Iran labels CIA 'terrorist organization' by Ali Akbar Dareini.

this is priceless! tit for tat? equal treatment under the Law? How will Americans like it now when Iran or other countries treats us like we treat them? When Americans are held with suspended Human Rights?! Look out! don't notice these double -standards! Really one good Bateson binding Bonds! Is this the begining of Fair Play on the US by all the other countries of the Planet?

ok from

Iran labels CIA 'terrorist organization'

 

By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press WriterSat Sep 29, 6:09 PM ET

Iran's parliament voted Saturday to designate the CIA and the U.S. Army as "terrorist organizations," a largely symbolic response to a U.S. Senate resolution seeking a similar designation for Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

The parliament said the Army and the CIA were terrorists because of the atomic bombing of Japan; the use of depleted uranium munitions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq; support of the killings of Palestinians by Israel; the bombing and killing Iraqi civilians and the torture of imprisoned terror suspects.

Burning Men, Part 2: the Order of Things by Erik Davis of techgnosis

How does Erik think this stuff UP^! too much and very nice. R eally gettin' a Clue!

The Perp! above ^

eDavis:

So when Burners invoked specifically legalistic categories like "arson" and "reckless endangerment"–and I did it too at times–they were not just rationally debating Addis' fate. They were actively deflating the productive legal ambiguity of Black Rock City as a self-governing political and territorial space by capitulating, too quickly and without consciousness, to the reality tunnel of the State and, particularly, to its conception of property.

and

Look, for example, at the constricted lives of so many kids today, with their helmets and knee pads and car-seats, their time managed, their piss checked, their movements tracked by cell phones and prohibitions against aimless wandering. What has been killed in the process of making them less likely to be killed? Perhaps, in our fearful genuflection before safety, we are deadening our taste for the raw and nervy exultation of cognitive and physical liberty–a liberty which most certainly should include the freedom to attend dangerous and wayward festivals where, if your aren't careful or even lucky, large burning things might fall on your head.

Burning Men
Part One: Chaosmos

book: Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (Digital Formations) by Jussi Parikka

by

image

x.

Joseph Nechvatal
Mid-September 2007, Marrakech
http://www.nechvatal.net

from

http://transition.turbulence.org/blog/2007/09/28/review-of-digital-contagions/trackback/

Though no J. G. Ballard or William S. Burroughs, Jussi Parikka nevertheless sucks us into a fantastic black tour-de-force narrative of virulence and the cultural history of computer viruses (*), followed by innumerable inquisitive innuendoes

We may wish to recall here that for Deleuze and Guattari, media ecologies are machinic operations (the term machinic here refers to the production of consistencies between heterogeneous elements) based in particular

To begin this caliginous expedition, Digital Contagions plunges us into a haunting, shifting and dislocating array of source material that thrills. Parikka launches his degenerate seduction by drawing from, and intertwining in a non-linear fashion, the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (for whom my unending love is verging on obsession), Friedrich Kittler, Eugene Thacker, Tiziana Terranova, N. Katherine Hayles, Lynn Margulis, Manuel DeLanda, Brian Massumi, Bruno Latour, Charlie Gere, Sherry Turkle, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Deborah Lupton, and Paul Virilio. These thinkers are then linked with ripe examples from prankster net art, stealth biopolitics, immunological incubations, the disassembly significance of noise, ribald sexual

Jussi Parikka

Jussi Parikka studied Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland, and is currently Visiting Lecturer and Research Scholar in Media Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin. His Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses is published by Peter Lang, New York, in the Digital Formations series (2007). In addition, two co-edited books are forthcoming: The Spam Book: On Viruses, Spam, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture and Media Archaeologies. Parikka's homepage is <http://users.utu.fi/juspar>.

Back to article.

book on amazon

Node magazine started based on William Gibson's new novel, Spook Country!

Listen to latest Gibson audio interview here

William Gibson

Listen to William Gibson
Part one (runs 13:16) | Part two (runs 17:03)

CBC Radio One site and info

 September 19, 2007

 

William Gibson Bookclub

This week on the podcast a special audio bookclub with award-winning author William Gibson.

fromhttp://www.nodemagazine.com/

WGibson

"Someone's already named a Web site after NODE, the nonexistent magazine in "˜Spook Country,' " [Gibson] said. "It's sort of scary." – Chris Watson, Bookends: William Gibson explores the science fiction of the here-and-now in his new novel [Santa Cruz Sentinel]

http://nodemagazine.com/

From

http://node.tumblr.com/ from

" "Someone has a website going where every single thing mentioned in Spook Country has a blog entry and usually an illustration so, every reference, someone has taken it, researched it and written a sort of little Wikipedia entry for it and all in the format of a website that pretends to be from a magazine called Node,

W. Gibson shows up in Second Life!

Turning Ahmadinejad into public enemy No. 17 by Juan Cole on Salon.com

from Salon.com

Turning Ahmadinejad into public enemy No. 1

Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem controversial are all part of the neoconservative push for yet another war.

