Spyware and Security - PC World's Info Center

"Your one-stop source for tools and tips to help you fight spyware and maintain your PC's security."

good place to start.

Revisiting the 2004 election fraud.

Yeah, I've been wondering when someone would bring this up again. There are too many unanswered questions, and we can't really go around telling other countries how to hold honest elections, if our own are in question.

"The point of our revisiting the last election, rather, is to see exactly what the damage was so that the people can demand appropriate reforms. Those who say we should "move on" from that suspicious race and work instead on "bigger issues" – like electoral reform – are urging the impossible; for there has never been a great reform that was not driven by some major scandal. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization," Thomas Jefferson said, "it expects what never was and never will be." That much-quoted line foretells precisely what has happened to us since "the news" has turned into a daily paraphrase of Karl Rove's fevered dreams. Just as 2+2=5 in Orwell's Oceania, so here today the United States just won two brilliant military victories, 9/11 could not have been prevented, we live in a democracy (like the Iraqis), and last year's presidential race "was, at the end of the day, an honest election." Such claims, presented as the truth, are nothing but faith-based reiteration, as valid as the notions that one chooses to be homosexual, that condoms don't prevent the spread of HIV, and that the universe was made 6,000 years ago."

When Armageddon Gets No Press

"What has become of the print and TV media watchdogs who hounded President Nixon from office because he lied about when he learned of a minor burglary of no consequence in itself?

What became of the watchdog media that bayed after President Reagan because some low level neoconservative officials sold arms to Iran and diverted the money to anti-communist insurgents in Latin America?

President Clinton was impeached by the House, though not convicted by the Senate, for lying about a sexcapade with a White House intern.

Now that we really need them, the watchdog media has hired out as public relations and propaganda shills for the Bush administration and the neocon network.

The entire Bush administration-not merely the president-is involved in the most extraordinary lies and fabrication of false intelligence claims in order to lead America into an unwarranted and illegal invasion of Iraq, an invasion that has cost the US taxpayers $300 billion and resulted in the deaths and maiming of tens of thousands of people."

And while the media can no longer be called anything but "co-conspirators", it still isn't really necessary to dig deep at all, in order to know where we're heading. It's all plain and obvious to all who've paid attention.

We used to proclaim our uniqueness in the world, because of governmental checks and balances, and especially our Constitutional rights. Well, all that's already gone, and we haven't raised any fuss about it. That means we never deserved it in the first place.

"The executive, armed with a compliant media, will have war-making power subject only to successful PR spin. It means the final end of the people's right to declare war via elected representatives in Congress.

The few remaining restraints on the executive's ability to detain people indefinitely without charges will be removed. This power will silence the Internet.

Spiteful neighbors, employees, former spouses, whomever will gain the power to report any disliked person. The anti-terrorist apparatus needs victims to demonstrate its effectiveness, and as warrants, hearings, and evidence are no longer required, Americans will simply disappear like Soviet citizens in the Stalin era."

Spyware Warrior: Anti-Spyware Feature Comparison

"As spyware and adware have become increasingly powerful and difficult to remove, developers of anti-spyware programs have added a wider range of functionality to their applications to give users more powerful tools as well as greater control over those tools. Moreover, although anti-spyware applications have long resembled standard anti-virus applications in many ways, they have also started to acquire their own distinctive set of features in order to help users deal with the unique problems posed by spyware and adware. Given the bewildering array of programs and features available to users looking for anti-spyware applications, users may find it difficult to usefully compare anti-spyware programs and their feature sets.

To remedy that potential confusion, this page presents two Feature Comparison Tables for the major anti-spyware programs currently available."

The Milgram Experiment: A Lesson in Depravity

A lesson in depravity, peer pressure, and the power of authority

The aftermath of the Holocaust and the events leading up to World War II, the world was stunned with the happenings in Nazi German and their acquired surrounding territories that came out during the Eichmann Trials. Eichmann, a high ranking official of the Nazi Party, was on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The questions is, "Could it be that Eichmann, and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"

Stanley Milgram answered the call to this problem by performing a series of studies on the Obedience to Authority. Milgram's work began at Harvard where he was working towards his Ph.D. The experiments on which his initial research was based were done at Yale from 1961-1962.

