] Gov. James E. McGreevey's top contributor was charged on
] Tuesday in a bizarre scheme to enlist prostitutes in an
] effort to silence potential witnesses in a federal
] investigation of possible illegal campaign contributions.

The New York Times - Lurid Charges Hit Top Donor to New Jersey Governor

I want to be like Ted Turner when I grow up. I just got the sudden urge to edit together various comments from this interview into one long string. Its an effort to capture the essence of Ted..

The invasion of Iraq was the biggest debacle in the history of the world... except maybe the AOL Time-Warner merger. They can't even get Haiti right, how are they going to get Iraq right? Wars may have worked in the past, but now we have pro-football. Before there wasn't anything to be excited about so War was exciting. War isn't fun anymore. 9/11 wouldn't have happened if I had been president. We were having a cold war with Russia when I went to Russia to produce the Good Will Games. A few years later, the Berlin Wall came down. The AOL Time-Warner merger was bullshit. It was good for me. I ended up with 10% of the stock in AOL/TW. I was friendly with two other people who owned 10% each so it was OK for me. Why not? They are the original American cattle. The meat has 1/2 as much fat as beef. I am going into the restaurant business and philanthropy. Rupert Murdoch is is a bad journalist. Sloppy journalist. He runs Britain. I asked Tony Blair why he was allowed to have so much influence and Tony Blair said, "I wouldn't have my job without Rupert." He wants to rule the world. He has Britain, almost has Australia and he would like the US. He has no interest in helping anyone, in charity. He won't even give you an interview. He's not interesting in whether what he is doing is right or wrong. The $1M / yr I was getting as Vice Chairman was just hush money. You also need vision. My vision comes from thinking. I don't watch TV.

Joi Ito's Web: Brainstorms 2004 dinner interview notes - Ted Turner

] A second variant of the Atak worm, which goes to sleep to
] avoid detection by antivirus software, has been linked to
] an al-Qaida sympathizer who once threatened to release a
] powerful worm if the United States attacked Iraq.

] Mihai Radu, communications manager at BitDefender, said
] the virus, discovered Friday, is signed by Melhacker, which
] is the moniker of a Malaysian-based coder called Vladimor
] Chamlkovic, who in 2002 threatened to release an
] "uber-worm" if the United States attacked Iraq.

'Atak' worm variant linked to al-Qaida sympathizer | CNET News.com

] Most Instant Messenger users broadcast when they sign on,
] sign off, go idle, and flag themselves as away. This
] presence information is typically innocuous, useful for
] knowing if your buddies are available to chat. But when
] monitored continuously, over long time periods, those few
] signals tell a lot. This website lets you record and
] analyze anybody's IM activity.

Somebody is watching you... for someone else.

IM Watching.net

In a break from my very strict "no martha" policy, I feel a strange urge to post this older link.

Photoshop Contests | Martha's Jail Cell

Here is a collection of all the artwork from HOPE for your printing and distributing needs. It turns out that the creepy Ready.gov posters weren't fake. The site that distributes them is linked from here. Now, if only they had a link for the almost funny if they weren't real "Republicans are coming, make nice" posters that were hung up on the lamp posts down the street.

The Fifth HOPE Artwork

This is life.... This is life on Fox News.

] The plane landed. My husband and I gathered our bags and
] quickly, very quickly, walked up the jetway. As we exited
] the jetway and entered the airport, we saw many, many men
] in dark suits. - A few yards further out into the
] terminal, LAPD agents ran past us, heading for the
] gate. -  I have since learned that the representatives of
] the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Los
] Angeles Police Department (LAPD), the Federal Air
] Marshals (FAM), and the Transportation Security
] Association (TSA) met our plane as it landed. -  Several
] men -- who I presume were the federal air marshals on
] board -- hurried off the plane and directed the 14 men
] over to the side.

Flight screening drops a major ball. Either Syrian artisans don't know how to behave on American planes these days, or Capital-T Terrorists are testing bomb assembly techniques. Much intrigue. Read in the dark. If you happen to have an MP3 of airline cabin sounds, play it. Perhaps Young's Let's Roll..

How would you react? What drink would have you gotten when the cart came around?

Warning: Author is the type of person who would quote Ann Coultier.

Terror in the Skies, Again? - WomensWallStreet

] "If you're 15 and angry at your dad, you want to go and
] break something. But the biggest part of hacking is
] creation," notes "Acidus," a speaker at a Friday panel on
] intellectual property and technology.

The line that got be the biggest applause was "Do you think Marconi and Tesla could have built the radio if the telegraph was a little black box you couldn't open? We are selling out our future inventors and innovators for the short terms profits of the RIAA."

USATODAY.com - Hackers have HOPE

] Powell is on track to become the least traveled secretary
] of state in more than three decades, since Henry A.
] Kissinger embodied the concept of the globe-trotting
] foreign policy guru, according to records maintained by
] the State Department's historian. Powell's three
] immediate predecessors, the records show, traveled an
] average of more than 45 percent more than he has.

MSNBC - Colin Powell no globe-trotter

k wrote:
] [ I think this movie is gonna totally kick ass. -k]

I've seen it via bootleg DVD. It first came out in China about 2 or 3 years ago. It is very good, in a Chinese Spaghetti Western kind of way. Great use of color.

Its also one hell of a propaganda film in disguise. You will walk out of the movie theatre repeating "One China" to yourself over and over, and not knowing why.. Hero is extremely political, pro-dictatorship, pro-unification by force, pro-imperialism, etc. I remember reading somewhere that the PRC specifically cracked down on pirated copies of (just) this movie as a reward to the director in return for making a "historical" plot so favorable to the state. Its sort of like Mel Gibson's "The Patriot", only for a one-party dictatorship. I bet that pro-democracy intellectuals in China _hate_ this movie. There is a reason this one took so long to make it to the USA. It will be interesting to see if the version we get here contains all of the same dialog with the King that drives these points home..

RE: Miramax | Hero - US Release