MetaFilter posts by Postroad.
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Escape to Romance Here's a blogmeister that runs a romantic Powerball and offers the following:
"Romantic_atlanta_2 Are you a member of the Mile High Club? Would you like a free membership? Here is your chance to make your fantasy a reality with the amorous, single webmaster of Grow-a-Brain and the southern hospitality of the folks at Mile High Atlanta."
Do you qualify?
posted on Feb-20-06 at 1:29 PM
Lawyers Group Says Bush Exceeds His Powers [found at Linkfilter] The American Bar Association denounced President Bush's warrantless domestic surveillance program Monday, accusing him of exceeding his powers under the Constitution.
posted on Feb-14-06 at 11:11 AM
Top 12 media myths and falsehoods on the Bush administration's spying scandal Summary: Media Matters presents the top 12 myths and falsehoods promoted by the media on President Bush's spying scandal stemming from the recent revelation in The New York Times that he authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on domestic communications without the required approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court.
posted on Feb-10-06 at 9:52 AM
Depictions of Mohammed Throughout History This page is an archive of numerous depictions of Mohammed, to serve as a reminder that such imagery has been part of Western and Islamic culture since the Middle Ages -- and to serve as a resource for those interested in freedom of expression.
posted on Feb-4-06 at 2:34 PM
I Spy Black Satellites Amateur satellite spotters can track everything government spymasters blast into orbit. Except the stealth bird codenamed Misty
posted on Feb-1-06 at 6:03 AM
Spies, Lies and Wiretaps Instead of the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the warrantless spying on Americans, we've received only the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation and a couple of big, dangerous lies...
posted on Jan-29-06 at 6:46 AM
US plans to 'fight the net' revealed "Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads. "Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.
posted on Jan-27-06 at 3:29 PM
When George Met Jack As details poured out about the illegal and unseemly activities of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, White House officials sought to portray the scandal as a Capitol Hill affair with little relevance to them..."The President does not know him, nor does the President recall ever meeting him," McClellan said....The President's memory may soon be unhappily refreshed. TIME has seen five photographs of Abramoff and the President that suggest a level of contact between them that Bush's aides have downplayed.
posted on Jan-22-06 at 12:42 PM
NSA,FISA, and Privacy It is of course the president who finally approves of actions that may or may not be deemed legal but before 9/11, this is what he had been advised to consider "The largest U.S. spy agency warned the incoming Bush administration in its "Transition 2001" report that the Information Age required rethinking the policies and authorities that kept the National Security Agency in compliance with the Constitution's 4th Amendment prohibition on "unreasonable searches and seizures" without warrant and "probable cause," according to an updated briefing book of declassified NSA documents posted today on the World Wide Web. If this is the sort of reading you enjoy, then by all means dig about here: But then Windows allowed NSA to have a sure access to your machine . And by now we all know that Google will fight the government on making its search data base available in order to protect your privacy.(Reality: to protect Google stuff). And if you worry about search engines tracking you and making data available, then here is a workaround
posted on Jan-20-06 at 3:31 PM
Defense of Bill Cosby [...]My crimes that afternoon were two. I committed the transgression of wearing a tweed jacket, black sweater, black slacks and glasses, a no-no for the “ thug barbers" there because to be an appropriate African American by their standards was to wear saggy pants, sport jerseys and doo-rag caps. My second transgression was to bring a book, James Baldwin’s Notes of A Native Son.
posted on Jan-19-06 at 12:20 PM
Army Orders Soldiers to Shed Dragon Skin or Lose SGLI Death Benefits Two deploying soldiers and a concerned mother reported Friday afternoon that the U.S. Army appears to be singling out soldiers who have purchased Pinnacle's Dragon Skin Body Armor for special treatment.
posted on Jan-17-06 at 11:10 AM
Diego Garcia, a heavenly spot you can not go to. Take your time and go through a large batch of links at this site: drinking, hot babes, great beaches.(see, too, Other links on this page) Just what is this place? Well, this is how we got it and this is a brief sketch of the place and this is the official Navy page at which you will find some odd stuff if you put your mind to it. Note, for example, employment opportunities. Ok. Now you know it is strategically located place for Amrican planes. For further information, read (see index) James Bamford, Body of Secrets.
posted on Jan-12-06 at 1:57 PM
Angry and Furious at the Collaborationist Democrats I [Martin Garbus] don't understand. An hour after I saw the Times "scoop" on the Bush illegal wiretapping plan, I wrote that it was clearly illegal and unconstitutional. But as it now turns out, dozens of politicians, as well as the New York Times knew about the surveillance plan and did nothing. Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, and Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, a man known for some sensitivity to civil liberties infringements, and a substantial number of congressmen, plus the New York Times, all knew of Bush's illegal spying.