By Juan Cole

Sep. 24, 2007 | Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly has become a media circus. But the controversy does not stem from the reasons usually cited.

no evidence for any US Media/govt. Lies

Washington is also unhappy with Mohammad ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He has been unable to find credible evidence that Iran has a weapons program, and he told Italian television this week, "Iran does not constitute a certain and immediate threat for the international community." He stressed that no evidence had been found for underground production sites or hidden radioactive substances, and he urged a three-month waiting period before the U.N. Security Council drew negative conclusions.

The neoconservatives are even claiming that the United States has been at war with Iran since 1979. As Glenn Greenwald points out, this assertion is absurd. In the '80s, the Reagan administration sold substantial numbers of arms to Iran. Some of those beating the war drums most loudly now, like think-tank rat Michael Ledeen, were middlemen in the Reagan administration's unconstitutional weapons sales to Tehran. The sales would have been a form of treason if in fact the United States had been at war with Iran at that time, so Ledeen is apparently accusing himself of treason.

Pangea animations "mind"-blowin'! Astronomy Picture of the Day

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2007 September 22
See Explanation.  Clicking on the picture will download  the highest resolution version available.

Breakup of Pangea (200 mya – Present)Seafloor Spreading in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans

(to run animation, drag mouse across image)

(Read the explanation below, while you wait for the animation to load.)

http://www.scotese.com/sfsanim.htm

Return Home

The Following animations can be downloaded and viewed at your computer.

Plate Tectonic Animations

NEW Breakup of Pangea: Pangea Breakup VR

http://www.scotese.com/newpage13.htm

Constitution Day Program — Interrogation and Intelligence Gathering What happened to the 5th. Amendment?

Seton Hall Law CONSTITUTION DAY
September 17, 2007

Constitution Day will be held in the Law School Auditorium


Press Release (September 7, 2007)
Seton Hall School of Law on Second Life: Constitution Day Program on Interrogation and Intelligence Gathering to be Featured at Virtual Guantánamo Bay Detention Center [Read Press Release here]


Seton Hall Law School is pleased to offer you an outstanding simulcast program in celebration of Constitution Day on September 17, 2007. As you may recall, the 2006 Guantánamo Teach-In was an amazing success, with three hundred colleges, universities, medical schools, divinity schools and law schools participating. A DVD of the Guantánamo Teach-In program sponsored last year by Seton Hall Law School is available.

http://law.shu.edu/constitutionday/

Constitution Day Program — Interrogation and Intelligence Gathering

(To view this webcast, you must register a user name and password which you will be prompted for when
entering the event. If you haven't already registered, click here to REGISTER )
 
 
  Monday, September 17, 2007 01:30 PM EDT
Click Here For Your Local Time
Connect via Streaming
Audio/Video
 
 
  1:30 – 1:45pm EDT Welcome & Introductions
   
 
Professor Mark Denbeaux
  Seton Hall Law School
 
 
 
  1:45 – 2:00pm EDT FBI Interrogation Seeking
   
 
Mr. Jack Cloonan
  Clayton Consultants and Retired FBI Counter Terrorism Expert
 

http://event.netbriefings.com/event/seton/Live/constitutionday/

time lapse film compresses 35 years of skyscraper construction in Shinjuku district of Tokyo

 http://blog.longnow.org/2007/09/10/35-year-time-lapse-of-tokyo-skyline/

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/laPU0bS8JOc" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

What's a Meta For? George Lakoff surfaces to US Politics/Media on "Betrayal"

Whose Betrayal?

By George Lakoff, The Rockridge Institute

Betrayal is everywhere in the news. We learned from the Washington Post that Alan Greenspan said, in his new book, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1307

The issue is this: Who has been betraying the trust of the American people — including our troops — in bringing about the American invasion of Iraq and in continuing the occupation? What were the acts of betrayal and with what consequences? And is a betrayal of trust still going on, and if so where, how, and by whom?

I have developed a deeper look at these issues. You can read that in my new article Iraq and the Betrayal of Trust . But meanwhile, let's talk about one of the traps we should stay out of: The Politeness Trap.

and so forth

Tags ? metaphor, What's a Meta For?, Gregory Bateson, Lakoff,

'In the Shadow of the Moon' film opens; no stars in any film frames?

