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Sunday, August 3, 2008 |
"This album has been written for and inspired by the English version of the book by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami (村上春樹) called 'The Wind-up Bird Chronicle' (ねじまき鳥クロニクル). Each tune corresponds to a different section of this book, but of course, you don't have to have read the book in order to enjoy the music."
10:37:04 PM 
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CNet: "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has concocted a remarkable new policy: It reserves the right to seize for an indefinite period of time laptops taken across the border.
A pair of DHS policies from last month say that customs agents can routinely - as a matter of course - seize, make copies of, and 'analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to enter, re-enter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States'.
This is a disturbing new policy, and should convince anyone taking a laptop across a border to use encryption to thwart DHS snoops. Encrypt your laptop, with full disk encryption if possible, and power it down before you go through customs.
It's true that any reasonable person would probably agree that Customs agents should be able to inspect travelers' bags for contraband. But seizing a laptop and copying its hard drive is uniquely invasive - and should only be done if there's a good reason.
The new DHS policies say that customs agents can, 'absent individualized suspicion', seize electronic gear: 'Documents and electronic media, or copies thereof, may be detained for further review, either on-site at the place of detention or at an off-site location, including a location associated with a demand for assistance from an outside agency or entity.' "
While the hypocrites are raising hell about human rights in China, the US government is trampling on every possible citizen's right.
Never before has politics been so devious and machiavellian.
11:50:40 AM
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Salon: "The 2001 anthrax attacks remain one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 era. After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential. The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters - with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 - that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax - sent directly into the heart of the country's elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets - that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.
If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks.
One other fact to note here is how bizarrely inept the effort by the Bush DOJ to find the real attacker has been. Extremely suspicious behavior from Ivins - including his having found and completely cleaned anthrax traces on a co-worker's desk at the Ft. Detrick lab without telling anyone that he did so and then offering extremely strange explanations for why - was publicly reported as early as 2004 by The LA Times (Ivins 'detected an apparent anthrax leak in December 2001, at the height of the anthrax mailings investigation, but did not report it. Ivins considered the problem solved when he cleaned the affected office with bleach')."
This makes it quite possible that the US government is involved in the anthrax scare. They had a motive, to accuse Saddam Husein and Iraq, and they had the means, this special strain of anthrax that was US property. The recent 'suicide' makes it ever more suspicious. Maybe a whole team at Ft. Detrick was engaged in a covert anthrax operation.
Video.
11:39:13 AM
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