Category: Uncategorized

Amazing update on the Judi Bari bombing civil trial….

For those of you just tuning in to this long-running whodunit, Bari and Cherney were driving through east Oakland in May 1990 when a bomb exploded in their car. The injured pair were prominent figures in the Earth First! movement, a loose-knit, nominally leaderless group of shit-disturbing environmentalists. Oakland cops – working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation – quickly arrested the duo. Cherney and Bari, the cops said, had accidentally blown themselves up while transporting their own bomb.

“We’re assuming the device was placed in the car by the occupants,” one Oakland detective told the San Francisco Examiner at the time.

The press pounced on the story. The Ex painted Earth First! as a band of deranged ecoterrorists. The New York Times ran a front-page piece on the incident. Then, a few months later, with Earth First!’s reputation in tatters, the charges were quietly dropped for lack of evidence.

The cops never busted the real bomber – a fact that’s tied amateur sleuths and paranoiacs from Arcata to the Golden Gate in Pynchonian knots for the past 12 years.

To Cherney and Bari it smelled like a classic COINTELPRO-type setup, the kind of thing J. Edgar Hoover did to the Black Panthers. They figured the feds and local cops had jumped at the chance to arrest them – and link them to terrorism in the media – even though the evidence was shaky at best. In 1991 the two Earth First!ers hit back, suing the FBI and the Oakland Police Department, charging the agencies with fabricating evidence, giving false testimony, and collaborating in a smear campaign.

Last month, after more than a decade of legal tussles – and five years after Bari died of cancer – Cherney and Darlene Comingore, the executor of Bari’s estate, finally got the suit in front of a jury.

It was a wild ride. Testimony in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken lifted the lid on some amazingly suspicious – possibly criminal – behavior on the part of the FBI and the OPD.

First the agencies were forced to admit that information included in two key search warrants was bogus – the only real question was which agency had lied. Later testimony revealed that Oakland cops raided Bari’s house even after she and Cherney were exonerated by an FBI bomb expert. Then we learned about the mysterious disappearance of 57 FBI documents related to the case.

On top of the bungling or subterfuge – it’s tough to say which – the trial unearthed another fairly stunning fact: A shadowy OPD unit kept tabs on scores of local dissidents and shared that information with the feds. The G-men, for their part, compiled a database of some 600 people Bari and Cherney called on the phone.

And who said the Red Squads and COINTELPRO were a thing of the past?

Cory Doctorow’s latest O’Reilly Net column neatly distills down the reason why we ‘blog:

As a committed infovore, I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web, RSS feeds, email, chance, and serendipity. I used to bookmark this stuff, but I just ended up with a million bookmarks that I never revisited and could never find anything in.

Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don’t know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this — it’s one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

Until I started blogging. Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mentalregisters…

Being deprived of my blog right now would be akin to suffering extensive brain-damage. Huge swaths of acquired knowledge would simply vanish. Just as my TiVo frees me from having to watch boring television by watching it for me, my blog frees me up from having to remember the minutae of my life, storing it for me in handy and contextual form.

Since they protested in favor of Starbucks, I’m leaning towards feral libertarians, but this is almost as absurd as it is scary.

Disguised as well scrubbed “freedom-loving” acitvists, this really offensive group is using the web to organize protests AGAINST movements for social change. The anti-NOW, anti-feminist flyer is incredibly ignorant, implying that feminism is about women hating men and seeking “special privileges” from the the government. They offer instead something called “ifeminism”, where no one asks for equality under the law or other silly democractic concepts–but hey, you’re free to be a stripper. So clueless and un-informed it could only have been written by a CIA libertarian who just got dumped by his girlfriend. Either that or someone took the SubGenius too seriously. Chilling.

Hundreds of chefs, restaurateurs and dealers across the country have agreed to participate in “Take a Pass on Chilean Sea Bass.” The fish (which isn’t a bass at all, it’s a Patagonian toothfish) is being overfished to the point of extinction as environmental laws struggle to keep up with hungry American pallets driven onward by marketing. The punchline to the story (if you can say such a thing) is that commercial fishermen in Antarctic waters have now begun substituting a related fish, which they call Antarctic toothfish for “Chilean Sea Bass.”

Paging John Cage…

“Lowercase sound” is the name given to a loose movement in electronic music that emphasizes very quiet sounds and the long, empty silences between them.

Created largely by scientists, techies and experimental musicians, lowercase recordings are frequently based on the magnification of minute sounds through a computer, typically a Macintosh.

Recent compositions include a bubbling symphony of boiling tea kettles, the gentle hiss of blank tapes being played through a stereo and the soft bumps of helium balloons hitting the ceiling.

The truth can now be told! America wake up! When the New World Order comes, they’ll be driving on the wrong side of the road!

It’s all there. Seriously.

Hitting the wires today in full force. The BBC leaks a story that NASA is announcing that vast quantities of water ice exist just below the Martian surface. If melted, the ice would create a water ocean that could cover the entire planet to a depth of 500 meters.

OK, I’m waiting patiently to sign up for the first trip.

Remember back at the beginning of the Afghanistan campaign, the Defense Department bought up all of the photographs taken by private surveillance satellites? Ever wonder what happened to them?

For nearly a month after the bombing campaign began, pilots had to make do with old Russian maps of Afghanistan, because the American intelligence community was slow to figure out how to process and distribute satellite photographs from a private contractor, the officials say.

Once Air Force officers discovered that thousands of the fresh, high-resolution satellite pictures were sitting on CD-ROM’s in storage at a military base here, they skirted the bureaucracy and began ferrying the photographs themselves directly to a forward air base in Saudi Arabia. But the episode underscores the way American intelligence’s management of spy satellite technology has encountered problems in trying to integrate information from the private sector.

One question I did have about the Current Situation was “what happened to Echelon?” You would think that with all the money poured into it that it would have vacuumed up some hits. Apparently it did, but the real intelligence breakdown here is in putting together the big picture from all this data.

The FAZ, quoting unnamed German intelligence sources, said that the Echelon spy network was being used to collect information about the terrorist threats, and that U.K. intelligence services apparently also had advance warning. The FAZ, one of Germany’s most respected dailies, said that even as far back as six months ago western and near-east press services were receiving information that such attacks were being planned.

Within the American intelligence community, the warnings were taken seriously and surveillance intensified, the FAZ said. However, there was disagreement on how such terrorist attacks could be prevented, the newspaper said.