-Caveat Lector-
RadTimes # 89 October, 2000
An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities.
"We're living in rad times!"
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Contents:
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--Anti-Capitalist Youths Challenge IMF in Montreal
--Protesters' message reaches economic meeting in Canada
--Global Stench
--The New Asterix
--Ecuador asks U.S. for $160 mln in anti-drug aid
Linked stories:
*Fingerprint Security Gets Handier
*Selling Votes or Peddling Lies?
*In Search of Cyber Humanity
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Begin stories:
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Anti-Capitalist Youths Challenge IMF in Montreal
Students, Cops Clash At Bankers' Summit
By Josina Dunkel
Montreal
First in Seattle, then Washington, then Prague, now
Montreal. Once again the youths of a major city clashed with
the International Monetary Fund and the so-called free-trade
forces.
In a militant but mostly peaceful demonstration Oct. 23,
hundreds of protesters expressed their anger at the Group of
20 conference scheduled to begin the following day in
Montreal.
The crowd--mostly students--chanted in French and English
and danced to drums in front of the Sheraton Centre, site of
the conference.
A few students threw paint and eggs at the hotel, and a
plate glass window was broken.
According to the G-20 Web site, "In Sept. 1999 in
Washington, D.C., the finance ministers of the Group of
Seven (G-7) leading industrialized nations announced the
creation of the Group of Twenty (G-20). This new
international forum of finance ministers and central bank
governors represents 19 countries, the European Union and
the Bretton Woods Institutions (the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank)."
The G-20 include both major imperialist powers and oppressed
countries. They are: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Britain,
Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy,
Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South
Korea, Turkey, the United States and the European Union.
One protester told the Canadian Broadcasting Co. evening
news, "The G-20, the IMF and their policymakers require
violence. The very policies they implement are violent by
nature. The fact that 19,000 children die each day in the
Third World because of IMF restructuring policies--I think
that is violent."
Police provoked the protesters to lash out. They pushed the
crowd back and chanted, "Move, move, move," to the menacing
beat of their billy clubs smacking their shields.
The cops were clearly prepared for the situation they
created, having worn riot gear all afternoon. A Molotov
cocktail was thrown at the cops, who responded with a gas
that choked the young crowd.
But the standoff wasn't over yet. Riot police, backed up by
the cavalry, repeatedly charged into the crowd to move the
protesters off the major street they were occupying.
While the protesters would fall back, moments later they
would surge forward to continue their action. Some pelted
the cops with rocks and pieces of a fence they were
dismantling. One cop was injured and seen limping away with
the support of two other riot police. Two other cops were
also reported injured.
Several protesters were aided by medics, mostly for the
effects of the gas. Thirty-nine were arrested. The
demonstrators marched away, vowing to return the following
day. Bigger, louder protests were expected at the conference
opening.
While the protest here was much smaller than those recently
held in Seattle, Washington and Prague, there was a high
degree of militancy. People expressed fierce opposition to
the cruelties of the so-called free trade system being
forced on the poor of the world by the United States, Canada
and the other imperialist powers.
Not surprisingly, Canadian Finance Minister Paul Martin, the
conference chairperson, refused to come out of the hotel to
meet with the protesters.
----
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Nov. 2, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Protesters' message reaches economic meeting in Canada
October 25, 2000
MONTREAL (AP) -- After two days of demonstrations that deteriorated
into ugly battles with police, some of the world economic leaders who
gathered here insist they hear protesters' message and want to tackle the
problems of globalization.
Police pushed about 200 protesters away from the hotel where finance
ministers and central bank governors from the Group of 20 were meeting
Tuesday night. Seven demonstrators were arrested.
Inside the downtown Sheraton Hotel, Canadian Finance Minister Paul Martin
said he and others at the meeting, which convenes again Wednesday, shared
the fears of some protesters over the distribution of wealth from
globalization.
If the benefits from integrating the world's economies "are limited only to
the privileged few, it's not going to work. It's unfair," said Martin, the
G-20 chairman.
Created last year, the G-20 aims to facilitate dialogue between the
world's richest industrial nations in the Group of Seven and some of the
biggest developing nations, including India, China and Brazil.
"It is incumbent on us to essentially provide developing countries with the
tools they require to be able to participate in globalization," Martin
said, urging financial leaders to tackle issues like poverty, debt relief
and corruption.
