Log

A link related to the previous post: The Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie.

_{Thanks Aczid.}

Did you know that, after World War II came to an end, a secret organisation called "Gladio", funded by the CIA and NATO, was brought to life in Europe in order to (amongst other things) neutralise communistic influences? The organisation spanned almost the whole of West-Europe, including countries such as Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands, France, the Scandinavian countries and more.

The organisation varied widely between countries and remained active (officially) until 1992 in at least the Netherlands. In some countries, the network deteriorated into terrorist organisations. Evidence has been found that in Italy, the organisation was involved in a bombing on the Italian Military Corps. In 1983 the Dutch government was forced to confirm that weapons found in a stash were related to NATO planning for unorthodox warfare. Earlier this year, investigators in the Netherlands found out that weapons had been illegally supplied to the Gladio network long after it had supposedly been dismantled in 1992. The same thing happened in Norway in 1979. Strong evidence was found in Germany that arms caches revealed by the person responsible for the 1980 Octoberfest bombing where related to the Gladio network.

More information on Wikipedia's English Gladio article. A Dutch article (with more information on Dutch specifics of the network) is also available.

A secret organisation brought to life in order to influence politics in a massive amount of countries… and it goes rogue and commits random acts of terrorism.. Amazing! Who would've thought something like that might happen?!

It's strange how today's 'freedom fighting' groups supplied with arms by western countries always seem to wind up being tomorrow's terrible terrorists. Maybe.. I dunno, but, you know, maybe we should stop funding these kind of things? Just maybe. Oh, and, also stop bringing secret organisations to life. They have a tendency to not work out very well, it appears.

Good news for the tin-foil hat wearers though: They can't call you paranoid now anymore. Big bad evil secret organisations really are everywhere! And to top it off, they're terrorists that are funded by your government, with your money, trying to stop you from exercising your right to democracy! Because, just in case nobody informed you yet: Democracy is great, unless you want to believe in something your government doesn't approve of, such as communism.

In a nutshell, because living abroad I know first hand what the world thinks of America and it is not a pretty picture at the moment. I want people to think of America as the land of freedom and democracy, not the land of arrogance and blind revenge. I want to be proud of America again. The U.S. media do a spectacularly bad job of informing Americans about what is going on in rest of the world. After Sept. 11, the U.S. could do no wrong. The entire world was on America's side. The invasion of Afghanistan was seen as completely justified. After all, the Al-Qaida leadership had to be decapitated. No one questioned that.

But Iraq was a completely different matter. Bush, Cheney, and Powell said they had conclusive proof that Saddam had WMD and could attack at any instant. The rest of the world wanted to see the proof. No proof was forthcoming. The answer was "trust us." We now know there were no WMD. There weren't even factories or labs to produce them. Saddam was an evil dictator with evil fantasies but he was no threat to America. Yet former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said that the planning to invade Iraq began the day Bush was inaugurated. The administration simply misused the horror of Sept. 11 as a convenient excuse for doing something that was already in the works.

Let me tell you a short story. When I was in elementary school, the school was plagued by a bully. He was the biggest, strongest kid around and would beat up anyone he didn't like. We were all exceedingly polite to his face, but hated his guts behind his back. One day he was chasing some poor kid and he tripped and skidded a considerable distance, scraping his face on the rough asphalt of the playground. He was bleeding and in pain, screaming for help. But nobody came to help him. We all just walked away. George Bush is the world's playground bully. The world sees him–and by inference, America–as arrogant, self-centered, and mean. I spoke to Americans from dozens of countries at the DA caucus. Everyone told the same story–the world hates America. When talking to foreigners, I can tell them about the Bill of Rights or freedom or World War II, or whatever I want, but all they see is this big, stupid, arrogant, playground bully and a stolen election in Florida last time. I think America deserves better. I want America to be respected in the world again, and John Kerry can restore the respect America deserves.

Don't believe me that the world hates us? The Guardian, one of Britain's most respected newspapers, ran a column by Charlie Brooker last week ending with this paragaph: "On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed …" Then it gets so bad that I refuse to quote it. Maybe Brooker is a nut and maybe it was a joke, but the fact that a serious newspaper would publish this piece shows how deep the hatred of George Bush runs. And this comes from our closest ally. Imagine what people in Spain or Indonesia or the Arab world think.

– Andrew Tanenbaum, http://www.electoral-vote.com

It's true. Everyone I know hates Bush and the U.S. in extension. Further more, I'll personally never set foot in any of those fascist states until they get at least a basic level of human rights.

I don't buy music CDs. They're more expensive than they should be, and the prices never drop, even if the CDs are old. I don't buy music online either, since it's usually even more expensive than a CD, it has stupid DRM (Digital Restriction Management) restrictions, and you don't even get the nice booklet. How can something that has no costs for physical production, worse quality than the real product and less value for your money cost more than the real thing? I don't buy movies (DVDs) either, because there's all kinds of restrictive stuff on them such as regions and DRM copy restrictions.

DRM that's meant to keep you from copying media is illegal in the Netherlands. We've got a law that says you can make backup copies of media you buy. Fair-use probably also allows me to convert media I've bought so that I can listen to it in my car (if I had one), or on whatever device I happen to have. It's also legal in the Netherlands to make copies of music and movies for your friends. Since DRM prevents these things, it's illegal. Why would I buy a product that is too expensive, restricts my rights and is also illegal?

Instead of buying content, I download it. I download massive amounts of music and movies, and I never pay for any of it. And I don't have to feel guilty about it, because it's legal in the Netherlands. I can download as much as I want, but distributing contents is illegal (unless it's to some close friends).

