Going. For People Who Love to Go Out.
See where Boston is going, share places you hang out and meet people who like the same things.
posted by: Nick
This group is just an idea of mine to get more politically active.
Any suggestions or postings are welcome. Good links:
If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
Recent Buzz
Election nite in Washington DC
Does anyone know of any bars/pubs in Washington DC who are hosting
election night parties this Tuesday? Will be there for work, and
would like to watch the numbers roll in at a cool place with other
Dems...
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10/23/06, 7PM
at Barnes & Noble Boston University
2 Added it
Post It On...
elle
Election nite in Washington DC + -
Carolyn
moveon.org + -
Nick
Help to Turn the Tide on 9/11/06 + -
If all, most, or even just part of the accusations are true about the Neo-Con/Bush involvement in the 9/11 attacks, not only should the Bush gang be thrown out of office, but they should be tried as war criminals before the world court. Because if they instigated 9/11 then that, on top of the phoney WMDs in Iraq, prove that the entire "War on Terror" is a con.
On the anniversary of 9/11, I would really like to participate in some sort of protest or even just distribute flyers to people. I know there must be some people reading this who agree with me. We need to turn people's fear of terrorism into anger against the Republican-controlled Congress which has followed in locked step with the Bush administration.
What can we do to get people informed?
Nick
CSPAN covers symposium: 9/11 and Neo-Con Agenda + -
Five years later, several scientists, demolition experts, and aviation experts however point out certain glaring inconsistencies in the WTC collapse:
(1) Each building fell in a straight line right onto their own footprint.
(2) The speed of their collapse was very close to free-fall (as an object falling from the same height).
(3) Building 7 also fell as though in a controlled demolition. It was not struck by a plane. Both buildings to the right and left of it were untouched.
(4) No skyscraper in the history of construction has ever collapsed due to fire. The only ones so far are buildings 1, 2, and 7 of the WTC.
There is more. Much more. You can take the blue pill or the red pill. If you click on these links you are facing some painful realities.
C-SPAN Symposium (100 min.)
Building 7 Collapse (36 min.)
There are powerful people in government who are willing to accept innocent civilian casualties if it will further their cause. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Don Rumsfeld all were members of the Project for a New American Century (or PNAC). The agenda of PNAC was to instigate a "Pearl Harbor like event" that would motivate the people of the US to follow an agressive war campaign against the Middle East.
Nick
RE: CSPAN covers symposium: 9/11 and Neo-Con Agenda + -
Loose Change, 2nd Ed.
Nick
Take This Job and Ship It + -
* I admit "free trade" has a marvelous sound to it. It sounds distinctly American.... The thing is, though, free trade must be fair trade, and these days it is not, and we in the United States are paying a huge price.
* [There is a view that] says that "free trade" is good, and anyone who opposes it is some sort xenophobic isolationist stooge who must want to build walls around our country and set the clock back a century.
Even in the face of all the evidence that this so-called "free trade" strategy is a bankrupt strategy, one that shortchanges our workers and cripples our manufacturing industries, American corporations and this administration continue to push the free trade myth.
* Is this "free trade" a practice that is mislabled? Is it really about freedom? If so, for whom? And more important, is this free-trade strategy of the United States exporting freedom or misery?
* Corporations use our roads to transport merchandise. Their children and employees are educated in American schools. They want their interests protected by our courts and armies at home and abroad. More and more, they just don't want to pay for it. These days, tax avoidance is the entitlement program for the wealthy and their corporations.
* But the free market only works when you have many competitors. When one of the competitors becomes large enough to clog the arteries of the free market system, even on a local level, then the market is no longer free. Innovation is retarded, and in essence you have the same stagnation that exists when there is no competition.
* Wal-Mart has a right to pursue their business plan, but I also believe local governments have a right to make their zoning decisions based on whether they believe their next Wal-Mart superstore will help or hurt their local economy.
* The FDA is supposed to be regulating the drug industry, not representing them.
* Exploiting labor forces in America and abroad by pitting them against one another is a flawed strategy and just plain wrong. You can't blame Mexico. They're playing the game created by global corporations, but the only ones winning are corporations. One of the basic rules for long-term successful trade is everyone has to win. Global corporations are making up the rules as they go along, but rule number one remains constant: Profit matters, people don't.
* Corporate America is slowly but surely devouring its own customers.
* There [is] no social program as important as a good job that pays well.
* Wealth is measured by what you produce, not what you consume. America is a nation of builders, a nation of innovators, inventors, and creators, and driving that great engine of commerce is the American worker.
* The worker becomes the fall guy for aspiring to earn a good wage and support his family.
* If the $5.15 minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay since 1990, the lowest-paid workers in the country would make $23.03 an hour.
* I say why not bring basic human rights to the oppressed workers in other nations through our trade agreements? Why don't we use our economic muscle to ensure that those with whom we trade raise their workplace standards to meet our own? In saving others, we save ourselves.
* I do support trade, and plenty of it, provided it is fair, free, and mutually beneficial to us and our trade partners. However, that's not the case today. And we do desperately need change.
Change doesn't mean closing our borders and retreating from the global economy. But it does mean standing up for our country's interests and establishing a set of rules for trade in the global economy that reflect our country's interests. It means establishing a trade strategy that is designed to lift others up without pushing American workers down. We can do that. But we need to start now.
* As Americans we have to understand that economic vulnerability is as dangerous as military vulnerability; in fact, the former causes the latter. The fanatical terrorists who have us in their sights understand this as well. When, as a nation, we carelessly allow ourselves to become as financially vulnerable as this president has, it is dangerous to our national security.
