Please -- Help Kenny's Kids!!

"The Right to Read" (aka "The Road to Tycho"), by Richard Stallman

Peacefire's "Censored by Censorware" T-shirt "lists 36 sites that have been blocked at different times by Internet censorship software, surrounded by the names of the products that block them." Blocked sites include The Village Voice and The Vatican.

From: BBC News: TV link to violence:

The findings show that of children who watch less an hour of television a day at the age of 14, only 5.7% turned to violence between the ages of 16 to 22. For those who watch between one and three hours, this number jumped to 22.8%.

ZDNet News: Richard Stallman on how software patents victimize developers

oprah.com: "How Children Learn—And Why Some Don't". See also AllKindsOfMinds.org

Will there be Yodeling in Heaven?

New Scientist: Alcohol impairs driving more than marijuana

CERN Courier:

• Superluminal phenomena shed new light on time
• DESY workshop combines gravity and particle physics

Tired: hanging chads -- Wired: partially eaten ballots

From DRCnet: Supreme Court Hears Arguments in High School Drug Testing Case -- Comments by Justices Ominous:

Justice Anthony Kennedy drew gasps from the courtroom audience when he appeared to personally attack plaintiff Lindsay Earls. Kennedy posed a hypothetical with one school that had drug testing and one that did not -- "the druggie school," he called it. "Every parent" would want to send his children to the first school, Kennedy told plaintiff's attorney Graham Boyd of the ACLU's Drug Policy Litigation Project, but then added dismissively, "Well, perhaps not your client."

Outside the Supreme Court after the hearing, a visibly upset Lindsay Earls told reporters: "I don't use drugs. I shouldn't have to prove that."

But if the questions and comments of the justices are any indication, she and every other high school student in America may soon have to do precisely that.

The best Hunt the Boeing yet!

Oh man, I hate it when this happens: ACLU Prepares to Defend First Amendment in Campaign Finance Struggle. Rush and Drudge and the whole right-wing corporate-government-media complex (there's an "axis of evil" for ya) must be simply delighted by this.

EFF Action ALERT: Tell the Senate Judiciary Committee to Oppose CBDTPA and Digital Media Mandates. Background:

• Infowarrior.org: "Operation ENDURING VALENTI"
• Wired News: "What Hollings' Bill Would Do"
• EFF: "Intellectual Property - Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA)" Archive
• EFF: "Frequently Asked Questions (and Answers) About Fair Use"

AOL mail: OK for others, not itself. So easy to use, it makes you run screaming to MS Outlook.

Operation Clambake ("The Fight Against The Church Of Scientology On The Net") has now been un-disappeared by Google. Well, sort of.

From guardian.co.uk: Widow [of Efrain Bamaca-Velasquez] blames US [CIA] officials for Guatemala "dirty war" death:

"There are lots of different situations when the government has legitimate reasons to give out false information," the solicitor general, Theodore Olson, told the supreme court this week.

From The Atlantic: "Seeing Around Corners", by Jonathan Rauch -- "the new science of artificial societies":

If I showed you these illustrations and told you they represented genocide, you might well assume you were seeing a schematic diagram of an actual event. Moreover, the model is designed without any element of imitation or communication, so mass hysteria or organized effort is literally impossible. No agent is knowingly copying his peers or following the crowd; none is consciously organizing a self-protective enclave. All the agents are separately and individually reacting "rationally"—according to rules, in any case—to local conditions that the agents themselves are rapidly altering. As hotheads begin to go active, the odds that any one misbehaving agent will be arrested decline, emboldening more-timid agents nearby to act up, reducing the odds of arrest still further, emboldening more agents, and so on. As in real life, the violence, once begun, can spread rapidly as cops are overwhelmed in one neighborhood after another. Although the agents are atomized and disorganized, the violence is communal and coherent.

Chicago IndyMedia: George Bush was greeted with catcalls, jeers and ‘carols of dissent’ at his appearance at Chicago’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade

From smh.com.au: "U.S. Supreme Court looks at school drug tests":

The US Supreme Court appears set to authorise a substantial expansion in drug testing of public school students. It has already found random drug testing for student athletes to be constitutional.

During a heated hearing this week, the lawyer for the school board in Tecumseh, Oklahoma, called its policy requiring the tests for everyone in years seven to 12 who joins in extracurricular activities a "reasonable response". The activities would include the school choir and band.

