in matters other than carnage and melodrama aside (re: above cited link's origin) and despite the irony of the header "Transition of Power" (as though it were ever anywhere but out of the hands of the civilian population and [to me, axiomatically, as it is in any center of resources but not riches] dictatorial 'regime' or its not-just-symbolically-rear-entry-variety puppeteer being a totally moot, titular veneer and the work of assholes no matter the offered-up flavor and then without delay arises the parallel of the non-gamble in a forecast for an incessant putrid slush from any so-named party onto those below - so again, flavor) but so in sum I just mean in such sordid matters you can not only rely on the comedy surely but also in some aspects the verity of the reporting and also on the vile specificity of it. Opportunists (the media in this case) have no scruples, only an acumen of what could be made into capital or a funnel to it, through the assumption of public focus, or just the pulpy desire of Americans to see horrors, react to them, but only through a sort of tabloid mentality...it's almost like a caricature (the impression taken by viewer, I don't mean the salience of the issue...well except under supposedly globally educated and democratic duress or "scrutiny").

I hope this introduction doesn't baffle or call out too detrimentally any scattered process I dub reason, or logic and well either way I welcome expository rebuttal or dissection or requests for further perspicacity or elaborated boobery. So now, to the bat-cave or the core of the political Döner-Kebab...usw.

After several weeks of grasping for a solid topic for a first deluge, I have taken instead the collage of a probably too-raw but nonetheless just thought-feeding opinion on a cycle; one describing our (as in American) participation in the for-this-week mission of whatever falsely evolved just-the-same-as-before-variety of imperial terror we're calling pro-democractic. This article, above - though brief - sort of clinched my atomized feelings about an obvious but unspoken issue, at least in my neighborhood, and for-the-love-of-Cod did it need a crotch to at once assemble this all-wood but trunkless fray of branches and tendrils.

Ahem, future reference I guess would allow an asterisk skirting all flowery bellestristic window drapery upon the aforesaid.

*
The important practical, current, and by focus nuclear (pardon the pun) concern is illustrated exactly in this most recent happenstance. It's almost without reproach that "58 strikes on Monday" is mentioned. We can just assume without even discussing quantity and just say that we're doing a lot of damage and prejudice is a loose and barely applicable term - to the tune of 30K-100K innocents killed. I guess that's progress; if they're dead they don't need security or well....anything. But so, in this episode of the "white death" we just OOPS! vaporized 66 percent of someone's family. I don't think they are calmly pondering the universal implications of this event and whether on the whole we didn't mean it because we're really trying to blow up the "terrorists" the "enemy" and other "Saddam loyalists" (so, likely, the neighbor who was so motivated by the eradication of his entire life the previous week or day or hour) and ensure the "transition to democracy" (which would be easily accomplished by withdrawal, removing the cannon we've installed that is perpetuating the entire fiasco and is just totally prima facie bullshit in its civic validity). Being bereaved absolutely, indentured even more firmly in their already years long plight, you have to wonder - judging by the pandora's box's worth of "insurgents" that just fly out of the woodwork mostly in the areas where we're fighting "them" - why there is any sensible differentiation between "the enemy" and "the Iraqi people" to anyone with any information.

I find the notion beyond gut-wrenching that no one in the "liberal media" questions the actual causality of our role in the (if memory serves) escalating cycle of death and doom in a(nother) country that in essence doesn't even know what the hell "Iraq" is...it's not like the national boundaries mean anything...the only coagulation even noteworthy is sectarian and fundamentalist and in no way are they feelin' skippy about our continued game of blindfold-on anti-darky laser-tag. I'd say the commonplace belief that America should be 86'd and a rudimentary and poorly aimed but nonetheless unilateral process in a grassroots fashion of the civilan population rising up to oust us despite the rhetoric spouted off to disguise the actual reality of our tyranny is a sign that the people that live there want things arranged and decided on their terms. The people should rule...as they choose, not as we do. Democracy isn't even present in our own country. The people are totally removed...and they have to be, or the anti-socialist gang bang wouldn't go on. In such places it is present (and it follows that these are the rare examples of nations that have extricated themselves from our hegemony, and hence, are in mainstream circles damned) it's subverted as some sort of "radical" government. Venezuela being a solid example of a nation with a popular movement that actually rose up and worked, in the case of the election then coup then re-election of Chavez.

