Beaver Report - Day 14

There haven't been any beaver reports because the slacker was nowhere to be found. But this morning showed some progress.

He took quite a bit of this side of the tree. The other side was untouched.

Big Stink

Big Stink Over a Simple Link

In a letter to a consultant in Britain who runs a personal website that has not been especially nice to KPMG, the company said it had discovered a link on his site to www.kpmg.com, and that the website owner, Chris Raettig, should "please be aware such links require that a formal Agreement exist between our two parties, as mandated by our organization's Web Link Policy."

The letter added that Raettig should feel free to arrange this "Web Link Agreement" with KPMG, but that until he has done so, he should remove his link to the company's homepage. (The KPMG in question here is a tax and audit firm that is no longer affiliated with KPMG Consulting, the independent consulting firm at kpmgconsulting.com -- that firm has no "linking policy."

Raettig is one of those digital-age 22-year-olds who know the Web inside out, and he's aware when he's being flimflammed. So he penned a nice no-thanks letter back to the company, saying that "my own organization's Web link policy requires no such formal agreement."
[read more]

thanks to wood s lot

Here is the link to KPMG.

analysis and thoughts regarding kpmg from Raettig himself.

I started designing web sites as a living while I was at the Boeing Co. in 1995. It was a frustrating experience since there was no existing job classification for Web Designer. The computing organization thought they should be in charge since it had something to do with computing. They thought it was programming. I finally ended up asigned to the public relations group.

My boss was a classic information control type of PR person. She felt that Boeing needed to control all references to the Boeing Co. She felt that people should need Boeing's permission to link to the Boeing web site. She moved on to become the PR person for the CEO of Boeing. Scarey. I finally bailed out of Boeing in early 1998.

Here is the link to KPMG again.

America, Land of Big Money

Above the Law
Bush’s Racial Coup D’Etat and Intell Shutdown

Did Jeb Bush fix the Florida election long before any votes were cast? Did President Bush shut down the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies’ investigations into terror networks prior to 9-11, leaving America wide open to the attacks?

In a conversation with GNN Executive Editor Anthony Lappé, journalist Greg Palast breaks down two of the biggest scoops you’ve never heard and explains how they, and other groundbreaking stories, are ignored by most mainstream news outlets. [read more]

Clash of Cultures

Looking the World in the Eye

Samuel Huntington is a mild-mannered man whose sharp opinions—about the collision of Islam and the West, about the role of the military in a liberal society, about what separates countries that work from countries that don't—have proved to be as prescient as they have been controversial. Huntington has been ridiculed and vilified, but in the decades ahead his view of the world will be the way it really looks
[read more]

The War Against Some Terrorists

The Real Roots of Terror

Debate over the causes of the terrorist attacks on America has been inhibited by the fear that to inquire into them is somehow to extenuate evil. So let's substitute "sources" for the morally fraught "causes." Do that, and this becomes clear: All but three of the terrorists, like Bin Laden himself, were from Saudi Arabia; Mohamed Atta, their ringleader, was from Egypt, as is the number two man in al Qaeda, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. Something about these countries helped to produce the terrorists. The terrorists are dead; bin Laden will soon join them. But that something endures. The domestic political arrangements of Egypt and Saudi Arabia should be regarded as among our real enemies in the war on terror.
[read more]

thanks to Unknown News

ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS!

Crusades are messy, bloody affairs, and it's often hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Exhibit A: Afghanistan, where the United States just suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the wily Russians. Happily for the White House, neither the US media or the public understand what just happened. They continue to cheer on the president, who is mighty thankful he is leading a jolly little war against evil Muslims instead of having to explain to voters why the economy is nose-diving and hundreds of thousands are losing their jobs.
[read more]

thanks to Red Rock Eater Digest

Israel/Palestine

Beyond tribalism

It is part of an overall process that is going on in Israel. That is the subject of another book which I published after "One Palestine, Complete": "The New Zionists." It describes recent developments in Israel, all of which seem to be leading us to something people call a "post-Zionist" situation. The new Zionists are part of that process. They are not the ones who instigate the changes; they are part of the changes.

We have a generation of Israelis today, especially people living in Tel Aviv and in places that look up to Tel Aviv, where people don't live for any ideology anymore. They don't live for the past or the future. They live for life itself and they live very much in the spirit of the American culture. They are much more open to realize, for example, that we share at least part of the responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee situation and for the tragedy of 1948 [when 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during Israel's war for independence.] They are much more open to hearing that because the whole country is more open and pluralistic and less ideological. This is something that has happened particularly since Oslo [the 1993 peace accords between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, which gave rise to great hope that peace might finally be at hand].

But since the present intifada began 14 months ago, we are being pushed back in time to tribal togetherness and closeness, which is really the major damage that we suffer as a result of terrorism. Of course, [we suffer] lost lives and tragedies. But in addition to that, what terrorism does to the fabric of the society, to the mentality and to the collective mood is perhaps even more damaging because it really stops that process [of becoming more open and pluralistic].
[read more]

Hamas Leader Was in Palestinian Prison Until Freed by Israeli Attack

On August 26 of last year, Hamas’ Hanoud was wounded by Israeli forces in a shootout near the West Bank town of Nablus. Hanoud then surrendered to the Palestinian Authority, and four days later he was sentenced to 12 years in prison by a Palestinian military tribunal for training and arming military groups (Associated Press, 9/2/00).

On May 18, Israel launched an F-16 attack on the Nablus jail where Hanoud was being held, in an attempt to kill him. The action proved disastrous: Eleven Palestinian police officers are believed to have died, and Hanoud escaped (New York Times, 5/20/01). Castro Salameh, the Palestinian commander of the Nablus post, told the Times, "Abu Hanoud has been my charge for nine months, and I have kept him under lock and key... But now Israel has liberated him. I have absolutely no idea where he has gone to."

These facts have been reported in the New York Times, most recently in a November 25 story about Hanoud's assassination. But the stories written after the latest round of violence have omitted these facts. Targeting civilians is never acceptable, but context is critical as people seek a way out of the cycle of Mideast violence: If the Times reminded readers that the Hamas leader whose killing sparked the recent round of violence was in a Palestinian jail until the Israeli military tried to assassinate him, it would put the contention that the Palestinian Authority bears most of the responsibility for the current strife in a different light.
[read more]

thanks to Unknown News

I must be missing something. Israel accuses the PA of not doing the job of arresting the terrorists and then the bomb the shit out of them. They don't bomb the organizations that take credit for the terrorism. They bomb the people that they want to arrest the terrorists. Apparently, Israel sees the PA as the Palestinian organization that is supposed to arrest whoever Israel wants arrested so Israel can kill them when they are in prison. What's wrong with this picture?

History Repeats

I mentioned the Reichstag fire not long after the events of September, 11. More recent events are following the Reichstag script. A country who's leader uses a fire to scare the bejeesus out of it's people and takes their civil liberties away to make them safer. It didn't work then. It work work now. Learn what became of this leader...

The Reichstag fire

thanks to The Liberal Arts Mafia