 How come no stars in the film/photos taken outside the atmosphere of the Earth? No views of the Star Fields on the 3 day trip to Moon. We went there 9 times?! No comments by any astronauts on the stars and how they do not twinkle in no air…and there would be plenty to see! Duh?! and what gives…I 've never seen a star in any photo by NASA taken by a film camera by a person outside the atmosphere since NASA started…

Astronauts Live 'In the Shadow of the Moon'

Film Records Deepest Thoughts of Men Who Went to the Moon

By NED POTTER

Sept. 7, 2007 –

In all of time, only 24 human beings have flown to or around the moon, looked back, and seen Earth as a small blue sphere in the blackness of space.

Their numbers are dwindling. Of the 12 who walked on the moon's surface, only nine are alive today, and the youngest is 71.

So British director David Sington and his crew set out to seize the moment — now, before the opportunity passes, to bring the Apollo astronauts together in one film, and ask them how the experience affected them.

"I think these guys are very sane individuals. They are very down to earth, because, in some sense, they really know what Earth is," says Sington. "There are 7 billion of us on the planet, and nine of those 7 billion have stood on another heavenly body."

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3399586&page=1

Film web site

http://www.intheshadowofthemoon.com/

Clip on Apple

http://www.apple.com/trailers/thinkfilm/intheshadowofthemoon/trailer/

CIA, Not! RIP 1941-2003 Chalmers Johnson reviews Legacy of Ashes by 100% failure rate

Copyright 2007 Chalmers Johnson
This article was originally posted at TomDispatch.com.

Suprise Attacks

As an idea, if not an actual entity, the Central Intelligence Agency came into being as a result of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. It functionally came to an end, as Weiner makes clear, on September 11, 2001, when operatives of al-Qaeda flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade towers in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Both assaults were successful surprise attacks.

The Central Intelligence Agency itself was created during the Truman administration in order to prevent future surprise attacks like Pearl Harbor by uncovering planning for them and so forewarning against them. On September 11th, 2001, the CIA was revealed to be a failure precisely because it had been unable to discover the al-Qaeda plot and sound the alarm against a surprise attack that would prove almost as devastating as Pearl Harbor. After 9/11, the Agency, having largely discredited itself, went into a steep decline and finished the job. Weiner concludes: "Under [CIA Director George Tenet's] leadership, the agency produced the worst body of work in its long history: a special national intelligence estimate titled "˜Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction.'" It is axiomatic that, as political leaders lose faith in an intelligence agency and quit listening to it, its functional life is over, even if the people working there continue to report to their offices.

http://aep.typepad.com/american_empire_project/2007/07/the-life-and-ti.html

and so on!

The Agency gathered under one roof Wall Street brokers, Ivy League professors, soldiers of fortune, ad men, newsmen, stunt men, second-story men, and con men. They never learned to work together — the ultimate result being a series of failures in both intelligence and covert operations. In January 1961, on leaving office after two terms, President Eisenhower had already grasped the situation fully. "Nothing has changed since Pearl Harbor," he told his director of central intelligence, Allen Dulles. "I leave a legacy of ashes to my successor." Weiner, of course, draws his title from Eisenhower's metaphor. It would only get worse in the years to come.

The historical record is unequivocal. The United States is ham-handed and brutal in conceiving and executing clandestine operations, and it is simply no good at espionage; its operatives never have enough linguistic and cultural knowledge of target countries to recruit spies effectively. The CIA also appears to be one of the most easily penetrated espionage organizations on the planet. From the beginning, it repeatedly lost its assets to double agents.

and on and on!

Nothing has done more to undercut the reputation of the United States than the CIA's "clandestine" (only in terms of the American people) murders of the presidents of South Vietnam and the Congo, its ravishing of the governments of Iran, Indonesia (three times), South Korea (twice), all of the Indochinese states, virtually every government in Latin America, and Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The deaths from these armed assaults run into the millions. After 9/11, President Bush asked "Why do they hate us?" From Iran (1953) to Iraq (2003), the better question would be, "Who does not?"

his book is one of the best possible places for a serious citizen to begin to understand the depths to which our government has sunk. It also brings home the lesson that an incompetent or unscrupulous intelligence agency can be as great a threat to national security as not having one at all.