posted on Jan-9-06 at 7:05 AM
Prone to Violence FROM THE French Revolution to contemporary Iraq, the beginning phase of democratization in unsettled circumstances has often spurred a rise in militant nationalism. Democracy means rule by the people, but when territorial control and popular loyalties are in flux, a prior question has to be settled: Which people will form the nation? Nationalist politicians vie for popular support to answer that question in a way that suits their purposes. When groups are at loggerheads and the rules guiding domestic politics are unclear, the answer is more often based on a test of force and political manipulation than on democratic procedures.
posted on Jan-7-06 at 4:38 AM
National Security Agency What is it that NSA does? What are or were its legal parameters and its history? This is a quick "NSA 101" course that might be helpful as stories continue to emerge about the agency. Oddly, as large as this organization is, it has been very much in the background, and only recently when some whistleblowers spoke up, has this agency gained a good deal of public attention. Some of you may recall the fuss raised about some spy agency named Echelon and wonder how this group is or is not connected to NSA. And soon at least one whistle blower will testify before congress, though the White House seems to have convinced some 50% of Americans that the president can do whatever he wants in time of war, ignoring legal constraints upon intel branches. And that raises the question (for me): if NSA can skirt the courts to "fight terror," then what of the FBI, also once requied to have court approval for phone taps. Are they too now free to do as they want in this "fight against terror"?
posted on Jan-5-06 at 1:48 PM
Bush could bypass new torture ban [From the here-we-go-again department. ] When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief.
posted on Jan-4-06 at 11:57 AM
KGB's secret UFO files finally made public Files comprising the famous Blue Folder have been declassified a while ago. The prominent Soviet cosmonaut Pavel Popovich got the folder from the KGB in 1991. These days Mr. Popovich holds the position of honorary president of the Academy of Informational and Applied Ufology. The folder contains numerous descriptions of UFO flights and reports on some (mostly failed) attempts taken by the military in order to catch the aliens.
posted on Jan-2-06 at 6:33 AM
The DeLay-Abramoff Money Trail The U.S. Family Network, a public advocacy group that operated in the 1990s with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay and claimed to be a nationwide grass-roots organization, was funded almost entirely by corporations linked to embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to tax records and former associates of the group.
posted on Dec-31-05 at 12:46 PM
Checks and No Balance While previous presidents have at various times claimed the legal right to authorize searches and electronic surveillance without court warrants so as to gather foreign intelligence, those decisions have undergone scrutiny by either courts or congressional hearings. It's fair to say that Bush had no intention of allowing public scrutiny of his act, since he personally summoned the top executives of The New York Times to a private meeting on December 6 and pressured them not to run the story about the domestic spying
posted on Dec-29-05 at 8:14 AM
The Agency That Could Be Big Brother [when this guy talks about NSA, he is authoritative] "DEEP in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour"...
posted on Dec-26-05 at 11:17 AM
Listening In and Naming Names "...The press tends to shy away from covering America's largest and most secretive intelligence agency, fearing precisely the kind of scolding President Bush delivered to the New York Times. But the truth is that the NSA—which has an estimated $6 billion annual budget bigger than those of the CIA and the FBI combined—has a decidedly checkered history when it comes to playing by the rules." And yet, NSA abuse seems not limited to Bush. Now, possib ly, Carter and Clinton also used NSA for spying on civilians. That said, NSA seems also to have been used for non-miltary spying, to help selected American firms compete against rival companies elsewhere. What is curious about this agency is that it is the single biggest intelligence organization in our country and yet so few people know what they do, where they are, what they had been legally allowed to do. If, as we are told, tapping phones is necessary in our fight against terror, why then doesn't the FBI do this? If any mobster worth his blackjack knows not to use phones because they are potentially tapped, why are we told that NSA doesn't want terrorists alerted to our tapping their phones and therefore there ought not to be any discussion of this "strategy."? In sum, my suspicion is that a lot more is going on than we have thus far been told, and that in fact email and the internet are more involved in what is taking place than is phone tapping.
posted on Dec-21-05 at 4:27 AM
Echelon This is what we know--or do not know--about NSA prgram called Echelon, from 60 Minute show (TV) in 2000. If we assume this what had been going on and there were some sort of restraints for internal spying, then what is going on now? This evening I had heard on radio that the White House claimed that only calls going in and out of the country might be monitored. But this early interview suggests that such calls were monitored previous to the "new" approach. Why were legal restraints put in place calling for judicial hearings? Because of spying abuse done under Nixon. Those restraints are now removed.
