kband: bluprnt 4 rvolution

Crazy Ass Japanese fashion

(some of the dresses are actually sort of hot...)

This one's from my dad

This article is unbelievable in that the auto makers have developed clean internal combustion cars but are not pushing them unless mandated by a few states because they are afraid of being seen as sissy cars.

electronic voting = seriously fucked

"A quiet revolution is taking place in US politics. By the time it's over, the integrity of elections will be in the unchallenged, unscrutinized control of a few large--and pro-Republican--corporations." All the President's Votes? Common Dreams Newscenter

the gist:
"The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private [republican advocating] company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal - on pain of stiff criminal penalties - for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly. There was not even a paper trail to follow up."
"What, then, is one to make of the fact that the owners of the three major computer voting machines are all prominent Republican Party donors? Or of a recent political fund-raising letter written to Ohio Republicans by Walden O'Dell, Diebold's chief executive, in which he said he was "committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" - even as his company was bidding for the contract on the state's new voting machinery?"

Nike sues artists over satire

Wish I Thought of it Department: the European art group 0100101110101101.ORG has created a fake Nike website, Nike Ground, portraying the company as real-estate vultures who buy streets and squares in cities around the world in order to rename them and install giant monuments of the swoosh. The site looks and feels so much like a Nike site that even the savviest web surfers should be forgiven for missing the point. But if ambiguity makes for a muddy message, it also insures that Nike will take note, and indeed -- Phil Knight et al. have issued a 30-page injunction demanding the immediate removal of material related to copyrighted material.

purple frog!

A new *purple* frog was discovered in India.

Totally cute:	here's another picture:

Resistance.

This post covers all the resistance movements I’ve read about this week.

Surprisingly, there are quite a few. The most amazing one I’ve read about
was in Bolivia. In a shift from Latin America's usual pattern of natural
succession - Dictator, Revolution, Anarchy, Dictator, Revolution, etc...-
there was just a huge coup in which 70 people were killed but they kicked
out their US / gas loving president and will have elections in the near
future. I’m not too sure on the specifics outside the articles below but it
seems that his resignation was yet another step in the movement for Latin
America to shed the economic imperialism of the States. But it just blows my
mind…I sit here in a little cube all day while these revolutions are
blooming and change seems to be happening. It’s really hard to know how to
help. Or even who should be helped. Thus the spam. It’s good reading though.

The beautiful and impeccable rallying cry of the Bolivian Revolution

Most recent events according to the Economist

A Bolivian perspective from the 17th.

And this is a beautiful speech by Gerry Adams on the elections being
scheduled in Northern Ireland and the on going effort to reunite Ireland.
(Keep in mind that their republicans are different that ours…)

Here’s some background on the Sinn Fein.

And here is a hopeful article on an upcoming trial brought by a group of
30,000 people in the Ecuadorian Amazon against ChevronTexaco for pretty much
killing them and the ecosystem by dumping oil waste in unlined pits in the
middle of the rainforest. Their defense is that “this was a generally
accepted operating practice.” Supposedly this lawsuit could change how
multinational corporations do business throughout Latin America.

The beautiful and impeccable rallying cry of the Bolivian Revolution

Meeting in Buenos Aires by Bolivia

EDITORIAL

NOW IS THE TIME
The beautiful and impeccable rallying cry of the Bolivian Revolution

Jorge Altamira

The insurrection in Bolvia is a call to order for those who have dared to bury the "Argentinazo" in the past. It is true that the explosion of the people was provoked by the policies of a "Menemist" government and that very same thing would have been provided by a victory for Menem in the last elections. The Argentine bosses have managed to "escape" with the Duhalde´s and with the Kirchner´s. But for how long? The signing of the accord with the IMF, the payment of a foreign debt of incredible magnitude, the freezing of wages, the re-privatization of the privatizers and fresh subsidies, the "barter" of the foreign debt for education and housing, the pressure of the international creditors, the "penal code" to confront the piqueteros: where is this taking us except to Bolivia, which is to say, the second edition of our December 19-20?
The daily Ambito Financiero (14 Oct) very correctly attributed the Bolivian uprising to the piqueteros. In effect, the peasants of the high plateaus (with their road and highway blocks) and the unemployed of El Alto are nothing more than a replica of the piqueteros. The fact that they find themselves in the vanguard of a gigantic revolution shows that they concentrate the historic experience of what has been, ever since the ´40´s, the most advanced proletariat in Latin America.

