Bullshit Business Babble

This is incomprehensible with a hangover.

"The banking and financial industry needs to focus on the customer experience as a differentiator. This includes optimizing key operational processes to improve marketing intelligence effectiveness; identifying opportunities through analytics, and gain an enterprise-wide customer view across a range of channels; act on cross-channel customer activity by using detailed rules-based intelligence linked to process and data models; and improving staff productivity and efficiency for better client care."

What multinational published this turd?

Hint: Secret deals with nazis.

The History of the Soviet Union: Tetris Style

China's Cyberposse

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Human-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

The short video made its way around China’s Web in early 2006, passed on through file sharing and recommended in chat rooms. It opens with a middle-aged Asian woman dressed in a leopard-print blouse, knee-length black skirt, stockings and silver stilettos standing next to a riverbank. She smiles, holding a small brown and white kitten in her hands. She gently places the cat on the tiled pavement and proceeds to stomp it to death with the sharp point of her high heel.

“This is not a human,” wrote BrokenGlasses, a user on Mop, a Chinese online forum. “I have no interest in spreading this video nor can I remain silent. I just hope justice can be done.” That first post elicited thousands of responses. “Find her and kick her to death like she did to the kitten,” one user wrote. Then the inquiries started to become more practical: “Is there a front-facing photo so we can see her more clearly?” The human-flesh search had begun.


Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results.

There is no portal specially designed for human-flesh searching; the practice takes place in Chinese Internet forums like Mop, where the term most likely originated. Searches are powered by users called wang min, Internet citizens, or Netizens. The word “Netizen” exists in English, but you hear its equivalent used much more frequently in China, perhaps because the public space of the Internet is one of the few places where people can in fact act like citizens. A Netizen called Beacon Bridge No Return found the first clue in the kitten-killer case. “There was credit information before the crush scene reading ‘www.crushworld.net,’ ” that user wrote. Netizens traced the e-mail address associated with the site to a server in Hangzhou, a couple of hours from Shanghai. A follow-up post asked about the video’s location: “Are users from Hangzhou familiar with this place?” Locals reported that nothing in their city resembled the backdrop in the video. But Netizens kept sifting through the clues, confident they could track down one person in a nation of more than a billion. They were right.

The traditional media picked up the story, and people all across China saw the kitten killer’s photo on television and in newspapers. “I know this woman,” wrote I’m Not Desert Angel four days after the search began. “She’s not in Hangzhou. She lives in the small town I live in here in northeastern China. God, she’s a nurse! That’s all I can say.”

Only six days after the first Mop post about the video, the kitten killer’s home was revealed as the town of Luobei in Heilongjiang Province, in the far northeast, and her name — Wang Jiao — was made public, as were her phone number and her employer. Wang Jiao and the cameraman who filmed her were dismissed from what the Chinese call iron rice bowls, government jobs that usually last to retirement and pay a pension until death.

“Wang Jiao was affected a lot,” a Luobei resident known online as Longjiangbaby told me by e-mail. “She left town and went somewhere else. Li Yuejun, the cameraman, used to be core staff of the local press. He left Luobei, too.” The kitten-killer case didn’t just provide revenge; it helped turn the human-flesh search engine into a national phenomenon.

AT THE BEIJING headquarters of Mop, Ben Du, the site’s head of interactive communities, told me that the Chinese term for human-flesh search engine has been around since 2001, when it was used to describe a search that was human-powered rather than computer-driven. Mop had a forum called human-flesh search engine, where users could pose questions about entertainment trivia that other users would answer: a type of crowd-sourcing. The kitten-killer case and subsequent hunts changed all that. Some Netizens, including Du, argue that the term continues to mean a cooperative, crowd-sourced investigation. “It’s just Netizens helping each other and sharing information,” he told me. But the Chinese public’s primary understanding of the term is no longer so benign. The popular meaning is now not just a search by humans but also a search for humans, initially performed online but intended to cause real-world consequences. Searches have been directed against all kinds of people, including cheating spouses, corrupt government officials, amateur pornography makers, Chinese citizens who are perceived as unpatriotic, journalists who urge a moderate stance on Tibet and rich people who try to game the Chinese system. Human-flesh searches highlight what people are willing to fight for: the political issues, polarizing events and contested moral standards that are the fault lines of contemporary China.

Versions of the human-flesh search have taken place in other countries. In the United States in 2006, one online search singled out a woman who found a cellphone in a New York City taxi and started to use it as her own, rebuffing requests from the phone’s rightful owner to return it. In South Korea in 2005, Internet users identified and shamed a young woman who was caught on video refusing to clean up after her dog on a Seoul subway car. But China is the only place in the world with a nearly universal recognition (among Internet users) of the concept. I met a film director in China who was about to release a feature film based on a human-flesh-search story and a mystery writer who had just published a novel titled “Human-Flesh Search.”

The prevailing narrative in the West about the Chinese Internet is the story of censorship — Google’s threatened withdrawal from China being only the latest episode. But the reality is that in China, as in the United States, most Internet users are far more interested in finding jobs, dates and porn than in engaging in political discourse. “For our generation, the post-’80s generation, I don’t feel like censorship is a critical issue on the Internet,” Jin Liwen, a Chinese technology analyst who lives in America, told me. While there are some specific, highly sensitive areas where the Chinese government tries to control all information — most important, any political activity that could challenge the authority of the Communist Party — the Western media’s focus on censorship can lead to the misconception that the Chinese government utterly dominates online life. The vast majority of what people do on the Internet in China, including most human-flesh-search activity, is ignored by censors and unfettered by government regulation. There are many aspects of life on and off the Internet that the government is unwilling, unable or maybe just uninterested in trying to control.

The focus on censorship also obscures the fact that the Web is not just about free speech. As some human-flesh searches show, an uncontrolled Internet can be menacing as well as liberating.

