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—————— Journalism ——————
Google, Cloud Computing and the Surveillance-Industrial Complex (PDF) In June 2007, Privacy International, a U.K.-based privacy rights watch-dog, cited Google as the worst privacy offender among 23 online companies, ranking the “Don’t Be Evil” people below Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, Facebook and AOL. According to the report, no other company was “coming close to achieving [Google’s] status as an endemic threat to privacy.” What most disturbed the authors was Google’s “increasing ability to deep-drill into the minutiae of a user’s life and lifestyle choices.” The result: “the most onerous privacy environment on the Internet.” …
Commander Palin and the Flying Submarine A few years before the first Great Depression, President Calvin Coolidge said that the "business of America is business," suggesting that the God who blesses America is Mammon, the fat deity of unbridled greed whose Invisible Hand guides the free market, efficiently feeding and enriching all who defend the laissez-faire faith. But America has a new god for the 21st century: Mammon has wed, or been raped by, Mars, the god of war, and spawned the monster that Eisenhower warned us about -- a Military-Industrial Complex on steroids, lobbying and conspiring for perpetual war, a sustainable war, to keep the promotions and profits infinitely rolling without a downturn as the rest of the nation slides deeper into debt and depression the world begins to make sense again."…
Chemtrails: More Proof (PDF)* Since 1998, citizen observers, scientists and activists have been reporting on what appears to be a covert program of atmospheric spraying by fleets of military tanker planes over the U.S., Europe and other parts of the world. Dismissed as "conspiracy theorists" mistaking normal jet contrails for some secret evil, the activists adduce a growing body of evidence to support their claims: normal jet contrails persist for only 20 minutes on average, whereas chemtrails often linger from horizon to horizon and spread out to form artificial cirrus clouds. Lab-tested soil and water samples taken on Mt. Shasta in California have shown an astounding increase in levels of barium and aluminum oxide after spraying…
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Bicycle Liberation One of the great wonders of human history is how the humble bicycle was not invented until the 19th century, while the basic principle — a two-wheeled vehicle — was created 5000 years beforehand. That's a very long R&D gap. It took the greatest natural catastrophe in civilization to finally spur the leap from cart and chariot to the bicycle — the explosion of Tambora in 1815. The largest recorded volcanic eruption, Tambora killed 71,000 people directly and created a "volcanic winter" in 1816, the "year without a summer," resulting in the worst famine of the 19th century. Crops failed and livestock starved across the Northern Hemisphere. Not only the food supply, but also Europe's whole transportation network was devastated. This led a German civil servant, Karl von Drais, to think of a mechanical replacement for the horse...
Mayday, 1960: The U2 Files In an editorial penned on November 20 at Truthout.org, “What Obama Is Up Against,” veteran reporter Russ Baker recounts a brief history of Pentagon/CIA skullduggery and deception against presidents from Eisenhower onward, as prologue to the dilemma that Obama now finds himself in, with Gen. Stanley McCrystal publicly demanding several thousand more troops for the war in Afghanistan -- “like Vietnam without the napalm,” in the words of an Army trooper. Referring to the famous military-industrial complex speech, Baker concludes…
9/11 Metastasizing: the Left’s Co-Dependency In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein relates how nations brutalized by the Chicago School’s savage capitalism and the Dirty War juntas enforcing it have recovered and developed a healthy immunity against more eviscerating shock therapy: "Any strategy based on exploiting the window of opportunity opened by a traumatic shock relies heavily on the element of surprise... in North America, the September 11 attacks were, at first pure event, raw reality, unprocessed by story, narrative or anything that could bridge the gap between reality and understanding. Without a story, we are, as many of us were after September 11, intensely vulnerable to those people who take advantage of chaos for their own ends. As soon as we have a new narrative that offers perspective on the shocking events, we become reoriented and
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—————— Plays ——————
Signal Underground 55-min. film, shot on Hi-8 video. Written, directed and produced, 1994. Graduate student project, broadcast on Tucson Community Cable channel. A Dallas ad agency exec flees a scandal and ends up down-and-out in Tucson, AZ. Utah Alamo 1 hr. radio play, broadcast on KZMU community radio, 2007. A gun-toting redneck hijacks a liberal radio station talk show, fielding calls from the town's many bizarre characters. |
Ringo Ruck Spec screenplay. A Washington lobbyist spies on the firm's client -- a mad Mormon Texas oil heir banished to a Indian reservation -- and must stop a plot to ignite nuclear Armageddon. An apocalyptic present-day Western with shades of Dr. Strangelove. D.B. Cooper Spec screenplay. The notorious unknown hijacker returns to his original hideout 25 years later, evading a suspicious cop and finding love and redemption. |