In the Netherlands, we pay a tax on empty CDs and DVDs. Legislators assume everybody buying empty, writeable media is a criminal. It's not even a case of "Guilty until proven innocent", because there's no way to escape the tax, short of illegally importing empty media from across the border. What if I just want to make backups of my personal files? The money's supposed to go to the record companies. It doesn't always get there apparently, but it's the idea that counts. I don't want my money to go to the record companies, because they're greedy bastards that keep breaking the law and violating my rights. So I don't buy empty media either. I've got a big fat Internet connection and harddisk space is cheap, so why would I keep my stuff on CDs or DVDs?

I don't have to feel sorry for the artists either. They get their money from the tax on empty media. Except from me of course. But if the law can be ambiguous, so can I. Besides, those poor artists should stand up to their record companies and distributors and demand fairly priced CDs and DVDs and renounce DRM.

I've got 8000 pieces of music on my computer. Let's say the average CD contains eight songs. That's a thousand CDs. I'd consider €10,- for a CD that's just been released a fair price. An older CD, say, a year old, should cost a maximum of €5,- to €7,- euro's. So let's say €6,-. Most of my music was older than a year by the time I downloaded it. Perhaps 2% was just released. That would be twenty CDs.

20 x €10,- = €200,-
980 x €6,- = €5880,-
Total: €6080,-

So, the record industry could have had approximately €6000,- of my money in their pocket instead of €0,-, all because they're greedy bastards. Too bad folks, but I don't really feel sorry for you.

Here's what the government should do:

• Remove the tax on empty media.
• Break the Record Industry's cartel
• Demand fair prices on CDs
• Outlaw Digital Restriction Management when it breaks the law.

Armchair-bumm's got something to say about the 'so called Dutchlands'.

Movie transcript:

Yeah, I'm a Dutch person, and I'm from the United States, and I just want to say I went to look up some stuff in Holland, and I was hoping to see some cool Dutch people, and I was kind of like schocked to see that, like, there's not a lot of Dutch people there any more. I was like not impressed, and there's better stuff in the United States then there is in the so called Dutchlands, the like, Netherlands. And I think the society is really sick there now. And all these Indian types and Ghandi types. I wish I'd never would've looked that stuff up, and I was really offended that I saw that in my former home country. And I uh don't think those people belong there in my country.

Well, to you I say… glad you moved to the U.S, and I, uh, like, uh, like, like uh… hope you stay there and don't you's ever comes back here now ya hear? Dumb racist pig. At least we've still got basic human rights here in the Dutchlands.

^{Via GeenStijl.}

"Beatrix is een hoer"…

En de politie zijn een stelletje laffe honden die niets beters te doen hebben dan onschuldige mensen op te pakken. Ga eens boeven vangen of zo?! En waarom beeldmateriaal in beslag nemen?

Interesting review of a book:

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why: A review.

Thus, the KJV [King James Version of the bible] consists of Jesus' words twice refracted through the prism of translation. Second, Erasmus's Greek New Testament was based on handwritten copies of copies of copies of copies, etc., going back over a millennium, and today is considered one of the poorer Greek New Testaments.

[...]

Many people have a vague notion that all the original biblical texts are preserved in vaults somewhere, and translators work from those original texts. Unfortunately, that isn't the case. The earliest surviving versions of the gospels are handwritten copies dating from centuries after the original texts were written. Also, we don't just have a single version of each gospel; we have many versions, and even more fragments. The trouble is, none of the versions agree with each other. As Ehrman puts it, there are more points of disagreement between manuscripts than there are words in the Gospels.

[...]

Also, we may have a document from the fourth century and one from the eighth; but the latter might have been copied from a second-century document, making it closer to the original.

And yet, some religious people base their entire faith on the Bible, and regularly use it to deprive other people of the right to live their life the way they want to. Mankind's lack of intellect sometimes really amazes me.

Unauthorized spying on U.S. citizens' international tele-communications will continue, as an appeals court in Cincinnati dismissed the case brought against the Bush administration to stop the surveillance activity.

The illegal wiretapping program was authorized by Bush after the 9/11 events and allows the monitoring of (amongst others?) international telephone calls e-mail.

"The Bush administration is basically left free to violate an act of congress with impunity – the foreign intelligence surveillance act, which congress adopted over 30 years ago to prevent the executive from engaging in precisely this kind of unchecked surveillance," Goodman [ACLU] said.
"They are effectively saying you can't show that you've been wiretapped and you'll never be able to show that you've been wiretapped because the whole thing is so secret."

The reason the case was thrown out: The appeals court panel ruled that the groups and individuals (ACLU on behalf of other groups including lawyers, journalists and scholars) who brought the lawsuit did not have the legal right to bring the challenge. Judge Julia Smith Gibbons, a Sixth Circuit judge (appointed by Bush naturally), said: "The plaintiffs failed to show they were subject to the surveillance and therefore do not have standing for their claims."

Kind of hard for the people that do have standings for their claims to sue, as basically everything from McDonald's coffee-recipe to how many sheets of toilet paper Bush uses on the toilet has been classified under the National Security/Terrorism Threat strawman. So, if you want to sue, it has to be you who they've been spying on or the case will get dismissed. But you can't know you're being spied on, since everything is classified.

Land of the Free indeed.

www.SorryNorwayDenmark.com. Finally some people with sense.

From Slashdot:
The New York Times is reporting that the "volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged." The NSA gained the cooperation of many American telecommunication companies after 9/11 to access streams of communication, both domestic and international, as a part of a presidentially approved program to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity.
What was it again? Oh yeah!

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak out.

– Rev. Martin Niemöller

Land of the Free indeed.