The piqueteros of Bolivia now march together with the factory workers, the miners, the teachers, the students and with the masses as a whole, to overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie.

They have erred, then, and badly, those who insist, in Argentina, on denying the revolutionary potential of the masses who are organizing in Berazategui or in Ledesma (Jujuy), in Ensenada or in Tartagal (Salta), in Moreno and La Matanza or in Caleta Olivia and Río Turbio, in Resistencia and Barranqueras or in the San Juan capital.

There is a thread which runs through the Bolivian revolution. The colonial mitas (exploitation in mining) led to indigenous insurrections in the 18th century; as social plundering impelled the guerilla of Upper Perú; tin led to the revolution of ´52 and oil to that of 1971 (Popular Assembly); and gas now (and genetically modified potatoes) the revolution in course at the present time. That is, exploitation for private gain and for the world market.

But the Bolivian revolution is not only due to this. As decisive as the domination of international monopoly is, Bolivia has constructed under its shadow a kind of capitalist development. And it is precisely these capitalists who find themselves in complete bankruptcy: eight out of every ten companies cannot affront their debts. Neither can they be rescued by the State or by the banks. The foreign debt, "pardoned" several times over, is no more than 20 per cent of the Bolivian GNP, but it is enough to destroy public finances. There is a real process of dissolution of capitalism, which explains perfectly well why even the
social classes that voted for Sánchez de Lozada participate in the
insurrection or maintain their neutrality. But the financial collapse and the economic bankruptcy are no monopoly of Bolivia´s, as we ourselves well know, as do the Brazilians, the Russians and the Asians (and now the Californians).

Given its social breadth the Bolivian insurrection is reminiscent of that of Nicaragua of 1979. Only between August and October of the year before, Somoza had massacred 50,000 insurgents in his eagerness to crush the people´s uprising by military means.

In Bolivia it is a question also, neither more nor less, of the intervention of the peasantry, that many times in the past was the rear guard of the governments.
The Bolivian insurrection possesses an enormous historic density, because the Bolivians know that the plunder of gas signifies a new tombstone over the possibility of national existence.

It is not the gas, then, that is at stake but rather the restructuring of Bolivian history upon new social foundations.

Just as Che thought, anticipated, understood through intuition,
Bolivia is an epicenter of revolution in South America. For completely bankrupt capitalist regimes, as are those of the surrounding countries (including, especially, Brazil), the victory of the Bolivian revolution is a mortal danger.
Skipping over the laws of history, the destitute Bolivia may become, all of a sudden, through the action of its exploited, a model of development for other more developed States.

This explains why Yankee imperialism has snapped to attention, not only
for the gas deals, which is not even in the hands of the principal international monopolies. The order was, just as when the Iranians rose up against the Sha in 1979, bullets and more bullets; no other intermediary party enjoys the confidence Bush has as a factor capable of controlling or obstructing the insurrection of the masses. The OAS, with Kirchner, Lula and the Frente Amplio (Broad Front) of Uruguay, among others, have cowered before US imperialism.

The question is they can discuss with Bush the FTAA tariffs or diplomacy with Cuba, but they have no position independent of their master´s in the face of a workers and peasants revolution. At the decisive moment they have not uttered a single miserable word in favor of the human rights of the oppressed massacred in Bolivia. That these oppressed have transformed themselves into revolutionaries has eliminated all democratic sensitivity in them.

Bolivia has laid bare the counterrevolutionary character of democracy and of the democratizing, especially those of the left. Lula reached government bent on preventing a breakdown in the banking system and, its counterpart, the Argentinazo. Faced with Bolivia, he has shown that that bent is decidedly strategic.

In 1995 the Partido Obrero broke up an International Conference of the San Pablo Forum, in Montevideo, because of the refusal of the parties present there to expel from their midst a nationalist Bolivian party that had backed, as a member of the government, marshal law and the use of repression against a general strike in Bolivia. In the government or still in the opposition those parties today support the OAS.

