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I'm horrified to discover there is spying going on in our spy services... If you aren't paranoid, you aren't paying attention

Democracies the most eager to cast stones and bugs
It is a sunniest Saturday and that splendid Sydney Morning Herald carries a story based on the new book by former Air Force Secretary Thomas Reed, describing some of the audacious efforts President Reagan authorized to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union: Reagan approved plan to sabotage Soviets. On the other hand, National Review Online yesterday posted Ion Mihai Pacepa's account of one set of KGB "active measures" to sabotage American foreign policy that is relevant to the current presidential campaign: Kerry's Soviet rhetoric.
· CIA [link first seen at KGB ]
· See Also Weapons inspectors' phones 'bugged'
· See Also Blix, Butler bugged: Russell Balding

Old Customs Die Hard
Barbara Walters of 60 Minutes (USA) did a story on gender roles in Kabul several years before the Afghan conflict. She noted that women customarily walked about 5 paces behind their husbands.
She returned to Kabul recently and observed that women still walk behind their husbands, but now seem to walk even further back and are now happy with the old custom.
Ms. Walters approached one of the Afghani women and asked. "But why do you now seem happy with the old custom that you used to try and change?"
"Land mines," said the woman.
According to the Corriere della Sera, Silvio Berlusconi, the most entertaining European politician since mad king Ludwig..
· See Also Welcome to Europe! Have Fun! Drive Fast!
[link first seen at Geoff Goodfellow ]

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Fifty years ago, an unpublished 28-year-old American poet came into the United States at Mexicali dreaming of literary glory. His name was Allen Ginsberg

Why Certain Polliticians Should Sue the Truth...
Washington is attempting to give us a 14-mile triple fence along San Diego's border as its solution to the problem of illegal immigration from Mexico.
· A Fence Won't Stem the Tide of Immigration... [ via Wall]
If British Prime Minister Tony Blair is President Bush's poodle, then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is his cocker spaniel

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Censorshipssss
There are basically two kinds of censorship, but most people only notice the harmless kind that involves trying to hide naughty words or pictures once they’re already out there in plain sight. This kind of censorship is what brought down the Soviets. It just doesn’t work, and ain’t worth the trouble of trying. It just ends up as a joke.
[...]
The other sort of censorship is harder to spot and much more cruel. It’s a matter of which stories get told or noticed in the first place, rather than fussing about the language in which they get told. Put it this way: how many things happened yesterday? and how many of those things made the nightly news? For starters, you probably didn’t. Yup, if you’re reading the eXile, it’s a good bet that nothing you did or ever will do made the news.
Your story is just too depressing. To make the news, your story has to be one of the consoling lies that a culture, any culture, tells itself to make the ordinary suckers’ lives seem bearable to them. If your bike is rearended at a stoplight and you spend the rest of your life tetraplegic, it’s not going to be on the news. It’s a big story to you, and it’s the kind of story total strangers enjoy hearing, if only out of morbid curiosity, but it won’t make the news. It’s too true. It’s not an exception.
[...]
Try keeping track of the stories you see featuring 'ordinary people' and you’ll discover that they’re all lies: Illiterate nobodies get rich. Terminal cancer case is spontaneously cured. Parakeet and cat become best friends. Behind all these like the breath of the grave whisper the simple, censored facts: the poor stay poor. Millions of terminal cancer patients die on schedule. The cat grabs the parakeet first chance it gets, and kills it slowly, torturing it with great pleasure.
When a culture really wants to censor the horrible truth, it takes these stories and puts them together into an 'inspirational' movie. And that movie is called Forrest Gump.
· Poet Hugh MacDiarmid famously and foolishly said he would kill a million men for one glorious lyric [link first seen at Ken McLeod]

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Confessions of a Media Maverick: Exposing Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists
Stossel began by recounting his evolution from an Emmy-award-winning consumer-affairs reporter to America's best-known skeptic of government regulation. What seems strange to him in hindsight, he explained, is not that he came to have more confidence in the market's protection of consumers than in consumer protection laws, but that this development took as long as it did:
I'd go further and say that you really don't need the government to even be the information agency, because as we should have learned from the fall of the Soviet Union, government agencies don't do things well. And if you simply eliminated the FDA, the private groups that government has crowded out would step in and do the job better, quicker, cheaper. . . . It's a fatal conceit to predict how the market will work, but maybe Underwriters Laboratories would do it or Consumer Reports. But I bet they'd do it better than the government.
· Patrick Henry didn't say, Give me absolute safety or give me death... It's supposed to be about freedom [
· U.S. Iraq Policy Uncovered, by Ivan Eland
· Oval Office Club
· No More Great Presidents
· Nova Nuclear Danger
· For the President's Eyes Only

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Unmasked: Hilarious story in the NY Times today reporting that anonymous reviewers of books at Amazon were temporarily unmasked...

