Gender: Male
Status: Divorced
Age: 48
Sign: Cancer
Country: US
Signup Date:
09/04/05
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Thursday, April 12, 2007
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Vonnegut in his own words...
Current mood:  crushed
Category: Dreams and the Supernatural
The wit and wisdom of Kurt Vonnegut
10:51 PM PDT, April 11, 2007
"When I think about my own death, I don't console myself with the idea that my descendants and my books and all that will live on. Anybody with any sense knows that the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by. I honestly believe, though, that we are wrong to think that moments go away, never to be seen again. This moment and every moment lasts forever."
— "Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons," 1974.
" ... when a society is in great danger, [writers are] likely to sound the alarms. I have the canary-bird-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts. You know, coal miners used to take birds down into the mines with them to detect gas before men got sick. The artists certainly did that in the case of Vietnam. They chirped and keeled over. But it made no difference whatsoever. Nobody important cared. But I continue to think that artists — all artists — should be treasured as alarm systems."
— Playboy interview, 1973
"You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed."
— Undated speech to the American Psychiatric Assn.
"I do think ... that public speaking is almost the only way a poet or a novelist or a playwright can have any political effectiveness in his creative prime. If he tries to put his politics into a work of the imagination, he will foul up his work beyond all recognition."
— "Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons," 1974
"Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well-connected."
— "Slaughterhouse-Five," 1969
"The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings, not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems."
— "Player Piano," 1952
"Poverty is a relatively mild disease ... but uselessness will kill strong and weak souls alike."
— "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," 1965.
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
— "Mother Night," 1962
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Currently
watching
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Metropolis (Restored Authorized Edition)
Release date: 18 February, 2003
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12:13 AM
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Friday, December 22, 2006
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as we celebrate.... remember.....
Current mood:  uncomfortable
Category: News and Politics
Independent Appeal: 'What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today?'
Johann Hari on the plight of pregnant women in the West Bank, where babies are dying needlessly
Published: 23 December 2006
In two days, a third of humanity will gather to celebrate the birth pains of a Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem - but two millennia later, another mother in another glorified stable in this rubble-strewn, locked-down town is trying not to howl.
Fadia Jemal is a gap-toothed 27-year-old with a weary, watery smile. "What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today? She would endure what I have endured," she says.
Fadia clutches a set of keys tightly, digging hard into her skin as she describes in broken, jagged sentences what happened. "It was 5pm when I started to feel the contractions coming on," she says. She was already nervous about the birth - her first, and twins - so she told her husband to grab her hospital bag and get her straight into the car.
They stopped to collect her sister and mother and set out for the Hussein Hospital, 20 minutes away. But the road had been blocked by Israeli soldiers, who said nobody was allowed to pass until morning. "Obviously, we told them we couldn't wait until the morning. I was bleeding very heavily on the back seat. One of the soldiers looked down at the blood and laughed. I still wake up in the night hearing that laugh. It was such a shock to me. I couldn't understand."
Her family begged the soldiers to let them through, but they would not relent. So at 1am, on the back seat next to a chilly checkpoint with no doctors and no nurses, Fadia delivered a tiny boy called Mahmoud and a tiny girl called Mariam. "I don't remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital," she says now. For two days, her family hid it from her that Mahmoud had died, and doctors said they could "certainly" have saved his life by getting him to an incubator.
"Now Mariam is at an age when she asks me where her brother is," Fadia says. "She wants to know what happened to him. But how do I explain it?" She looks down. "Sometimes at night I scream and scream." In the years since, she has been pregnant four times, but she keeps miscarrying. "I couldn't bear to make another baby. I was convinced the same thing would happen to me again," she explains. "When I see the [Israeli] soldiers I keep thinking - what did my baby do to Israel?"
Since Fadia's delivery, in 2002, the United Nations confirms that a total of 36 babies have died because their mothers were detained during labour at Israeli checkpoints. All across Bethlehem - all across the West Bank - there are women whose pregnancies are being disturbed, or worse, by the military occupation of their land.