As the article says, the experiments spanned 25 years, and was done in several countries. The results confirm what I've believed for a long time, that many of us are quite capable of committing all types of behaviors that we'd find very difficult to admit to, even to ourselves.

Notable, Quotable Presidents

Some nice quotes here from a few of our Presidents. A few that I like;

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
--Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to (Col.) William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864, five months before his assasination

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."--Abraham Lincoln

"Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first."
--Ronald Reagan, March 2, 1977

"The best way to enhance freedom in other lands is to demonstrate here that our democratic system is worthy of emulation."
--James E. Carter

"We Americans have no commission from God to police the world."
--Benjamin Harrison

"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
--George Washington, Treaty of Tripoli, 1796

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."
--Harry S. Truman

"I glance at the headlines just to kind of get a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves."
--George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Sept. 21, 2003

Ok, so which one of the above, just seems horribly out of place, hmm?

Weblog Ethics Survey Results

Report Summary:


As the prevalence and social influence of weblogs continue to increase, the issue of the ethics of bloggers is relevant not only to the blogging community, but also to people outside it.
This study explored ethical beliefs and practices of two distinct groups of bloggers--personal and non-personal--through a worldwide web survey. Over a period of three weeks, 1,224 responses were collected and analysed.
Our findings show that these two groups are distinctively different in demographics, blogging experiences, and habits. We also found that there are significant differences between personal and non-personal bloggers in terms of the ethical beliefs they value and the ethical practices to which they adhere.


Key Findings:


Our findings indicate that 73% of the bloggers surveyed said that their weblogs are personal while the remaining 27% said that their weblogs are non-personal. Further investigation of, these two groups revealed many significant differences between personal and non-personal bloggers.

Interesting results they have here. I fall very neatly into the non-personal blogger catagory, and damn proud of it too!! Unless I actually know the person, I couldn't care less for the "What I did today" blogs.

Terror attacks are response to military actions

Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, has put together a comprehensive data bank of every suicide terrorist attack (315) in the world since 1980.

"What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common," notes Pape in his book, Dying to Win, "is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland." Pape also observes that once a military occupation ends, the suicide terrorism tends to stop.

I could go back even farther than 1980, to find examples throughout the 20th century, and with very little effort, throughout human history, though not all involve suicide attacks.

I remember the day Iranians took American hostages from our embassy in Iran. The day they took them, I knew exactly why, without even waiting for "official" US government explanations or media hype. For me, knowing our history with Iran, I knew how pissed they were at not only our support for the Shahs' repressive regime, but also the fact that we installed it in the first place by subverting their legitimate election. We didn't like the guy they elected, so we supported a coup that would lead their people into about 25 years of U.S. sponsored dictatorship. It was for a good cause though, we needed an ally in the region besides Israel, for the Cold War. That justified their suffering, didn't it? If you think so, then consider how you would feel if your leaders were installed by a foreign power, and trained them to suppress and brutalize you.

Somehow I don't think you'd like it. Such actions by our own government led to our contempt and hatered for the very people who struck back in frustration at what we'd done to them first. We hated them because we preferred to believe that they were just evil people, rather than in the truth, that had already been revealed to the public, by our government, just a few years prior. We chose to continue believing we had been innocent victims when they took our hostages. We kept it in the spotlight day after day, with government and media analysts that nitpicked over every reason in the world for their treacherous actions towards such innocents as ourselves, and gave only minor lip service to what we'd done to them. We could've put a stop to their suffering before it led up to "America Held Hostage", but instead chose to look the other way, for the sake of our Cold War stratagy.

That happened throughout the world, and in most cases, we paid a price for our arrogance, but not nearly the price paid by our pawns.

You know, it's funny how, if you ask most people about owning up to personal responsibility, they'll agree that people should be held accountable for their actions, but when it comes to the actions of our "representatives", we live in some fantasy world, where they can do whatever they want, with our ignorant blessings, as long as it's off shore. We all can name countless examples of (domestic) government mismanagement, deceptions, and fraud, but when it comes to foreign policy decisions and their consequences, we naively believe they've somehow magically become competent and always look out for our best interests. We continue to believe in the age old fallacy that says that only the elite are qualified to comprehend the intricacies of international politics. Bullshit!

Stop living in denial, and start demanding our representitives treat the people of the world with the same respect and common decency that we demand they treat us, otherwise.......