Wednesday, November 29, 2006

US to NORK : NO IPOD FOR YOU!!1

Come on now, this isn't going to do any good at all. Political posturing and nothing more. We attempted sanctions to curtail the NORK weapons program and that didn't work, what's to think anything will come of it?
U.S. Bans Sale of IPods to North Korea
Nov 29 2:26 AM US/Eastern

By TED BRIDIS
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON

The Bush administration wants North Korea's attention, so like a scolding parent it's trying to make it tougher for that country's eccentric leader to buy iPods, plasma televisions and Segway electric scooters.

The U.S. government's first-ever effort to use trade sanctions to personally aggravate a foreign president expressly targets items believed to be favored by Kim Jong Il or presented by him as gifts to the roughly 600 loyalist families who run the communist government.

Kim, who engineered a secret nuclear weapons program, has other options for obtaining the high-end consumer electronics and other items he wants.

But the list of proposed luxury sanctions, obtained by The Associated Press, aims to make Kim's swanky life harder: No more cognac, Rolex watches, cigarettes, artwork, expensive cars, Harley Davidson motorcycles or even personal watercraft, such as Jet Skis.

The new ban would extend even to music and sports equipment. The 5- foot-3 Kim is an enthusiastic basketball fan; then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright presented him with a ball signed by Michael Jordan during a rare diplomatic trip in 2000.

Experts said the effort _ being coordinated under the United Nations _ would be the first ever to curtail a specific category of goods not associated with military buildups or weapons designs, especially one so tailored to annoy a foreign leader. U.S. officials acknowledge that enforcing the ban on black-market trading would be difficult.

The population in North Korea, one of the world's most isolated economies, is impoverished and routinely suffers widescale food shortages. The new trade ban would forbid U.S. shipments there of Rolexes, French cognac, plasma TVs, yachts and more _ all items favored by Kim but unattainable by most of the country.

"It's a new concept; it's kind of creative," said William Reinsch, a former senior Commerce Department official who oversaw trade restrictions with North Korea during Bill Clinton's presidency. Reinsch predicted governments will comply with the new sanctions, but agreed that efforts to block all underground shipments will be frustrated.

"The problem is there has always been and will always be this group of people who work at getting these goods illegally," Reinsch said. Small electronics, such as iPods or laptops, are "untraceable and available all over the place," he said. U.S. exports to North Korea are paltry, amounting to only $5.8 million last year.

The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, the trade group for the liquor industry, said it supports the administration's policies toward North Korea. The Washington-based Personal Watercraft Industry Association said it also supports the U.S. sanctions _ although it bristled at the notion a Jet Ski was a luxury.

"The thousands of Americans and Canadians who build, ship and sell personal watercraft are patriots first," said Maureen Healey, head of the trade group. She said it endorsed the ban "because of the narrow nature of this ban and the genuine dangers that responsible world governments are trying to stave off."

Defectors to South Korea have described Kim giving expensive gifts of cars, liquor and Japanese-made appliances to his most faithful bureaucrats.

"If you take away one of the tools of his control, perhaps you weaken the cohesion of his leadership," said Robert J. Einhorn, a former senior State Department official who visited North Korea with Albright and dined extravagantly there. "It can't hurt, but whether it works, we don't know."

Responding to North Korea's nuclear test Oct. 9, the U.N. Security Council voted to ban military supplies and weapons shipments _ sanctions already imposed by the United States. It also banned sales of luxury goods but so far has left each country to define such items. Japan included beef, caviar and fatty tuna, along with expensive cars, motorcycles, cameras and more. Many European nations are still working on their lists.

U.S. intelligence officials who helped produce the Bush administration's list said Kim prefers Mercedes, BMW and Cadillac cars; Japanese and Harley Davidson motorcycles; Hennessy XO cognac from France and Johnny Walker Scotch whisky; Sony cameras and Japanese air conditioners.

Kim is reportedly under his physician's orders to avoid hard liquor and prefers French wines. He also is said to own an extensive movie library of more than 10,000 titles and prefers films about James Bond and Godzilla, along with Clint Eastwood's 1993 drama, "In the Line of Fire," and Whitney Houston's 1992 love story, "The Bodyguard."