In Salfit, on the other side of the West Bank, Jamilla Alahad Naim, 29, is waiting for the first medical check-up of her five-month pregnancy. "I am frightened all the time," she says. "I am frightened for my baby because I have had very little medical treatment and I cannot afford good food ... I know I will give birth at home with no help, like I did with Mohammed [her last child]. I am too frightened to go to hospital because there are two checkpoints between our home [and there] and I know if you are detained by the soldiers, the mother or the baby can die out there in the cold. But giving birth at home is very dangerous too."
Hindia Abu Nabah - a steely 31-year-old staff nurse at Al Zawya Clinic, in Salfit district - says it is "a nightmare" to be pregnant in the West Bank today. "Recently, two of our pregnant patients here were tear-gassed in their homes ... The women couldn't breathe and went into premature labour. By the time we got there, the babies had been delivered stillborn."
Many of the medical problems afflicting pregnant women here are more mundane than Jamilla's darkest fears: 30 per cent of pregnant Palestinians suffer from anaemia, a lack of red blood cells. The extreme poverty caused by the siege and now the international boycott seems to be a key factor. The doctors here warn grimly that as ordinary Palestinians' income evaporates, they eat more staples and fewer proteins - a recipe for anaemia. There is some evidence, they add, that women are giving the best food to their husbands and children, and subsisting on gristle and scraps. The anaemia leaves women at increased risk of bleeding heavily and contracting an infection during childbirth.
Earlier this year, conditions for pregnant women on the West Bank - already poor - fell off a cliff. Following the election of Hamas, the world choked off funding for the Palestinian Authority, which suddenly found itself unable to pay its doctors and nurses. After several months medical staff went on strike, refusing to take anything but emergency cases. For more than three months, the maternity wards of the West Bank were empty and echoing. Beds lay, perfectly made, waiting for patients who could not come.
In all this time, there were no vitamins handed out, no ultrasound scans, no detection of congenital abnormalities. Imagine that the NHS had simply packed up and stopped one day and did not reopen for 12 weeks, and you get a sense of the scale of the medical disaster.
Some women were wealthy enough to go to the few private hospitals scattered across the West Bank. Most were not. So because of the international boycott of the Palestinians, every hospital warns there has been an unseen, unreported increase in home births on the West Bank.
I found Dr Hamdan Hamdan, the head of maternity services at Hussein Hospital, Bethlehem, pacing around an empty ward, chain-smoking. "This ward is usually full," he said. "The women who should be in this hospital - what is happening to them?"
They have been giving birth in startlingly similar conditions to those suffered by Mary 2,000 years ago. They have delivered their babies with no doctors, no sterilised equipment, no back-up if there are complications. They have been boycotted back into the Stone Age. The strike ended this month after the PA raised funds from Muslim countries - but the effects of stopping maternity services are only now becoming clear. Hindia Abu Nabah says: "There is a clear link between the deteriorating health situation and the international boycott.
Amid this horror, one charity has been supporting pregnant Palestinian women even as their medical services fell apart.
Merlin - one of the three charities being supported by the Independent Christmas Appeal - has set up two mobile teams, with a full-time gynaecologist and a paediatrician, to take medical services to the parts of the West Bank cut off by the Israeli occupation. They provide lab technicians and ultrasound machines - the fruits of the 21st century.
I travelled with the team to the Salfit region - scarred by Israeli settlements pumping out raw sewage on to Palestinian land - to see women and children desperately congregating around them seeking help. Amid the dozens of nervous women and swarms of sickly children, Rahme Jima, 29, is sitting with her hands folded neatly in her lap. She is in the last month of her pregnancy, and this is the first time she has seen a doctor since she conceived.
"The nearest hospital is in Nablus, and we can't afford to pay for the transport to get there through all the checkpoints," she says, revealing she is planning - in despair - to give birth at home. Even if she had the cash, she says she is "too frightened of being detained at the checkpoint and being forced to give birth there". She sighs, and adds: "I will be so relieved to finally be seen by a doctor, I have been so worried." But when she returns from seeing the doctor, she says: "I have anaemia, and they have given me iron supplements," supplied by Merlin. She can't afford to eat well; she lives with her husband and four children in a room in her mother-in-law's house, and her husband, Joseph, has been unemployed since his permit to move through the checkpoints expired. "The doctor says I should have been seen much earlier in my pregnancy. My baby will probably be born too small."