posted on Dec-19-05 at 2:40 PM
The Occupation of Iraq I first went to Iraq in 1978, and I’ve been there I suppose fifty or sixty times. Sometimes for as long as three months, at other times for a fortnight or so. In all I have spent a bit more than half my time in Iraq since the Occupation. I was there before, during and after the invasion...
posted on Dec-16-05 at 9:02 AM
Bush Threatens U.N. Over Clinton Climate Speech Bush-administration officials privately threatened organizers of the U.N. Climate Change Conference, telling them that any chance there might’ve been for the United States to sign on to the Kyoto global-warming protocol would be scuttled if they allowed Bill Clinton to speak at the gathering today in Montreal,
posted on Dec-9-05 at 5:07 PM
Bush and Blair slated by Pinter George W Bush and Tony Blair must be held to account for feeding the public "a vast tapestry of lies" about the Iraq war, writer Harold Pinter said. [Postroad: but then, what do artists know about politics?]
posted on Dec-7-05 at 10:40 AM
A Peek Under the PR Mask Once in a blue moon, we actually get a peek under the White House's public-relations mask, and this morning it comes courtesy of Peter Baker and Dan Balz , whose front-pager in The Washington Post suggests that Bush's unflagging public confidence about his Iraq policy reflects the work of public opinion researchers.
posted on Dec-5-05 at 10:38 AM
Arianna Calling! Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, we learned from reading the New England Transcendentalists, yet Arianna is often put down, bad mouthed, for having moved from the Right to the Left...Yes. she is very wealthy. Yes, she seems always in a spotlight. But there is much substance to this woman, as is indicated in this piece, found via Arts&Letters.
posted on Dec-2-05 at 6:25 AM
The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities There are a lot of great freeware products out there. Many are as good or even better than their commercial alternatives. This list features my personal pick of the "best of the best."
posted on Nov-25-05 at 1:18 PM
The Web's First Shaggy Dog Story Archive Fuckwit says: skip lengthy intro and go direct to archives at margin and click away for mucho chortles on this grand holiday weekend.
posted on Nov-24-05 at 9:28 AM
Intelligent Evolution ...Today we live in a less barbaric age,[than the age of Copernicus and Bruno] but an otherwise comparable disjunction between science and religion, the one born of Darwinism, still roils the public mind. Why does such intense and pervasive resistance to evolution continue 150 years after the publication of The Origin of Species, and in the teeth of the overwhelming accumulated evidence favoring it? The answer is simply that the Darwinian revolution, even more than the Copernican revolution, challenges the prehistoric and still-regnant self-image of humanity. Evolution by natural selection, to be as concise as possible, has changed everything...
posted on Nov-12-05 at 10:05 AM
Wahhabi U. A top U.S. diplomat recently revealed Saudi Arabia still teaches students to hate non-Muslims and the West. So why are we making it easier for Saudi students schooled in that hatred to visit the U.S.?
posted on Nov-11-05 at 7:56 AM
Why Paris Is Burning Officially, the French state doesn't recognize minorities, only citizens of France, all of them equal under the law. But that republican ideal has seemed especially hollow over the past week as the children of impoverished, largely Muslim immigrants from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa fought running battles with police throughout the banlieues, or suburbs, to the east and north of the French capital...
posted on Nov-5-05 at 10:20 AM
Cindy Sheehan for President Or Senate. The anti-war left seeks a challenger for Hillary Clinton
posted on Nov-1-05 at 10:46 AM
FBI Papers Indicate Intelligence Violations ...Records turned over as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit also indicate that the FBI has investigated hundreds of potential violations related to its use of secret surveillance operations, which have been stepped up dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but are largely hidden from public view...
posted on Oct-24-05 at 11:43 AM
Whistle-Blower or Troublemaker, Bunny Greenhouse Isn't Backing Down Another trouble maker can't keep her mouth shut !Bunny Greenhouse was once the perfect bureaucrat, an insider, the top procurement official at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Then the 61-year-old Greenhouse lost her $137,000-a-year post after questioning the plump contracts awarded to Halliburton in the run-up to the war in Iraq. It has made her easy to love for some, easy to loathe for others, but it has not made her easy to know.
posted on Oct-19-05 at 10:31 AM
Unwed mothers have difficulty finding 'good' husbands What is to be done? The many children born under such condtions repeat this pattern and malthusian-like place increasing burdens upon society. Causes? Solutions?