Amazon Glitch Unmasks War of Reviewers
MEdia Dragons and close observers of Amazon.com noticed something peculiar this week: the company's Canadian site had suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had anonymously posted book reviews on the United States site under signatures like "a reader from New York."
The weeklong glitch, which Amazon fixed after outed reviewers complained, provided a rare glimpse at how writers and readers are wielding the online reviews as a tool to promote or pan a book — when they think no one is watching.
John Rechy, author of the best-selling 1963 novel "City of Night" and winner of the PEN-USA West lifetime achievement award, is one of several prominent authors who have apparently pseudonymously written themselves five-star reviews, Amazon's highest rating. Mr. Rechy, who laughed about it when approached, sees it as a means to survival when online stars mean sales.
· Incestous, catty, galaxy of book reviewing [ courtesy of One Star Review]
· Happy V Day: Speaking of The Kama Sutra: The joy of pagelets e-book angles

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An article in the Guardian about authors writing glowing anonymous reviews for their own books at Amazon.com. This only further confirms my feeling one shouldn't evaluate books on reader reviews alone.First of all, we have Harriet Klausner who typically rates books no less than One Star Reviews :=) Just one star thrills Jozef Imrich His Star, Lucy, is a diamond in the sky
Apparently I'm only a second-rate cynic. How about you? A cynic is someone who habitually questions the motives of others, believing them to be selfish by nature.

The law of diminishing monopoly: Amazon reviewers brought to book
The five-star review on Amazon, one of the world's biggest online booksellers, was attributed only to 'a reader from Chicago'.
· Star Wars [link first seen at Google ]
· Another long look at life in the age of Google.

Shorter Washington Post editorial page
Senate Democrats are bad people who have strategies and constituencies and stuff, but the Republicans shouldnt have stolen a really lot of their files like that (just a few would have been OK), although the people the bad thief lawyer guy worked for clearly knew nothing about it at the time and really the Republicans are the heroes of this story for not stonewalling after they were publicly busted by the Sergeant at Arms.
[ via Thief Memo]

Breathtaking Gianna is Due Today & All Shook Up

It's not exactly Oprah's Book Club, but the German ZDF-show Lesen!, hosted by Elke Heidenreich, seems to be an influential book-show.
· Lessen

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NAO to investigate whisky fraud claims, Accountancy Age, 6 February 2004.
The National Audit Office is to take a close look at whisky fraud after the chancellor said the Treasury misses out on duty on one in every six bottles.

Buyers under the hammer
A Tax Office review is hunting for gaps between declared income and the prices paid for antiques and fine art. Peter Fish reports. Bought or sold any art work lately? If so you could be in for a shock.
Sydney Morning Herald 14/02/2004 (hard copy only)

Fine That Dare Not Speed Its Name
Police gave a record $216,900 speeding ticket to a millionaire under a system in which traffic fines are linked to an offender's income. The Iltalehti tabloid reported that millionaire Jussi Salonoja zoomed through the city center last weekend in a 25 mph zone and police handed him a ticket of $216,900. It didn't say what his speed was. [...] Two years ago, Anssi Vanjoki, then executive vice president of Nokia's mobile phones division, landed a $148,000 ticket after being caught doing 46 mph in a 31 mph zone on a motorcycle. [...] Other hefty speeding tickets have included a $71,000 one for a professional hockey player and one for $190,000 given to one of Finland's wealthiest people.
· Finnish Police Give Record Speeding Fine [link first seen at Skoda: Harm]
· The US legislature is spending a great deal of time scrutinizing the tax revenues and the state budget proposals.