Much of the U.S. information about Kim's preferences comes from defectors, including Kenji Fujimoto, the Japanese chef who fled in 2001 and wrote a book about his time with the North Korean leader.

Monday, November 27, 2006

007, is he for real?

Saw the new bond flick over the weekend, I give it an 8 out of 10. Really want to read the books now, found this article that sheds some light on the differences between the character we have come to love on the big screen and the character as orginally penned by Fleming. very interesting...
Will the real James Bond please stand up?
27 November 2006
By DAN KAUFMAN
Sydney Morning Herald

It's hard to imagine Sean Connery's James Bond stripped naked, tied to a bottomless cane chair and genitally tortured until convinced he's impotent, although some feminists might wish he had been. Yet this happens in Ian Fleming's first Bond novel, Casino Royale.

It's just one of many situations Bond finds himself in that would never have appeared on screen until, perhaps, the newest Bond movie is released next month.

The popularity of the suave secret agent of the films has obscured the darker, flawed and altogether more human Bond of the books. There are no glib wisecracks, no high-tech gadgets to pull him out of scrapes (he even bemoans this in From Russia With Love); he often screws up his missions, resulting in brutal torture at the hands of his enemies, and when he drags himself back to the office he is berated by his boss.

Even the girls sometimes reject him: in Moonraker he watches, crestfallen, as the girl whose life he saved walks off with another man, while in From Russia with Love we're told that Tiffany Case, his love affair from the previous book, has left him after a painful break-up.

The latest Bond movie is Casino Royale and the filmmakers assure us it will be more faithful to the novel than previous films have been. The gadgets are gone, Bond is slightly less superhuman and the excruciating genital torture scene is supposed to be enacted. But fans of the books shouldn't get too excited; judging from the trailers, it seems that yet again Fleming's introspective civil servant has been discarded for a swaggering action hero.

This is, however, to be expected. After all, had Fleming's deeply misogynistic, racist and occasionally impotent Bond been accurately portrayed on film in the first place, he would never have become a pop culture hero.

"Every civilisation has the hero it deserves," Yuri Zhukov once wrote in the Soviet newspaper Pravda and, though he was criticising Bond's capitalistic vices, the quote still comes to mind when thinking about the transformation Bond had to undergo to appeal to cinema audiences.

Fleming had intended the books to be a form of escapism, self-deprecatingly referring to them as "pillow fantasies of the bang-bang kiss-kiss variety" (his wife, incidentally, referred to them snidely as "Ian's pornography"), but he still made sure Bond was realistic enough to be accessible to readers.

The filmmakers thought differently and decided audiences wanted their action heroes to be flawless and uncomplicated, so they turned Bond into an indestructible sex machine who utters bon mots after casually dispatching villains.

"If Bond didn't win and get the girl, why watch?" says Steven Reschly, who teaches a film and history course called "James Bond and the 20th Century" at Truman State University in Missouri. "It's important to realise the movies are fantasies and as such require perfection."

One of the cinematic Bond's key qualities, for example, is his undying confidence, a trait most cinemagoers would love to have. It doesn't matter if Bond is about to be castrated by a laser or is chatting up a girl, he never doubts his abilities and his ego is always unchecked. This has not changed in the new film, with Daniel Craig's Bond even admitting to having a "fantastically formed arse", a statement that would have made Fleming's almost painfully humble Bond cringe.

As befits most cinematic action heroes, Craig's Bond also has no qualms about killing. Yet in the novels, Bond agonises to the point where, in Goldfinger, he decides to drown his guilt by getting so drunk he "would have to be carried to bed by whatever tart he picked up".

Toby Miller, professor of cultural studies and cultural policy at New York University and the author of an essay called James Bond's Penis (published in The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader), says the literary Bond's self-contemplation would have detracted from the visual spectacle that became the hallmark of Bond films. "Cinema of the action kind necessitates movement rather than reflection," he says. "Figures in film can become important without being heroic - think of Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas - but not in high-octane Hollywood adventure."

Stephen Watt, one of the editors of Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007, agrees. "While a number of film icons and heroes in the '60s and '70s were deeply flawed - I think of Paul Newman as Hud and Fast Eddie in The Hustler - they usually appeared in more serious films," he says. "An unrealistic Bond became an icon; Hud and Fast Eddie never did."

