"Man oh man, 'Dr. Menlo.' Now there's an alternative blog. Kindness to animals, Seattle anarchists, nudism galore, SubGenius, anti-Bush black propaganda, jeez louise, Doc, that thing sure is happenin'." --Bruce Sterling, Schism Matrix
"Dr. Menlo is one smart guy, with a sharp eye for images sacred, profane, and in between. Sometimes the doctor riffs on them, sometimes he leaves you to connect the dots." -- Killing the Buddha
--Marine Staff Sgt. Russell Slay, giving instructions to his 5-year-old son, Walker, in a letter to his family shortly before he was killed. He was one of 12 soldiers from Texas killed in Iraq this month.
Currently showing at the Roq in Seattle (Seattle's coolest art gallery). Don't forget the Roq's curator Kirsten Anderson's blog is here (the most underrated blog on the net). And, oh yea, who can forget her book:
Freemans tuesday night the 16th of nov. the bush twins along with 2 massive secret service men tried to have dinner they were told by the maitre 'd that they were full and would be for the next 4 years upon hearing the entire restaurant cheered and did a round of shots it was amazing!!! [Ed: We're hearing that this is actually true.] [source]
This is is a car advertisement from Germany. When they finished filming the ad, the people who made it, noticed something moving along the side of the car, like a ghostly white mist.
If you turn up the sound, you can also hear whispering. The ad was never put on TV because the unexplained ghostly phenomenon frightened the production team out of their wits. Watch it and about halfway through (after the car comes from behind the trees) look closely and you will see the white mist coming up from behind the car and then following it along the road!
Massive irregularities in the November 2 presidential vote count “will probably lead to congressional hearings in the Committee on the Judiciary,” predicts Rep. John Conyers, the committee’s ranking Democrat and longest sitting member of the Congressional Black Caucus. If tampering is found, said the Detroit lawmaker, “there will be prosecutions” under federal law.
Watergate first surfaced as a short, curious story about a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters, in the summer of 1972. A decidedly low-tech crime, the Watergate conspiracy unraveled slowly as the Republican malefactors turned on each other, finally leaving their president naked to the world, disgraced. The Great Vote Theft of 2004, on the other hand, was in part a series of high-tech crimes against numbers – felonies designed to leave no physical trace, but which are evident through the patterns created by the perpetrators. Squads of dedicated sleuths are on the case – some of them at the top of their technical game – assembling data to reveal tell-tale patterns of massive vote fraud. There may soon be compelling circumstantial evidence of how the crimes were committed and, by deduction, the identity of the conspirators. [more]
According to Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.com, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.
Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his hagel.senate.gov website says, Hagel "was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska."
What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company. Programmed by that company.
"This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was," said Hagel's Democratic opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka (www.lancastercountydemocrats.org/matulka.htm). "They say Hagel shocked the world, but he didn't shock me."
Is Matulka the sore loser the Hagel campaign paints him as, or is he democracy's proverbial canary in the mineshaft?
In Georgia, Democratic incumbent and war-hero Max Cleland was defeated by Saxby Chambliss, who'd avoided service in Vietnam with a "medical deferment" but ran his campaign on the theme that he was more patriotic than Cleland. While many in Georgia expected a big win by Cleland, the computerized voting machines said that Chambliss had won.
The BBC summed up Georgia voters' reaction in a 6 November 2002 headline: "GEORGIA UPSET STUNS DEMOCRATS." The BBC echoed the confusion of many Georgia voters when they wrote, "Mr. Cleland - an army veteran who lost three limbs in a grenade explosion during the Vietnam War - had long been considered 'untouchable' on questions of defense and national security."
Charlie Matulka, who lost to Hagel, had this to say: "They can take over our country without firing a shot, just by taking over our election systems."
The Republicans were still getting the kinks out of their electronic voting theft scheme in 2002:
In the Houston area, two Republican U.S. representatives were declared winners in the last election until it was discovered that the results were caused by a "faulty" and Republican-friendly microchip. When the proper chip was installed in the computerized voting machine the correct results were revealed: two Democratic victories. [source]
Charlie Matulka elaborated in a Jan 30, 2003 interview: "I suspect they're getting ready to do this all across all the states. God help us if Bush gets his touch screens all across the country," he added, "because they leave no paper trail. These corporations are taking over America, and they just about have control of our voting machines."
Well, they're not all over the country yet--but they have been installed in at least two states with a higher number of electoral votes: Ohio and Florida.
The disputed election of 2000 left a lasting scar on the nation's psyche. A recent Zogby poll found that even in red states, which voted for George W. Bush, 32 percent of the public believes that the election was stolen. In blue states, the fraction is 44 percent.
Now imagine this: in November the candidate trailing in the polls wins an upset victory — but all of the districts where he does much better than expected use touch-screen voting machines. Meanwhile, leaked internal e-mail from the companies that make these machines suggests widespread error, and possibly fraud. What would this do to the nation?
Unfortunately, this story is completely plausible. [more]
"We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true. But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube. You eat like the tube. You raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness -- you maniacs! In God's name you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion.
Which died--at least in the form originally espoused by it's creators wherein people were allowed to vote--in 2000. Our new targets if we ever hope to fight the current American dictatorship--and let's not mince words, for a one-party government with no effective elections is just that: a dictatorship--are these:
1). the electronic voting machines and the GOP-run companies which run them.
2). the corporate media, as complicit as ever in the voter fraud and theft of the election of 2004.
There are many falling for the horseshit that Rove is pushing: fundamentalists came out in bigger numbers and the election was won on "moral values." They are suckers; let's hope they get educated soon. They are not worth more severe criticism as they have probably spent too much time in front of a TV and their circuits are jammed.
It is your job to spread the word: each of you has an inside line on one or more of the fifty million plus Kerry voters out there who are now depressed--it is your job to turn that depression into vote-theft elucidation and subsequent anger. Nay, fury.
As Randi Rhodes points out: elections are the one day where even the smallest, poorest person in America has as much say as the richest and most powerful--and those motherfuckers took that day away. Are you going to stand for that, America? Are you going to lie down for 4 more years like a dog? Are you going to let that smirky, lying, vote-stealing motherfucker strut around like Il Duce in this country?
America, you poor suckers. Wake up and smell the Diebold steal. All those serious conversations plastered across the corporate media now about why the Democrats lost is about as close to reality as my debit card is to a million bucks. This is the truth, folks. You select few reading this are peering around the American Matrix. Get an eyeful and swallow hard.
I thought of this phrase this morning but I've seen it a couple of other places since.
I'm still putting together for myself what happened yesterday, but I can tell you a few things: American Samizdat is needed now more than ever. Corporate media is more poisonous than ever. People don't turn out in record numbers for an election and stand for hours in line to keep an incumbent in. Diebold prez promised to deliver Ohio and he did. I wish I had a Diebold machine in front of me and a bat. This new issue of "morals" is nothing but a red herring: don't swallow it. With the neocons owning the presidency and House and Senate and two years until the next election wherein our vote may not be guaranteed with receipt-printing machines: America is now effectively a dictatorship, and most likely has been for longer than today. To change this, protests in the streets don't mean shit. Letters and calls to your rep. don't mean shit. They have sewn up the previous democratic system and the opinion of the people doesn't mean shit--now more than ever.