BBC Newsnight: "Anthrax attacks":

A Newsnight investigation raised the possibility that there was a secret CIA project to investigate methods of sending anthrax through the mail which went madly out of control.

From The Norway Post: Norway and Ireland again demand a stop to Sellafield pollution:

Norway and Ireland have repeated their demands for a stop to the emissions of radioactive pollutants from the Sellafield nuclear reposession plant.
[...]
It is a paradox that Britain does not want to store the radioactive waste material on land because they are afraid the radioactive Tecnetium will pollute the underground water resources, the Irish Minister said.

The Irish authorities are taking Britian to court, in order to make Britain stop the nuclear wastes which pollute both the Irish Sea and the North Sea.

EqualMarriage.org: Oppose the "Super DOMA" Amendment (H. 4840) to the Massachusetts State Constitution, which would prevent almost any legal recognition of same-sex couples:

"... only the union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Massachusetts. Any other relationship shall not be recognized as a marriage or its legal equivalent, nor shall it receive the benefits or incidents exclusive to marriage from the Commonwealth, its agencies, departments, authorities, commissions, offices, officials and political subdivisions."

From RTMark: New projects:

"Hack the NY Times World Trade Center victims obituaries page and add the names of the innocent Afghanis who have been slaughtered by US bombing. Afghan obits must be real, i.e. photos and descriptions of actual Afghan bombing victims."

thenation.com: "God Changes Everything", by Katha Pollitt

The Effects Of Drugs On A Web-Based Lifestyle. Best argument for decaf that I've ever seen.

From Infoshop News: "Armed Struggle Against the Institutions of Patriarchy":

"The Red Zora and Her Gang" is a children’s book about a wild street kid who steals from the rich to give to the poor.

Discover Magazine: "The Smoking Gun of AIDS: Were well-intended medical treatments ultimately responsible for the rise of the HIV virus?" -- the theory that won't go away. And no, this isn't the tainted-polio-vaccine theory. Or maybe it was those bloodsucking stable flies.

The Salt Lake Tribune: "Public Schools May Unwittingly Be Part of Cyberspace 'Holy War'" -- what web-filtering software does your town's school system use?

thenation.com: "The Making of a Militant", by Anonymous

DRCNet: "DOJ Study Takes Ominous Look at Drug and Drug Policy Web Sites"

This prompted me to write to the National Drug Intelligence Center:

From: "Craig Burket" craig@burket.net
To: NDIC.Webmgr@usdoj.gov; NDIC.Contacts@usdoj.gov
Sent: Sunday, March 17, 2002 1:07 AM
Subject: Re: Drugs and the Internet: An Overview of the Threat to America's Youth

I read with great interest your report on "Drugs and the Internet: An Overview of the Threat to America's Youth".

If you would be so kind, please send me the URLs of the 32 sites that "probably were associated with drug legalization groups". I would like to add them to the "Drugs" section of my website: http://www.burket.net/craig/links.htm#drugs

Also, I believe that the above URL qualifies for inclusion in the following categories of "Offending Websites" that are listed in the report:

• personal websites maintained by individuals
• containing links to other drug-related sites
• containing a "for information purposes only" disclaimer

I assume that, as part of "phase two" of the project (http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs/682/continue.htm), you are trying to keep your lists of these sites up-to-date, so please add my website, if not already present. And please add me to your list of "Advocates of an expanded freedom of expression" who "publish information on the Internet to push the boundaries of self-expression and the First Amendment".

Although my site does not yet include information on MDMA, GHB, or LSD use, production or sale, I'm working to correct this, so please check back soon. I'll be watching for you!

Thanks.

P.S. And thanks for the pointers to Alexander and Ann Shulgin's books "Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved: A Chemical Love Story" (a.k.a. "PIHKAL"), and "Tryptamines I Have Known And Loved: The Continuation" (a.k.a. "TIHKAL"). And to the alt.drugs newsgroup.

Your report is just a treasure-trove of references to sources of drug information on the Internet -- you should be on your own list!

Sincerely,

Craig Lee Burket

From Independent.co.uk: "Radical science: did angels create the universe?":

On a cold, lonely moon, shrouded in purple-pink fog, a sentient ocean marshals the energy of a galaxy and focuses it on to a tiny mote of matter. A hundred billion stars flicker and dim. The air above the ocean sizzles and catches fire. Crushed by stupendous energies, the mote twists and bucks and, with a violent shudder, implodes. Elsewhere – in another space, another time – a searing-hot fireball explodes out of nothingness and begins to expand and cool. The ultimate scientific experiment has produced the ultimate experimental result: the birth of a new universe.
[...]
There may be beings so advanced that their children make universes in the same way human children make figures out of plasticine.

