The Hive reborn: http://www.incunabula.org/hive/

techno§hamanic reborn: http://www.incunabula.org/techno/

We're still working out some of the bugs, but they're up again. Don't forget to reset your links and bookmarks.

Following an embarrassing leak of its proprietary software over a file transfer protocol site last January, the inner workings of Diebold Election Systems have again been laid bare.

A hacker has come forward with evidence that he broke the security of a private Web server operated by the embattled e-vote vendor, and made off last spring with Diebold's internal discussion-list archives, a software bug database and more software. [more]

Carlyle Group Inc., a private equity firm whose senior executives include former U.S. cabinet members and ex-President George H.W. Bush, has turned a $180-million 1997 investment in United Defense Industries Inc. into $1.2 billion.

. . .

United Defense has acknowledged Carlyle's connections helped its business. "Our board of directors consists of members who have served in senior positions within the U.S. government, such as secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and commander-in-chief of the United States Central Command," it said in its October 2001 prospectus. The management and board's "unique insights into the U.S. Department of Defense and allied militaries is one of our key assets." [more]

"The fate of the world depends on the United States, and President Bush is leading us in the wrong direction," Soros said in a written statement. "ACT is an effective way to mobilize civil society, to convince people to go to the polls and vote for candidates who will reassert the values of the greatest open society in the world."

Now, I don't know much about Soros--and please correct me if I'm wrong--but he seems to be a relatively good guy what with his Open Society work and all, and now this . . . I have actually fantasized about this sort of scenario--I mean us little people, how much can we do? Are there any good rich guys out there who can save the world from the likes of Bush & Co.?

secret meetings to plan new generation of nuclear weapons
Guardian | 'Dr Strangeloves' meet to plan new nuclear era

As negotiations with the Palestinians lurch forward and the separation wall snakes its way through the West Bank, two veteran leftists have reached a startling conclusion: There cannot be two states for two peoples in this land.

The Bush administration has repeatedly mischaracterized scientific facts to bolster its political agenda in areas ranging from abstinence education and condom use to missile defense, according to a detailed report released yesterday by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

The White House quickly dismissed the report as partisan sniping.

Yea, all criticism of the White House is "political" or "partisan," right? Fact-challenging is responded to with name-calling. Damn cheap-labor conservatives . . .

The Bechtel Group, one of the world's biggest engineering and construction companies, has dropped out of the running for a contract to rebuild the Iraqi oil industry, as other competitors have begun to conclude that the bidding process favors the one company already working in Iraq, Halliburton.

After the United States Army Corps of Engineers quietly selected Halliburton in the spring to perform early repairs of the Iraqi oil business in the aftermath of the war, other companies and members of Congress protested that the work should have been awarded through competitive bidding.

Halliburton's role in the rebuilding has been under political scrutiny because the company was formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. But the Bush administration and the Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing the Iraqi oil reconstruction effort, have repeatedly said that Halliburton has no inside track. [more]

Well, if they say Halliburton "has no inside track" . . . then I guess we have to, uh . . .

id: drmenlo
password: samizdat

The brilliant political mind has been showering J.Lo with gifts, compliments, and an array of other romantic dictums, which Rove is using strategically to achieve his personal goal of marrying Lopez.

“He’s always had a thing for Jennifer,” said a close friend of Rove. “For the past several months, Karl’s been getting his campaign organized to convince her that she should leave Ben and marry him instead.”

“I knew he wouldn’t fail if he put his mind to it. If Karl Rove can make George W. Bush into President of the United States, then he can get J.Lo to fall madly in love with him,” said the source.

via GWBush04.com

A sizeable if as yet unknown proportion of Iraqi families will contain a relative whose life was ended or put on hold by the US or British forces. Even if only in self-interest, the US and UK administrations should be putting the needs of the injured at the very heart of its strategy to “win hearts and minds”. Instead, along with deaths, the maimed civilians of Iraq have been brushed under the carpet, with the exception of a few recipients of “high-profile” rescues...

Gary for Governor!

Schwarzenegger announces bid for governor

L. Stuart Vance is planning to run for governor. He wants you to run, too.

A shy 18-year-old who never won a high school election. A racy Hollywood billboard vixen. And a former homeless man who now lives at a rest stop.

Don't forget Larry Flynt and the TSOL lead singer

F-'em all. I'm still casting my vote for the THONG PARTY!

(via)

Among the many remarks that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz no doubt wishes he hadn't made, the following, from prewar congressional testimony last February, stands out:

It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.

