Operation Dumbo Drop

MPAA Rating: PG
The army escorts an elephant to a village during the Vietnam War.

SEX/NUDITY 1 - Male villagers are bare-chested with knee-length loincloths that show the sides of their thighs.
VIOLENCE/GORE 3 - Gunfire in a couple of scenes, fistfights, reckless plane flying. A man is attacked by a man with a knife, a village is held at gunpoint, a man almost falls over a railing into a river many feet below, a boy is shown with a bloody nose and lip after being captured and interrogated, and a boat explodes. Two people and an elephant almost fall out of a plane, an elephant is shot (we hear the shots and see the corpse), an elephant runs wild through a village causing people to run away and scream in fear and a plane is fired upon.
PROFANITY 2 - A handful of mild obscenities.
DISCUSSION TOPICS - War, sacrifice and responsibility, the relationship between animals and humans, clash of cultures.
MESSAGE - Sometimes doing a good deed is worth any risk; you must take responsibility for what you cause to happen -- even inadvertently -- and you must try to remedy the situation.

"Gale Norton is the greatest threat to America's wildlife and natural heritage today," Defenders of Wildlife President Rodger Schlickeisen says. "Our last remaining wild land is quickly vanishing, and we desperately need a steward who will passionately implement and enforce laws protecting those places and the wildlife that depends on them for survival. Instead, our Interior Secretary is determined to undermine those laws for her friends in industry."

As Colorado attorney general, she was hostile to environmental protection and took a head-in-the-sand approach to polluters. She stood by, for instance, as cyanide leaks from the Summitville gold mine killed wildlife in 17 miles of the Alamosa River. As a lawyer, she represented the oil industry, loggers and miners. She was a senior attorney at the arch-conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation under its founder, the bombastic Watt.

Norton has declined to oppose a single lawsuit by home builders and other developers attacking federal protections for critical wildlife habitat. As the Los Angeles Times put it in a March 26 editorial: "Ranchers, home builders and others in favor of pell-mell development are blasting away at the federal Endangered Species Act like hunters on a rampage through a zoo. And the people whom President Bush appointed to defend the act are either cowering or cheering them on.

following Zina Kaye's point to Bill Seaman led to Digital Traces

girlhacker pointed toward Teller vis the Costello/Brodsky collaborative, and I went there and was glad I did.

ZK: You mean the Anti-Destination Society, which is in fact a construct my father invented. He says that the Anti-Destination Society changes all the traffic lights to red so that he can't get anywhere in a hurry. A few years ago I brought it back into being and made it into a proper organization. My ideal was that everyone can become a secret agent. You can do what you like with it, just use the name. I was looking at what happened when the Cold War was supposedly declared 'over'. MI5, MI6, the CIA etc had to reconstruct themselves. They had, and still have to, re-establish themselves economically and as a power, by creating new enemies. The enemy can be the people, activists, perceived communists, anarchists, anybody with chewing gum, etc....

...Surveillance art deals with public spaces more than private spaces but there might not necessarily be any viewer. It might be narcissism which perpetuates some form of surveillance, normalizing it, like that young woman with a web-cam permanently switched on in her bedroom. She writes rubbish to go with it, but there is a certain kind of audience that can't seem to pull away...

Zina Kaye interviewed at old boys network in their reading room from a point via Bruce Sterling(see above)

these guys are doing something amazing but I can't get all the way in to hear what it is.


maybe I need this

vectored this book thru ftrain and joe bob briggs

NYRB Joyce Carol Oates

and now for something completely

Douglas Adams joined force with Terry Jones to create a CD-ROM called
Starship Titanic

investigate
Western Front

memory hole preserves the brief and cosmically witless and yet somehow still terrifyingly amusing speechmaking of the disenfranchised James 'Beam Me Up' Traficant

ftrain witlinks

mighty girl

{rather than blurbing everything, the idea is if it's here w/out comment it's good, recommended, something I want to go back to}

sara hepola

when

Indigenous peoples' and farmers' organizations from the Andes and the Amazon gathered at the offices of the Ecological Forum in Lima, Peru on 28 June 2002 to formally denounce US patents on maca, the high-altitude Andean plant (of the Cruciferae [mustard] family) that has been grown for centuries by indigenous peoples in the Puna highlands of Peru, both as a staple food crop and for medicinal purposes. Today, maca-based products are commonly promoted as natural enhancers of sexual function and fertility, and demand for maca is growing in the US, Europe and Japan. While maca exports have the potential to create new markets and income for Peruvian farmers, recent US patents related to maca may actually foreclose opportunity for the true innovators of the Andean crop.