Chalmers Johnson's latest book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (Metropolitan Books, 2007). It is the third volume of his Blowback Trilogy, which also includes Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire. A retired professor of international relations from the University of California (Berkeley and San Diego campuses) and the author of some seventeen books primarily on the politics and economics of East Asia, Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute.

http://www.americanempireproject.com/

Current TV covers Burnin' Man

Live video cam from burnin' womans

http://qtss.telascience.org/live.sdp

burning man site and info

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2007/08/video-current-t.html

current.tv coverage of burning man
http://www.current.tv/network/video?id=39821750

More current TV 2007 vids day by day
http://www.current.tv/burningman/

Jonathan Ott on Free/Cheap/Peak fossil fuels/minerals update/comments

from

Erowid Conference Report: Mind States Costa Rica by Lux, Erowid Staff Writer

v1 – Jul 18, 2007

sample from Jon Ott-

"The End of the Treasure in the Basement", by Jonathan Ott

Jonathan described himself as "not a prophet", but someone who has been interested in the question of energy and the petroleum-based political and economic infrastructure of the industrialized world since the 1970s. He's surprised that the infrastructure has held itself together as long as it has.

Most known organisms derive their energy from the sun, which was properly regarded by many religious cultures as the origin of life.

….

Since 1979 the amount of energy per capita has decreased, and more people have no access to energy and water every year. We're starting over the hill and soon it will be a cliff. This is important because energy equals life, in a literal and direct equation. What Hubbard pointed out was the disparity between the natural ecology of energy and the economic system of the world.

So we start looking to alternatives to oil, coal, natural gas, and wood. Take nuclear energy � it is highly efficient in generating electrical power, but it requires a huge investment of energy to operate. Nuclear power plants must have their own power plant to run, and it may be the case that nuclear power does not even generate net energy.

Fusion reactors are too little, too late. A best-case scenario is production of fusion power in 2050, and that's way too late.

There are currently four countries that have not yet reached their peak. Jonathan predicts that within 30 years the wheels will come off the global economy. Perhaps as soon as 20, but definitely by 30.

Jonathan's response to this situation has been to create a self-sufficient solar and water power supply that powers his lights, a short-range electric car, and his basic needs. He's beginning to generate all of his own food in a sustainable little farm as well, and his hope is to live to see the day when everything comes unglued so he can see what happens.

http://erowid.org/general/conferences/conference_mindstates7.shtml

Ott is one of my favourite writers and   theoreticians.

 

Author of (Books)

  • Ometochtzin: Las Muertes de Dos Conejo (2001)
  • Just Say Blow. Coca and Cocaine: A Scientific Blowjob (2001)
  • Shamanic Snuffs or Entheogenic Errhines (2001)
  • Pharmacophilia: The Natural Paradise (1997)
  • Ott book
    http://www.erowid.org/library/books/images/age_of_entheogens.jpg

    This is a mind-blowing book, especially the Angel's Dictionary!

  • Age of Entheogens & the Angels' Dictionary (1995)
  • Ayahuasca Analogues: Pangaean Entheogens (1995)
  • Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic drugs, their plant sources and history (1993)
  • Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion (1986)
  • The Cacahuatl Eater: Ruminations of an Unabashed Chocolate Addict (1985)
  • Teonanacatl: Hallucinogenic Mushrooms of North America (Co-edited by J. Bigwood, 1978)
  • Hallucinogenic Plants of North America (1976)
  • more on Ott here
  • http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/ott_jonathan/ott_jonathan.shtml
  • What resources are not Peaking? Now it's Phosphorus! Way important!

    From the Oil Drum site

    Peak Phosphorus

    Google Technorati del.icio.us StumbleUpon

    This is a guest post by Patrick Déry and Bart Anderson. Patrick Déry is a physicist, energy, agriculture and environment analyst and consultant in Quebec, Canada. Bart Anderson is a former reporter, teacher and technical writer; he currently is co-editor of Energy Bulletin. Peak oil has made us aware that many of the resources on which civilization depends are limited.
    But oil production is not the whole story. Nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus were also required for the "Green Revolution".

    Nitrogen is present in large quantity in the atmosphere (78% of its composition). The Haber-Bosch process for obtaining nitrogen uses one percent of all energy consumed by humans [5]. Nitrogen can also be fixed in the soil using micro-organisms such as rhizobium and azotobacters. If there is sufficient energy, nitrogen will be available.

    Phosphorus may be the real bottleneck of agriculture. [6]

    Population growth was only possible because we found phosphorus deposits and cheap energy to extract, transform and transport it to farms. When we plot data of world population versus world phosphate production, we find a significant correlation.

    What does this correlation mean? Even if we find a real substitute for fossil fuels, it will be impossible to maintain population growth because phosphate deposits are probably in decline. It will be impossible to maintain an agriculture without recycling nutrients.
    http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2882