posted on Oct-7-05 at 4:03 AM
Bush Considers Military Role in Flu Fight If the flu (say) breaks out in New Jersey, why not use the New Jersey National Guard. Just what is the guard for? Simply to be sent overseas for our bringing freedom to nations not having what we believe we have?
posted on Oct-4-05 at 12:18 PM
Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side' RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today. According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.
posted on Sep-27-05 at 6:22 AM
INSURRECTION Why were American military sent almost instantly when Rita threatens Texas but we were told that they could not be sent to Louisiana till requested? What is the history behind Posse Comitatus? Does the president have the authority just on his say so to send troops into a "sovereign" state? Nice summary of history here.
posted on Sep-22-05 at 8:08 AM
Explosion Over the N-Word When Kanye West blasted President Bush’s treatment of poor black people in New Orleans after Katrina hit, the rapper unintentionally set off a hurricane of words in Florida. The Independent Florida Alligator, the student newspaper, ran a cartoon last week that criticized West’s statements by showing him holding a large playing card marked “The Race Card,” and having Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, exclaim with scorn at West: “Nigga Please!”
posted on Sep-20-05 at 8:14 AM
Disaster relief? Call in the Marines President Bush suggested a larger disaster relief role for the armed forces in his national address last week, and Congress has indicated it will take up the issue this autumn. Though the topic has emerged at other troubled times - most recently 9/11 - Congress has always avoided amending Posse Comitatus, the law that has kept active-duty soldiers out of civilian law-enforcement affairs since Reconstruction.
posted on Sep-19-05 at 7:48 AM
Katrina Ushers in Return of Big Government We have a larger govt now (people working for the govt) than we have ever had. We have now the Patriot Act, overseeing much of our activities. We have intelligence agencies doing lord knows what domestically, and security checks etc. Now we learn that Big govt is back? Where had it been before the storm?
posted on Sep-15-05 at 2:10 PM
Katrinanomore&global warming Welcome to the first web site in America dedicated exclusively to raising awareness about the connection between hurricane Katrina and global warming. See below an essay just written by author Mike Tidwell that explains how climate change will soon turn every coastal city in America into another New Orleans unless we make a rapid switch to clean, renewable energy worldwide.
posted on Sep-9-05 at 8:57 AM
Opinion: No time for turf wars--and much more coverage worth reading People at all levels of government will have to answer for what they did and didn’t do in the days before and after Hurricane Katrina. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has earned scorching criticism for its day-late-and-billions-short response to the ghastly crisis in New Orleans. And maybe it was only a matter of time before officials at FEMA and its parent organization, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, began looking for others to blame.
posted on Sep-7-05 at 4:32 PM
BEHIND THE CURTAIN.... George Bush's photo-op tour of New Orleans yesterday has apparently driven Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu over the edge. Today she blasted FEMA for its feeble response to Hurricane Katrina and Bush for his phony, stage managed promises of action:
posted on Sep-5-05 at 10:10 AM
Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans? WHAT do people really know about New Orleans? Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not only a great white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where African-Americans have come together again and again to form the strongest African-American culture in the land?
posted on Sep-3-05 at 3:33 PM
What if Hurricane Ivan Had Not Missed New Orleans? Author’s Note: This column was originally intended to be the final disaster in the “Disasters Waiting to Happen” series. As I was developing the hypothetical situation depicting a devastating hurricane striking New Orleans, Louisiana, the disaster waiting to happen threatened to become a reality: Hurricane Ivan, a category 4 hurricane (with 140 mph winds) fluctuating to a category 5 (up to 155 mph winds), was slowly moving directly toward New Orleans. Forecasters were predicting a one-in-four chance that Ivan would remain on this direct path and would be an “extreme storm” at landfall. In reality, the storm veered to the north and made landfall east of Mobile Bay, Alabama, causing devastation and destruction well into the central Gulf shoreline and throughout the Southeast and the Mid-Atlantic states.
posted on Sep-2-05 at 12:43 PM
Drowning New Orleans [2001]A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city By Mark Fischetti
posted on Sep-1-05 at 4:41 AM
Gas prices too high? Try Europe. $7 a gallon? That's what drivers in Amsterdam pay. But Europeans have long adapted to high prices.
posted on Aug-28-05 at 7:18 AM
Cindy Sheehan says Bill O'Reilly is an "Obscenity to Humanity" [...]Asked how she feels about the MSM devoting so much time to the Natalee Holloway story, Sheehan said "Holloway is a tragedy for one family" but what she's doing is trying to help thousands of families avoid tragedy.[...]