Still, Martin labeled intolerable the violence of Monday night, when some
demonstrators hurled chunks of asphalt, smoke bombs, bottles and other
debris at police. Thirty-nine protesters were detained.
The protesters, like those who have gathered at other global finance
meetings since one in Seattle last December, complained the private meeting
would protect the interests of wealthy nations without benefiting
the world's poor.
"The large majority of people feel disenfranchised and powerless," said
Nadia Alexan of the Council of Canadians, which helped organize the
protest. "The corporations and multinationals impose their ideology of the
free market on citizens."
McGill University student Heather Fisher criticized the closed-door policy
at the meeting.
"We don't even know what they're discussing," she said. "Maybe they're
coming up with good solutions, but I really don't think so."
Delegates from the European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund and
World Bank joined the G-20 gathering.
Canadian officials said the ministers and bank governors were likely to
discuss unstable oil prices at some point.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, speaking in Washington on Tuesday
before leaving for Montreal, called for reforming weak banking systems in
the developing world as a way to protect what he described as a recovery
among emerging market economies. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan
Greenspan joined Summers at the talks.
Protests by a broad coalition of groups concerned about the environment,
poverty, workers' rights and other issues have become commonplace at
international meetings involving global trade.
Street violence disrupted the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle,
and clashes also have occurred at gatherings this year, including an IMF
meeting in Washington, an Organization of American States meeting in
Ontario and a World Bank meeting in Prague, Czech Republic.
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Global Stench
<http://www.laweekly.com/ink/00/48/news-ehrenreich2.shtml.shtml>
Come to Tijuana to experience globalization
October 20 - 26, 2000
by Ben Ehrenreich
There is perhaps no better place to study the effects of the
globalization of the world economy than the TijuanaSan Diego border region.
There, migrant labor camps abut the bountiful malls of Anglo suburbs, just
miles from streets where barefoot Indian children uprooted from southern
Mexico beg well-fed tourists for pocket change. Billions of dollars a year
flow in to keep the largest naval fleet in the world lethal and afloat just
offshore and across a high steel fence from the thousands of men and women
who flock from every corner of Mexico to sell their labor for a dollar an
hour in factories owned by American, Asian and European
corporations. Others pay small fortunes and risk their lives for a chance
to enter the land of plenty, awaited on every ridge by armed immigration
agents, while, in a stark microcosm of global power relations, young women
from rural villages fill the bars and line the streets to sell their bodies
to American men, carefree and with dollars to spend. The border region is,
in the words of anthropologist Juan Manuel Sandoval, a speaker at last
weekend's Festival of the Globalphobics, "a laboratory for globalization."
Held in the Casa de Cultura, a grand brick building on a hill overlooking
downtown Tijuana and, in the distance, the bare hills of southern San Diego
County, the conference took its name from a term coined by former Mexican
President Ernesto Zedillo to belittle the enemies of his neoliberal
economic policies. It was organized by activist groups on both sides of the
border united by their rejection of corporate globalization "in favor of a
democratic, people's movement for a globalization with human rights,
economic justice, social well-being, environmental sustainability and
international solidarity."
Groups from San Diego and Tijuana have worked together sporadically in the
past, protesting the militarization of the border, the exploitation of
maquiladora workers, and police brutality in both cities. But, says
organizer Enrique Dávalos, "even though we are very close, sometimes we are
very far." The conference, he says, was meant to be a first step toward
creating formal networks of collaboration for a binational movement to
fight the injustices brought about by corporate globalization. It was
inspired, according to Dávalos, who teaches history at San Diego's City
College and the University of Baja California, both by the Zapatista
movement, which in 1994 first pushed the excesses of globalization into the
world's gaze, and, more recently, by last year's shutdown of the World
Trade Organization meetings in Seattle, which united labor, environmental
and human-rights groups in a common fight.
A similarly diverse array of forces was present at the Festival of the
Globalphobics. About 200 people attended Saturday's workshops. Activists
from Amnesty International, the Green Party, Global Exchange, the Committee
for Solidarity in the Americas and other groups crossed the border from the
north, as did an entire class of students from Claremont's Pitzer College.
Representatives of the Zapatista National Liberation Front (the civilian
wing of the Zapatista National Liberation Army), the Tijuana-based Workers
Support Center, the Baja California Women's Network, the environmental
organization Grupo Gaviota and many others came from Tijuana, Ensenada,
Rosarito and Mexico City.