In Bolivia leftist democratism has been exposed with the efforts of Evo Morales to boycott the insurrection in function of assuring himself of the 2004 municipal elections. The revolution is serving the interests of the right-wing, he has said, as something which seems to have turned into a fig-leaf for the Lula´s, the Ibarra´s, etc., in order to justify their dirty work. Frei Betto has just said the same thing to justify the alliance of the PT with the Brazilian land-owners and bankers and with imperialism. Trotskyism, as occurs in Brazil, should be ready to govern, a runt of porteño intellectuality has recently declared. After having proclaimed it "utopia" the democratizers have now turned it into a "provocation" that would serve imperialism itself, with whom they have united in order to drown the Bolivian revolution.

After having attempted to negotiate the gas decrees with Sánchez de
Lozada, now Evo aims to limit the overcoming of the crisis to the mandate-holder stepping down. But even a constituent assembly convened on the basis of the old regime would be a defeat for the revolution. For there to be a sovereign constituent [assembly] it is necessary for the masses to overthrow the government and that their organizations take power.

What distinguishes above all the Bolivian insurrection from the "Argentinazo" is the exceptional concentration of historic, absolutely immense energies of the Bolivian worker and peasant piqueteros. That is what is summed up in the slogan of the neighbors of La Portada, a neighborhood that dominates from the heights the highway going from El Alto to La Paz: "Now is the time.

bolivia mobilizes

BOLIVIA: A MULTITUDE HAVE CORNERED THE PRESIDENT AND
HIS TANKS

Econoticiasbolivia (Translated by: Latinsol),
17.10.2003 05:47

A giant multitude have sieged the Presidential Palace throughout Thursday demanding Bolivia´s President resignation as around a million people from all walks of life have joined on a national hunger strike until Sanchez de Lozada steps down.

La Paz, October 16, 2003 (17:00).- At least a quarter of a million workers and residents of almost every popular neighbourhood from El Alto and La Paz have
surrounded the Government Palace and are giving the last chance to the most hated and dammed man in their national history, the wealthy Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, to resign the Presidency and leave Bolivia.

The gigantic mass mobilization, that has filled for over eight hours the center of the city, was more numerous, better organized and more radical than the imposing recent manifestation.

In San Francisco square, the multitude gathered on an open people´s assembly at noon today, and agreed to deepen even more the social mobilization throughout the entire country and advised all men and youth to prepare themselves for street combat against tanks and machine gun.

"We must dig trenches in every neighbourhood, on every block, we must raise pickets of self defence groups", said the miner Jaime Solares, leader of the Bolivian Workers Central (COB), who advised everyone to sustain the siege of the Palace, guarded by war tanks, precarious trenches and extremely tens army personnel. There, they fear the beginning of the battle.

PATIENCE IS RUNNING OUT

"This is going to be a long battle", responded Solares to the voices of university youth who wanted to immediately start the assault of the solitary Government Palace, located four blocks away from San Francisco square.

Since the worsening of the crisis, Sanchez de Lozada is cornered in the presidential residence located in the residential area of San Jorge, in the south of the city, several kilometres away from downtown. A huge group of protesters want to head towards there to once and for all do away with the "magnate", with the "dammed gringo", as the President is known on the blood tainted areas of El Alto and La Paz.

Unlike yesterday, today chanting repeated by a multitude are more radical: "civil war now, civil war now", men, women, elders and children yelling and raising thousands and thousands of wooden sticks, with which they are confronting the genocide and brutality.

The speeches are radical and they all say the same: The gringo must go!. They all say the same, but they don´t say how, or when. The people are desperate, they want more, they want to do away with the President once and for all. The leaders try to calm down the tumultuous, impetuous grass roots base, and advise on maintaining the siege, to remain on the streets, keeping pressure over the Palace, taking over the downtown area, exerting power, in vigil.

The speeches are over, there are marches through the central streets, and many are assuming their positions, controlling almost every downtown corner. Others are going back to their neighbourhoods, many are just arriving, rushing, breathless, yelling "civil war now".