All the problems afflicting these 21st century Marys are paraded in Merlin's clinic. One terrified, terrorised mother after another presents herself to the specialists here, and leaves clutching packs of folic acid, calcium, iron and medicine. Dr Bassam Said Nadi, the senior medical officer for this area, says: "I thank Merlin for the specialist care they have brought. Not long ago, we didn't even have petrol in our cars. Alongside other organisations, they are helping us survive this terrible period in our country's history."
Merlin can only maintain these mobile clinics with your help. Leaning in the doorway of her bare clinic, Hindia Abu Nabah says: "Tell your readers that we need their help. There are no Hamas or Fatah foetuses. They don't deserve to be punished. I couldn't stand to look another anaemic woman in the eye and tell her that her baby will be underweight or malformed and we don't have iron supplements to give her. I can't go back to that. I can't."
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Currently
listening
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Sailing to Philadelphia
By
Mark Knopfler
Release date: 26 September, 2000
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10:44 PM
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Saturday, November 04, 2006
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News Item
Current mood:  recumbent
This was the first posted story on the AP newswire for 4November.... I have not added or sub-tracted a single word......
By Associated Press
November 4, 2006, 12:41 AM EST
EL CERRITO, Calif. -- A man was arrested on suspicion of carrying a concealed weapon after police found him outdoors -- naked -- and he told them he had a tool in his rectum, authorities said.
The man was lying on a tree stump, masturbating beside a nature path, near a Bay Area Rapid Transit station Thursday, police said.
John Sheehan, 33, of Pittsburg, was initially arrested on suspicion of indecent exposure. But when asked whether he was carrying anything police should know about, Sheehan mentioned the tool, said El Cerrito Detective Cpl. Don Horgan.
"You can't get much more concealed than that," Horgan said.
Officers drew their weapons and firefighters were called to the scene. Sheehan removed a 6-inch metal awl wrapped in black electrical tape without incident.
Sheehan, who was paroled from state prison last week, was then booked into jail on suspicion of parole violations, indecent exposure and one felony count of possessing a concealed weapon.
"When you're talking about an awl or an ice pick and you're dealing with somebody who's fresh out of prison, it's a weapon. That's a stabbing instrument," Horgan said.
It was not immediately clear what Sheehan was on parole for. A person answering the phone at the jail Friday night did not know whether Sheehan had a lawyer.
Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.
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Tuesday, September 26, 2006
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Bejing's Penis Emporium
Category: Food and Restaurants
Beijing's penis emporium
By Andrew Harding
BBC News, Beijing |
There are many thousands of Chinese restaurants around in the UK and everyone has their favourite dish, but only in China itself do chefs specialise in a range of slightly more unusual delicacies.
The dish in front of me is grey and shiny.
"Russian dog," says my waitress Nancy.
"Big dog," I reply.
"Yes," she says. "Big dog's penis..."
We are in a cosy restaurant in a dark street in Beijing but my appetite seems to have gone for a stroll outside.
Nancy has brought out a whole selection of delicacies.
They are draped awkwardly across a huge platter, with a crocodile carved out of a carrot as the centrepiece.
Nestling beside the dog's penis are its clammy testicles, and beside that a giant salami-shaped object.
"Donkey," says Nancy. "Good for the skin..."
She guides me round the penis platter.
"Snake. Very potent. They have two penises each."
I did not know that.
Deer-blood cocktail
"Sheep... horse... ox... seal - excellent for the circulation."
She points to three dark, shrivelled lumps which look like liquorice allsorts - a special treat apparently - reindeer, from Manchuria.
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Government officials... two of them... they're having the penis hotpot
Nancy |
The Guolizhuang restaurant claims to be China's only speciality penis emporium, and no, it is not a joke.
The atmosphere is more exotic spa than boozy night-out.
Nancy describes herself as a nutritionist.