* Will global corporations supersede nations as the dominant powers? I believe we are headed in that direction.
Take This Job and Ship It
Nick
Bye + -
Eva
RE: Bye + -
There is quote that says something like a small group of committed people can move mountains. I saw it on some bumper sticker last night. Don't give up. Frustration is a sign that you're getting bigger so you'll be ready for the next even bigger challenge. Giving up indicates weakness ... and that is not you.
Those are my words of wisdom for this morning. How do you want your world to look ... hold that line ...
Eva
Nick
RE: Bye + -
I want to see major campaign finance reform done before I will believe in any candidate for public office.
Those who don't believe in the benefit of campaign finance reform really do not understand the corrupting influence money has on our "formerly" democratic institutions.
I think Cambridge/Somerville are prime locations for a clean elections breakthrough, where we can have every person in office completely free of obligation to the moneyed interests that are often seen swarming all over Capitol Hill (50 lobbyists for each congressman).
I think the populations of either of these towns would be pleasantly surprised by the courtesy, attention, and interest these legislators would have with their constituents. What better than to have a responsive legislature in a liberal town?
I believe that we can succeed only locally with concerted effort and much luck. Even then I do not expect a "clean" electorate to stay clean for very long.
My goal is to just make it happen and at least be able to tell others that we did something.
Eva
clean elections ... where does one start ... + -
Eva
Nick
RE: clean elections ... where does one start ... + -
That is why I think a town clean elections policy has a better chance than a state clean elections policy. At least it's something.
Oh, and the candidates had to get a certain number of signatures from their future constitutents to qualify for public funding. After that they were qualified to receive a certain percentage of whatever their opponent was spending. It made a lot of sense and could have worked if the Mass. Legislature was not so corrupt.
Nick
Reasons to get focused and active in November + -
There is an orchestrated campaign by certain extreme factions in the Republican party to subvert our election system and make voters even more distrustful of our electoral process. They have an army of at least 1000 paid "volunteers" to disrupt elections in key states like Florida and Ohio. We can match them here in Massachusetts or maybe a local battleground state, like New Hampshire.
Anyway, the article is long but worth the read (the Rolling Stone site was a little slow so I found a copy of the article here):
Rolling Stone Article
Nick
Blocking Electronic Voting + -
Bob Urosevich, the first CEO of Diebold Election Systems was also the founder of ES&S, a competing voting machine company now owned by the McCarthy Group. Together these two companies are responsible for tallying around 80% of votes cast in the United States. The current vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.
It is reputed that the software architecture common to both is a creation of Mr Urosevich's company I-Mark and is easily compromised, in part due to its reliance on Microsoft Access databases; and that the I-Mark and Microsoft software each represent a single point of failure of vote counting process, from which 80% of votes can be compromised via the exploit of a single line of code in either subsystem.
Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.
Exit polls are statistically known among pollsters across the world to be an accurate predictor of voting results. However, the last two elections in 2000 and 2004 showed a marked discrepancy between exit polls and actual counts. The greatest anomolies occurred on the Diebold and ES&S machines.
We, as a group, need to do our part to prevent another election from being stolen. I believe we can get together and "act up" in some way to thwart this attack on American democracy.
There are a couple web sites I found. But I believe we can do much more. Please post any ideas you might have that we can do locally (maybe a trip to NH, VT, NY, or CT could be arranged).
http://www.voteraction.org/
http://www.sourcewatch.org
Nick
RE: Blocking Electronic Voting + -
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?titl...
Nick
RE: Blocking Electronic Voting + -
Nick
How to see if the NSA is spying on you + -
Wired magazine wrote this article and supplied a simple way that YOU TOO can see if the NSA is spying on your computer traffic to the internet.
http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/#151...
With that in mind, here's the 27B Stroke 6 guide to detecting if your traffic is being funneled into the secret room on San Francisco's Folsom street.
If you're a Windows user, fire up an MS-DOS command prompt. Now type tracert followed by the domain name of the website, e-mail host, VoIP switch, or whatever destination you're interested in. Watch as the program spits out your route, line by line.
C:\> tracert nsa.gov
1 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 12.110.110.204
[...]
7 11 ms 14 ms 10 ms as-0-0.bbr2.SanJose1.Level3.net [64.159.0.218]
8 13 12 19 ms ae-23-56.car3.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.68.123.173]
9 18 ms 16 ms 16 ms 192.205.33.17
10 88 ms 92 ms 91 ms tbr2-p012201.sffca.ip.att.net [12.123.13.186]
11 88 ms 90 ms 88 ms tbr1-cl2.sl9mo.ip.att.net [12.122.10.41]
12 89 ms 97 ms 89 ms tbr1-cl4.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.122.10.29]
13 89 ms 88 ms 88 ms ar2-a3120s6.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.123.8.65]
14 102 ms 93 ms 112 ms 12.127.209.214
15 94 ms 94 ms 93 ms 12.110.110.13
16 * * *
17 * * *
18 * *
In the above example, my traffic is jumping from Level 3 Communications to AT&T's network in San Francisco, presumably over the OC-48 circuit that AT&T tapped on February 20th, 2003, according to the Klein docs.
The magic string you're looking for is sffca.ip.att.net. If it's present immediately above or below a non-att.net entry, then -- by Klein's allegations -- your packets are being copied into room 641A, and from there, illegally, to the NSA.
Nick
Less Offensive Logo + -