posted on Aug-10-05 at 2:14 PM
posted on Feb-20-06 at 1:29 PM
Lawyers Group Says Bush Exceeds His Powers [found at Linkfilter] The American Bar Association denounced President Bush's warrantless domestic surveillance program Monday, accusing him of exceeding his powers under the Constitution.
posted on Feb-14-06 at 11:11 AM
Top 12 media myths and falsehoods on the Bush administration's spying scandal Summary: Media Matters presents the top 12 myths and falsehoods promoted by the media on President Bush's spying scandal stemming from the recent revelation in The New York Times that he authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on domestic communications without the required approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court.
posted on Feb-10-06 at 9:52 AM
Depictions of Mohammed Throughout History This page is an archive of numerous depictions of Mohammed, to serve as a reminder that such imagery has been part of Western and Islamic culture since the Middle Ages -- and to serve as a resource for those interested in freedom of expression.
posted on Feb-4-06 at 2:34 PM
I Spy Black Satellites Amateur satellite spotters can track everything government spymasters blast into orbit. Except the stealth bird codenamed Misty
posted on Feb-1-06 at 6:03 AM
Spies, Lies and Wiretaps Instead of the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the warrantless spying on Americans, we've received only the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation and a couple of big, dangerous lies...
this is an editorial pointing out the lies given the American public about spying. In addtion some 15 legal scholars here conclude that the Bush "initiative" is clearly illegal and violates the American constitution. Declaring "war powers" simply will not do!
posted on Jan-29-06 at 6:46 AM
US plans to 'fight the net' revealed "Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads. "Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.
posted on Jan-27-06 at 3:29 PM
When George Met Jack As details poured out about the illegal and unseemly activities of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, White House officials sought to portray the scandal as a Capitol Hill affair with little relevance to them..."The President does not know him, nor does the President recall ever meeting him," McClellan said....The President's memory may soon be unhappily refreshed. TIME has seen five photographs of Abramoff and the President that suggest a level of contact between them that Bush's aides have downplayed.
posted on Jan-22-06 at 12:42 PM
NSA,FISA, and Privacy It is of course the president who finally approves of actions that may or may not be deemed legal but before 9/11, this is what he had been advised to consider "The largest U.S. spy agency warned the incoming Bush administration in its "Transition 2001" report that the Information Age required rethinking the policies and authorities that kept the National Security Agency in compliance with the Constitution's 4th Amendment prohibition on "unreasonable searches and seizures" without warrant and "probable cause," according to an updated briefing book of declassified NSA documents posted today on the World Wide Web. If this is the sort of reading you enjoy, then by all means dig about here: But then Windows allowed NSA to have a sure access to your machine . And by now we all know that Google will fight the government on making its search data base available in order to protect your privacy.(Reality: to protect Google stuff). And if you worry about search engines tracking you and making data available, then here is a workaround
posted on Jan-20-06 at 3:31 PM
Defense of Bill Cosby [...]My crimes that afternoon were two. I committed the transgression of wearing a tweed jacket, black sweater, black slacks and glasses, a no-no for the “ thug barbers" there because to be an appropriate African American by their standards was to wear saggy pants, sport jerseys and doo-rag caps. My second transgression was to bring a book, James Baldwin’s Notes of A Native Son.
posted on Jan-19-06 at 12:20 PM
Army Orders Soldiers to Shed Dragon Skin or Lose SGLI Death Benefits Two deploying soldiers and a concerned mother reported Friday afternoon that the U.S. Army appears to be singling out soldiers who have purchased Pinnacle's Dragon Skin Body Armor for special treatment.
posted on Jan-17-06 at 11:10 AM
Diego Garcia, a heavenly spot you can not go to. Take your time and go through a large batch of links at this site: drinking, hot babes, great beaches.(see, too, Other links on this page) Just what is this place? Well, this is how we got it and this is a brief sketch of the place and this is the official Navy page at which you will find some odd stuff if you put your mind to it. Note, for example, employment opportunities. Ok. Now you know it is strategically located place for Amrican planes. For further information, read (see index) James Bamford, Body of Secrets.
posted on Jan-12-06 at 1:57 PM
Angry and Furious at the Collaborationist Democrats I [Martin Garbus] don't understand. An hour after I saw the Times "scoop" on the Bush illegal wiretapping plan, I wrote that it was clearly illegal and unconstitutional. But as it now turns out, dozens of politicians, as well as the New York Times knew about the surveillance plan and did nothing. Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, and Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, a man known for some sensitivity to civil liberties infringements, and a substantial number of congressmen, plus the New York Times, all knew of Bush's illegal spying.