In workshops on subjects ranging from the environment and labor rights to
immigration and the militarization of the border, activists tied their
individual concerns to the broader context of neoliberal policies and trade
agreements like NAFTA that, in the words of Global Exchange organizer
Juliette Beck, "have meant that, far too often, human rights are
sacrificed, the environment is sacrificed, all in the name of corporate
profits."
If the effects of corporate globalization are often something of an
abstraction for American activists, they are very real for Lourdes Luján
and Olga Rendón, who drove from Tijuana's Colonia Chilpancingo to the
conference. Chilpancingo is a neighborhood of more than 1,000 families
perched just beneath the large industrial park at Otay Mesa, where many of
the colonia's inhabitants work. In 1994, Metales y Derivados, a lead
smelter and car-battery recycler, closed and abandoned its plant on Otay
Mesa, leaving behind thousands of tons of lead waste and corroding
batteries, contaminating the local water supply. The water that runs
through an open arroyo stretching from the mesa into the colonia, which
passes through the grounds of the neighborhood kindergarten, according to
Rendón, is black and foul-smelling. "Children play in it," she says. "They
don't know."
The neighborhood suffers high rates of infant mortality, asthma, birth
defects and cancer. When both the plant's owner (who lives, Rendón says,
"en el otro lado") and the Mexican government failed to clean up the site,
community activists brought their case to the NAFTA-created Commission for
Environmental Cooperation (CEC), which took a year and a half before
agreeing to investigate the situation in May. "They haven't done anything,"
Rendón complains. "They know all about the problem, and they haven't done
anything."
It is unlikely that they will. The NAFTA "side agreements" that offer
nominal environmental and labor-rights guarantees, says Guillermo Mayer, an
aide to state Senator Tom Hayden, are completely unenforceable. The most
the CEC can do is make the results of its investigation public; it cannot
compel corporations or governments to act. In another case this year,
workers from Tijuana's Han Young maquiladora, who had been prevented from
forming an independent union, were beaten when they tried to attend a
seminar set up under the NAFTA process to discuss their situation.
Mayer contrasts this process with the recourse NAFTA gives corporations to
fight local laws that interfere with their ability to profit. When Governor
Gray Davis signed an order banning the gasoline additive MTBE, a carcinogen
that worms its way into ground water, the Canadian company Methanex, which
produces a component of the additive, used NAFTA to sue the United States,
demanding damages of $970 million or the repeal of the ban. In a similar
case, the government of Mexico was forced to pay a Newport Beachbased
company $16.7 million when the state of San Luis Potosí refused to let it
build a toxic-waste dump. The closed-door tribunal that decides such cases
is made up of just three individuals, one representing the corporation, one
representing the offending nation, and another chosen by both
parties. "This is a situation where a company has the same power as an
entire nation," Mayer says, adding, "Globalization is marginalizing
institutions, not just people institutions like the California Legislature."
Some specific proposals came out of the weekendlong conference, including a
campaign against Operation Gatekeeper, the border-patrol program that has
heavily fortified populated border regions like San Diego and resulted in
the deaths of nearly 600 immigrants; and protests on the border and in the
migrant-farm-worker community of San Quintin set to coincide with an April
2001 meeting in Quebec to establish a Free Trade Agreement for the
Americas, a NAFTA-like trade agreement that would cover all of North and
South America. The weekend's most important accomplishment, most
participants agreed, was to open lines of communication between the
Californias and lay the framework for a binational network of activist
groups that could coordinate efforts on both sides of the border. "It's
historic," said Global Exchange's Beck. "To transcend national differences
and class differences is very challenging. This conference has achieved
that. We've definitely planted seeds for long-term organizing."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The New Asterix
Attacking McDonald's made French farmer José Bové a folk hero.
Now he is taking on other multinationals.
Wednesday, October 25, 2000 in the Times of London
by Charles Bremner
Slightly built and clad in jeans and an old V-neck sweater, the middle-aged
sheep farmer
hardly cut a dash as we walked into a Chinese eatery in the drab Paris
suburb of Bagnolet.
But he might have been a rock or football star. A quick hush was followed
by a buzz as the
customers realised that they had a celebrity in their midst: José Bové, the
scourge of
McDonald's and national hero in the struggle to save the Gallic soul from
fast food and free
trade.