It's one thing to be wrong. It's another to be incapable of imagining yourself wrong. Much of what has gone wrong in the Bush administration's postwar Iraq policy can be attributed to a failure of imagination. But there was no excuse for this particular failure. In the previous dozen years, U.S. armed forces had taken part in five major post-conflict nation-building exercises, four of them in predominantly Muslim nations. There is a record of what works and what doesn't. Had Wolfowitz studied the record, or talked with those who had, he wouldn't have made such a wrongheaded remark.

US government scientists and Pentagon officials will gather today behind tight security at a Nebraska air force base to discuss the development of a modernised arsenal of small, specialised nuclear weapons which critics believe could mark the dawn of a new era in proliferation.

The Pentagon has not released a list of the 150 people at the secret meeting, but according to leaks, they will include scientists and administrators from the three main nuclear weapons laboratories, Los Alamos, Sandia and Livermore, senior officers from the air force and strategic command, weapons contractors and civilian defence officials.

Requests by Congress to send observers were rejected, and an oversight committee which included academic nuclear experts was disbanded only a few weeks earlier. [more]

Have you seen all those article and pictures of Bush "at home on the ranch" in Crawford - the ones that imply that he is "just an ole ranch hand" more comfortable on the family homestead than in the "Big City," be it Austin or D.C.? Well, if you bought this image, you've been royally snuckered. The Bush family homestead in Crawford is nothing more than an elaborate set. The house, built in 2000, was designed to be ready for Bush to step into - like a set awaiting an actor - during the 2000 presidential election. Not only was the "ranch" created in 2000 - so, essentially, was the "town" of Crawford! Before then only about 400 people lived in the area. The Crawford Chamber of Commerce and Agriculture were formed shortly after the ranch was finished.

. . . So, in short, we have a "president" who, ON THE SAME DAY - November 7, 2000 - stole an election and had the last nail driven into a phony ranch set. But with a completely snuckered press corps, we also have had a completely snuckered public. And a platoon of completely snuckered world leaders, chief among them Blair and Putin, who have been hosted at the "ole ranch" set and completely taken in. Alas, the Crawford ranch is a symbol of the utter corporate phoniness of this administration. The whole scenario reminds me of those type of sophisticated con artists (like the ones who recently convinced several investors they could turn sand into gold! ) who blow into town, rent an upscale office space just long enough to give them enough credibility to hoodwink investors. Then, once they have fleeced enough "marks," they disappear. What makes the Bush case much, much worse is that I doubt he will disappear. [more]

The Bush administration is actively seeking to gag or punish social service organizations that challenge the party line on such matters as health care for poor children and HIV prevention, according to a new report. Nonprofits that disagree with the president's own solutions, or go further and blame him for problems in the first place, have come to expect unpleasant consequences. Those might include audits of federal-funds spending and reviews of content, such as workshop literature.

"If you disagree with the administration on ideological grounds, they're going to come down with a hammer. This has huge implications for the free flow of speech in this country," says Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, itself a nonprofit, which released the report last week as part of its 20-year-old mission to monitor White House budget and spending decisions.

As dramatic as that assessment sounds, the assault has been nearly invisible to the public. The Bush administration and its allies have hit progressives under the radar, maneuvering in the soporific—if enormously important—realm of nonprofit oversight. [more]

hardhitting attack on the criminals who have positions of power in the bush administration
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Masters of deceit

Contents include:

All Aboard the Black Magic Bus! by Adam Gorightly

In this excerpt from The Shadow Over Santa Susana: Black Magic, Mind Control and the Manson Family Mythos, self-described crackpot historian Adam Gorightly looks at Chuck Manson’s dark connections to Hollywood and the entertainment industry, and how they may have motivated one of the most notorious mass murders in the 20th century.

The Ong's Hat Mystery Revealed: An Interview with Joseph Matheny

NWD interviews Joe Matheny, author of Ong’s Hat: The Beginning, in order to find out what’s the real story behind the documents that claim a group of renegade scientists and ontological dissidents/adventurers had opened a gateway to a parallel dimension, went through, and settled there. Hope? Hoax? Or something cooler?

Nothing Natural///Black Planet by Adrian Gargett PhD

Using philosophers such as Sade, Deleuze, Bataille, and Clausewitz, Adrian Gargett analyzes war, death, nature, and the inescapable march towards nothingness, in this prison camp of mortal flesh.

The Montauk PsyOp by Alexandra Bruce

Alexandra Bruce, author of The Philadelphia Experiment: Parallel Universes and the Physics of Insanity, investigates the origins of the Philadelphia experiment and Montauk project, and finds evidence they may be part of a long term government Psyop, aimed at influencing humanity’s consciousness.

