A Day of Mournful Overcast 09/14/08

Nigerian Rebels Declare 'Oil War'. Al Jazeera: September 14, 2008.

The nameless and faceless Movement For Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), a militant indigenist group, has declared war on Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, Total, and Eni. Nigeria is the world's eighth largest oil exporter, where indigenous peoples are fed up with the wealthy elite foreigners expropriating their wealth. They have announced that the fight is for "total control" of the oil region against the multinational oil companies who are complicit in abuses against the Nigerian people.

The Fourth World: Struggles For Traditional Lands and Ways of Life. Ward Churchill. Left Turn: June 16th, 2007.

In response to an originally Maoist formulation of the first, second, and third worlds hypothesis, Churchill proposes the "Fourth World" to include the indigenous people, which are often transformed into "Settler States", wherein a foreign population takes over a new land after it denounces the colonial power - but then continues to abuse the native population. "All but inevitably," Churchill writes, "this would lead to the contours of the resulting societies conforming closely to bioregional realities, a circumstance that would go far towards shaping the nature of their economies and facilitating a high degree of interactivity among/between societies through the medium of satisfying reciprocal needs."

HUD is a Sewer. Diffon Read & Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits. Catherine Austin Fitts.

Written in memoir-form by a former US HUD assistant secretary during the First Bush Administration, Austin Fitts chronicles the vast and extensive exposure to corruption she experienced while working for just one year. She recalls, I asked why we should spend money to lose more money in a way that would harm communities. After a long silence during which 30 staff members intently studied their feet, one brave soul explained to me that the mortgage bank was owned and run by a major Republican donor.

MEDUSA Phase 1 Report. The United States Navy: 2004.

The device – dubbed Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio (MEDUSA) – exploits the microwave audio effect, in which short microwave pulses rapidly heat tissue, causing a shockwave inside the skull that can be detected by the ears. A series of pulses can be transmitted to produce recognizable sounds. The device is aimed for military or crowd-control applications, but may have other uses... such as mind control!!!

Postmodern Writer Is Found Dead at Home. Timothy Williams. New York Times: September 14, 2008.

Writer and professor at Pomona college, David Foster Wallace, was compared to Borges, Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His opus, “Infinite Jest,” was the most widely known in a series of writings that gained him a reputation for the postmodern sensibility. "A lot of contemporary literature uses irony as a self-protective gesture, but he never did that," a colleague at Pomona said about him. "He was brilliantly funny. People stayed with these long, complicated novels because they made them laugh," another said. He hung himself in Claremont, CA and was discovered by his wife.

Against the Logic of Submission. Wolfi Landstreicher. Venomous Butterfly Publications: 2005.

ALoS is a collection of anarchist essays written between 1996 and 2005 in the publication Willful Disobedience. The author's name is the nom de plume of an Oregon-based anarchist whose ideas are mainly influenced by insurrectionary anarchism, Max Strirner's egoism, surrealism, the Internationale Situationiste and non-primitivist critiques of civilization.