See also Cosm by Gregory Benford, and Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss.

Anti-racists, supremacists meet at meeting in Framingham, Massachusetts

From EFF Archive: "Intellectual Property Online - Linking, Framing & Inlining - Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp./Ditto.com":

Wednesday, February 27, 2002

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today filed a brief on behalf of Ditto.com, urging the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a ruling that threatens to make all linking on the World Wide Web a copyright infringement.

In order to hold Ditto.com liable for copyright infringement, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals created a novel legal rationale. It found that linking to a website without permission infringes the public display rights of the website owner.

Like this (trollin', trollin', trollin'...):

From Newsbytes: Court Rules 'Thumbnail' Images OK, Full-Sized Copies Not :

Mark Lemley, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said the decision was a landmark case in that this was the first time a court had addressed the issue of inlinking and framing.

Lemley called the first part of the court's decision an important vindication of the right of search engines to make copies incidental to their search functions, but said he found the latter portion of the decision "troubling."

"While I agree that Ariba's use of full-size images was problematic, the court's opinion contains some troubling language suggesting that anyone who links directly to copyrighted material is directly infringing by displaying it," Lemley said. "That's a bad result. Kelly is the one displaying his images on the Net (and) linking to such a display is not itself a new display."

See also discussion on MetaFilter.

WSJ: Rational [Software Corp.] Bets on Two Camps In a Web-Software Scramble, namely .NET and J2EE, with its XDE Professional v2002 IDE, which claims "tightly integrated support for Microsoft® Visual Studio™ .NET and full integration into the IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer or Eclipse Integrated Development Environments (IDE)".

Mark my calendar:

• JDJ Edge 2002 East, Java Developer's Conference & Expo, will be held June 24-27, 2002 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City along with Web Services Edge 2002 and XMLEdge 2002.
  
  
• Festival del Pueblo, May 1 - 5, Boston

Beware the ever-morphing Nigerian Scam Spam!

From Brookline [MA] Tab: Selectmen defense of police avoids hard issues (28 February)
Questions remain about Amer Jubran's arrest at Israel Independence Day Celebration, by Dennis Fox:

More than 250 Israeli reservists now refuse to serve in Occupied Territory. Some day, fed up, maybe they'll all move to Brookline.

In These Times: The Art of Confusion: An Interview with ®™ark's Frank Guerrero.

As soon as the TotL.net Human Virus Scanner has given you the All Clear, you can join the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence.

iabolish.com: Canadian Oil Company [Talisman Energy] Ordered Ethnic Cleansing in Sudan in 1999.

ACLU Action Alert: Support the "Unaccompanied Alien Child Protection Act" S.121 / H.R.1904

BBC: Porn amnesty at Ford:

"Ford staff have been granted a two-week amnesty to remove pornographic material from their computers. [...] After a fortnight, there will be spot checks and any transgression will be treated as a serious disciplinary offence."

So that would explain why everyone is bringing CD burners to work, and all the diskettes have disappeared...

CNET: Morpheus woes lift rival from obscurity, namely Darth Kazaa and its nefarious m2k Morpheus Migration Tool. But wait -- Kazaa Admits to Morpheus Shutdown, even as Morpheus rises again, clad in raiment GNU...

The Norwegian fungus of the month for March, 2002 is -- you guessed it -- Arrhenia salina!!

Washington Post: Airports Screened Nine of Sept. 11 Hijackers, Officials Say

The Young Lutheran's Guide to the Orchestra, by Garrison Keillor

From Mad Cow Morning News: "The Sugar Land Sanction":

S. H. "Hal" Werlein is the Constable for the county precinct encompassing the posh Sweetwater development where [former Enron Vice Chairman Cliff] Baxter lived. [...] "Our Constable’s office has a contract deputy program which provides private security guards for the Sweetwater homeowner’s association, and it was one of these men who discovered Mr. Baxter," Werlein told us. [...] "The report I got from my Deputy Constable there on the scene stated he had come upon a Mercedes sitting parked in a turnout. He became suspicious and approached the vehicle, where he found Baxter still alive. He then immediately called for EMT’s (Emergency Medical Technicians)."
[...]
Confronted with Constable Werlein’s statement, Sugar Land Police spokesperson Patricia Whitty admitted that Werlein was correct.