Author: Chris Barrus

Fluffy
Your motto: “White Overall Movement Building Liberation Through Effective Struggle forever!”

You love sticking two fingers up at authority, and you plump for fun, non-violent tactics such as street parties and fire-breathing to make your point. You are likely to belong to Reclaim the Streets or the Mayday Collective, have not visited a hairdresser in the last five years and sport at least one penny whistle. You will probably end May Day at a friend’s squat, regaling your mates with tales of guerrilla gardening.

…via the Guardian

One of the more off-the-wall documents that The Smoking Gun has dug up… Wired Magazine solicited Ted Kaczynski for opinions on Iridium phone network (this was from 1998).

Getting kids involved in history by using conspiracy theory.

All of this makes conspiracy theories a wonderful teaching tool. To the students, exploring them is a “real-world,” and therefore valid, exercise. Each student in my American Studies course picks a theory and, using information obtained from several disciplines, attempts to assess its credibility and social function. Were the moon landings faked? To write about that one, you have to get into history, astronomy, physics, photography, and political science.

I’ve had a cold all day long, and am attracted to absurd headlines like this one.

The New York Museum of Modern Art is running an exhibition of early Soviet avant garde and futurist illustrated books. The online exhibition is just amazing to page through.

Two heroes this week: Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington and Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Joel Connelly

Even polite questions produced an outburst out of Ashcroft that could have come out of Joe McCarthy in witch hunts of the 1950s. “Your tactics only aid terrorists — for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve,” he told a hearing.

Ugly stuff. One of the few standing up to it was Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. “Who should be watching the watchers?” she asked Ashcroft.

He sneered at her, saying: “You remind me of a spate of cartoons that has appeared in the last week, and it’s generally a kid sitting on Santa’s knee and Santa saying, ‘I know when you’ve been sleeping, I know when you’ve been awake, I know when you’ve been bad or good — and the kid looks up and says, ‘Who are you, John Ashcroft’?”

The AG’s handlers thought it hilarious, but Cantwell quietly observed: “I’m not sure everybody in America is laughing at that.”

It’s your standard media-induced paranoia story… “Two-lane undivided highways, they kill! What will the government do about it?!” But what’s kinda cool is that you can put in your state and county and get a report on the number of fatal accidents and fatalities reported for each road during 1996-2000.

True Believers™ will still label this as Disinformation, but a new book take a critical look at the last 50 years of UFOlogy and concludes that there was a government cover-up and disinformation campaign in regards to UFOs – but as a means to sway public opinion.

But Clarke and Roberts, whose research is to be published this week in a book called Out of the Shadows, did uncover evidence that the American Secret Service, with the possible connivance of the British, looked at ways of using the public panic over UFOs as a psychological weapon against the Russians.

In CIA memos marked ‘secret’ and seen by The Observer, top officials consider exploiting the UFO craze. ‘I suggest that we discuss the possible offensive or defensive utilisation of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes,’ wrote CIA director Walter Smith in 1952.

The Guardian sends out six writers to the best bookshops in the UK to put their staff to the test. Hilarity ensues…

Twenty minutes later, I ask another assistant.

“I really loved The Naked Chef, will I like The Naked Lunch?”

Assistant asks herself if Jamie Oliver did one called The Naked Lunch. Looks on computer, asks colleague.

“We think you mean the novel…”

“Does it have good recipes in it?”

“No, it’s about drugs. It’s really surreal and it’s got giant cockroaches in it. It’s completely mental.

Coolest… Idea… Ever… The traditional version of steganography works by embedding the information inside a digital picture. However, you can stego a message inside anything – like say a list of disco songs (as demonstrated here), or any other kind of list. Ever get the feeling that those VH-1 countdown specials were Illuminati controlled? Wonder no longer…