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Monday, May 20, 2002

paralegal

columbia warmongering posing as news.

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blog happening

chris matthews has a weblog and msnbc has a weblog tab in their opinions section. cant get much more mainstream than that.

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Sunday, May 19, 2002

fear is our friend

talking points smells a rat with todays spate of bogeyman warnings. is someone trying to change the subject?

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national insecurity

"If Hollywood has made one concrete contribution to democracy, it's the strong but little understood impact that movies have had on the U.S. intelligence community. A prime example is Oliver Stone's JFK. Denounced as fast-and-loose fiction by many historians, the movie nonetheless indirectly forced the CIA and other secretive agencies to fork over documents that had been hidden for decades. Incited by the film, constituents flooded Capitol Hill with letters and phone calls demanding full disclosure of government records on the president's death. As a result, in 1993 Congress mandated the mass declassification of files that might have a bearing on the assassination. The millions of secret papers that were made public didn't reveal Kennedy's killer or killers, but they did detail covert operations in Cuba, Vietnam and other early 1960s hotspots."

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Saturday, May 18, 2002

chindi lha-cha-eh

even when hollywood takes on a noble unheralded subject like the navajo codetalkers from world war 2, they manage to turn it into paternalistic jingoistic pyrotechnic nonsense. todays abject lesson is Windtalkers.

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profiles in scourge

"executive summary: mindset of mass destruction"

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unconscious party

"What Professor McFadden realized was that every time a nerve fires, the electrical activity sends a signal to the brain's electromagnetic (em) field. But unlike solitary nerve signals, information that reaches the brain's em field is automatically bound together with all the other signals in the brain. The brain's em field does the binding that is characteristic of consciousness."

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left handed compliment

blog left: critical interventions

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beat happening

"Binaural beats are auditory brainstem responses which originate in the superior olivary nucleus of each hemisphere. They result from the interaction of two different auditory impulses, originating in opposite ears, below 1000 Hz and which differ in frequency between one and 30 Hz (Oster, 1973).For example, if a pure tone of 400 Hz is presented to the right ear and a pure tone of 410 Hz is presented simultaneously to the left ear, an amplitude modulated standing wave of 10 Hz, the difference between the two tones, is experienced as the two wave forms mesh in and out of phase within the superior olivary nuclei. This binaural beat is not heard in the ordinary sense of the word (the human range of hearing is from 20-20,000 Hz). It is perceived as an auditory beat and theoretically can be used to entrain specific neural rhythms through the frequency-following response (FFR)--the tendency for cortical potentials to entrain to or resonate at the frequency of an external stimulus. Thus, it is theoretically possible to utilize a specific binaural-beat frequency as a consciousness management technique to entrain a specific cortical rhythm."

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Friday, May 17, 2002

dog eat dog

"So it all boils down to snobbery. Poshintang is not haute cuisine. Even in Korea, where a bowl is quite expensive, dog soup exists at the margins, associated with older traditions, both culinary and medical. In its postwar struggle to make a place for itself at the global table, Korea has left poshintang behind. Countryside culture is popular in Seoul, with restaurants serving makkoli (rice liquor) and country-style pancakes, but it is a carefully sanitized version of the countryside, not unlike Cracker Barrel's appropriation of down-home cooking in the United States. The poshintang restaurants, unregulated and unrepentant, provide a glimpse of an older Korea that has somehow managed to survive Japanese colonialism, World War II, the Korean War, several dictatorships, and the latest wave of globalization sweeping Korean culture. I ate poshintang in a small restaurant on a tiny side street in Seoul. Around the corner, on the main thoroughfare, young Koreans favored Dunkin' Donuts, Japanese fast food, and Korean hamburger and pizza joints, all considerably hipper by Seoul standards than something associated with Chinese medicine and questionable slaughtering standards. In the long run, poshintang's greatest enemy is not Brigitte Bardot but Colonel Sanders."

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