Book Review of TSOG: The Thing that Ate the Constitution by Jaye Beldo

The Lone Nutter reviews The Illuminatus! Trilogy and Cosmic Trigger author Robert Anton Wilson’s latest tome.

Thou Sayest: Is Brainwashing Possible? By William H. Kennedy

Esoteric expert William H. Kennedy uses the latest mass media manifestation of mind control – the Elizabeth Smart case – as the launching point for an investigation into the mind control and brainwashing phenomenas (with Robert Anton Wilson and Fu Manchu making special guest appearances along the way).

AIDS by Kenji Siratori

Extreme writing by Japanese experimental writer and author of the cyberpunk classic Blood Electric.

Conquest by Convergence: The Case Against Elite Convergence by Paul David Collins

The author of The Hidden Face of Terrorism: The Dark Side of Social Engineering, From Antiquity to September 11, smashes the myth of elite convergence (“according to this hopelessly flawed view, the problems of injustice and inequity that destabilize societal order are remedied when opposing factions of the ruling class arrive at an agreement”) by using political and business intervention in the Congo as an example of how elite interests can converge, and still end up exploiting the masses.

SARS and the New World Order by Barry Chamish

Israel’s number one conspiracy theorist investigates the origins of the SARS virus and the NWO’s possible reasons for releasing it.

Memory/System/Prediction by Kurt Eckhart

Kurt riffs on how the evolution of the symbiotic relationship between the virtual and the real has lead us to this current historical moment, where the internal contractions of both Communism and Capitalism have become manifest, and how a post-scarcity anarchism that “reconciles the Utopian urges of Communism with the complex utilization of localized information inherent in Capitalism” can be incubated in the current political/economic systems about to be chucked into the dumpster of history.

Deprogramming 101 by Victor Thorn and Lisa Guliani

Victor and Lisa on anti-war rallies and the false right-left divide.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want by Jason Lubyk

New World Disorder’s editor on the failure of the anti-war movement to prevent the expansion of Empire, why it’s not necessarily a bad thing, and what to do next.

(and big thanks to Doc for the web design and Joe for helping out)

Another al Qaeda terror wave beginning? US corporations and people are getting punished for Bush administration policies....
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | 13 die as terror returns to Indonesia

The ferocity in which the London INDEPENDENT is going after the Blair gang is exemplary; would it be that there were a journalistic institution in the US that would go after the Bush cabal in the same way and spirit; this is just one of about five articles today attacking Blair et al
News: "A sorry, sorry affair"

In 13303, President Bush declares a national emergency as the basis for protecting the Development Fund for Iraq (an entity intended to fund reconstruction efforts with oil proceeds, overseen by an international board including World Bank officials) as well as all Iraqi petroleum, petroleum products, “interests”, proceeds, and contracts related to Iraqi petroleum. Claiming that interference with Iraqi petroleum, petroleum products, and “interests therein” jeopardizes reconstruction efforts in Iraq, EO 13303 offers a wide range of protections to certain persons, entities and assets associated with the Iraqi oil industry. The document is apparently intended as a sweeping grant of immunity to individuals, corporations, agencies and others involved in Iraqi oil sales, marketing, or other oil-related activities.

The Order provides protection at both the front end—the activities that generate the oil—as well as the back—the profits and proceeds that ensue. U.S. companies engaged in petroleum-related work in Iraq are purportedly given broad immunity from suits for environmental damage, workplace harms, contractual disputes, and numerous other wrongs. For example, a U.S. oil company benefiting from human rights abuses, no matter how egregious, apparently falls within the Order’s immunity from suit. Similarly, the Order purports to protect any assets derived from Iraqi oil from judgment, garnishment, or any other seizure in U.S. courts. For example, if a corporate entity or an individual engages in criminal activity in the U.S., its assets traceable to Iraqi oil are protected by this order. The list of situations in which a person or corporation could get away with, if not murder, then at least millions, is endless.

Now Halliburton civilian contractors are getting killed in Iraq in part because of Cheney's desperate folly in pushing Iraq war to get Halliburton contracts
U.S. Civilian Contractor Killed in Iraq

I wish I could say that general understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs and Islam in the US has improved, but alas, it really hasn't. For all kinds of reasons, the situation in Europe seems to be considerably better. What American leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, so that "we" might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow. It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar. But this has often happened with the "orient", that semi-mythical construct which since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in the late 18th century has been made and remade countless times. In the process the uncountable sediments of history, a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences, and cultures, are swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sandheap along with the treasures ground into meaningless fragments that were taken out of Baghdad.