ON A WINDY NIGHT in late December 2007, a man was headed back to work when he saw someone passed out in the small garden near the entryway to his Beijing office building. The man, who would allow only his last name, Wei, to be published, called over to the security guard for help. A woman standing next to the guard started weeping. Wei was confused.

Wei and the guard entered the yard, but the woman, Jiang Hong, was afraid to follow. As they approached the person, Wei told me, he realized it was the body of someone who fell from the building. Then he understood why Jiang wouldn’t come any closer: the body was that of her sister, Jiang Yan, who jumped from her apartment’s 24th-floor balcony while Hong was in the bathroom. Two days earlier, Yan, who was 31, had tried to commit suicide with sleeping pills — she was separated from her husband, Wang Fei, who was dating another woman — but her sister and her husband had rushed her to the hospital. Now she had succeeded, hitting the ground so hard that her impact left a shallow crater still evident when I visited the site with Wei a year and a half later.

Hong soon discovered that her sister kept a private diary online in the two months leading up to her death and wanted it to be made public after she killed herself. When Hong called her sister’s friends to tell them that Yan had died, she also told them that they could find out why by looking at her blog, now unlocked for public viewing. The online diary, “Migratory Bird Going North,” was more than just a reflection on her adulterous husband and a record of her despair; it was Yan’s countdown to suicide, prompted by the discovery that her husband was cheating on her. The first entry reads: “Two months from now is the day I leave . . . for a place no one knows me, that is new to me. There I won’t need phone, computer or Internet. No one can find me.”

A person who read Yan’s blog decided to repost it, 46 short entries in all, on a popular Chinese online bulletin board called Tianya. Hong posted a reply, expressing sadness over her sister’s death and detailing the ways she thought Yan had helped her husband: supporting him through school, paying for his designer clothes and helping him land a good job. Now, she wrote, Wang wouldn’t even sign his wife’s death certificate until he could come to an agreement with her family about how much he needed to pay them in damages.

Yan’s diaries, coupled with her sister’s account of Wang’s behavior, attracted many angry Tianya users and shot to the top of the list of the most popular threads on the board. One early comment by an anonymous user, referring to Wang and his mistress, reads, “We should take revenge on that couple and drown them in our sputa.” Calls for justice, for vengeance and for a human-flesh search began to spread, not only against Wang but also against his girlfriend. “Those in Beijing, please share with others the scandal of these two,” a Netizen wrote. “Make it impossible for them to stay in this city.”

The search crossed over to other Web sites, then to the mainstream media — so far a crucial multiplier in every major human-flesh search — and Wang Fei became one of China’s most infamous and reviled husbands. Most of Wang’s private information was revealed: cellphone number, student ID, work contacts, even his brother’s license-plate number. One site posted an interactive map charting the locations of everything from Wang’s house to his mistress’s family’s laundry business. “Pay attention when you walk on the street,” wrote Hypocritical Human. “If you ever meet these two, tear their skin off.”

Wang is still in hiding and was unwilling to meet me, but his lawyer, Zhang Yanfeng, told me not long ago: “The human-flesh search has unimaginable power. First it was a lot of phone calls every day. Then people painted red characters on his parents’ front door, which said things like, ‘You caused your wife’s suicide, so you should pay.’ ”

Wang and his mistress, Dong Fang, both worked for the multinational advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Soon after Netizens revealed this, Saatchi & Saatchi issued a statement reporting that Wang Fei and Dong Fang had voluntarily resigned. Wang’s lawyer says Saatchi pushed the couple out. “All the media have the wrong report,” he says. “[Wang Fei] never quit. He told me that the company fired him.” (Representatives for Saatchi & Saatchi Beijing refused to comment.) Netizens were happy with this outcome but remained vigilant. One Mop user wrote, “To all employers: Never offer Wang Fei or Dong Fang jobs, otherwise Moppers will human-flesh-search you.”

What was peculiar about the human-flesh search against Wang was that it involved almost no searching. His name was revealed in the earliest online-forum posts, and his private information was disclosed shortly after. This wasn’t cooperative detective work; it was public harassment, mass intimidation and populist revenge. Wang actually sought redress in Chinese court and was rewarded very minor damages from an Internet-service provider and a Netizen who Wang claimed had besmirched his reputation. Recently passed tort-law reform may encourage more such lawsuits, but damages awarded thus far in China have been so minor that it’s hard to imagine lawsuits having much impact on the human-flesh search.

FOR A WESTERNER, what is most striking is how different Chinese Internet culture is from our own. News sites and individual blogs aren’t nearly as influential in China, and social networking hasn’t really taken off. What remain most vital are the largely anonymous online forums, where human-flesh searches begin. These forums have evolved into public spaces that are much more participatory, dynamic, populist and perhaps even democratic than anything on the English-language Internet. In the 1980s in the United States, before widespread use of the Internet, B.B.S. stood for bulletin-board system, a collection of posts and replies accessed by dial-up or hard-wired users. Though B.B.S.’s of this original form were popular in China in the early ’90s, before the Web arrived, Chinese now use “B.B.S.” to describe any kind of online forum. Chinese go to B.B.S.’s to find broad-based communities and exchange information about everything from politics to romance.

Jin Liwen, the technology analyst, came of age in China just as Internet access was becoming available and wrote her thesis at M.I.T. on Chinese B.B.S.’s. “In the United States, traditional media are still playing the key role in setting the agenda for the public,” Jin told me. “But in China, you will see that a lot of hot topics, hot news or events actually originate from online discussions.” One factor driving B.B.S. traffic is the dearth of good information in the mainstream media. Print publications and television networks are under state control and cannot cover many controversial issues. B.B.S.’s are where the juicy stories break, spreading through the mainstream media if they get big enough.