Bové's choice of the local Chinese was a typical touch for a man who has
used a campaign for
Roquefort, the quintessentially French cheese made from his ewes' milk, to
turn himself into a
figurehead in the global "citizens' movement" against the World Trade
Organisation.
Not surprisingly, he had refused my suggestion to repair to the nearby
branch of the company
whose mascot, Ronald McDonald, hangs lifesize from a noose in his Paris
office. A Big Mac would have been unthinkable for a man who has just been
sentenced to three months' jail for his celebrated
assault last year on the "McDo" restaurant under construction in his home
town of Millau.
The French still see McDonald's, which has some 800 booming outlets in the
country, as
rather exciting, if unpatriotic, Bové says as he tucks into his beef satay.
"If you question
people coming out of one, they're embarrassed. It's like they've just been
to a sex shop.
They say 'I just went to see what it was like and I won't be going back'."
With trademark pipe in hand, the moustachioed "Saint José" patiently
explains that his
peasants' revolt has nothing against the Americans or the British, even if
hamburgers were
his target and Gandhi his model for resistance against the oppressor. "Our
struggle is not
with the American 'Great Satan' it's with the multinationals. A lot of
them happen to be
American. I tell the Americans that what we did in dismantling the
McDonald's restaurant
was what they did at Boston when they threw the English tea into the sea."
As for the British, they may not know much about food, but he admires the
anti-GMO
movement and is cultivating his ties with Scottish crofters and Welsh hill
farmers. And he
does not really object to all those anglais who have invaded southern
France in their Volvos
and Land Rovers."It's all right if they try to fit in and get to know the
farming people, even if
it's just for the holidays. What's bad, though, is the way they push up
prices. The worst are
the ghettoes of foreign-owned houses all those Dutch who bring their
holiday food with
them in their cars."
In little over a year, the war against "McDomination" has shot this
eloquent paysan from the
obscurity of his hill farm in the lower reaches of the Massif Central to
the status of icon.
Thanks to his assault on the Millau McDo, plus a talent for exuding
plain-man's indignation,
France has fallen in love with the charismatic Bové.
He is being hailed as a new Asterix, leading the plucky Gauls in defiance
of the new
Romans. A sort of Lech Walesa of the Internet, he is fêted as he jets
around the world
attending summits of the "new international", the "alternative global
network" that embraces
Third World activists, environmentalists and neo-hippies. In France he gets
up the nose of
the national farmers' union; mainstream politicians defer to him, admiring
his style but privately
deploring his Luddite counter-revolution.
A new figure emerged yesterday in the ranks of those who do not worship
Bové: his wife
Alice. She denounced him in his own union magazine for running a macho
organisation,
exploiting her and leaving her for another woman.
Most French may do their shopping in cut-price supermarkets, but more than
70 per cent of
the public back his campaign against la malbouffe the term that he
invented which
roughly translates as "horrible nosh".
His admirers, known locally as bovistes, include the likes of Anita
Roddick, the Body Shop
founder, and Ralph Nader, the veteran American campaigner who joined Bové
and the other
militants of the citizens' movement in the protests that disrupted last
December's Seattle
summit of the WTO. In July, after more than 40,000 people descended on
Millau to turn his
trial into a Woodstock-style happening, there were calls for him to stand
for the presidency.
Covered by US TV networks, the "Seattle-on-the-Tarn" spectacular put Bové
on the front
page of the New York Times and led an American magazine to list him as one
of the 50
movers and shakers of Europe.
As unlikely as the soft-spoken 47-year-old seems as a glamour figure, it is
not hard to see
what lies behind his rise to folk hero. The ingredients are good timing,
passion, showmanship
and clumsy tactics by the Americans and the French authorities.
With his ruddy cheeks and blunt manner, Bové may look like the authentic
paysan, but he
hardly hails from the backwoods of la France profonde. He was the son of
left-wing
university teachers and he spent four years of his early childhood with
them in Berkeley,
California. "I have strong memories of America," he says. "I really like
the United States.
The language is still in my ears and it really helps to be able to explain
things to the
Americans in English."
Henry Thoreau, the 19th-century Utopian, is one of his heroes. Bové opted
for the country
life when, along with Alice, his future wife, he dropped out of the
University of Bordeaux in
the wake of the 1968 student revolt and joined the back-to-the countryside
movement. He
spent a decade in the epic fight by leftist militants and small farmers to
wrest the Larzac
plateau, overlooking Millau, from the grips of the Ministry of Defence. He
squatted in an
empty farm and has stayed on the land since, raising two daughters and
becoming a voice
in the Confédération Paysanne, a radical movement opposed to big farm business.
