Memorial Day

{moment of silence}

Link

Maybe I mentioned this site before, but I'll link to it again. Right or wrong, it's great for expanding one's Reality Tunnel.
Conspiracy Planet
THE ALTERNATIVE NEWS & HISTORY NETWORK
"Your Antidote to Media Cartel Propaganda"


Read and decide.

"Punk Rock Warlord"

"The Future is Unwritten" are the words written in blood in the "Know Your Rights" logo and is the title of a documentary released on May 18th about Joe Strummer. If you've been a reader of Complex 39 for any length of time, you'll know that Joe's not just a cool guy to me, but a mentor. This film I'm looking forward to. Looks like they even grabbed Martin Scorsese for an interview.

• The Future is Unwritten website

Tom Waits

SeeqPod Music beta - Playable Search

Copyright

It just hit me. Who owns the information about us? Information about us that's handled and traded all the time?
With that...
I'm copyrighting myself, anything about me, all subsequent data and information, all aliases, names, and lives before someone else claims that information as their own.

Me.

Hence forth:
Copyright © 2007 Blank Snag, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Peace

Theater of the absurd

Continuing from Nothing Oils the Gears Like "Sex Offender"

Actually, what it is is an erosion of the Fourth Amendment.

MySpace Reportedly Labels Innocent Woman as Sex Offender (Threat Level)

I don't have a particular desire to protect sex offenders. It's a creepy and usually cowardly crime on the surface. It's a crime of power. However, technically speaking, in some states if you get caught in something other than missionary position, it's a sex crime. No, it's that some states want databases available to them without a crime necessarily being committed. This is what they call a lack of probable cause.
Sex crimes are also some of our own doing, as a society, with the tolerance for the sexualization of children, the infantilization of women, and the promotion of sex as power throughout the commercial world.
I've also heard the argument from parents to the effect that in this case it's ok to be irrational because it has to do with kids. Particularly their kids. No it's not ok! We are a society that teaches our kids to do the right thing, not the knee jerk emotional thing. We teach children that we are a nation of laws, not a nation of reactionary behavior. People who tolerate reactionary behavior implicitly condone others who use terror as a weapon and people who use sex as a weapon.
Part two of this absurdity is that because some AG's want to grandstand and make a name for themselves at the expense of hard won Liberty and centuries of tradition, names of folks are being purged from a database based on some other database which may or may not be accurate. A large enough database and the accuracy drops. A little inconvenience for some, but just one more accepted violation of the Bill of Rights.
Technically not a violation because the government only leaned on a private entity.
The third bit of theater, from two folks swept up the purge:

• "Davis told ABC News that she supports MySpace's efforts, but is worried that the database it built with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. will start circulating with her information in it."
• "In a sense I can understand why they do that ... But why not (also) do it for identity theft convictions, drug dealing conviction, murder convictions? Because criminals use MySpace for these things as well." (article)
  

Because we are a nation of "innocent until proven guilty" and that the state does the punishing. Does nobody stand up for anything higher than their instant sense of gratification? Scarlet letter anyone?
Lastly, most of these services only require a valid email address, which one can get from Yahoo or Goggle without actually being verified as to who you are. So what happens. Criminals hide their identity, even the stupid ones. At least if you let them operate above ground, the idiot criminals will surface.
Every time some do-gooder wants to prove to the world how great s/he is by chest thumping and sloganeering, investigations get a little harder by driving the bad guys a little deeper into the shadows.
Any half decent investigator knows this, so why does it keep happening when only the regular citizen is impacted in the long run? Aside from the grandstanding, why is their such a promotion of bad detective practices, when only innocent people will end up being investigated...

Oh!

At the end of the day the colors of the flag are a little more faded

.

Soundtrack for Ballard

As many of you know, my "ambient" soundtrack is usually nothing more than a good Rock n' Roll tune from the Clash, Ramones, Jerry Lee Lewis, and such.

However, if you dig disturbing (albeit a bit cliché) ambiance to contemplate the J.G. Ballard you just read, here's a pretty nifty link:

• cousin silas - ballard landscapes 2

Here's a list of the track titles which in of itself I find disturbing. I find relief in the fact that I can still be troubled - but that's the point of Ballard, isn't it?:

The Sands Of Shepperton
Crumbling Infrastructures
Cloud Sculptor
Dawn - Utah Beach
Rusting Gantry
Love And Bullets For Bobby & Jack
Motel Architecture
Concrete Islands
The Sign Of The Radar
Abandonned Motorway
Vermillion Drift
Drained Swimming Pools
Burning Wreckage
Schematics For Terminal Seventeen
The Death Of Reagan
Capsule Retrieval
Island Gardens
After The Hurricane

While searching for a disturbing, Ballardian illustration to add some eye candy to this little post, I ran across the above disturbing picture associated with this article:

Designer terror-porn now in vogue
The horrific images of abuse at Abu Ghraib have been recycled in the name of fashion. (Article)

"CIVPOL"

I've long argued for an American equivalent of GSG9 rather than disastrous, irrelevant war expeditions in our quest for dealing with political actors that use the illegal tactic of terror in an effort to forward their cause.
Philip Carter mentions that a colleague who is "a leading theorist in the field where crime and warfare converge", Lt. John Sullivan agrees...

Constabulary operations, such as these, are the "missing mission" in the United States security structure. The U.S. has no national police service (the FBI is a non-uniformed investigative agency) and state and local police address these functions internally. Few if any local U.S. Forces could field or contribute to an on-going expeditionary capability without straining their ability to perform their home mission. The U.S. also has no standing constabulary or EXPOL force and relies upon scarce or ill-fitted military units (and ad hoc civilian police units) to fill expeditionary needs. The same is true for NATO and the U.N.

(More at Intel Dump)
I've actually met one of Lt. Sullivan's people at an law enforcement intel seminar. Probably one of the most informative speakers at the conference.

I don't get paid enough...

Intel Analysis

Here's a level of sophistication that I haven't seen reported up to this point.

Tankers for U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan attacked in Pakistan (Article)

A fairly organized effort is usually represented when you see a coordinated attack on logistics. The article mentions missiles were fired remotely. TOW possibly?
Talk about a tight rope act. Musharraf is single handedly keeping the lid on the conflagration that's in that pot. Unfortunately, I think it's only a matter of time before Islamic extremists get to him.