“Chinese users just use these online forums for everything,” Jin says. “They look for solutions, they want to have discussions with others and they go there for entertainment. It’s a very sticky platform.” Jin cited a 2007 survey conducted by iResearch showing that nearly 45 percent of Chinese B.B.S. users spend between three and eight hours a day on them and that more than 15 percent spend more than eight hours. While less than a third of China’s population is on the Web, this B.B.S. activity is not as peripheral to Chinese society as it may seem. Internet users tend to be from larger, richer cities and provinces or from the elite, educated class of more remote regions and thus wield influence far greater than their numbers suggest.

I found the intensity of the Wang Fei search difficult to understand. Wang Fei and Jiang Yan were separated and heading toward divorce, and what he did cannot be uncommon. How had the structure of the B.B.S. allowed mass opinion to be so effectively rallied against this one man? I tracked down Wang Lixue, a woman who goes by the online handle Chali and moderates a subforum on Baidu.com (China’s largest search engine, with its own B.B.S.) that is devoted entirely to discussions about Jiang Yan. Chali was careful to distance herself from the human-flesh search that found Wang Fei and Dong Fang. “That kind of thing won’t solve any problems,” she told me. “It’s not good for either side.” But she didn’t exactly apologize. “Everyone was so angry, so irrational,” Chali says. “It was a sensitive period. So I understand the people who did the human-flesh search. If a person doesn’t do anything wrong, they won’t be human-flesh-searched.”

Chali was moved by the powerful feeling that Wang shouldn’t be allowed to escape censure for his role in his wife’s suicide. “I want to know what is going to happen if I get married and have a similar experience,” Chali says. “I want to know if the law or something could protect me and give me some kind of security.” It struck me as an unusual wish — that the law could guard her from heartbreak. Chali wasn’t only angry about Jiang Yan’s suicide; she also wanted to improve things for herself and others. “The goal is to commemorate Jiang Yan and to have an objective discussion about adultery, to talk about what you want in your marriage, to find new opinions and have a better life,” Chali says. Her forum was the opposite of the vengeful populism found on some B.B.S.’s. The frenzy of the occasional human-flesh search attracts many Netizens to B.B.S.’s, but the bigger day-to-day draw, as in Chali’s case, is the desire for a community in which people can work out the problems they face in a country where life is changing more quickly than anyone could ever have imagined.

THE PLUM GARDEN Seafood Restaurant stands on a six-lane road that cuts through Shenzhen, a fishing village turned factory boomtown. It has a subterranean dining room with hundreds of orange-covered seats, an open kitchen to one side and a warren of small private rooms to the other. Late on a Friday night in October 2008, a security camera captured a scene that was soon replayed all over the Chinese Internet and sparked a human-flesh search against a government official.

In the video clip, an older man crosses the background with a little girl. Later the girl runs back through the frame and returns with her father, mother and brother. The subtitles tell us that the old man had tried to force the girl into the men’s room, presumably to molest her, and that her father is trying to find the man who did that. Then the girl’s father appears in front of the camera, arguing with that man.

There is no sound on the video, so you have to rely on the Chinese subtitles, which seem to have been posted with the video. According to those subtitles, the older man tells the father of the girl: “I did it, so what? How much money do you want? Name your price.” He gestures violently and continues: “Do you know who I am? I am from the Ministry of Transportation in Beijing. I have the same level as the mayor of your city. So what if I grabbed the neck of a small child? If you dare challenge me, just wait and see how I will deal with you.” He moves to leave but is blocked by restaurant employees and the girl’s father. The group exits frame left.

The video was first posted on a Web site called Netease, whose slogan is “The Internet can gather power from the people.” The eighth Netizen comment reads: “Have you seen how proud he was? He’s a dead man now.” Later someone chimed in, “Another official riding roughshod over the people!” The human-flesh search began. Users quickly matched a public photo of a local party official to the older man in the video and identified him as Lin Jiaxiang from the Shenzhen Maritime Administration. “Kill him,” wrote a user named Xunleixing. “Otherwise China will be destroyed by people of this kind.”

While Netizens saw this as a struggle between an arrogant official and a victimized family of common people, the staff members at Plum Garden, when I spoke to them, had a different take. First, they weren’t sure that Lin had been trying to molest the girl. Perhaps, they thought, he was just drunk. The floor director, Zhang Cai Yao, told me, “Maybe the government official just patted the girl on the head and tried to say, ‘Thank you, you’re a nice girl.’ ” Zhang saw the struggle between Lin and the family as a kind of conflict she witnessed all too often. “It was a fight between rich people and officials,” she says. “The official said something irritating to her parents, who are very rich.”

Police said they did not have sufficient evidence to prosecute Lin, but that didn’t stop the government from firing him. It was the same kind of summary dismissal as in the kitten-killer case — Lin drew attention to himself, and so it was time to go. The government had the technology and the power to make a story like this one disappear, yet it didn’t stand up to the Netizens. That is perhaps because this search took aim at a provincial-level official; there have been no publicized human-flesh searches against central-government officials in Beijing or their offspring, even though many of them are considered corrupt.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, argues that China’s central government may actually be happy about searches that focus on localized corruption. “The idea that you manage the local bureaucracy by sicking the masses on them is actually not a democratic tradition but a Maoist tradition,” she told me. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao encouraged citizens to rise up against local officials who were bourgeois or corrupt, and human-flesh searches have been tagged by some as Red Guard 2.0. It’s easy to denounce the tyranny of the online masses when you live in a country that has strong rule of law and institutions that address public corruption, but in China the human-flesh search engine is one of the only ways that ordinary citizens can try to go after corrupt local officials. Cases like the Lin Jiaxiang search, as imperfect as their outcomes may be, are examples of the human-flesh search as a potential mechanism for checking government excess.