posted on Jan-9-06 at 7:05 AM
Prone to Violence FROM THE French Revolution to contemporary Iraq, the beginning phase of democratization in unsettled circumstances has often spurred a rise in militant nationalism. Democracy means rule by the people, but when territorial control and popular loyalties are in flux, a prior question has to be settled: Which people will form the nation? Nationalist politicians vie for popular support to answer that question in a way that suits their purposes. When groups are at loggerheads and the rules guiding domestic politics are unclear, the answer is more often based on a test of force and political manipulation than on democratic procedures.
posted on Jan-7-06 at 4:38 AM
National Security Agency What is it that NSA does? What are or were its legal parameters and its history? This is a quick "NSA 101" course that might be helpful as stories continue to emerge about the agency. Oddly, as large as this organization is, it has been very much in the background, and only recently when some whistleblowers spoke up, has this agency gained a good deal of public attention. Some of you may recall the fuss raised about some spy agency named Echelon and wonder how this group is or is not connected to NSA. And soon at least one whistle blower will testify before congress, though the White House seems to have convinced some 50% of Americans that the president can do whatever he wants in time of war, ignoring legal constraints upon intel branches. And that raises the question (for me): if NSA can skirt the courts to "fight terror," then what of the FBI, also once requied to have court approval for phone taps. Are they too now free to do as they want in this "fight against terror"?
posted on Jan-5-06 at 1:48 PM
Bush could bypass new torture ban [From the here-we-go-again department. ] When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief.
posted on Jan-4-06 at 11:57 AM
KGB's secret UFO files finally made public Files comprising the famous Blue Folder have been declassified a while ago. The prominent Soviet cosmonaut Pavel Popovich got the folder from the KGB in 1991. These days Mr. Popovich holds the position of honorary president of the Academy of Informational and Applied Ufology. The folder contains numerous descriptions of UFO flights and reports on some (mostly failed) attempts taken by the military in order to catch the aliens.
posted on Jan-2-06 at 6:33 AM
The DeLay-Abramoff Money Trail The U.S. Family Network, a public advocacy group that operated in the 1990s with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay and claimed to be a nationwide grass-roots organization, was funded almost entirely by corporations linked to embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to tax records and former associates of the group.
posted on Dec-31-05 at 12:46 PM
Checks and No Balance While previous presidents have at various times claimed the legal right to authorize searches and electronic surveillance without court warrants so as to gather foreign intelligence, those decisions have undergone scrutiny by either courts or congressional hearings. It's fair to say that Bush had no intention of allowing public scrutiny of his act, since he personally summoned the top executives of The New York Times to a private meeting on December 6 and pressured them not to run the story about the domestic spying
posted on Dec-29-05 at 8:14 AM
The Agency That Could Be Big Brother [when this guy talks about NSA, he is authoritative] "DEEP in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour"...
posted on Dec-26-05 at 11:17 AM
Listening In and Naming Names "...The press tends to shy away from covering America's largest and most secretive intelligence agency, fearing precisely the kind of scolding President Bush delivered to the New York Times. But the truth is that the NSA—which has an estimated $6 billion annual budget bigger than those of the CIA and the FBI combined—has a decidedly checkered history when it comes to playing by the rules." And yet, NSA abuse seems not limited to Bush. Now, possib ly, Carter and Clinton also used NSA for spying on civilians. That said, NSA seems also to have been used for non-miltary spying, to help selected American firms compete against rival companies elsewhere. What is curious about this agency is that it is the single biggest intelligence organization in our country and yet so few people know what they do, where they are, what they had been legally allowed to do. If, as we are told, tapping phones is necessary in our fight against terror, why then doesn't the FBI do this? If any mobster worth his blackjack knows not to use phones because they are potentially tapped, why are we told that NSA doesn't want terrorists alerted to our tapping their phones and therefore there ought not to be any discussion of this "strategy."? In sum, my suspicion is that a lot more is going on than we have thus far been told, and that in fact email and the internet are more involved in what is taking place than is phone tapping.
posted on Dec-21-05 at 4:27 AM
Echelon This is what we know--or do not know--about NSA prgram called Echelon, from 60 Minute show (TV) in 2000. If we assume this what had been going on and there were some sort of restraints for internal spying, then what is going on now? This evening I had heard on radio that the White House claimed that only calls going in and out of the country might be monitored. But this early interview suggests that such calls were monitored previous to the "new" approach. Why were legal restraints put in place calling for judicial hearings? Because of spying abuse done under Nixon. Those restraints are now removed.