"We don't call them waiters here. And we don't serve much alcohol," she says. "Only common people come here to get drunk and laugh."
But she does offer me a deer-blood and vodka cocktail, which I decide to skip.
Medicinal purposes
The restaurant's gristly menu was dreamt up by a man called Mr Guo.
He is 81 now and retired.
After fleeing China's civil war back in 1949, he moved to Taiwan, and then to Atlanta, Georgia, where he began to look deeper into traditional Chinese medicine, and experiment on the appendages of man's best friend.
Apparently, they are low in cholesterol and good, not just for boosting the male sex drive, but for treating all sorts of ailments.
Laughter trickles through the walls of our dining room.
"Government officials," says Nancy. "Two of them upstairs. They're having the penis hotpot."
Most of the restaurant's guests are either wealthy businessmen or government bureaucrats who, as Nancy puts it, have been brought here by people who want their help.
What better way to secure a contract than over a steaming penis fondue.
Discretion is assured as all the tables are in private rooms.
The glitziest one has gold dishes.
"Some like their food served raw," says Nancy, "like sushi. But we can cook it anyway you like."
Rare order
"Not long ago, a particularly rich real estate mogul came in with four friends. All men. Women don't come here so often, and they shouldn't eat testicles," says Nancy solemnly.
The men spent $5,700 (£3,000) on a particularly rare dish, something that needed to be ordered months in advance.
"Tiger penis," says Nancy.
The illegal trade in tiger parts is a big problem in China.
Campaigners say the species is being driven towards extinction because of its popularity as a source of traditional medicine.
I mention this, delicately, to Nancy, but she insists that all her tiger supplies come from animals that have died of old age.
"Anyway, we only have one or two orders a year," she says.
"So what does it taste like?" I ask.
"Oh, the same as all the others," she says blithely.
And does it have any particular potency? "No. People just like to order tiger to show off how much money they have."
Welcome to the People's Republic of China - tigers beware.
Sliced and pickled
"Oh yes," she adds, "the same group also ate an aborted reindeer foetus.
"That is very good for your skin. And here it is..."
Another "nutritionist" walks in bearing something small and red wrapped in cling film.
My appetite is heading for the airport.
Still, I think, it would be rude not to try something.
I am normally OK about this sort of thing. I have had fried cockroaches and sheep's eyes, so...
There is a small bowl of sliced and pickled ox penis on the table.
I pick up a piece with my chopsticks and start to chew. It is cold and bland and rubbery.
Nancy gives me a matronly smile.
"This one," she says, "should be eaten every day."
From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 23 September, 2006 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times
5:42 PM
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Thursday, September 14, 2006
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White Buffalo.... we try again...........
Category: Dreams and the Supernatural
By EMILY FREDRIX
Associated Press Writer
September 13, 2006, 7:13 PM EDT
MILWAUKEE -- A farm in Wisconsin is quickly becoming hallowed ground again for American Indians with the birth of its third white buffalo, an animal considered sacred by many tribes for its potential to bring good fortune and peace.
Dave Heider said he was inspecting damage on his farm after a late August storm when he saw the newly born buffalo, a male. His last white buffalo, a female named Miracle, died in 2004 at the age of 10. Thousands of people came to see the animal, whose coat became darker as it aged.
"We took one look at it and I can't repeat what I thought but I thought, 'Here we go again,'" Heider said.
This time around Heider plans to recruit volunteers to handle the visitors he expects at his farm, called Davalas, in Janesville, about 70 miles southwest of Milwaukee. About 50 American Indians held a drum ceremony at the farm this past weekend to honor the calf, which has yet to be named, he said. It is no relation to Miracle, he said.
"We never even thought about having another white one until we got this one," he said. "There's got to be a reason that we're getting these white calves."
The second white buffalo born at the nearly 200 acre farm was born in 1996 but it died after three days, he said.
It's no surprise that the farm has had another white buffalo, said Floyd "Looks for Buffalo" Hand, a medicine man in the Oglala Sioux Tribe in Pine Ridge, S.D. He said it was fate that the white buffaloes chose one farm, which will become a focal point for visitors, who make offerings like tobacco and dream catchers in the hopes of earning good fortune and peace.