The human-flesh search engine can also serve as a safety valve in a society with ever mounting pressures on the government. “You can’t stop the anger, can’t make everyone shut up, can’t stop the Internet, so you try and channel it as best you can. You try and manage it, kind of like a waterworks hydroelectric project,” MacKinnon explained. “It’s a great way to divert the qi, the anger, to places where it’s the least damaging to the central government’s legitimacy.”

THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT has proved particularly adept at harnessing, managing and, when necessary, containing the nationalist passions of its citizens, especially those people the Chinese call fen qing, or angry youth. Instead of wondering, in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, why the world was so upset about China’s handling of Tibet, popular sentiment in China was channeled against dissenting individuals, painted as traitors. One young Chinese woman, Grace Wang, became the target of a human-flesh search after she tried to mediate between pro-Tibet and pro-China protesters at Duke University, where she is an undergraduate. Wang told me that her mother’s home in China was vandalized by human-flesh searchers. Wang’s mother was not harmed — popular uprisings are usually kept under tight control by the government when they threaten to erupt into real violence — but Wang told me she is afraid to return to China. Certain national events, like the Tibet activism before the 2008 Olympics or the large-scale loss of life from the Sichuan earthquake, often produce a flurry of human-flesh searches. Recent searches seem to be more political — taking aim at things like government corruption or a supposedly unpatriotic citizenry — and less focused on the kind of private transgressions that inspired earlier searches.

After the earthquake, in May 2008, users on the B.B.S. of Douban, a Web site devoted to books, movies and music, discussed the government’s response to the earthquake. A woman who went by the handle Diebao argued that the government was using the earthquake to rally nationalist sentiment, and that, she wrote, was an exploitation of the tragedy. Netizens challenged Diebao’s arguments, saying that it was only right for China to speak in one voice after such a catastrophe. These were heady days, and the people who disagreed with Diebao weren’t content to leave it at that. In Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, Feng Junhua, a 25-year-old man who on the Internet goes by the handle Hval, was getting worried. Feng spent a lot of time on Douban, and, he told me later, he saw where the disagreement with Diebao was going — the righteous massing against the dissenter. He e-mailed Diebao, who lived in Sichuan Province, to warn her of the danger and urge her to stop fighting with the other Netizens. “I found out that the other people were going to threaten her with the human-flesh search engine,” he told me. “She wrote back to me, saying she wanted to talk them out of it.”

The group started to dig through everything Diebao had written on the Internet, desperate to find more reasons to attack her. They found what they were looking for, a stream-of-consciousness blog entry Diebao posted right after the earthquake hit: “I felt really excited when the earthquake hit. I know this experience might happen once in a lifetime. When I watched the news at my aunt’s place, I found out that it caused five people to die. I feel so good, but that’s not enough. I think more people should die.” Diebao wrote this right after the earthquake struck her city, possibly while she was still in shock and before she knew the extent of the damage.

The group tried to use this post to initiate a human-flesh search against Diebao. At first it didn’t succeed — no one responded to the calls for a search. (There are hundreds, maybe thousands of attempts each week for all kinds of human-flesh searches, the vast majority of which do not amount to much.) Finally they figured out a way to make their post “sparkle,” as they say in Chinese, titling it, “She Said the Quake Was Not Strong Enough” and writing, of Diebao: “We cannot bear that an adult in such hard times didn’t feel ashamed for not being able to help but instead was saying nonsense, with little respect for other people’s lives. She should not be called a human. We think we have to give her a lesson. We hereby call for a human-flesh search on her!”

This time it took hold. A user named Little Dumpling joined the pile-on, writing: “Earthquake, someone is calling you. Please move your epicenter right below [Diebao’s] computer desk.” Juana0906 asked: “How could she be so coldblooded? Her statement did greater harm to the victims than the earthquake.” Then from Expecting Bull Market, the obligatory refrain in almost every human-flesh search, “Is she a human?”

Feng, the user who tried to warn Diebao of the impending search, became angry that so many people were going after Diebao. “I cannot stand seeing the strong beating the weak,” he told me. “I thought I should protect the right of free speech. She can say anything she wants. I think that she just didn’t think before she spoke.” But the searchers managed to rally users against Diebao. “Her school read a lot of aggressive comments on the Internet and got pressure from Netizens asking them to kick out this girl,” Feng told me. Shortly after the human-flesh search began, Diebao was expelled from her university. “The school announced that it was for her own safety, to protect her,” Feng says.

Feng decided to get revenge on the human-flesh searchers. He and a few other users started a human-flesh search of their own, patiently matching back the anonymous ID’s of the people who organized against Diebao to similar-sounding names on school bulletin boards, auction sites and help-wanted ads. Eventually he assembled a list of the real identities of Diebao’s persecutors. “When we got the information, we had to think about what we should do with it,” Feng says. “Should we use it to attack the group?”

Feng stopped and thought about what he was about to do. “When we tried to fight evil, we found ourselves becoming evil,” he says. He abandoned the human-flesh search and destroyed all the information he had uncovered.


Tom Downey is the author of “The Last Men Out: Life on the Edge at Rescue 2 Firehouse.”


On the Media also did a story about it: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/03/05/04

Gunman's Environmental Grudges Well Known Before Discovery Channel Hostage Standoff

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/09/01/james-jay-lee/

James Jay Lee wasn't a stranger to the Discovery Channel employees he terrorized Wednesday with a gun and with what appeared to be makeshift bombs strapped to his chest and back.

Lee, a 43-year-old California man with a seemingly religious fervor for his environmental causes, had a history of targeting the channel for its programming, most notably in a 2008 protest in front of the channel's Silver Spring, Md., headquarters, where 1,900 employees work. On that day, the protest included tossing wads of cash in the air, and it ended in his arrest.

But web postings show Lee was increasingly obsessed with civilization's "filth" and the problem of over-population, which he blamed on "parasitic human infants." That obsession ended Wednesday afternoon when police shot and killed him to end a nearly four-hour hostage standoff inside the Discovery headquarters. Lee's three hostages escaped safely.