posted on Dec-19-05 at 2:40 PM
The Occupation of Iraq I first went to Iraq in 1978, and I’ve been there I suppose fifty or sixty times. Sometimes for as long as three months, at other times for a fortnight or so. In all I have spent a bit more than half my time in Iraq since the Occupation. I was there before, during and after the invasion...
posted on Dec-16-05 at 9:02 AM
Bush Threatens U.N. Over Clinton Climate Speech Bush-administration officials privately threatened organizers of the U.N. Climate Change Conference, telling them that any chance there might’ve been for the United States to sign on to the Kyoto global-warming protocol would be scuttled if they allowed Bill Clinton to speak at the gathering today in Montreal,
posted on Dec-9-05 at 5:07 PM
Bush and Blair slated by Pinter George W Bush and Tony Blair must be held to account for feeding the public "a vast tapestry of lies" about the Iraq war, writer Harold Pinter said. [Postroad: but then, what do artists know about politics?]
posted on Dec-7-05 at 10:40 AM
A Peek Under the PR Mask Once in a blue moon, we actually get a peek under the White House's public-relations mask, and this morning it comes courtesy of Peter Baker and Dan Balz , whose front-pager in The Washington Post suggests that Bush's unflagging public confidence about his Iraq policy reflects the work of public opinion researchers.
posted on Dec-5-05 at 10:38 AM
Arianna Calling! Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, we learned from reading the New England Transcendentalists, yet Arianna is often put down, bad mouthed, for having moved from the Right to the Left...Yes. she is very wealthy. Yes, she seems always in a spotlight. But there is much substance to this woman, as is indicated in this piece, found via Arts&Letters.
posted on Dec-2-05 at 6:25 AM
The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities There are a lot of great freeware products out there. Many are as good or even better than their commercial alternatives. This list features my personal pick of the "best of the best."
posted on Nov-25-05 at 1:18 PM
The Web's First Shaggy Dog Story Archive Fuckwit says: skip lengthy intro and go direct to archives at margin and click away for mucho chortles on this grand holiday weekend.
posted on Nov-24-05 at 9:28 AM
Intelligent Evolution ...Today we live in a less barbaric age,[than the age of Copernicus and Bruno] but an otherwise comparable disjunction between science and religion, the one born of Darwinism, still roils the public mind. Why does such intense and pervasive resistance to evolution continue 150 years after the publication of The Origin of Species, and in the teeth of the overwhelming accumulated evidence favoring it? The answer is simply that the Darwinian revolution, even more than the Copernican revolution, challenges the prehistoric and still-regnant self-image of humanity. Evolution by natural selection, to be as concise as possible, has changed everything...
posted on Nov-12-05 at 10:05 AM
Wahhabi U. A top U.S. diplomat recently revealed Saudi Arabia still teaches students to hate non-Muslims and the West. So why are we making it easier for Saudi students schooled in that hatred to visit the U.S.?
posted on Nov-11-05 at 7:56 AM
Why Paris Is Burning Officially, the French state doesn't recognize minorities, only citizens of France, all of them equal under the law. But that republican ideal has seemed especially hollow over the past week as the children of impoverished, largely Muslim immigrants from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa fought running battles with police throughout the banlieues, or suburbs, to the east and north of the French capital...
posted on Nov-5-05 at 10:20 AM
Cindy Sheehan for President Or Senate. The anti-war left seeks a challenger for Hillary Clinton
posted on Nov-1-05 at 10:46 AM
FBI Papers Indicate Intelligence Violations ...Records turned over as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit also indicate that the FBI has investigated hundreds of potential violations related to its use of secret surveillance operations, which have been stepped up dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but are largely hidden from public view...
posted on Oct-24-05 at 11:43 AM
Whistle-Blower or Troublemaker, Bunny Greenhouse Isn't Backing Down Another trouble maker can't keep her mouth shut !Bunny Greenhouse was once the perfect bureaucrat, an insider, the top procurement official at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Then the 61-year-old Greenhouse lost her $137,000-a-year post after questioning the plump contracts awarded to Halliburton in the run-up to the war in Iraq. It has made her easy to love for some, easy to loathe for others, but it has not made her easy to know.
posted on Oct-19-05 at 10:31 AM
Unwed mothers have difficulty finding 'good' husbands What is to be done? The many children born under such condtions repeat this pattern and malthusian-like place increasing burdens upon society. Causes? Solutions?