The first Bond films were released in the '60s and, as James Chapman notes in Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films, the character of Bond changed to reflect the social and political conditions of that time. The conservative civil servant of the novels, written in the '50s, would have seemed old-fashioned to moviegoers and the rebellious, cavalier, camp and extraordinarily promiscuous Bond of the films became a poster boy for the swinging '60s. "James Bond has developed into the biggest mass-cult hero of the decade," Time magazine proclaimed.

"The women were supposed to want him, the men to want to be him," Miller says. "He becomes a less reflective and troubled figure and more straightforwardly heroic."

And far more virile. Fleming's Bond was certainly fond of women: both Casino Royale and the first Playboy magazine were published in 1953 and the womanising spy was often associated with the magazine. But it was the movies that really turned Bond into a playboy of almost sex-addict proportions.

In the books Bond usually sleeps with one woman a novel, the same number Fleming once noted that any handsome young chap would bed while on a trip abroad; on film he beds an array of women who simply fall into his arms, sometimes several in the same night. And unlike the books, where Bond often worries about his performance and at the end of You Only Live Twice is temporarily impotent, on screen the secret agent's mojo never goes missing.

Fleming always wanted his character to be portrayed seriously but the filmmakers decided from the start to turn the movies into comedies that spoofed the spy genre until, as Watt says, "in the Roger Moore era [they] descended into almost comic book caricature and self-parody". This offended countless fans of the books, who included the conservative literary figures Kingsley Amis (who once referred to the films as "piling outrage upon outrage") and Ayn Rand.

"Rand adored the 007 books for what she saw as their unabashed romanticism and heroic transcendence but she was appalled by the films, because they were laced with 'the sort of humour intended to undercut Bond's stature, to make him ridiculous'," Miller says.

"Any scan of the popular sociology and literary criticism of the time indicates how threatening this was to the [political] right, which drew analogies between the decline of empire and the rise of unruly personal libertarianism. In the novels, for all his supposed association with fast living, high-octane sex and a dazzling life, Bond basically runs away from sex, leaving the desiring women who surround him in a state of great anxiety."

Then again, it could have been Bond's continual threat of spanking that had the women worried. Fleming was known to have a spanking fetish and in almost every novel Bond tells a girl (usually one with a masculine and muscular derriere) that he wants to spank her.

Rape is portrayed as a fantasy in several of the books. In Casino Royale Bond wants to marry Vesper Lynd (the girl he refers to at one point as a "silly bitch") because having sex with her has "the sweet tang of rape", a line that is unlikely to make it onto the screen.

Racism is rife, too: a chapter in Live and Let Die, for example, is titled "Nigger Heaven" and describes a room in a Harlem club in which the "air was thick with smoke and the sweet, feral smell of two hundred negro bodies".

There's little doubt Fleming made Bond an idealised version of himself and many of the author's vices are revealed through his hero. Bond lost his virginity to a prostitute as a teenager (although Fleming caught gonorrhoea and, out of embarrassment, his family shipped him off to a Swiss private school) and Bond also shares his creator's love of liquor and smoking.

On average Bond binges on half a bottle of spirits and 60 to 70 cigarettes a day and, like any real man with a substance abuse problem, he's not always at his physical best. Thunderball, the ninth Bond novel, begins with Bond staring bleakly at himself in the bathroom mirror, hung over and coughing so hard from smoking that black spots swim before his eyes. M, the boss to whom Bond is always obedient and servile (unlike the movies), then orders him to go to a detox clinic. Feeling angry and helpless, Bond walks out of the office and throws a tantrum in front of Miss Moneypenny.

Unlike his fearless cinematic namesake, Bond becomes scared in almost every novel, even when flying. When his plane hits turbulence in Live and Let Die, for example, he grips his armrest until his hand hurts and swears, sweats and imagines all the horrible ways in which he can helplessly die.

So when the filmmakers say the new film will be closer to Fleming's Bond, you need to take this with a grain of salt. After all, this claim has been made before, most recently with the Timothy Dalton films. These were more realistic, though the usually unflattering character traits of Fleming's Bond that lent him some humanity were removed and audiences ended up with generic, cold and ruthless action thrillers. For all the faults in the early Connery and Moore films, at least they had their distinctive quirks, such as Bond's habitual flirting with Miss Moneypenny and taunting of Q (neither of which appears in the new movie).