Those who knew him say they weren't surprised.

"A desperate act to validate his own ego and opinion," is how Lee's brother-in-law, Thomas Leonard, described the attack in an interview with Fox News' Neil Cavuto as the hostage standoff was unfolding.

Lee had "a lack of respect for any type of authority" and was prone to "emotional outbursts" and "erratic behavior," Leonard said.

Lee had issued a list of demands in an online manifesto that criticized Discovery for what he saw as the channel's promotion of human birth and war coverage, and he called on the channel to devote programming to exposing evil deeds of man.

"Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is," the manifesto reads. "That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn't, then get hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! It is the moral obligation of everyone living otherwise what good are they??"

In another section, he wrote: "All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it."

Discovery Communications Inc. operates U.S. cable and satellite networks including The Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet. Discovery shows include "Cash Cab" and "Man vs. Wild," and TLC airs "American Chopper" and "Kate Plus 8."

David Leavy, Discovery's executive vice president for corporate affairs, said all employees had been accounted for. "We're relieved that it ended without any harm to our employees," he said.

Leonard said Lee had been estranged from his family for about two years -- since his February 2008 protest in front of the same building.

"The Discovery Channel produces many so-called 'Environmental Programs' supposedly there to save the planet," Lee said in an ad he took out in a Washington newspaper to promote the protest. "But the truth is things are getting WORSE! Their programs are causing more harm than good."

Photos of the protest show Lee walking in front of the building while holding a sign that read, "SAVE THE PLANET DISCOVERY CHANNEL!!" He reportedly hired homeless people to carry signs as well. At one point, he threw wads of cash into the air, sparking a scuffle among onlookers.

He was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct and sentenced a month later to a six-month probation, fined $500 and told to stay at least 500 feet away from the building.

The judge in the case had nothing but scorn for Lee's actions.

"I can't tell you how foolish this is," Judge Stephen Johnson said, according to a story in the local Gazette. The judge also said that after throwing money around, Lee could "give some to the state."

Lee said at the time that his point was to show "money means nothing. Money is trash."

The Gazette also reported that Lee had spent two weeks in jail following his arrest, including several days being evaluated by psychiatrists.

"I told them my idea of saving the planet," he said. "They couldn't find anything wrong with me."

Lee said he started his crusade after being laid off from a job in San Diego. He also appears to have been inspired by books by the environmental novelist Daniel Quinn, notably Quinn's "Ishmael." He singled out pages of that novel in his manifesto, saying that Discovery should create programming based on its message. He said he also was inspired by Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."

On Lee's MySpace profile, he gave himself the label "World Guardian," and in a December 2008 blog post, Lee wrote of "having strange dreams."

"I can't seem to stop myself from this venture. I can't think about anything else except this and this alone. Thanks for ruining my life Shannon," the blog reads. "I am ready to go all the way with this one. All the way guys!"

In another posted that same month, he wrote:

"I refuse to read anything that is not directly related to the overpopulation problem and global warming. I am searching history for clues that could save the planet. I still am baffled why this is happening. It seems impossible. I am awaiting some nature videos that I ordered."

Under the "Who I'd like to meet" category of his MySpace page, he listed, "Environmentalists, scientists, readers of Daniel Quinn, and people who want to work toward a real change."

Among his TV interests: the Discovery Channel.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Clearly someone who takes hostages should be dealt with but this is what passes for news at Fox. I know you're not surprised but they seem to be going so much harder for a political message and trying to skew boogeymen out of these crimes than they ever did before. He shoots people because he's an environmental extremist.

An oldie but goodie.

The Biggest Company You've Never Heard Of.

I'm back, fuckers!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek

The majestic plastic bag.

This guy is awesome!

Now for the remix

You will like this James

http://www.transbay.net/~nessie/Pages/atabrine.html

Is Sarah Palin gunning for 2012?

Shovel Man: Russian hero saves woman from certain rape by wild dogs.

Live the dream.

Mel Gibson's descent into madness! Caught on tape for our amusement.

Check this shit out

I was reading about the progress of scientific knowledge in the modern world and stumbled upon a gem. Al-Ghazali, a muslim scholar from the 11th century that guided the progress of western science indirectly for the next 500 years. Also he is partly responsible for the regression of arabic science that is so apparent in the fundamentalist regimes of our time. Funny how shit works out, huh?

Happy Fifth of July!

Unconstitutional bullshit in the Gulf of Mexico

Bill O'reilly getting schooled by Richard Dawkins

Bill O'Reilly getting schooled by ICP

I read some Marx (and I liked it)

this is a parody of katy perry's "i kissed a girl (and i liked it)". in case you haven't heard it.

Reprehensible shit said on the Senate floor!!!!

Press the little soccer ball button for maximum effect.

Oil washing up on Florida's beaches.

Oh, BTW that shit is a toxic carcinogen you FUCKING MORONS! Don't stick your finger in it! Not to mention the fact that the dispersant BP uses is also a carcingen and absorbes through skin! These people are swimming in this shit, letting their kids play in toxic chemicals. "I don't want to walk in it because I don't want to get it in the car." how about I don't want to get cancer? I want to fly down there and break some jaws.

Badass Dog

BTW, a bulldog ate someone in my old neighborhood today, They had to shoot it nine times.
http://news.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/20100624dog_attacks_woman_child_in_lakeville/

Heavy Metal Pizza

Company Flow- Patriotism

[El Producto]
Do you know who you are..
Do you know who you are fucking with?
Do you know the access to weapons money and power
that we have? We will fucking kill you!

