Pulp Free

I don’t know why… this just makes me laugh…

Written by Keith Olbermann

Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.

All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and — as I discovered from those “missing posters” seared still into my soul — two more in the Towers.

And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors.

I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.

And anyone who claims that I and others like me are “soft,”or have “forgotten” the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.

However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast — of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds — none of us could have predicted this.

Five years later this space is still empty.

Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.

Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.

Five years later this country’s wound is still open.

Five years later this country’s mass grave is still unmarked.

Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.

It is beyond shameful.

At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial — barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field — Mr. Lincoln said, “we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”

Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.

Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their reprehensible inaction. “We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground.” So we won’t.

Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they’re doing instead of doing any job at all.

Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.

And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.

And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.

The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.

Those who did not belong to his party — tabled that.

Those who doubted the mechanics of his election — ignored that.

Those who wondered of his qualifications — forgot that.

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation’s wounds, but to take political advantage.

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President — and those around him — did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, “bi-partisanship” meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President’s words yesterday, “validate the strategy of the terrorists.”

They promised protection, and then showed that to them “protection” meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had ’something to do’ with 9/11 is “lying by implication.”

The impolite phrase is “impeachable offense.”

Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.

Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.

Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.

Yet what is happening this very night?

A mini-series, created, influenced — possibly financed by — the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.

The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.

How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How dare you — or those around you — ever “spin” 9/11?

Just as the terrorists have succeeded — are still succeeding — as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero.

So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.

This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney’s continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.

And long ago, a series called “The Twilight Zone” broadcast a riveting episode entitled “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street.”

In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car — and only his car — starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man’s lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An “alien” is shot — but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there’s no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, “they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves.”

And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.

“For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own — for the children, and the children yet unborn.”

When those who dissent are told time and time again — as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus — that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American…When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have “forgotten the lessons of 9/11″… look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

May this country forgive you.

LONDON (AFP) - A group of top classical musicians has warned of the threat to artistic life from a hand baggage ban introduced after British police foiled an alleged bomb plot against transatlantic airliners.

The issue even struck a false note at the world-renowned Last Night of the Proms concert on Saturday, with one conductor joking that next year audiences may have to put up with “Concerto for Laptop and Orchestra”.

“I think it’s greatly to be regretted,” said Mark Elder, a guest conductor for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, at the Royal Albert Hall. “The time has come really to put an end to this unfairness.”

Many performers refuse to let their instruments, often centuries old and extremely valuable, out of their sight when they travel on planes in case they are damaged in the hold.

But now they are falling foul of strict rules introduced in August amid fears that apparently innocuous materials could be used to build and detonate bombs on flights to and from the United States.

It is not only high art which is suffering — a spokesman for Scotland’s oldest bagpipe teaching college said tourism could be hit as the regulations deter pipers from the United States and Canada from coming to competitions.

In a letter to The Times newspaper on Friday, seven artists including the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis, and cellists Julian Lloyd Webber and Ralph Kirshbaum, warned that terrorists must not be allowed to threaten Britain’s place in the artistic world.

“This enviable position is now under serious threat from draconian new rules that forbid any article exceeding the specified dimensions for hand luggage to be carried on planes,” the letter said.

“It is now effectively impossible for musicians to travel by air, since there is no way that priceless 18th-century violins or cellos, for example, can ever travel without unacceptable risk in the hold of an aircraft.”

Kirshbaum, an American, later told the BBC: “When you have an instrument, as I do, that was made in 1729, worth over three million pounds (5.6 million dollars, 4.4 million euros), you have a responsibility obviously for that but it’s also our voice.

“And without that voice, we can’t create our artistic world for those who we perform for.”

Passengers travelling from Britain are only allowed to carry on a laptop-sized bag. However, Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander said Sunday that the restrictions may soon be eased.

He has been working with British airports and airlines on the possibility of relaxing hand baggage size rules and the restrictions on taking certain liquids on board, he told Sky News television.

Further meetings are expected this week to determine whether any changes can be made.

The Musicians’ Union is planning to lobby parliament over the airline security measures, calling for a dispensation on all flights to let musicians carry instruments into the cabin.

Spokesman Keith Ames said Sunday: “It is a risk putting instruments in the hold because they could get damaged — no insurance company will cover it.

“Nobody expects a slackening in security but the fact that musical instruments… have to go into the hold means that musicians will just not fly.”

Some of the best known companies and events in the arts world, including the BBC Proms, an annual two-month season of classical concerts in London, have been affected.

The Orchestra of St Luke’s, from New York, pulled out of a concert shortly after the alleged plot was discovered, while soloists including Russian violinist Maxim Vengerov ditched the plane for the train to get there.

Russia’s Bolshoi Theatre, which was performing in London when the restrictions came in, pledged to use the London-Paris Eurostar service because they refused to check in their instruments on an airplane.

And Willie Park, a piper at the College of Piping in Glasgow, said he knew of Russian and Japanese pipers who had posted their instruments home rather than putting them in an aeroplane hold.

“We’ve got pipers coming from all over the world to compete in championships and this puts people off,” he said.

“Bagpipes are sensitive to temperature variation in the hold because if the wood shrinks it can split, apart from the rough handling they might get.”

Stringent baggage restrictions have come in across the European Union and in the United States, Australia, Canada, Ghana, Kenya and Switzerland in the wake of the alleged plot.

Seventeen people have been charged with terrorism-related offences and 11 with conspiring to murder and preparing acts of terrorism following police raids in Britain on August 10.

by Katherine Haddon

After running into some problems using P2P software with the Linksys WRT54G (a known issue it seems) I decided to search around to see what else was available. I’ve been using DD-WRT for probably the last year or so as a pretty nice replacement… But yesterday came across Tomato. It’s quick, not much over head, works and looks pretty… I miss the fact that it doesn’t have SNMP built-in since the internal bandwidth graphs only show the last 5 hours in detail. The rest of the time is summed. Let’s hope it’s in a later release…

If you’re into trying out new firmware - head on over and try it out…

Today’s Earworm selection is a Trance tune from Angelina entitled “Snowflakes”. It’s on the Dream Dance #40 CD.

Angelina - Snowflakes - (Song Sample)

(This sample is in stereo since the original mono version didn’t translate very well…)