While Fleming considered the early Bond films cartoonish, he wasn't overly upset by them and even slightly changed the Bond in his books as a result of their success.

Nonetheless, what makes the Bond of Fleming's books so likeable is that he was the type of man who would have despised his cinematic double. In From Russia With Love, for example, a girl tries to flatter him by saying he's like a movie star.

Bond, naturally, is horrified. "For God's sake! That's the worst insult you can pay a man!" he exclaims.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Marx Cafe tonight!





Most glorious dj set awaits you for make triumphant benefit glorious city of DC. So to make be know tonight between what hours of the pm known to man as 10 and 2, mighty dj mattb commence spinning of records for sound enjoyment proud patrons of Marx Café. You will come, yes? I make my word to you much bobbing of heads happen in steady rhythm with juicy cuts emanating from amplified speaker system. I make good time for you, snappy good happenings; like trip to Ukrainian dentist although lacking putrid spit rinse cycle and diesel fumes from soviet tractors. You not want to miss!

3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW

Monday, November 20, 2006

The end of the UK?

Did William Wallace die in vain? It's interesting to see how deeply tied to the oil in the North Sea this whole issue seems to be.
The End of the United Kingdom?

London, England - One of the world's most successful multinational states, and a key ally of the United States, could in a few months time start to unravel: I mean, of course, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The process will be set in motion if the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) ends up the largest party in the Scottish parliament after elections next May. This is a distinct possibility. The break up of the UK will not be inevitable even if the SNP do dominate the parliament, but it will certainly make the political classes of Britain -- and perhaps of the U.S. and the main EU states too -- think hard about the point and value of the union to them. (Ironically, the elections will come just a matter of days after the 300th anniversary of the creation of modern Britain when the Scottish and English parliaments were merged in 1707.)

Most people in England who think about these things assumed that the "Scottish question" had been dealt with when, as one of the first acts of the Blair government elected in 1997, it announced the creation of a devolved Scottish parliament with wide ranging powers over domestic matters. But disillusionment with the performance of that parliament (and the UK parliament in London), the long-standing belief that the English "stole" Scotland's oil and gas, and the postmodern temptations of identity politics, have put independence back on the agenda (a recent opinion poll found 51 percent of Scots favoring it).

And a new front has now been opened up in the independence debate from the political right. Writing in the latest issue of London-based Prospect magazine, Michael Fry, a conservative Scottish historian, argues that the only way to revive the moderate right in Scotland and to better reflect the country's conservative Calvinistic soul is for former Tories like himself to back the SNP. If enough Tories heed Fry's advice it makes the likelihood of a SNP victory in May even more likely.

That would be bad news for Gordon Brown, the British chancellor, who should be taking over from Tony Blair as prime minister soon after those May elections. Brown, who is a Scot, is well aware that following devolution many people in England question whether it is possible for a Scot to become prime minister -- hence he has been making many speeches about the importance of Britishness. (Unfortunately for him Britishness continues to become less meaningful, especially to the Scots, as those things that helped to create and sustain it such as empire, world wars, Protestantism and the labor movement, fade from memory and importance.) If the chatter about full independence started to grow louder, as it surely would with an SNP-dominated parliament, that could cast further doubt on Brown's standing as an all-British prime minister. It might also tempt David Cameron's reviving Conservative party to finally cast themselves as an English party.

Losing Scotland's 5 million people would not be a huge blow to England's size (more than 50m) and would not damage its main economic and cultural assets. But it would dent its standing in the wider world and might call into question things like the UK's permanent membership of the UN security council. More important it would be another depressing victory for tribalism. The Anglo-Scottish double act has been a rare example of successful multi-culturalism, with the moral earnestness of the Scots leavening the famous pragmatism of the English. On a more practical note, the Ireland model -- with its dynamic economy, and national self-confidence -- is increasingly popular in SNP circles. Yet Ireland looks far more like America than the social-democratic Scandinavian states that the left-wing Scots Nationalists admire. To emulate the Irish model, the Scots would probably need to cut public spending by one-third, not a good start to life as an independent nation.