Bové had already been given a suspended sentence for destroying genetically
modified
crops when Washington decided last year to punish Europe, and France in
particular, for
banning the import of US beef over the use of hormones. Incensed by a 100
per cent duty
slapped on Roquefort, Bové decided on "direct action" and descended with a
platoon of
fellow farmers and local protesters on the Millau McDonald's after
notifying the police of his
plans. "The Americans took Roquefort hostage, so we had to act beyond the
law to defend
ourselves," he says. The one-hour demolition job did not, however, meet the
docile response
that the gendarmes usually accord French farmers when they smash things.
Bové was arrested and briefly jailed after refusing to pay bail, becoming a
household name
for a country that always takes the side of the protester or the striker.
His glory was
ensured when he made the news raising his manacled hands in defiance. The
Millau trial
and unexpectedly harsh jail sentence, passed last month, has confirmed his
martyr's crown.
Bové says he brought about a "déclic" - a wake-up call - that touched
something in the
French psyche as fears over BSE, GMOs and food safety were compounding
longstanding
unease over the loss of French identity. "Hormones versus Roquefort. You
couldn't get a
better contrast between local quality and globalisation," he says. "It took
small farmers to
get people to make the link between farming, food and international politics."
"Le déclic could have happened anywhere, perhaps, but in France more than
anywhere one
of the first concerns for the individual is to know what's on their plates,
and it's through the
paysans that this has come about."
Bové's doctrine of "food sovereignty" - set out in a bestselling book -
proved potent for an
intellectual world that was boiling against the "imperialism" of world
trade and France's
socialist Government's supposed surrender to globalisation. He became the
darling of Le
Monde Diplomatique and other bibles of left-wing thinkers. For ordinary
people, Bové spoke
for the France of petits villages, red wine and honest paysans that
inhabits the Gallic
imagination.
Decoding "Bovémania", Jean Viard, a leading sociologist, says that Bové,
with his "exemplary
lifestyle" has established himself as "a bridge between the rural and urban
universe. In one man,
he is 'we the French'."
Not everyone is joining in the adulation. René Riesel, a colleague who
broke with the
Confédération last year, says: "José Bové is pure showman with all that
circus he cultivates
around anti-globalisation. The message is too narrow. He spouts rubbish and
collects slogans,
and Les Bovistes are sometimes extreme reactionaries."
The view seems to be shared by Alice Monier, Bové's wife, whose attack on
him in
Campagnes Solidaires, the union monthly, knocked some of the gilt off his
halo. In the
indignant tones of the wronged spouse, she proclaimed her "sadness and
disgust" over her
husband's "union of machos". Despite spending years as Bové's unpaid
assistant in his
campaigning, she did not receive a single phone call from his colleagues,
not even a Post-it
note on the back of a circular" to support her when their marriage broke up
last June. "In
other words, the old male tactic of cowardice," she says.
Bové insists that he is not setting himself up as a model, a political
leader or a French nationalist.
He applies a steam-age label to himself, claiming the mantle of
"anarcho-syndicalism".
"We are a counterpower and not a substitute for politics. We have no fixed
answer for
everything. We are trying to stir a two-pronged movement, linking the land
to globalisation,
making people think." In practice, this translates as a form of Utopian
protectionism. For a
start, the WTO should be rebuilt as a democratic regulator of trade rather
than an instrument of
"planetary dictatorship".
"Taxes should be used to encourage farmers in all countries to produce
quality food. People
should be educated to shun the industrialised malbouffe that is
impoverishing the rural world and
destroying a healthy way of life.
"People don't object to paying for defence, but feeding the population
properly is surely more important
than the atomic bomb."
He admits the contradiction, some might say hypocrisy, of a modern,
high-tech France that
worships his creed while rushing for convenience food and devouring
Hollywood films. France, he insists,
is less of a lost cause than such countries as America, because, outside
Paris at least, people remain attached to old values.
"We have remained a culture where the time spent at the table is not just
for consuming
food. It's a social and family moment. There is a frightening statistic
from America that the
average time a family sits at the table is six minutes. That hasn't
happened here yet."
