The greatest post in the history of Bloging has been written. That’s it. It’s all over. The Ulysses of Blogging, if you will. And of course, it is from the greatness that is Fafblog.
Update: Bryan in comments reminded me that when traveling to the land of fafblog, you may want to turn the brightness on your monitor down. And maybe wear sunglasses.
WASHINGTON, June 28, 2004 � Justice Department officials say a huge database that serves as the public’s lone window on lobbying activities by foreign governments has been allowed to decay to a point they cannot even make a copy of its contents.
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Responding to a recent Freedom of Information request from the Center for Public Integrity, the Justice Department’s Foreign Agent Registration Unit said it was unable to copy its records electronically because their computer system was “so fragile.” In a letter, the head of the unit’s Freedom of Information office said that simply attempting to make an electronic copy of the database “could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating.”The database details millions of dollars spent on lobbying activities by foreign governments, companies, and foundations.
Those activities include everything from wining and dining lawmakers to broadcasting issue ads on American television and radio stations.
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The ancient computers the public and staff use often break down, however, and the printers malfunction. The system’s document handling software, itself an antique, operates on Microsoft Windows 95.
Windows 95. Windows 95! Windowsfucking95!!!?!?!?!? It runs in fucking DOS, man! ‘�ve got a calculator in my office more advanced than Windows 95. You know why? Because that OS came out almost ten years ago. Ten years out of date! AAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And we wonder why terrorists can do things like 9/11. Its because we have Government agents using a frickin abacus and slide rule to do their god damn math! Wait, let me see if that terror suspect is in our database, let me just flip through the ledger filled with degeritypes… I’ll get back to you on that… Hang on…
Christian writes in with a few words on the handover of soverignity in Iraq. He sums it up rather nicely: We’ll see.
With thousands of Republicans set to invade the city this summer, high-priced escorts and strippers are preparing for one grand old party.
Agencies are flying in extra call girls from around the globe to meet the expected demand during the Aug. 30-Sept. 2 gathering at Madison Square Garden.
‘We have girls from London, Seattle, California, all coming in for that week,’ said a madam at a Manhattan escort service. ‘It’s the week everyone wants to work.’
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Charging from $300 to upwards of $1,000 for an hour of companionship and a whole lot more, escorts said they can always count on conventioneers for big business.
This isn’t breaking news, but just a reminder of the facts, that Working Girls and Politicians go hand in hand (and by “hand” I mean… Other body parts).
Now, I’m all for legalizing prostitution. I think it’s a fine revenue generating profession, that the women involved are offering a much needed service to society. After all, who else is going to fuck Trent Lott?
Now if only we could get the Moral Rake Party to just admit this openly, that they are mortal men with physical needs and that those are fine and natural and there’s no shame in paying a buxom eighteen year old Guatemalan immigrant to let you lick her toes and then pee on your chest. That’s what this country was founded on: the right to get freaky with a hired gal. But it’s not just hypocritical to turn around the next day and spit fire and brimstone at the same ladies who massaged your frustrations away for being immoral. It’s humiliating. Which is only OK if that’s what you’re paying them for.
Along with this now familiar general warning, the FBI has introduced the specter of a new terrorism threat: booby-trapped beer coolers. A lightly classified bulletin sent to 18,000 state and local agencies last week advised local authorities to look out for plastic-foam containers, inner tubes and other waterborne flotsam commonly seen around marinas that could be rigged to blow up on contact. Also, the bulletin warned, terrorists might attach bombs to buoys.
if Terrorists were half as imaginative as the aspiring novelists at the FBI, I’d be worried. Not for an attack, mind you, but that I might have some competition as America’s next great undiscovered fabulist.
Thanks to Atrios for the link.
After hearing about Fahrenheit 9/11 I was eager to see it, and now after watching it for the first time, I was NOT disappointed. While comparisons to Bowling for Columbine differ among my friends, the movie serves up a thoughtful and aggressive critique of Things Bush, even politics in general these days.
The movie did an excellent job showing how the current government–all of its parts: the judicial, the legislative, the executive branches of government–is complicit in ruling by fear in a hierarhical society powered by difference in education, social class, position–especially in the current prolonged panic to the threat of terrorism on U.S. territory.
In my opinion, I could have stood for an even more exploratory approach to the theaters of conflict at home and abroad, but alas there is only so much time. While not completely absent, there could have been a few more interviews with some even tougher questions (though I’d have to do some work to make specific suggestions). Nonetheless, the film makes its points: the war on terror is rife with contradictions not only in the policies directing government action, but also contradictions with the foundations of American political life.
My hope, of course, is that the film maker’s standing as a member of the Independent Party enables both Republicans and Democrats to see the movie and consider its contribution to an empoverished political discourse.