I'm the ugliest version of passed down toxic capitalist
rapid emcee perversion I'm America!
Your bleeding heart liberal drivel gets squashed
Wash em with sterilized rhyme patriot guided weaponry bomb
from the makers of the devious hearts -- I'm America!
You bitchy little tarts don't even phase my basic policy
The bomb's smarter, my Ronald Reagan's crush Carter
Prepare big tactics, makin young men into martyrs
(Come on down!) Come to my happy promised land
Smiley faced opportunity cypher
and jump on the CoFlow pension plan
A proletariat, crushing State of the Union
between serpentine words and mass confusion
of media controlled blurb advertising disillusionment
Your family will love my low-rent, low-life
no-brain, reality-dagger, MOVEMENT
Hop over the border for amusement; try to test the waters
that the other slaughter crews periodic usin
You up against -- Jesus Freak, formin corporations in Young Republicans
Indelible NATO force hidden agenda, puppet governments
I'm lovin it! Keep the people guessin who I'm runnin with
Control the population and hide behind sacred covenants
Fuckin with me?!?! Means liberal wildlife burnin, gasoline seized
and an automagnetic third world printed with metal plates in they knees
Can't you hear the disenchanted, hide the scream of
Gabriel's reflected new wind instrument, a judgment played in flat C
I replace humans like robots in a GM factory (warning! warning!)
Then explore metaphors to sweat shops, cause the price is satisfactory
Your pious little cries of injustice get met with apathy (awww, SHUCKS!)
Soak, cloak, hormone injected dairy product
and conservative right-wing anti-eroticism; the poisonous
resevoirs and power lines in your neighborhood cause botchilism
SENSELESS! Join the census, censorship sentences sentence
Triple-felon citizen paid pennance!
Dissension against C-F ends in, penetentiary residence
Lock em up first, then ask questions
Omniscient presence, my CHARM is the weapon
with cameras mics and satellites that leave privacy breathless
You don't even know the chemicals you've ingested
Urine tested -- BEAT INNOCENT MAN TIL HE CONFESSES

"Who's America? Who's America? Who's America? Who's America?"
"Who's America? Who's America? Who's America? Who's America?"
[El-P] I'm America! I'm America! I'm America! Mr. Len, get busy on em!

* DJ Mr. Len the Space Ghost cuts up "God damn!!" *

[El-Producto]
I'm America arrogant!! Terminus verbal curfew murders
You either purchase my products or you're worthless, that's my servants!
Don't look into the oculars of a daylight saver
Erase your city head and momument defacer comprising of
patriot droids, sent into the void with lead linings
Employed by the bureaucrats of automatic twisted rhyme timing
You're guaranteed nothing but my fat little finger
that lingers one inch off of the big button -- LET'S START THIS!
I'm Saran gas, hide in your apartments
I'm stealth like a robot hidden in the fat asshole of Cartman
And give a crippling fuck like sand sharkskin condom
to your apparent vaginal problem - the hottest shit on Soundbombing
I'm American til infinite justice measure to Pesticide Cemetary
Invite you to cross the border then SHIT on your divinities
What language is that? I'm angusih in fact, tangle with a
star-spangled standard issue for crowd management
Go wild and get a trial and then a hot cry to harassment
by the crowd force of my mental pedestrian checker,
that smashes subordinate skulls and update the file in your dental records
You tryin to get elected but yet the crowd is my paid hecklers (BOO! BOO!)
You just stepped into the spectrum of paranoid word wrangle
Thinkin you sick with a sihlouette, burn transit cop out his plain clothes
I'm America!! This is where the pain grows like poppies
in a Field of Dreams I paid for, I'll burn it down if operated sloppily
COPY? My economic sanction rhyme style got your syllables
scraping for rice and riding in a green 1960 jalopy
My favorite flavour of gas is mustard
I'm fuckin a blind hermaphrodite icon and convincin you that it's justice!

"Who's America? Who's America? Who's America? Who's America?"
* DJ Mr. Len the Space Ghost cuts up "God damn!!" *

[El-Producto]
Treason will not be tolerated!
You have been enlisted.. into a lifestyle that you may not change!
Understand! You can't be happy.. and smile.. for the cameras!
MotherFUCKER

n/t

The more spills change, the more they stay the same.

I Call Bullshit 2

Gangster Computer God Worldwide Secret Containment Policy

What Hitler wants.

Drag queens that will kick your ass

Watch BP fail in real time!

Streaming video from the well-head.

Dick Riding Obama

Sorry for the spam, but I needed to push that cross dressing troll as far down the blog as possible. Honestly, you should know better then that James.

Pit Bulls Need Love Too

North Korean Animation

The sound in Barack Obama's head while making a speech...

YouTube Doubler

Pro-tip: Play both at the same time.

Zinnia Jones

Don't talk to cops

Drink a pitcher in 5 seconds

The earth is flat!!

Perhaps...

Perhaps these thoughts of ours
will never find an audience
Perhaps the mistaken road
will end in a mistake
Perhaps the lamps we light one at a time
will be blown out, one at a time
Perhaps the candles of our lives will gutter out
without lighting a fire to warm us.

Perhaps when all the tears have been shed

the earth will be more fertile
Perhaps when we sing praises to the sun
the sun will praise us in return
Perhaps these heavy burdens
will strengthen our philosophy
Perhaps when we weep for those in misery
we must be silent about miseries of our own

Perhaps
Because of our irresistible sense of mission
We have no choice

- Shu Ting (translated by Carolyn Kizer)

She asks are you cursed, he says I think that I'm cured...

Josh Ritter just put out a new album. If you are unaware of who Josh Ritter is, then this should be a treat. He is honestly one of the greatest lyricists of the day and is finally getting attention in the mainstream with his song "Changes" being featured on some godawful show on primetime network tv that a lot of people watch.

Anyways, he has put out four albums and he is consistently getting better with every album. His latest album is called "So Runs the World Away".