I had this conversation (concerning the Iraqi civilian/after-atrocity-now-a-terrorist insurgent dichotomy) the other weekend with someone I consider fairly well-read and open to radical or orthagonal points of view. He just couldn't understand my equation of "the terrorists" with "plain old Iraqis"...one into the other with a brief dusting of white phosphorous...he kept returning to the "well, we're there now so, why should we just leave, what if another 'dictator' takes over"...you give people social security, keep greedy hands off their nation, and things will sort themselves out on their terms...it's their country and they can do what they choose with it. They are NOT a threat to anyone...it's the weakest country militarily in the region and you've got Big Brother the Unites States of Israel next door and they totally dominate anything.

Here's Noam Chomsky with his usual wit and plain-speak :

"The doctrine, to oversimplify, is that we have to believe the United States would have so-called liberated Iraq even if its main products were lettuce and pickles and [the] main energy resource of the world were in central Africa. Anyone who doesn't accept that is dismissed as a conspiracy theorist or a lunatic or something. But anyone with a functioning brain knows that that's not true—as all Iraqis do, for example. The United States invaded Iraq because its major resource is oil. And it gives the United States, to quote [Zbigniew] Brzezinski, "critical leverage" over its competitors, Europe and Japan. That's a policy that goes way back to the second world war. That's the fundamental reason for invading Iraq, not anything else."

And if cars ran on pickles and lettuce it would be so. The people mean nothing to Bush & Co.

We have simply begun a "pre-emptive" takeover of a weak defenseless peasantry sitting on the greatest patch of petroleum on the planet. Had we not done a thing, and restored humanitarian support to the region, Saddam would likely have been ousted on their terms (as he would have been prior to the 1st Gulf Conflict). Granted this may have also lead to a Shi'a majority annexing the oil fields in Saudi Arabia and then making a reticent, but better-than-nothing defensive alliance with Iran. With China basically unstoppable on the terms we prefer to operate (militarily) and the area already threatening to change its currency of trade from the dollar to the Euro, we had to make a schism in the form of a puppet regime operating and divesting its riches to us on our terms. It also serves as a trial run should/for when military motion against Iran become/s compulsory...at least to the masters of the globo-chemical economy. This administration has legitimized the "supreme crime" as it was classified at Nuremberg: aggression against a sovereign nation outside the specific instance of immediate and imminent threat or attack. That doesn't entail "perceived" imminence...it means, bombs are raining down just next door and we're next. Not, "well, you need to prove to us that the things we can't prove don't warrant a strike". That's just elementary morality. You don't say, we're going to fuck you up unless you give a reason otherwise. Innocent, until guilt is ascertained without doubt. That's democratic and moral. Morality isn't "what the Bible might mean"...it's what you choose to do to those beneath when you've reached the top rung and snatched hold of the smoldering fire-poker.

One can only shudder or feel the rising vexation at being without any representative co-efficient at the level of (and faced with the dormancy of) the impotent UN in other far greater and possibly globally dire military lethality.

It doubly-so sends a message to the remaining powers on the planet, as was the case with N. Korea: that you must arm yourselves, or be steamrolled, castr(o)ated and gentrified.

The cycle continues...and the mark of Ouroboros has a sort of omnious crescendo to it, as time elapses; it remains annular, succinct and not an indecorous (in its eternal cannibalism) nor inappropriate summation of the geopolitical kingpins' inevitable (or perpetual) likely ends.

posted by C-Mentat @ 13:04 4 comments