again via the valiant and exciting etcgroup

Dr. West explains that if nanoparticles are present in the bloodstream, proteins in the blood will attach to the surface of the nanoparticles in an attempt to "wrap them up," like beans in a tortilla. When the proteins envelop the nanoparticles, the proteins� shape as well as their function may change. Parcels of nanoparticles in the bloodstream may be useful for some medical applications, such as drug delivery, but the changes in the proteins could trigger other unintended and dangerous effects, such as blood clotting. Equally alarming, West sees a need to examine whether nanoparticles absorbed into bacteria enhance the ability of other materials to piggyback their way in and cause damage. The nanomaterial itself may be benign, but, in the same way that proteins will bind to nanomaterials in the bloodstream, toxins, such as pesticides, could bind with nanoparticles in water, facilitating their transport.
It may be that the quality that makes nanoparticles so attractive to researchers trying to develop better drug-delivery systems�namely, their ability to enter the bloodstream and to cross the blood-brain barrier, as well as their ability to be taken up by individual cells�will turn out to be the same quality that makes them dangerous. The potential downside to the mobility of nanoparticles, including the possibility of "bad" particles joining forces with "good" nanoparticles, should be investigated with the utmost urgency, as companies race to find ways to bring us into intimate contact with human-made nanoparticles...

via etcgroup via some techpimp at the foresight institute's newsgroup-like thing via Kurzweil's newsletter

Here we report the discovery of six hominid specimens from Chad, central Africa, 2,500 km from the East African Rift Valley. The fossils include a nearly complete cranium and fragmentary lower jaws. The associated fauna suggest the fossils are between 6 and 7 million years old. The fossils display a unique mosaic of primitive and derived characters, and constitute a new genus and species of hominid. The distance from the Rift Valley, and the great antiquity of the fossils, suggest that the earliest members of the hominid clade were more widely distributed than has been thought, and that the divergence between the human and chimpanzee lineages was earlier than indicated by most molecular studies.
�nature 11 July 2002

"Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice was banned from classrooms in Midland, Michigan in 1980, due to its portrayal of the Jewish character Shylock. It has been similarly banned in the past in Buffalo and Manchester, NY. Shakespeare's plays have also often been "cleansed" of crude words and phrases. Thomas Bowdler's efforts in his 1818 "Family Shakespeare" gave rise to the word "bowdlerize".
Bowdlerism still exists today, but nowadays cleaning up sexual references is waning in popularity, and cleaning up racial references is growing in popularity. Case in point: This version of The Story of Dr. Dolittle, from the 1960s, was silently "cleaned up" from the 1920 original, in which Polynesia the parrot occasionally used some impolite terms to refer to blacks. In 1988, after the book had fallen from favor enough to have dropped out of print, the publishers issued a new edition that removed nearly all references to race from the book (and cut out a plotline involving Prince Bumpo's desire to become white). In contrast, the Newbery-winning Voyages of Dr. Dolittle has been available in its original form (impolite words and all) for a long time, in part because the Newbery awarders forbade their medal to be displayed on altered texts."

�from Banned Books Online. a well-written, calmly indignant, and strategically essential site, which led to this:

"The process of suppressing information -of people in power attempting to hide images, sounds and words- must itself be viewed in perspective. The organizing principles of The File Room archive recognize acts of censorship in relation to their social settings, political movements, religious beliefs, economic conditions, cultural expressions and/or personal identities. The means of censorship are understood in equally broad terms and techniques, from behind-the-scenes structural censorship that regulates and controls access to the means of production; to obvious physical restrictions of single instances; to subtle, pervasive, and often invisible psychological methods."

�from The File Room

which in turn led to the legal saga of Pen/Newman's Own freedom prize recipient CISSY LACKS-a Missouri high school Creative Writing teacher fired for "failure to censor her students' creative expression."

and to artist Laura Ferguson and her beautiful work
as well as to this Gutenberg of John Milton's Aeropagitica which if anyone's paying attention is the uplifting word whose noun form follows that of Dionysius, author of The Cloud Of Unknowing