Let the freedom of the First Amendment ring, ring in the cinema, in print and electronic media, in places of worship, in education and the arts, in the voting booths, and above all in the hallowed halls of government where our leaders struggle in a system torked and bent by fiercely conflicting social forces. Perhaps the great American experiment has not fallen prey to a sanitized public discourse. Let the election games begin!
Kevin and I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday evening and I’m here to tell you it was everything I thought it would be and then some. Now, as other reviewers have pointed out1, if your a political junkie or a blogger (but there I go, repeating myself) there isn’t a whole lot of new information in this movie. But that’s not the point. There are plenty of revelations for those fence sitters, moderates and people who watch Paris Hilton stick her arm up a cow’s ass instead of reading a newspaper every once in a while but the point of the film wasn’t to lift the rock of the Bush administration and make faces at the squirming things beneath. It was to take a lot of information that has been leaked, spun, buried, stifled, or reported only in the British Press and construct a Big Picture out of it. And Michael Moore does this with humor, and heart.
There were one or two bits of new information I learned last night that I was not aware of before. Firstly, that the Saudi Embassy has a contingent of six Secret Service Agents assigned to protect it and the Saudi Ambassador and that they are the only embassy in the US with such protection. This strikes me as odd, because security for Diplomats is generally regarded as State Department territory.
I was also surprised to find out the stunningly large amount of money that the Saudis have invested in the US, what amounts to nearly 7% of the US GDP and that the Saudi royal family has nearly a trillion dollars invested in US Banks. It was hinted at in the film that if the House of Saud were to get a bug up its ass and pull all of that money out at once, the US economy would be hit hard. Like Second Great Depression hard.
I had heard of “Bandar Bush” and the Saudi-Bush family Connections before, but I wasn’t aware that they were so incestuously close. Now, we’ve played six degrees of separation, and know that you can connect anyone to anyone else in the world with just some imagination and a bottle of tequila (I once connected myself to Sean Connery in only three degrees, all without even getting close to Kevin Bacon). But the only way the Bush and Bin Laden families could be closer is if the Bush Twins were to marry Osoma’s nephews. And that prospect isn’t so far out as one might think, when we consider that their grandfather, Bush 41, was in a Carlyle Group meeting on the morning of September 11 with Bin Laden’s half brother. They watched the planes hit the towers together.
Conspiracy mongering aside, the film does hit home the tense and thoroughly painful realities of having our troops in Iraq The emotional conflict of being anti war, pro troop; realizing too late that we’ve all been duped by petty, greedy bastards who don’t care that our sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, husbands and wives are being killed for vague excuses having little to do with the realities on the ground; realizing the horror of this war of no purpose, for both Americans and Iraqis as we all slowly but surely discover our worst fears: that this war was started, not to protect us from the vague threat of terrorism, but so that some rich men can make more money.
So if you are one of those Paris Hilton Fence Sitters, looking for a sign and you go to see this movie and you still vote for Bush in November, you have more than just a flawed character. You’re a dupe of supreme magnitude and deserve whatever horrors Bush can bestow upon you.
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Giblets, from the greatness that is Fafblog, has the best review of Fahrenheit 9/11 I’ve read yet. Go. Read. Enjoy. Laugh. Bring me back some pie.
Good news from across the Atlantic–the BBC is making its material available in a special news archive.
For U.S. readers looking for a more complete view of world events than American publishers are willing to print, this should be VERY welcome news indeed. The BBC move also presents a chance to look at specialized archival collections, collections in this case special by the form of the materials.
Moving picture archives often require a special set of skills to conserve the materials for public use, if not also specialized knowledge to help researchers access it.
Furthermore, a common misconception among the public is that one library is just like the next, according to InfoWorld writer Janet Balas. I think archivists must also watch out for user expections which do not help users cut through the myriad information sources at their disposal. Just like each library is different, so is each archive. The more we can do to help users identify what type of research tools will help meet their specific needs, the better off we’ll all be.
If you’re interested in digital archives:
Television News Archive
[This is a subscription service, unfortunately.]
For further reading:
“Digital Video, the Final Frontier” by Judith Thomas
Library Journal; Jan. 2004; 129, 1, pg. s8.
News release announcing BBC decision:
Greg Dyke, director general of the BBC, has announced plans to give the public full access to all the corporation’s programme archives.
Mr Dyke said on Sunday that everyone would in future be able to download BBC radio and TV programmes from the internet.
The service, the BBC Creative Archive, would be free and available to everyone, as long as they were not intending to use the material for commercial purposes, Mr Dyke added.
“The BBC probably has the best television library in the world,” said Mr Dyke, who was speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival.
“Up until now this huge resource has remained locked up, inaccessible to the public because there hasn’t been an effective mechanism for distribution.
“But the digital revolution and broadband are changing all that.”
A few real quick items (my shortened summer session class is a huge time sucker right now, so posting will be sparse until after the Fourth):
Lucy was a street kitten when we found her. She expresses afection the only way she knows how.