Right in the middle of it all are the miners, the coca growers, the peasants from the south, university students, factory workers, teachers, pensioners, merchants and youth, lots of youth. On some streets there are confrontations, tear gas, precarious barricades and burning of tires. Some people overcome by gas, some are bleeding. On other streets, coca growers from Yunga and residents of Villa Fatima share bread and refreshments with the police. There some exchanges, talks and smiles.

It is the popular up-rising of multitudes, with contradictions, a hole human swarm that is getting tired of waiting for the gringo to go away. Many are saying "We must kick him out, and send him away".

"We need to wait some more still", responded some middle level COB leaders advising on the arrival of more reinforcements, peasants, merchants and coca growers who are coming from Cochabamba, Oruro and Potosi. The protest is also wide on those districts, there is strike, marches and rebellion.

A COMMON FRONT

Others who await are sectors of the middle-high class, the intellectuals, human rights activists, professionals, who have already raised thirty some hunger strike pickets in temples and churches in almost all cities around the country.

In the residential neighbourhoods people also demand the resignation of the President, with vigils around churches. They also march, escorted by the police, asking for Sanchez de Lozada to go. And with that, there is a common front taking place on the streets between popular sectors and the accommodated classes to end the massacre.

UNCERTAIN WAY OUT

"We can´t accept more killings, we want to work and the only solution is for the President to leave", says an improvised protest leader. They also fear that the up-rising turn into a social revolution.

That is why they emphasize that "the way out must be a constitutional succession", around the same lines as what the former ombudsperson says, as well as human rights activists and those who support the Republic Vice-President, Carlos Mesa, who today has distanced himself much more from Sanchez de Lozada. "I don't have the courage for killing", says to take some prudent distance from the massacre.

Among those at the higher end of the social pyramid there is also solidarity with the peasants heading to San Francisco square. That solidarity becomes brotherhood in the popular neighbourhoods. On the hillside there are heroes welcome, brothers welcome. The residents open their homes to the coca growers and peasants, and share their bread and coca, before the battle.

"All the miners are advised to immediately head to la Paz", demands the leader of COB, preparing for Sanchez de Lozada and, in particular, the United States Embassy, to push the troops to the slaughter and the workers and residents of El Alto to the assault of the sky.

The evening is setting in, from the presidential residency, the minister of Defence, Carlos Sanchez Berzain confirms, through the catholic radio Fides, that the President will not resign and that those who are asking for his resignation "have no chance of winning".

- e-mail: latinsol@shaw.ca
Homepage: www.econoticiasbolivia.com

Roshambeau

Hey everybody! Buck Carruthers, K-Band Sports here. Listen to me, and listen to me well, so I don't have to come over and stuff a broomstick up your rear!

Ditch your friends and get thy ass to Toronto...for the 2003 Rock Paper Scissors International Championships this Saturday, October 25. Now we're cooking with gas.

pornographied

This is a great pair of articles from New York magazine on modern porn
consumption and its effects.

"It's just something to amuse you when you're bored," he says. "It's just
there--like white noise."

I find it really fascinating the way people can get addicted to porn. I
don't know why it becomes so fiendish, possibly because there is still some
level of taboo and shame left... I always seem to read about men describing
themselves being devoured by it....yes, you can read into that....

And a commentary on the situation by Naomi Wolf:

Sort of predictable - "The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening
male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and
fewer women as 'porn-worthy.'" - and she gets quite carried away with the
"other cultures" but it's interesting. I like her description of sex in the
70s: "If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a
pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up."

Of course, both articles completely ignore the fact that there exist women
who are into porn as well... for a more femme-friendly take on porn and the
erotic, check out www.cakenyc.com

Fox News and public's misperceptions

Incredible article, even as unsurprising as these facts are:

Fact-Free News

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, October 15, 2003; Page A23

Ever worry that millions of your fellow Americans are walking around knowing
things that you don't? That your prospects for advancement may depend on
your mastery of such arcana as who won the Iraqi war or where exactly Europe
is?

Then don't watch Fox News. The more you watch, the more you'll get things
wrong.