posted on Oct-7-05 at 4:03 AM
Bush Considers Military Role in Flu Fight If the flu (say) breaks out in New Jersey, why not use the New Jersey National Guard. Just what is the guard for? Simply to be sent overseas for our bringing freedom to nations not having what we believe we have?
posted on Oct-4-05 at 12:18 PM
Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side' RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today. According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.
posted on Sep-27-05 at 6:22 AM
INSURRECTION Why were American military sent almost instantly when Rita threatens Texas but we were told that they could not be sent to Louisiana till requested? What is the history behind Posse Comitatus? Does the president have the authority just on his say so to send troops into a "sovereign" state? Nice summary of history here.
posted on Sep-22-05 at 8:08 AM
Explosion Over the N-Word When Kanye West blasted President Bush’s treatment of poor black people in New Orleans after Katrina hit, the rapper unintentionally set off a hurricane of words in Florida. The Independent Florida Alligator, the student newspaper, ran a cartoon last week that criticized West’s statements by showing him holding a large playing card marked “The Race Card,” and having Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, exclaim with scorn at West: “Nigga Please!”
posted on Sep-20-05 at 8:14 AM
Disaster relief? Call in the Marines President Bush suggested a larger disaster relief role for the armed forces in his national address last week, and Congress has indicated it will take up the issue this autumn. Though the topic has emerged at other troubled times - most recently 9/11 - Congress has always avoided amending Posse Comitatus, the law that has kept active-duty soldiers out of civilian law-enforcement affairs since Reconstruction.
posted on Sep-19-05 at 7:48 AM
Katrina Ushers in Return of Big Government We have a larger govt now (people working for the govt) than we have ever had. We have now the Patriot Act, overseeing much of our activities. We have intelligence agencies doing lord knows what domestically, and security checks etc. Now we learn that Big govt is back? Where had it been before the storm?
posted on Sep-15-05 at 2:10 PM
Katrinanomore&global warming Welcome to the first web site in America dedicated exclusively to raising awareness about the connection between hurricane Katrina and global warming. See below an essay just written by author Mike Tidwell that explains how climate change will soon turn every coastal city in America into another New Orleans unless we make a rapid switch to clean, renewable energy worldwide.
posted on Sep-9-05 at 8:57 AM
Opinion: No time for turf wars--and much more coverage worth reading People at all levels of government will have to answer for what they did and didn’t do in the days before and after Hurricane Katrina. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has earned scorching criticism for its day-late-and-billions-short response to the ghastly crisis in New Orleans. And maybe it was only a matter of time before officials at FEMA and its parent organization, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, began looking for others to blame.
posted on Sep-7-05 at 4:32 PM
BEHIND THE CURTAIN.... George Bush's photo-op tour of New Orleans yesterday has apparently driven Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu over the edge. Today she blasted FEMA for its feeble response to Hurricane Katrina and Bush for his phony, stage managed promises of action:
posted on Sep-5-05 at 10:10 AM
Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans? WHAT do people really know about New Orleans? Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not only a great white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where African-Americans have come together again and again to form the strongest African-American culture in the land?
posted on Sep-3-05 at 3:33 PM
What if Hurricane Ivan Had Not Missed New Orleans? Author’s Note: This column was originally intended to be the final disaster in the “Disasters Waiting to Happen” series. As I was developing the hypothetical situation depicting a devastating hurricane striking New Orleans, Louisiana, the disaster waiting to happen threatened to become a reality: Hurricane Ivan, a category 4 hurricane (with 140 mph winds) fluctuating to a category 5 (up to 155 mph winds), was slowly moving directly toward New Orleans. Forecasters were predicting a one-in-four chance that Ivan would remain on this direct path and would be an “extreme storm” at landfall. In reality, the storm veered to the north and made landfall east of Mobile Bay, Alabama, causing devastation and destruction well into the central Gulf shoreline and throughout the Southeast and the Mid-Atlantic states.
posted on Sep-2-05 at 12:43 PM
Drowning New Orleans [2001]A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city By Mark Fischetti
posted on Sep-1-05 at 4:41 AM
Gas prices too high? Try Europe. $7 a gallon? That's what drivers in Amsterdam pay. But Europeans have long adapted to high prices.
posted on Aug-28-05 at 7:18 AM
Cindy Sheehan says Bill O'Reilly is an "Obscenity to Humanity" [...]Asked how she feels about the MSM devoting so much time to the Natalee Holloway story, Sheehan said "Holloway is a tragedy for one family" but what she's doing is trying to help thousands of families avoid tragedy.[...]
posted on Aug-10-05 at 2:14 PM
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