"That's destiny," he said. "The message was only choose one person."
That this latest birth is a male doesn't make it any less significant in American Indian prophecies, which say that such an animal will reunite all the races of man and restore balance to the world. The coat on this animal, like Miracle before it, will change from white to black, red and yellow, the colors of the various races of man, before turning brown again, he said.
Women have long been revered in American Indian culture but men now need to take responsibility for their families and the future of the tribe, he said. The birth of this male signifies that, he said.
"It's the time for man's responsibilities," Hand said. "They're not listening to their children, they're not hugging them. They're not telling them what life is about."
Odds of having a white buffalo are at least 1 in the millions, said Jim Matheson, assistant director of the National Bison Association. For years buffalo in general were rare but their numbers are increasing, with some 250,000 now in the U.S., he said.
Many people, like Heider, choose to raise the animals for their meat, which is considered a healthier, low-fat alternative to beef.
Heider and his wife have about 65 head of buffalo on their farm, which they hope to turn into a full-time business in the coming years. They plan to breed the new calf with Miracle's four daughters and three granddaughters, he said. None of those animals is white.
"I guess this is going to change things," Heider said. "We're going to have to figure out how things are going for this one."
Gary Adamson, 65, of Elkhorn, said the event at Heider's farm this weekend helped welcome the animal into the world. American Indian elders will help interpret what significance the animal has, said Adamson, who is of Choctaw and Cherokee heritage. The calf will help fill the void that was left with Miracle's passing, he said.
"There are still things that need to be done and Miracle's task wasn't quite done yet and we feel there's something there," Adamson said.
The news of the birth of another white buffalo calf at the same farm is surprising and will surely draw visitors to see the animal in the hopes of securing good fortune, said Mike Fox, interim director of the Intertribal Bison Association, based in Rapid City, S.D.
A group from his association visited and made offerings to Miracle not long after the animal was born, said Fox, a member of the Gros Ventre Tribe in Montana.
"Oh, absolutely this is big news. As we hear about it more and more, tribal interest will be drawn to it," he said.
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Friday, September 08, 2006
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photo of the day>>>>>>
Category: Dreams and the Supernatural
...here is the caption that was posted with photo, from the AP
This image provided by the Direction of Penal Centers of El Salvador shows an x-ray taken of one of four prisoners at a maximum security Salvadoran prison in Zacatecoluca, 35 miles southeast of the capital of El Salvador. Four cellular telephones were found in the intestines of as many prisoners in El Salvador's maximum-security prison, authorities said Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2006. The discovery happened Tuesday at the prison in Zacatecoluca after suspicious prison officials took x-rays of each of the prisoners, prison spokesman Jaime Villanova said. (AP Photo/Centros Penales)
Here is MY caption for the photo...
"Can you hear me now? Good!"
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Monday, September 04, 2006
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What I Have Learned.... from Esquire....
Current mood:  cheerful
Category: Life
Homer Simpson
Nuclear-power-plant safety inspector, 39, Springfield
Interviewed by John Frink and Don Payne
January 2002, Volume 137, Issue 1
The Simpsons © 2001 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
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When someone tells you your butt is on fire, you should take them at their word.
There is no such thing as a bad doughnut.
Kids are like monkeys, only louder.
If you want results, press the red button. The rest are useless.
There are many different religions in this world, but if you look at them carefully, you'll see that they all have one thing in common: They were invented by a giant, superintelligent slug named Dennis.
You should just name your third kid Baby. Trust meit'll save you a lot of hassle.
You can have many different jobs and still be lazy.
I enjoy the great taste of Duff. Yes, Duff is the only beer for me. Smooth, creamy Duff . . . zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
You can get free stuff if you mention a product in a magazine interview. Like Chips Ahoy! cookies.
You may think it's easier to de-ice your windshield with a flamethrower, but there are repercussions. Serious repercussions.
There are some things that just aren't meant to be eaten.
The intelligent man wins his battles with pointed words. I'm sorryI meant sticks. Pointed sticks.