...

The major influences on George W Bush's Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world who helped the American hawks to think about such preposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and the centuries-old Islamic decline which only American power could reverse. Today bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange oriental peoples. CNN and Fox, plus myriad evangelical and rightwing radio hosts, innumerable tabloids and even middle-brow journals, have recycled the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalisations so as to stir up "America" against the foreign devil.

Without a well-organised sense that the people over there were not like "us" and didn't appreciate "our" values - the very core of traditional orientalist dogma - there would have been no war. The American advisers to the Pentagon and the White House use the same clichés, the same demeaning stereotypes, the same justifications for power and violence (after all, runs the chorus, power is the only language they understand) as the scholars enlisted by the Dutch conquerors of Malaysia and Indonesia, the British armies of India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, West Africa, the French armies of Indochina and North Africa. These people have now been joined in Iraq by a whole army of private contractors and eager entrepreneurs to whom shall be confided everything from the writing of textbooks and the constitution to the refashioning of Iraqi political life and its oil industry.

The British and US governments are drawing up a controversial new strategy to convince the public that Saddam was developing weapons of mass destruction - an admission that they have so far failed to make a convincing case.

The "big impact" plan is designed to overwhelm and silence critics who have sought to put pressure on Tony Blair and George Bush. At the same time both men are working to lower the burden of proof - from finding weapons to finding evidence that there were programs to develop them, even if they lay dormant since the 1980s.

Heart experts today said it was 'unusual' for someone to wear electrode pads while walking following revelations that David Kelly had four of the special monitors on his chest when his body was found.

Dr Kelly - the BBC's source for a report claiming the government altered the contents of a dossier about Iraq - had probably been wearing a 24-hour electro-cardiogram recorder, also known as a Holter monitor, medical experts said.

But it was odd that the pads that are connected to the device had not been removed by doctors and were left attached to his chest, they said.

Kind of odd.

I am now retired. Shortly before my retirement I was allowed to return to my primary office of assignment, having served in NESA as a desk officer backfill for 10 months. The transfer was something I had sought, but my wish was granted only after I made a particular comment to my superior, in response to my reading of a February Secretary of State cable answering a long list of questions from a Middle Eastern country regarding U.S. planning for the aftermath in Iraq. The answers had been heavily crafted by the Pentagon, and to me, they were remarkably inadequate, given the late stage of the game. I suggested to my boss that if this was as good as it got, some folks on the Pentagon's E-ring may be sitting beside Saddam Hussein in the war crimes tribunals.

Saddam is not yet sitting before a war crimes tribunal. Nor have the key decision-makers in the Pentagon been forced to account for the odd set of circumstances that placed us as a long-term occupying force in the world's nastiest rat's nest, without a nation-building plan, without significant international support and without an exit plan. Neither may ever be required to answer their accusers, thanks to this administration's military as well as publicity machine, and the disgraceful political compromises already made by most of the Congress. Ironically, only Saddam Hussein, buried under tons of rubble or in hiding, has a good excuse.

Here's latest Bushism: "We had a good Cabinet meeting, talked about a lot of issues. Secretary of State and Defense brought us up to date about our desires to spread freedom and peace around the world."—Washington, D.C., Aug. 1, 2003 (Thanks to Tanny Bear.)
The Complete Bushisms - Updated frequently. By Jacob Weisberg
And another slam on Bush as worst president ever by former Nobel Prize winner:
US Nobel Laureate Slams Bush Gov't as "Worst" in American History
By Matthias Streitz
Der Spiegel

Tuesday 29 July 2003

George A. Akerlof is a 2001 Nobel prize laureate who teaches economics at the University of California in Berkeley.

BERLIN - American Nobel Prize laureate for Economics George A. Akerlof lashed out at the government of US President George W. Bush, calling it the "worst ever" in American history, the online site of the weekly Der Spiegel magazine reported Tuesday.

"I think this is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history It has engaged in extraordinarily irresponsible policies not only in foreign policy and economics but also in social and environmental policy," said the 2001 Nobel Prize laureate who teaches economics at the University of California in Berkeley.

"This is not normal government policy. Now is the time for (American) people to engage in civil disobedience. I think it's time to protest - as much as possible," the 61-year-old scholar added.

Jeffry Zeldman repots: "Gunfire marked our first night in Seattle. Street warfare broke out when rival gangs spotted each other following an annual torchlight parade."