In an interview with the businessman sought after for his views on the economy, he stressed that democracy doesn't mean very much, in real terms, if "the bottom group," meaning the most impoverished, is hungry...
· Economic freedom first, then political freedom
· Charlie Thompson saw a big mess and decided to clean it up
· 2003 Comparative Tax Study
· The British Dream: Why I am an Angry Young Man

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Small esoteric note that probably isn't worth reading:
The thing that tears people apart is money. The reason they are unhappy is money. The boss is so important in people's lives. He's more important than your spouse because he's the one who provides your PayCzech. Compared to that, love is just about procreation... How can you complain about things when you know that the life span in Botswana is 32 years old? Life can be really hard, and almost anyone's life in America is pretty easy.

The End of Happy Endings: Cold Reality
Happy endings are presumed to belong to the realm of fantasy. In real life, after all, even a thumping electoral victory is generally more a first act than a last; what ensues, much too often, is disappointment, broken promises and even murmurs of a recall. When the believer, in any faith, tells us that the reward for bloody sacrifice is eternal joy, the nonbeliever is often tempted to think that the believer is merely trying to justify the ways of God to man. On earth at least, the end of life is death.
America, though, is the spiritual home of new beginnings, which may be why it has always had a soft spot, a special gift, for happy endings. We speak brightly of ''closure,'' as if the most difficult things in life could be wrapped up as neatly as a gift package; we speak of people ''passing on,'' as if the end of life were just a passing phase. America, in fact, could almost be defined as the place that chose not to root itself in the tragic cycles of the Greeks and others from the Old World (even Shakespeare, after all, in his early comedy Love's Labour's Lost, ensures that we leave the theater with the memory of a sudden death uppermost in our minds, and the central courting couples failing to pair off as comic convention decrees).
· Love's Labour's Lost [link first seen at Cold River]

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One thing I think I think about the coincidences in life: Geez, let's read it again:
My grandmother had a name for moments such as this. She called them bashert. Like most Yiddish expressions, bashert is a tough word to translate. It means intended, pre-ordained, destined. Things that happen for the best, good things, strange things that aren't supposed to happen but do, things that so easily might not have happened but did, these are bashert.
Rabbi Whiman

Always the Mob
JESUS emptied the devils of one man into forty hogs and the hogs took the edge of a high rock and dropped off and down into the sea: a mob.
The sheep on the hills of Australia, blundering fourfooted in the sunset mist to the dark, they go one way, they hunt one sleep, they find one pocket of grass for all.
Karnak? Pyramids? Sphinx paws tall as a coolie? Tombs kept for kings and sacred cows? A mob.
Young roast pigs and naked dancing girls of Belshazzar, the room where a thousand sat guzzling when a hand wrote: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin? A mob.
The honeycomb of green that won the sun as the Hanging Gardens of Nineveh, flew to its shape at the hands of a mob that followed the fingers of Nebuchadnezzar: a mob of one hand and one plan. 5
Stones of a circle of hills at Athens, staircases of a mountain in Peru, scattered clans of marble dragons in China: each a mob on the rim of a sunrise: hammers and wagons have them now.
Locks and gates of Panama? The Union Pacific crossing deserts and tunneling mountains? The Woolworth on land and the Titanic at sea? Lighthouses blinking a coast line from Labrador to Key West? Pigiron bars piled on a barge whistling in a fog off Sheboygan? A mob: hammers and wagons have them to-morrow.
The mob? A typhoon tearing loose an island from thousand-year moorings and bastions, shooting a volcanic ash with a fire tongue that licks up cities and peoples. Layers of worms eating rocks and forming loam and valley floors for potatoes, wheat, watermelons.
The mob? A jag of lightning, a geyser, a gravel mass loosening…
The mob … kills or builds … the mob is Attila or Ghengis Khan, the mob is Napoleon, Lincoln.
I am born in the mob—I die in the mob—the same goes for you—I don’t care who you are.
I cross the sheets of fire in No Man’s land for you, my brother—I slip a steel tooth into your throat, you my brother—I die for you and I kill you—It is a twisted and gnarled thing, a crimson wool:
One more arch of stars,
In the night of our mist,
In the night of our tears.
· I slip a steel tooth into your throat, you my brother
· Stones of a circle of hills at Athens, [ courtesy of Steel Curtain: Hammers and wagons have them now ]

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After the brilliant War of Ideas (six) series, on the first Day of February 2004 AD Thomas Friedman has a column that kisses everything and makes it well. If you read only one column this election year, read his Budget of Mass Destruction...