As he launches his second book in a year, Bové has, of course, a few
contradictions of his
own. To the public, he is a humble paysan who spends time milking his
beloved ewes on
the Larzac plateau and struggling with local farmers against injustice. In
reality, he has
become a full-time personnage médiatique juggling TV appearances with near
non-stop
travel to citizens' summits from the Americas to East Asia.
Since January, he has managed to spend only a summer month on the farm,
which he runs
with a group of friends.
The travelling might have to stop if the appeal court at Montpellier
confirms his jail sentence
at a retrial in the New Year. Either way, the event is certain to produce
another explosion of
Bovémania.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ecuador asks U.S. for $160 mln in anti-drug aid
Reuters
10/23/00
By Anthony Boadle
WASHINGTON - Ecuador is asking the United States for up to $160 million to
create an economic buffer zone on its border with Colombia to stop the drug
trade from spreading, Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Heinz Moeller said.
Ecuador's wish list includes helicopters, fast boats to patrol rivers and
reconnaissance equipment to tighten control over the frontier, Moeller said.
In meetings with U.S. officials, Moeller said Ecuador needed between $30
million and $40 million a year in U.S. assistance to fund a $300 million,
four-year programme of social and economic development in its northern
border region.
Most of the funds would be spent on schools, health centres, new roads to
allow farmers to get their produce to market and alternative crops, Moeller
told a news conference.
Ecuador is bracing for the arrival of refugees from worsening violence in
Colombia, where the United States is funding an army offensive against
cocaine production protected by leftist guerrillas.
And Ecuador is not alone.
BRAZILIAN, VENEZUELAN FEARS
Brazil and Venezuela of Advanced International Studies.
"As a general fact, Plan Colombia will be a disaster because you are going
to have a large number of people moving across contiguous borders of
Colombia, whether it be refugees, guerrillas or paramilitaries," Roett said.
He said he did not foresee a militarization of the region but added that it
was too early to tell, as the plan was not yet in place.
"Clearly, there will be a very small military presence at the beginning, and
we have no idea whether it will escalate or not," Roett said.
Washington is pumping $1.6 billion over two years into the so-called Plan
Colombia, mostly in military helicopters and training. Ecuadorean officials
fear that successful operations against illicit drugs in southern Colombia
will push the drug business over the border into their country.
CONTAINING COCA
Moeller said Ecuador's border development strategy was aimed at preventing
the spread of plantations of coca, the raw material for cocaine, during and
after Plan Colombia.
"The only real way to stop drug production is by giving the peasants an
alternative, decent way (to earn a living)," he said at a news conference,
Most of Ecuador's northern province borders the rebel-controlled,
drug-producing Colombian region of Putumayo.
Nearly 800 Colombian refugees have already settled in northern part of
Ecuador, Moeller said.
Although most of them are not coca leaf farmers, several coca plantations
have been found and dismantled along the border, and the government fears
guerrillas have infiltrated the group, Moeller said.
Moeller said his government was strengthening its troops and police forces
along the border and would launch the development programmes next month.
Ecuador hopes to finance part of its border programme with debt for social
programme swaps with European governments.
Last month the Andean country signed a debt-restructuring agreement with the
Paris Club of official creditors. The accord allows for the negotiation of
bilateral swaps to channel funds into development programmes, Moeller said.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Linked stories:
********************
Fingerprint Security Gets Handier
<http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,39726,00.html?tw=wn20001030>
Password protection is just so passé. That's the word from those
promoting biometric fingerprint scanners, anyway, among them IBM and
Compaq. The prices are coming down, too.
********************
Selling Votes or Peddling Lies?
<http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,39770,00.html?tw=wn20001030>
Did Voteauction.com really solicit bids on American votes, or was it
all a mirage? The owner says yes, while the site's creator says no. A
judge will decide.
********************
In Search of Cyber Humanity
<http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,38846,00.html?tw=wn20001030>
'It always makes me nervous when people talk about an improved human
race,' says one critic of those who believe nirvana is becoming one
with technology and robotics. Patrick McGee reports from the Camden
Technology Conference in Maine.
********************
======================================================
"Anarchy doesn't mean out of control. It means out of 'their' control."
-Jim Dodge
======================================================
"Communications without intelligence is noise;
intelligence without communications is irrelevant."
-Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
======================================================
"It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society."
-J. Krishnamurti
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That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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