Some choice songs:

Lantern



Give me light for my lantern
Give me light for my lantern give me light
Be the light of my lantern, the light of my lantern, be the light
I need the light in my lantern, light in my lantern tonight

It's a hungry world out there
Even the wind will take a bite
I can feel the world circling
Sniffing round me in the night
And the lost sheep grow teeth
Forsake the lambs and lie with the lions

Where the living is desperate
Precarious and mean
And getting by is so hard
That even the rocks are picked clean
And the bones of small contention
Are the only food the hungry find

Where the thistles eat the thorns
And the roses have no chance
And it no wonder that the babies
Come out crying in advance
And the children look for shelter
In the hollow of some lonesome cheek

And the sky's so cold and clear
The stars might stick you where you stand
And you're only glad it's dark cause
You might see the master's hand
And you might cast around forever
And never find the peace that you seek

For every cry in the night
Somebody says, "Have faith!"
"Be content inside your questions"
"Minotaurs inside a maze"
Tell me what's the point of a light
That you have to strike a match to find?

So throw away those lamentations
We both know them all too well
If there's a book of jubilations
We'll have to write it for ourselves
So come and lie beside me darling
And let's write it while we still got time

So if you got a light, hold it high for me
I need it bad tonight, hold it high for me
Cause I'm face to face, hold it high for me
In that lonesome place, hold it high for me
With all the hurt that I've done, hold it high for me
That can't be undone, hold it high for me
Light and guide me through, hold it high for me
And I'll do the same for you, hold it high for me

I'll hold it high for you, cause I know you've got
I'll hold it high for you, your own valley to walk
I'll hold it high for you, though it's dark as death
I'll hold it high for you, and then gets darker yet
I'll hold it high for you, though your path is blocked
I'll hold it high for you, through the thieves and rocks
I'll hold it high for you, keep you safe from harm
I'll hold it high for you, until you're back in my arms


The Curse



He opens his eyes
Falls in love at first sight
With the girl in the doorway
What beautiful lines
How full of life
After thousands of years
What a face to wake up to
He holds back a sigh
As she touches his arm
She dusts off the bed
Where ‘til now he’s been sleeping
Under miles of stone
The dry fig of his heart
Under scarab and bones
Starts back to its beating

She carries him home
In a beautiful boat
He watches the sea
From a porthole in stowage
He can hear all she says
As she sits by his bed
And one day his lips answer her
In her own language
The days quickly pass
He loves making her laugh
The first time he moves
It’s her hair that he touches
She asks, “Are you cursed?”
He says, “I think that I’m cured.”
Then he talks of the Nile
And the girls in bulrushes

In New York he is laid
In a glass-covered case
He pretends he is dead
People crowd ‘round to see him
But each night she comes ‘round
And the two wander down
The halls of the tomb
That she calls a museum
Often he stops to rest
And then less and less
Then it’s her that looks tired
Stayin’ up asking questions
He learns how to read
From the papers that she
Is writing about him
And he makes corrections
It’s his face on her book
More and more come to look
There’s families from Iowa
Upper-West-Siders
Then one day it’s too much
He decides to get up
And as chaos ensues
He walks outside to find her
She’s using a cane
And her face looks too pale
But she’s happy to see him
As they walk he supports her
She asks, “Are you cursed?”
But his answer’s obscured
In a sandstorm of flashbulbs,
Rowdy reporters

Such reanimation
The two tour the nation
He gets out of limos
He meets other women
He speaks of her fondly
Their nights in the museum
But she’s just one more rag
Now he’s dragging behind him
She stops going out
She just lies there in bed
In hotels in whatever
Towns they are speaking
Then her face starts to set
And her hands start to fold
And one day the dry fig
Of her heart stops its beating

Long ago on the ship
She asked, “Why pyramids?”
He said, “Think of them as
An immense invitation.”
She asked, “Are you cursed?”
He says, “I think that I’m cured.”
Then he kissed her then hoped
That she’d forget that question.

Another New World



The leading lights of the age all wondered
amongst themselves what I would do next
After all that I've found in my travels around
the world was there anything left?

"Gentlemen," I said "I've studied the maps
and if what I am thinking is right
There's another new world at the top of the world
for whoever can break through the ice"

I looked round the room in the way I once
had and I saw that they wanted belief
So I said "all I got are my guts and my God
and I paused, and the Annabel Lee"

Oh the Annabel Lee, I saw their eyes shine,
the most beautiful ship in the sea,
My Nina, my Pinta, my Santa Maria,
my beautiful Annabel Lee

That spring I set sail as a crowd waved from shore
and on board the crew waved their hands
But I never had family just the Annabel Lee
so I didn't have cause to look back

I just set the course north, and I studied the charts
and towards dark I drifted towards sleep
and I dreamed of the fine deep harbor
I'd find past the ice for my Annabel Lee

After that it got colder the world got quiet
it was never quite day or quite night
and the sea turned the color of sky
turned the color of sea turned the color of ice

Till at last around us was vastness,
one vast glassy desert of arsenic white
and the waves that once lifted us sifted
instead into drifts against Annabel's sides

And the crew gathered closer at first for comfort
But each morning would bring a new set
of tracks in the snow leading over
the edge of the world till I was the only one left

After that it gets cloudy, but it feels like
I laid there for days and maybe for months
But Annabel held me the two of us happy
just to think back on all we had done

We talked of the other new worlds we discovered
till she gave up her body to me
And as I chopped up her main sail for timber
I told her of all that we still had to see

Then the frost turned her moorings to nine tails
and the wind lashed her sides in the cold
I burned her to keep me alive every night
in the loving embrace of her hold

And I won't call it rescue what brought me back
to the old world to drink and decline
And pretend that the search for another new world
was well worth the burning of mine

Sometimes at night in my dreams
comes the singing of some unknown tropical bird
and I smile in my sleep thinking
Annabel Lee had made it to Another New World

Yeah sometimes at night in my dreams
comes the singing of some unknown tropical bird
And I smile in my sleep thinking
Annabel Lee has made it to Another New World