Budgets of Mass Destruction
It should be clear to all by now that what we have in the Bush team is a faith-based administration. It launched a faith-based war in Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based plan for Iraqi reconstruction, supported by faith-based tax cuts to generate faith-based revenues. This group believes that what matters in politics and economics are conviction and will — not facts, social science or history.
· Bush


THE MARKET AND ITS ENEMIES
If, say, you're a pro-growth free-market economist who is creepily nostalgic for the good old days of Jim Crow, you will inevitably abandon your free market ideas in favor of economic nationalism and protectionist trade policy, using half-baked arguments that amount to "but they're foreigners." And, just as predictably, you will be embraced--at least temporarily--by supposed liberals, who will happily ignore your less savory views in exchange for the cover of a conservative ally in favor of protectionism.
· Even Pat Buchanan had a brief honeymoon with the left when he started bashing corporations and international trade [link first seen at Corante ]

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THE PROBLEM WITH SOAKING THE RICH
Daniel Weintraub looks at California tax data and finds that the state's in fiscal trouble because rich people aren't making enough money:
Because California's skewed income distribution, combined with progressive tax rates, means that the people at the very top of the income heap pay a very high percentage of the personal income tax collected in this state.
Their extraordinary, onetime income surge at the end of the last century provided most of the new tax revenue that legislators and former Gov. Gray Davis used to raise teacher salaries, increase welfare benefits and expand eligibility to state-provided health care. But the decline that followed also accounted for most of the revenue drop that contributed to the state's fiscal crisis. And as of the most recent tax year, they hadn't hit bottom yet.
The tax-collection data should provide an important reality check on Democrats who've been responding to Arnold's budget cuts with calls for higher taxes on the richest Californians. Soaking the rich is already the state's approach to taxation, and it's one reason the budget is such a mess.
Concludes Weintraub: Raising tax rates on this small group of highly successful Californians will undoubtedly be part of the mix of deficit-closing policy proposals debated in the Capitol this year. But the tax return data suggest that a more fruitful and more stable approach to balancing the budget over the long term would be to somehow figure out how to make more Californians wealthy, and keep them that way.
· Taxes

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BBC Chairman Gavyn Davies has resigned, as has BBC Director General Greg Dyke. Rest assured that this won't be enough for some people. As hard as it may be to believe, there are already people calling for the complete dismantling of the British Broadcasting Corporation because Lord Hutton has ruled that one aspect of it was flawed in one instance.
The man who is sure to lead the angry mob will be the media magnate Rupert Murdoch. He has made no secret of his hatred for the BBC, and his plans for the void its absence, under-funding or effective castration would create should be obvious.
Through his newspaper The Times and 'news' paper The Sun, Murdoch's minions will no doubt reach millions with a barrage of negative messages intended to bring about the under-funding, over-regulation or complete destruction of a the most vital public institution in this country.
The BBC not only serves to inform us, educate us and entertain us; by its very existence it also serves to protect us from a level of commercial saturation that would destroy much of what we currently take for granted. If you've ever watched television anywhere else in the world, you'll know what I'm talking about...
In the face of what is sure to be a bitter and concerted attack (no doubt including claims of bias from people with a very clear agenda of their own), I'm proposing a simple show of solidarity and support that is also meant to spread valuable information to those who may not know exactly who is behind this attack and what their motives are.
To show your support:
· Simply copy and paste the code from Bloggerheads site to show this button on your website or weblog

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As another car bomb rips through Iraqi city, the world security sinks to a new low with the latest nuclear exercise. Superpowers are showing that they have no intention of going quietly about showing off their amunitions

Secret Russian Weapons: Amerikan - Russian Honeymoon has Soured
The Russian armed forces are about to stage a major transition-to-war exercise simulating a nuclear conflict right up and including test launching several missiles and sending Tu-160 and Tu-22 bombers out on simulated mission profiles over the Arctic.
· Radiant Russia's perceived attempts to assert its authority over ex-Soviet neighbors [ via Google ]
· Worst flu epidemic
· IS THAT A MILLION BARRELS OF OIL IN YOUR POCKET
· Lobbyist Barrel: Disturbing fact about the Kerry campaign
· Ex-BBC head accuses government of bullying