It is important for sellouts to be shameless

On the take and loving it

 

 

Academic recipients of the U.S. intelligence budget.

By

Julian Assange (ja@iq.org - Advisory Board)

Date

2007-10-06 (Sunday)

Over the last decade, U.S intelligence funding of academic research has taken on cavalier, even brazen qualities. This article reveals over 3,000 National Security Agency and over 100 Defense Intelligence Agency funded papers and draws attention to recent unreported revelations of CIA funding for torture research.

Contents

[hide]

• 1 Covert CIA-funded torture research
• 2 The National Security Agency
  • 2.1 Investigative journalism
  • 2.2 NSA funding of academic research
• 3 Grant code 'MDA904' - National Security Agency
  • 3.1 Example documents
  • 3.2 Mass surveillance research is not academic
  • 3.3 Additional documents
• 4 Grant code 'MDA908' - Defense Intelligence Agency
  • 4.1 Example documents
  • 4.2 Additional documents
• 5 Conclusion
• 6 See also

 

Read on >>

"Going Republican"?

The recent run of outed Republican Sexual Hypocrites reminds me of the moment — and I remember this quite clearly — at which the phrase “going postal” entered the lexicon. You read about one postal worker going on a gun rampage, and then another, and then yet another — and then suddenly it seemed to click for everyone, that there was a distinct pattern emerging, that these weren’t simply troubling isolated incidents but rather a symptom of some larger problem (i.e. the soulless monotony of the job).

We’re clearly at that pattern recognition moment now, the moment at which it becomes obvious to everyone that there’s more going on here, that some not insignificant percentage of sanctimonious moralizers are in fact leading personal lives significantly at odds with their public pronouncements. To put it politely.

I’m just not sure what the phrase should be in this instance. “Going Republican”? ...

full post

 

An inquiry into the reasons for cursing

"...The episode highlights one of the many paradoxes that surround swearing. When it comes to political speech, we are living in a free-speech utopia. Late-night comedians can say rude things about their nation's leaders that, in previous centuries, would have led to their tongues being cut out or worse. Yet, when it comes to certain words for copulation and excretion, we still allow the might of the government to bear down on what people can say in public. Swearing raises many other puzzles--linguistic, neurobiological, literary, political.

The first is the bone of contention in the Bono brouhaha: the syntactic classification of curse words. Ose's grammatically illiterate bill not only misspelled cocksucker, motherfucker, and asshole, and misidentified them as "phrases," it didn't even close the loophole that it had targeted. The Clean Airwaves Act assumed that fucking is a participial adjective. But this is not correct. With a true adjective like lazy, you can alternate between Drown the lazy cat and Drown the cat which is lazy. But Drown the f___g cat is certainly not interchangeable with Drown the cat which is f___g..."    Full article >>

The 'F' word

The Strange Language of Capitalism

by Charles Sullivan 

When George Bush and other capitalists speak of bringing freedom to the world you must understand that they do not mean freedom in the sense that most of us understand it. We must realize that they are speaking from the perverted, oddly-skewed language of capitalism. By freedom they do not mean the spread of democracy or the liberation of oppressed peoples. They mean the unfettered access to markets through the use of coercive military and economic force. The majority of the world conceives of freedom in human terms. Capitalists conceive of freedom in terms of corporate personhood, access to markets by any necessary means and absolute dictatorial rule. This is the face of free markets and fair trade as it relates to human beings.

Not only did capitalism give birth to the idea of corporations, it endowed them, by very questionable means, with all of the rights of personhood and none of the social responsibility of real persons. The idea of corporate personhood has to be one of the most twisted and bizarre creations ever produced by the human imagination. Like Frankenstein’s fictional monster, it is sociopathic and evil, and it has wrecked havoc wherever its monstrous tread has touched the earth.

By freedom Bush and company mean corporate freedom. They are speaking about the freedom of corporations to operate with impunity in all parts of the world without regulation of any kind. Simply stated, they are talking about corporations ruling the world backed by the strong arm of the U.S. military. They are covertly advocating the oppression of the world’s people’s, the plunder of the earth, the destruction of culture and language, the exportation of jobs to the cheapest, least regulated and most exploitable pools of labor. That is what they mean by freedom—the freedom for Plutocrats to rule the world; Poppy Bush’s New World Order; the global domination of the working class by the ruling Plutocrats...  Read on >>