Change of Time



I had a dream last night
I dreamt that I was swimming
And the stars up above
Directionless and drifting
Somewhere in the dark
Were the sirens and the thunder
And around me as I swam
The drifters who'd gone under

Time, love
Time, love
Time, love
It's only a change of time

I had a dream last night
And rusting far below me
Battered hulls and broken hardships
Leviathan and Lonely
I was thirsty so I drank
And though it was salt water
There was something 'bout the way
It tasted so familiar

The black clouds I'm hanging
This anchor I'm dragging
The sails of memory rip open in silence
We cut through the lowlands
All hands through the saltlands
The white caps of memory
Confusing and violent

I had a dream last night
And when I opened my eyes
Your shoulder blade, your spine
Were shorelines in the moon light
New worlds for the weary
New lands for the living
I could make it if I tried
I closed my eyes I kept on swimming

(rough seas, they carry me wherever I go)


Here are his for albums for download.

Golden Age of Radio

The Animal Years

The Historical Conquests of...

So Runs the World Away

Asshole Mario

I can just feel the frustration sometimes. If you stick with it you will see him solve each level.

D-drive infinitely variable gear drive.

The one in the rear has it worst.

This has got to be bullshit.

Tea Party is not a grass-roots movement.

According to this article, the Tea Party movement was seeded by lobbyist think tanks. Specifically Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity.

As much as Glenn Beck would have you believe the Tea Party is organized by normal individuals in an organic fashion, in reality it is funded and promoted by special interest groups. I guess this will shock nobody seeing as Fox News is a special interest group, but I though I would just point this out in case you guys were looking for more ammunition when confronting the occasional wild teabagger. Not that they would believe anything that doesn't stick with their dogma.

Roman Empire aids in advanced particle physics experiment!

I think it's absolutely mind blowing that technology builds its self up in such unpredictable ways.

http://news.discovery.com/space/ancient-shipwreck-to-aid-ghostly-neutrino-search.html

I've read about the advantages of ancient materials before, but this was a find of a lifetime.

Banned from Youtube

Does anyone know where to find this movie?

Extreme picture post!!

You suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!!

Ugh, I was going to do a whole writeup on the gulf oil spill, but friggen Youtube is down! Crazy shit. Anyway, It'll have to wait until tomorrow.

The Gulf Oil Spill

Here is a decent video explaining the cause of the oils spill off the gulf coast.


BTW, why are we going to Al Jezeera to get a straight explanation?

The Associated Press reports the underwater rupture has grown to 210,000 gallons per day.

The oil spill rivals the size of Florida and can be clearly seen from space.

Also, someone managed to capture the rig's final moments as it sinks to the bottom, complete with the Coast Guard putting up a token effort to contain the inferno.

Today I heard someone on NPR claim that there is a real danger of a further rupture on the wellhead. This could potentially result in the leak to continue for several months. This will likely be far larger then the current worst spill in history. Be sure to note how each side in the Gulf War blames the other for this catastrophe. He who wins the war gets the most space in the Wikipedia article.

Also, there is talk that BP disregarded safety regulations and such. The good old Profits before safety mantra we've been hearing about lately.

Boy the universe does like to shit on Louisiana doesn't it? I just hope some Texans get their chance to experience this wonderful little ecological upper deck as well. I think they need to stew in some hydrocarbons to get the big picture of what we are doing to the world. I bet they will go home and bath in turpentine and call it a cost of doing business. Fuckers. I hope they prove me wrong.

Heres to the State of Arizona - Robert Erickson

Here's to the state of Arizona,
Mexico's land stolen through conquest, war, and lies
If you walk her scorching deserts, nameless bodies you will find.
Whoa the border walls and ICE agents have hid a thousand crimes,
The calender is lyin' when it reads the present time.
Whoa here's to the land you've torn out the heart of,
Arizona find yourself another country to be part of!

Here's to the people of Arizona
Who say the folks up north, they just don't understand
And they tremble in their shadows of the racist minuteman
The sweating of their souls can't wash the blood from off their hands
They smile and shrug their shoulders at the murder of a man
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Arizona find yourself another country to be part of

Here's to the cops of Arizona
Theyre stomping on your rights with racial profiling galore
They're asking you for papers as they knock upon your door
Just like the Nazi soldiers they wont just stop with 10 states more
Behind their broken badges there are racist pricks and more
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Arizona find yourself another country to be part of

And here's to the laws of Arizona
A xenophobic scheme to take your civil rights away
While the Constitution is drowning in an ocean of decay
Lets track immigrants with microchips, I've even heard them say
Will we ever see reform or will the dems just run away?
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Arizona find yourself another country to be part of

And here's to the government of Arizona
In the sands of their bureaucracy they're always bogging down
And criminals are posing as the sheriffs of the towns
They're hoping no one sues them, when their stopped for being brown
And the speeches of the governor are the ravings of a clown
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Arizona find yourself another country to be part of

Rhythm and tempo are a bit off but with the lyrics I feel like a nag bitching about the tempo.

Sam Harris is a kinda cool dude.

clicky

This is Sam Harris. He is a kinda cool dude. He got a bachelors degree from Stanford in philosophy and then got a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA. He wrote a book entitled The End of Faith and subsequently put out a response to criticism of it entitled Letter to a Christian Nation. He co-founded the Reason Project and has been interviewed three times on Point of Inquiry, the podcast of the Center for Inquiry which you should listen to even though the host is kinda douchey.

He has had a series of columns published in the Washington Post's On Faith section. He has done a whole bunch of other things like argue with theists and write stuff about brains and whatever but now you have to read about him because I'm not typing anymore.

But here's a video.

Dear Mandy

Some background:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Economy_Act_2010

New commercial starring ICP!

I had to post this

That Amber is a real freak.

TED talks again

I have been watching TED talks for a while but hadn't seen this one before. Steve Wolfram is a fucking genius.