There are way too many numbers. The world would be a better place if we lost half of themstarting with 8. I've always hated 8.
If I had a dollar for every time I heard My God! He's covered in some sort of goo, I'd be a rich man.
Be generous in the bedroomshare your sandwich.
I've climbed the highest mountains . . . fallen down the deepest valleys . . . I've been to Japan and Africa . . . and I've even gone into space. But I'd trade it all for a piece of candy right now.
Every creature on God's earth has a right to exist. Except for that damn ruby-throated South American warbler.
I don't need a surgeon telling me how to operate on myself.
Sometimes I think there's no reason to get out of bed . . . then I feel wet, and I realize there is.
Let me just say, Winnie the Pooh getting his head caught in a honey pot? It's not funny. It can really happen.
Even though it is awesome and powerful, I don't take no guff from the ocean.
I never ate an animal I didn't like.
A fool and his money are soon parted. I would pay anyone a lot of money to explain that to me.
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll get a hook caught on his eyelid or something.
I made a deal with myself ten years ago . . . and got ripped off.
Never leave your car keys in a reactor core.
Always trust your first instinctunless it tells you to use your life savings to develop a Destructo Ray.
When you borrow something from your neighbor, always do it under the cover of darkness.
If a spaceship landed and aliens took me back to their planet and made me their leader, and I got to spend the rest of my life eating doughnuts and watching alien dancing girls and ruling with a swift and merciless hand? That would be sweet.
I may not be the richest man on earth. Or the smartest. Or the handsomest.
Never throw a butcher knife in anger.
The office is no place for off-color remarks or offensive jokes. That's why I never go there.
My favorite color is chocolate.
Always feel with your heart, although it's better with your hands.
The hardest thing I've had to face as a father was burying my own child. He climbed back out, but it still hurts.
If doctors are so right, why am I still alive?
I'm not afraid to say the word racism, or the words doormat and bee stinger.
Always have plenty of clean white shirts and blue pants.
When that guy turned water into wine, he obviously wasn't thinking of us Duff drinkers.
I love natural disasters because we're allowed to get out of work.
When I'm dead, I'm going to sleep. Oh, man, am I going to sleep.
What kind of fool would leave a pie on a windowsill, anyway?
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Currently
listening
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I Can't Stand Still
By
Don Henley
Release date: 25 October, 1990
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2:21 AM
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Saturday, July 22, 2006
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Have a nice day.......
Current mood:  exanimate
Category: News and Politics
Don Henley The Garden of Allah
A tale in which the Devil visits a large Western city and finds that he has become obsolete....
It was a pretty big year for fashion, a lousy year for rock and roll
The people gave their blessing to crimes of passion
It was a dark, dark night of the collective soul...
I was somewhere out on Riverside, by the El Royale Hotel
When a stranger appeared in a cloud of smoke
(I thought I knew him all too well)
He said "Now that I have your attention,
I got somethin' I wanna say
You may not want to hear it, but
I'm gonna tell it to you anyway
Y'know I always liked you, boy
'cause you were not afraid of me....
But things are gonna get mighty rough
here in "Gomorrah-by-the-sea"
He said "It's just like home!
It's so dammed hot I can't stand it!
My fine seersucker suit is all soakin' wet!"
And the hills are burning, the wind is raging,
and the clocks strike midnight in the Garden of Allah....
Spoken word
"Nice car! I love those Bavarians... so meticulous!
Y'know, I remember a time when things were a lot more fun around here...
When good was good, and evil was evil... before things got so....... fuzzy!
Yeah, I was once a golden boy like you... I was summoned to the halls of power by the heavenly court, and I dined with the deities who looked upon me with favor for my talents, my creativity...
We sat beneath the palms in the warm afternoons and drank the wine with Fitzgerald and Huxley... they pawned a biting phrase from tongues hot with blood, and drained their pens of bitter ink, vainly reaching for the bottle full of empty Edens... branded 'specially for the ones who had come with great expectations to the perfumed halls of Allah, for their time in the sun."