Researchers from the Program on International Policy Attitudes (a joint
project of several academic centers, some of them based at the University of
Maryland) and Knowledge Networks, a California-based polling firm, have
spent the better part of the year tracking the public's misperceptions of
major news events and polling people to find out just where they go to get
things so balled up. This month they released their findings, which go a
long way toward explaining why there's so little common ground in American
politics today: People are proceeding from radically different sets of
facts, some so different that they're altogether fiction.

In a series of polls from May through September, the researchers discovered
that large minorities of Americans entertained some highly fanciful beliefs
about the facts of the Iraqi war. Fully 48 percent of Americans believed
that the United States had uncovered evidence demonstrating a close working
relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Another 22 percent thought
that we had found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And 25 percent
said that most people in other countries had backed the U.S. war against
Saddam Hussein. Sixty percent of all respondents entertained at least one of
these bits of dubious knowledge; 8 percent believed all three.

The researchers then asked where the respondents most commonly went to get
their news. The fair and balanced folks at Fox, the survey concludes, were
"the news source whose viewers had the most misperceptions." Eighty percent
of Fox viewers believed at least one of these un-facts; 45 percent believed
all three. Over at CBS, 71 percent of viewers fell for one of these
mistakes, but just 15 percent bought into the full trifecta. And in the
daintier precincts of PBS viewers and NPR listeners, just 23 percent adhered
to one of these misperceptions, while a scant 4 percent entertained all
three.

Now, this could just be pre-sorting by ideology: Conservatives watch
O'Reilly, liberals look at Lehrer, and everyone finds his belief system
confirmed. But the Knowledge Network nudniks took that into account, and
found that even among people of like mind, where they got their news still
shaped their sense of the real. Among respondents who said they would vote
for George W. Bush in next year's presidential race, for instance, more than
three-quarters of the Fox watchers thought we'd uncovered a working
relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda, while just half of those who
watch PBS believed this to be the case.

Misperceptions can also be the result of inattention, of course. If you nod
off for just a nanosecond in the middle of Tom Brokaw intoning, "U.S.
inspectors did not find weapons of mass destruction today," you could think
we'd just uncovered Hussein's nuclear arsenal. So the wily researchers also
controlled for intensity of viewership, and concluded that, "in the case of
those who primarily watched Fox News, greater attention to news modestly
increases the likelihood of misperceptions." Particularly when that news
includes hyping every false lead in Iraq as the certain prelude to
uncovering a massive WMD cache.

One question inevitably raised by these findings is whether Fox News is
failing or succeeding. Over at CBS, the news that 71 percent of viewers hold
one of these mistaken notions should be cause for concern, but whether such
should be the case at Fox because 80 percent of their viewers are similarly
mistaken is not at all clear. Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes and the other guys
at Fox have long demonstrated a clearer commitment to changing public policy
than to reporting it, and an even clearer commitment to reporting it in such
a way as to change it.

Take a wild flight of fancy with me and assume for just a moment that one
major goal over at Fox is to ensure Bush's reelection. Surely, anyone who
believes that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were in cahoots, that we've found
the WMD and that Bush is revered among the peoples of the world -- all of
these known facts to nearly half the Fox viewers -- is a good bet to be a
Bush voter in next year's contest. By this standard -- moving votes into
Bush's column and keeping them there -- Fox has to be judged a stunning
success. It's not so hot on conveying information as such, but mere
empiricism must seem so terribly vulgar to such creatures of refinement as
Murdoch and Ailes.

meyersonh@washpost.com

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

fabulous new gunwear

fabulous.

the race detection one is funny.

plus i'm sure you all saw this already but its great...

talk about overcompensation for "god" inadequacy... i'm sure he's got to
have the biggest gun as well...anyways Rumsfeld's defence of Boykin is
almost poetic in its hypocrisy:

"There are a lot of things that are said by people that are their views," he
said, "and that's the way we live. We are free people and that's the
wonderful thing about our country, and I think for anyone to run around and
think that can be managed or controlled is probably wrong."

dripping with doublespeak,
~ reb

pop culture

two fun new, ways to indoctrinate your daughters into the sheer joy that is
religious extremism.

or alternately, ways that spirituality is being co-opted by capitalist
bastards:

discuss.

revolve

razanne

partial birth abortion ban going through

this is absolutely terrible. you have to read the whole thing to really see
what's happening.