Friday, November 10, 2006

UK orders nimrods

This just in, America orders 13 dipshits, Korea has a standing request for half a dozen dumasses and Russian procurement officers recently completed negotiations for 8 blockheads. Woka Woka!!! sorry couldn't resist, HAPPY WEEKEND!
U.K. orders 12 next-generation Nimrods
July 21, 2006
BAE Systems will build 12 next-generation Nimrod MRA4 maritime patrol aircraft for the U.K. Royal Air Force under a deal announced at the Farnborough International Airshow in London.
The contract, announced by U.K. Defence Secretary Des Browne, was valued at 1.1 billion British pounds ($2 billion).
The MRA4 is the successor to the current Nimrod MR2.
The MRA4, which made its maiden flight in August 2004, is a maritime reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering platform with the potential to carry a wide range of modern weapons. The aircraft features a new integrated mission system that enables the crew to gather, process and display up to 20 times more technical and strategic data than the MR2 variant, BAE said in a news release. The new aircraft has range of more than 6,000 miles and a 14-hours loiter time without refueling.
Three MRA4 development aircraft have conducted more than 125 trial flights, including live link-ups with Royal Navy destroyers.
Delivery of the first production aircraft to is planned for 2009.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Tom Noe's fate to be decided by regular joes.

Send him to Jail! To jail with em'! Join trafficant, and cunningham and Abrahamhoff (and harris?) I fully expect to see a long prison term for this lying self serving scumbag. I love how his defense attourney claims that he had no reason to steal this money, because he was already a millioniare in his twenties. Well how do you think he got there? LOL, by pulling scams like these. rats all of em'!
Ohio Coin Dealer's Trial Handed to Jury
Nov 8th - 9:51am

By JAMES HANNAH Associated Press Writer

TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) - The case of a former Republican fundraiser accused of pilfering a $50 million state investment in rare coins was handed over to a jury Wednesday.

om Noe, 52, has pleaded not guilty to charges of theft, money laundering, forgery and corrupt activity. Defense attorneys have portrayed him as a victim of bad bookkeeping.

The jurors must weigh three weeks of testimony from more than 50 witnesses.

The investment scandal centering on Noe, who was once a go-to man for the GOP, was one of the reasons Ohio voters ousted many Republicans in the election Tuesday.

Democrats say Noe was entrusted with the investments because of his political connections. The scandal permeated campaign advertisements and debates for state offices and led to charges against GOP Gov. Bob Taft.

The defense, which rested Monday without calling any witnesses, said there was no evidence he got the coin-fund contract because of connections.

Prosecutor John Weglian said in closing arguments Tuesday that Noe, a prominent coin dealer, wasted no time dipping into $25 million that the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation gave him to invest in rare coins.

"The corrupt activity began the moment he got the money," Weglian said.

The insurance fund for injured workers gave Noe $25 million in 1998, followed by another $25 million in 2001.

Prosecutors said Noe lent the money to friends. Former employees said he borrowed some of the state's money to pay off business loans and boost his coin business when sales were slow.

Defense attorney John Mitchell said Noe had permission from the bureau to invest the money and that the coin fund produced $7.9 million in profits over seven years.

Defense attorney Bill Wilkinson said the bureau was so pleased, it gave Noe the second $25 million to invest.

Weglian said Noe violated the bureau contract by failing to keep accurate records, and $3.3 million was missing from the coin fund between September 2003 and May 2005, when Noe was relieved of his duties as the fund manager.

Wilkinson said Noe had no reason to steal the money, adding that he became a millionaire at age 25.

Prosecutors have not said whether Noe is suspected of using the money to make campaign contributions to Republicans, including President Bush and Gov. Bob Taft.

The investigation into Noe's coin investments led to separate ethics charges against Taft, who pleaded no contest last year to failing to report golf outings and other gifts. About a dozen others, including some of Taft's aides, also were charged.

n a separate case, Noe pleaded guilty earlier this year to federal charges accusing him of funneling $45,000 to Bush's re-election campaign and was sentenced last month to two years and three months in prison. He won't begin that sentence until after the state charges are resolved.

(Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Go Vote, then party @ MARX!!1

Go out and vote, cause it's election day here in the USA. Vote democratic and often!

annndd.... It's also tuesday, so I'll be at marx cafe from 10 - 2 tonight. seeya there!

3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW

Monday, November 06, 2006

Katherine Harris

Her answer to the second question is pretty funny. This woman is nutz!

Thursday, November 02, 2006