Singing
"And we were stoking the fires, and oiling up the machinery
until the gods found out we had ideas of our own!"
And the war was coming, the Earth was shaking,
and there was no more room in the Garden of Allah.....
Spoken word
"Today I made an appearance downtown. I am an expert witness, because I say I am!
And I said, 'Gentlemen (and I use THAT term loosely). I will testify for you!
I'm a gun for hire, I'm a saint, I'm a liar... because there are NO facts, there is NO truth, just data to be manipulated...
I can get you any result you like... what's it worth to ya?
Because there is no wrong, there is no right (and, I sleep very well at night!)
No shame, no solution, no remorse, no retribution... just people selling t-shirts, just an opportunity to participate in this pathetic little circus.... and winning, Winning, WINNING!!!!!'"
singing
It was a pretty good year for predators, the marketplace was on a roll
And this land of opportunity spawned a whole new breed of men without souls
This year, notoriety got all confused with fame
and the Devil is down-hearted, 'cause there's nothing left for him to claim!
He said "It's just like home...
It's so low-down I can't stand it!!!
I guess my work around here has all been done...."
And the fruit is rotten, the serpent's eyes shine
as he wraps around the vine in the Garden of Allah.........
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Sunday, June 18, 2006
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Happy Birthday, Sir Paul!!!!!!
When I get older, losing my hair...
Many years from now....
Will you still be sending me a Valentine?
Birthday greetings? Bottle of wine?
If I've been out 'til quarter-to three, would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?
OO-oooooo-oooo-ooooo-ooooo ooo oooo
YOU'LL BE OLDER TOO!!!!
And, if you say the word, I -could -stay -with -you.....
I could be handy, mending a fuse
When your lights have gone.....
You could knit a sweater by the fire-side....
Sunday mornings, go for a ride!
Doing the garden, digging the weeds...
Who could ask for more?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?
Every summer we could rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight
(if it's not too dear)
We shall scrimp and save!!!
Grandchildren on your knee,
Vera, Chuck, and Dave......
Send me a postcard, drop me a line, stating point of view....
indicate-precisely-what -you- mean- to- say.....
"Yours sincerely, Wasting Away!!!"
Give me your answer, fill in a form,
Mine forever-more!!!
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four??
Yes, I know this was too f***ing easy, but it still works!!!!
Happy Birthday, Paul!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
12:11 AM
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Friday, June 09, 2006
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Big Brother is watching you, version 9.9
Category: Dreams and the Supernatural
NewScientist.com news service
Paul Marks
Who knows who
.. type=text/javascript>..>.. src="http://adserver.adtech.de/?addyn|2.0|289|113656|1|170|target=nsad;loc=100;misc=1149836088784;grp=075448529;">  ..>"I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves." So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop's dream.
New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.
Americans are still reeling from last month's revelations that the NSA has been logging phone calls since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The Congressional Research Service, which advises the US legislature, says phone companies that surrendered call records may have acted illegally. However, the White House insists that the terrorist threat makes existing wire-tapping legislation out of date and is urging Congress not to investigate the NSA's action.
Meanwhile, the NSA is pursuing its plans to tap the web, since phone logs have limited scope. They can only be used to build a very basic picture of someone's contact network, a process sometimes called "connecting the dots". Clusters of people in highly connected groups become apparent, as do people with few connections who appear to be the intermediaries between such groups. The idea is to see by how many links or "degrees" separate people from, say, a member of a blacklisted organisation.
By adding online social networking data to its phone analyses, the NSA could connect people at deeper levels, through shared activities, such as taking flying lessons. Typically, online social networking sites ask members to enter details of their immediate and extended circles of friends, whose blogs they might follow. People often list other facets of their personality including political, sexual, entertainment, media and sporting preferences too. Some go much further, and a few have lost their jobs by publicly describing drinking and drug-taking exploits. Young people have even been barred from the orthodox religious colleges that they are enrolled in for revealing online that they are gay.
"You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resumé. People don't realise you get Googled just to get a job interview these days," says Callas.
