Indymedia is a worldwide voluntary collective of journalists, activists and filmmakers that provides news and street-level documentaries on issues that the corporate media choose to ignore. What is Indymedia?
A few days ago, the FBI seized Indymedia web servers in the United States and the United Kingdom. Read FBI Attacks Indymedia.
To get a sense of the usefulness of having a non-corporate news facility around, take a look at a local node: South Africa Indymedia.
Then browse the main Indymedia site. And here’s more info on the FBI attacks on Indymedia at Slashdot.
You have to ask yourself why: scientists have just managed to resurrect the fatal flu virus that in 1918 killed between 20-million and 50-million people. Now it’s back and being played with in a laboratory. Given that millions of people were killed by it, in the days before swift air travel around the world, try to imagine how many hundreds of millions would die if this bug escapes. Read Spanish Flu Virus Resurrected.
Alternatively, you could just yell for your mummy, at the rather odd site known as Mummy Freaks.
Or, if you think you have a clear sense of history and your place in reality, then go stare at the authentic Egyptian carvings that seem to show ancient aircraft.
Librarians and book readers are sexy! (I just thought I’d say that, to make those two minority segments of the population feel good, as no one else in the mass media is probably bothering.) That rather shaky lead-in is an introduction to a glorious site dedicated to the ancient, sleazy and really fun art of Dodgy Film and Book Covers.
Kabbalah-for-dummies time. Now that über-bimbo Madonna has embraced this esoteric teaching, it’s spreading online. Put your aluminium hat on and go stare at The Gematriculator.
Welcome to the never-ending global war — the UK makes a big step towards state terrorism. Read this report culled from the London Guardian: Detention Without Trial ‘Legitimate’.
I think it was Churchill who, when asked what constituted naval tradition, replied: “Rum, sodomy and the lash.” So, keeping that thought in mind, go consider How to Simulate Life in the Navy.
Big Brother time. Do you know that some products you are buying are fitting with miniature transmitters? From that “VIP membership” card for a clothing store in your wallet or purse, to razor blades and shirts — you are being spied on. These spy chips are called “RFIDs” (radio-frequency identification devices) and there is a slow but increasingly vocal movement growing to force companies to ‘fess up to using them to track consumers.
Take a considered look at Spychips. Then, to understand the history of these microchips that companies are secretly installing to track your movements, consult Wikipedia on RFID History. Read what the British Register had to say in a useful article titled RFID Chips Are Here. Here’s one of many online forums for Discussion of RFID.
For serious news on the privacy issues RFIDs raise, go to Epic RFID Privacy Page. And here’s a corporate RFID-maker’s FAQ on the subject, for companies considering using them: Corporate RFID FAQ.
The fix is in. You read it here first. For some rather suspicious reason, Associated Press (AP) released an announcement that Bush had won the election, right down to giving precise details of the win. To see the “accidental” announcement of detailed election results, as relayed by a Wisconsin TV station that picked up the AP “test report”, look at US Election Results on October 7.
And to prove that this really happened, read the apology from the TV station itself at Apology for Announcement of Bush Election Win. Time will tell if this “test report” actually becomes the supposed authentic election results.
Remember “red mercury”? That stuff which apparently doesn’t exist and which didn’t cause the Helderberg to crash? Well, sorry to pop that bubble, but an Austrian company is selling it — go look at the fairly cheap price of Red Mercury.
Dilbert fans, and other slaves trapped in offices, do yourself a favour and go look at the Ultimate Cubicle.
The Bush-Kerry debates continue, and despite the Bush campaign making it part of the agreement for the debates that no cameras would film from behind their candidate (for some unknown reason), there were enough camera shots taken to show a rather odd bulge in the president’s jacket — suggesting he was wired and being fed the lines and responses. Go stare at The President’s Bulge.
You won’t have heard of him, but Stanley Hilton is suing the US government for its deliberate act of terror known as 9/11 — so naturally his office was just ransacked by “unknown persons”. Read his site and, to listen to an interview with him, download Hilton Interview.