Other data the NSA could combine with social networking details includes information on purchases, where we go (available from cellphone records, which cite the base station a call came from) and what major financial transactions we make, such as buying a house.
Right now this is difficult to do because today's web is stuffed with data in incompatible formats. Enter the semantic web, which aims to iron out these incompatibilities over the next few years via a common data structure called the Resource Description Framework (RDF). W3C hopes that one day every website will use RDF to give each type of data a unique, predefined, unambiguous tag.
"RDF turns the web into a kind of universal spreadsheet that is readable by computers as well as people," says David de Roure at the University of Southampton in the UK, who is an adviser to W3C. "It means that you will be able to ask a website questions you couldn't ask before, or perform calculations on the data it contains." In a health record, for instance, a heart attack will have the same semantic tag as its more technical description, a myocardial infarction. Previously, they would have looked like separate medical conditions. Each piece of numerical data, such as the rate of inflation or the number of people killed on the roads, will also get a tag.
The advantages for scientists, for instance, could be huge: they will have unprecedented access to each other's experimental datasets and will be able to perform their own analyses on them. Searching for products such as holidays will become easier as price and availability dates will have smart tags, allowing powerful searches across hundreds of sites.
On the downside, this ease of use will also make prying into people's lives a breeze. No plan to mine social networks via the semantic web has been announced by the NSA, but its interest in the technology is evident in a funding footnote to a research paper delivered at the W3C's WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh, UK, in late May.
That paper, entitled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, by a research team led by Amit Sheth of the University of Georgia in Athens and Anupam Joshi of the University of Maryland in Baltimore reveals how data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people. The footnote said the work was part-funded by an organisation called ARDA.
What is ARDA? It stands for Advanced Research Development Activity. According to a report entitled Data Mining and Homeland Security, published by the Congressional Research Service in January, ARDA's role is to spend NSA money on research that can "solve some of the most critical problems facing the US intelligence community". Chief among ARDA's aims is to make sense of the massive amounts of data the NSA collects - some of its sources grow by around 4 million gigabytes a month.
The ever-growing online social networks are part of the flood of internet information that could be mined: some of the top sites like MySpace now have more than 80 million members (see Graph).
The research ARDA funded was designed to see if the semantic web could be easily used to connect people. The research team chose to address a subject close to their academic hearts: detecting conflicts of interest in scientific peer review. Friends cannot peer review each other's research papers, nor can people who have previously co-authored work together.
So the team developed software that combined data from the RDF tags of online social network Friend of a Friend (www.foaf-project.org), where people simply outline who is in their circle of friends, and a semantically tagged commercial bibliographic database called DBLP, which lists the authors of computer science papers.
Joshi says their system found conflicts between potential reviewers and authors pitching papers for an internet conference. "It certainly made relationship finding between people much easier," Joshi says. "It picked up softer [non-obvious] conflicts we would not have seen before."
The technology will work in exactly the same way for intelligence and national security agencies and for financial dealings, such as detecting insider trading, the authors say. Linking "who knows who" with purchasing or bank records could highlight groups of terrorists, money launderers or blacklisted groups, says Sheth.
The NSA recently changed ARDA's name to the Disruptive Technology Office. The DTO's interest in online social network analysis echoes the Pentagon's controversial post 9/11 Total Information Awareness (TIA) initiative. That programme, designed to collect, track and analyse online data trails, was suspended after a public furore over privacy in 2002. But elements of the TIA were incorporated into the Pentagon's classified programme in the September 2003 Defense Appropriations Act.
Privacy groups worry that "automated intelligence profiling" could sully people's reputations or even lead to miscarriages of justice - especially since the data from social networking sites may often be inaccurate, untrue or incomplete, De Roure warns.
But Tim Finin, a colleague of Joshi's, thinks the spread of such technology is unstoppable. "Information is getting easier to merge, fuse and draw inferences from. There is money to be made and control to be gained in doing so. And I don't see much that will stop it," he says.
Callas thinks people have to wise up to how much information about themselves they should divulge on public websites. It may sound obvious, he says, but being discreet is a big part of maintaining privacy. Time, perhaps, to hit the delete button.
12:00 AM
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