Then, before you make up your mind about the validity of Hilton’s campaign, read this page going into the disinformation campaign now under way to discredit the massive growing 9/11 conspiracy movement. Welcome to a glimpse of the murky hall of mirrors of intelligence operations. Read Bogus 9/11 Websites.
And staying briefly with 9/11, dive feet first into 9/11 Air Games. Then read the rather creepy article Flight 11 and Flight 93 Survived.
Time for stuff that just doesn’t fit in anywhere. Remember “toys”? Those things that didn’t require batteries or electricity to enjoy? Go see how many toys you remember in the Toy Hall of Fame.
Speaking of intelligence agents, if you’re interested in police spies, informants and rats in general, here is a lovely example of the power of the internet, and why authoritarian dictatorships worldwide are using the boogeyman of “kiddie porn” and other smokescreens to pass increasingly fascist legislation to try to take away internet freedom. Enjoy the pix and info of police informants and agents at Who’s a Rat. (And before anyone starts whining, there are ample laws to track and prosecute those who abuse children — without needing to pass any supposedly “better” laws to put internet users under secret surveillance.)
Open-your-ears time. Some of the shows are a little out there, but the content is still interesting — browse through the archives of this radio show and grab the programmes of interest (using the archive section) at Feet to the Fire.
There’s nothing nicer than classified government documents, so for you hardcore data geeks out there, go read and grab the Classified Abu Ghraib Documents Online.
Dead Beatles stuff. The FBI is grudgingly being forced to share what it has stored up on John Lennon, which ought to be a fairly large quantity of information, given that the FBI and other agencies were conducting systematic operations on “dissident” individuals throughout the Sixties and Seventies. Read FBI Forced to Open Lennon Files.
More Dilbert-like Project Mayhem actions that you can use. Go look over the joys of fun evil things to do to your fellow office workers, at Things to Do to Your Colleagues.
And here’s some real hardcore geek reading. A four-volume account of the history of US counter-intelligence, which was prepared for the now-defunct National Counter-intelligence Center (Nacic), is now online.) The CIA refused to provide a copy under the Freedom of Information Act, but in a glorious example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, the successor to Nacic provided a copy. So now it’s online for all of us. Yeehaa. Go grab it and learn something, at A Counterintelligence Reader.
Unlike here, where being a student means that you’re effectively just a dumb consumerist sponge ready to take your place in the queue to become debt-ridden, elsewhere in the world students are a little more awake. Take, for instance, this site created by high-school students who got hold of source declassified documents showing Bush family and Nazi connections. They scanned in the documents and put them online, complete with introductions and info for context. Go download a piece of history that isn’t generally reported at The Bush Family and the Nazis.
Net-geek time. Jpegs, one of the standard picture formats on the internet, have been compromised and hacked so that worms and viruses can be installed on PCs. Read Jpeg Worm Vulnerability.
I was listening to the old, colonial withered crone known as Jenny Cwrys-Williams, on 702 Talk Radio recently, bleating mindlessly and chortling about “her sisters” and “the sisterhood” (as if “gender” implies membership of a club of some kind.) Given that I figure that any attempt to compartmentalise and divide humans — whether by race, religion, gender or geographic location — is inherently fascist, I thought I’d dig up a nice provocative look at this bogus “sisterhood” idea, which aged grannies like Williams try to instil in the public.
I don’t agree with all the sentiments, but there are some interesting points made along the way, so go consider a radically different approach in the article Women Victimised by Feminist Fables.
The East is where the future is actually happening, and we here in the West gradually absorb bits and pieces of what emerges first from the Pacific Rim region — despite the US’s attempts to make us think that dominant world culture comes from there. Learn something and have some fun at Quirky Japan.
At last, the morally regrettable end-of-column site. This one is where politics and nudity collide. Go see (and yes, it’s adults only, please) what happens when cheerfully political students combine nudity and body art to make their feelings known. (To the joy of their assorted boyfriends, judging from the content of the captions.) Browse through Nude Student Politics. Or, for a loud (and way too noisy and bright) experience, go load up the naked Frenchman singing about Underpants.
Until the next time, if awkwardly named “learners” don’t get me.