First, the classic. Hellllooooooo Cleveland! We’re Hurrah Torpedo!

And now, it’s the Literal Video Version:

And finally, Lin Yu Chun and the one and only Shat:

• 20 Years Later: Remembering the Bombing of Judi Bari

Twenty years ago today, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, two prominent Earth First!ers, were in Oakland protesting clearcutting. They had been on the road organizing Redwood Summer, a campaign to save old-growth forests inspired by the Freedom Summer of the civil rights movement.
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The two were in Bari’s Subaru station wagon when a pipe bomb exploded underneath her, injuring Cherney and nearly killing her. Hours later, while Bari was still in Oakland’s Highland Hospital, local police arrested them and said they had knowingly transported the bomb—that they were responsible for their own bombing. Police dropped those charges weeks later, but this was just the beginning.

I’m too full of plague and pestilence to say very much right now, but I’d like to point out that after 20 years, I don’t believe anyone has found out who bombed Judi Bari, and I don’t think there has ever been a real investigation.

At the 1995 Round River Rendezvous, I heard her give a workshop called “Revolutionary Deep Ecology.” I’m pretty sure it was the basis for this pamphlet which she put out the next year. Again, I’m too full of snot to insert my own opinions here, so read her in her own words:

• Revolutionary Ecology: Biocentrism & Deep Ecology

RIP Wally Brown

It’s hard to know what to say about Wally, especially after so many years. All else aside, he did the hard work of every campaign he ever worked on. It’s telling how many people’s memories of Wally involve doing the dishes with him. If elbow grease were all it took, he would have saved us all a hundred times by now. He was an inspiration to more people than you could count, not in the world of theories and philosophies, but in doing the real work.

Damn it. Avalon didn’t make me cry, but Wally does. I guess I’m crying for myself as well.

For good and ill, if you’ve never known anyone like him, you don’t know shit.

For starters, I’m talking about tabletop role-playing games, the type with pencils and paper and dice. I’m not above playing rpg’s on the computer machine, but there’s both a social dynamic and a freeedom of action that are only available by sitting around a table with your friends. When I’m running a game, your character may take actions that are beyond my preparation, comfort level or even understanding, but never beyond my programming.

The regular Monday night game for the last year or so has been Reign, the fantasy implementation of the One Roll Engine. ORE is a neat little system, and Reign is probably its most mature version. The game is human-centric, with no dwarves or elves or goddamn halflings, but it’s designed to focus on a bigger picture than individual adventurers. The game allows you to build organizations, from criminal gangs to empires, and makes the player characters responsible for their ultimate success or failure. Reign’s other great strength is allowing as much depth of play for any type of skill as it does for combat- if you want to run a game about schmoozing at the imperial court, you have nearly as much crunch and as many options as if you ran a hack-and-slash dungeon crawl.

Reign has been on hiatus for the last few weeks, and while I plan to come back to it, I’m looking forward to some other games in the meantime, and to playing instead of running for once. Next up for Monday nights, Ms. Monstrrr is running Low Life, a post-apocalyptic poopfest for Savage Worlds. The wretched ruins of Mutha Oith are inhabited by the creatures to survive the planetary meltdown, namely twinkies and cockroaches, plus assorted worms, mutants and left-behind aliens. It’s a thoroughly ridiculous setting, and if nothing else, I recommend reading the book for a non-stop giggle-fest.

Meanwhile, the new every-other-Saturday game is D&D. None of this newfangled tomfoolery with at-will powers and healing surges, either. No, we’re kicking it old-school with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 1st edition. The focus for the first couple of sessions has been dungeon crawls, but we’ll probably expand into the outside world as we all become comfortable with the system. With the help of OSRIC, I can actually make sense of big chunks of the game that were always opaque in the past. I’m making an effort to understand the game on its own terms instead of forcing it into some sort of post-modern deconstruction, and it’s refreshing to see it stand on its own merits.

Somewhere in the future, Ms. Monstrrr will be running Kerberos Club, a Victorian setting for Wild Talents, the superhero version of ORE. I’m also hoping, before we go back to Reign on Monday nights, to run a few sessions of This Favored Land, the Civil War setting for Wild Talents (although I plan to run an Underground Railroad adventure set before the war.) And I’ve also got two sci-fi implementations of FATE that I’m itching to try. One is Diaspora, which is openly modelled on Traveller. The other is Starblazer Adventures, which defines itself as Rock and Roll Space Opera. And so many more games on the shelf….

• Russia executed all Somali pirates – spokesman

A pirate spokesman, who wished to remain anonymous, contacted Somalilandpress today said at least ten of his men were executed by the Russian navy after the troopers stormed MV Moscow University.
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“The Russians never released the young men instead they shot them point-blank range then loaded their lifeless bodies back on the boat,” he added.
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“We condemn the action of the Russians, it’s driven by racism and hate for black people and Africa, it’s the face of the new Russia. In future, if we capture Russians they will meet the same fate as those they executed,” he added.

I posted a bunch of links about nukes the other day, mostly about Brazil stepping up to the nuclear table. Brazil’s in the middle of this one here:

• Iran nuclear breakthrough? Tehran agrees to fuel swap
• Iran’s Nuke Fuel Deal: Breakthrough or Bogus?

This is a big deal for Iran, of course, but also Brazil. It’s a prominent international action that steps into a gap where the US and Europe failed. It brings Brazil into the inner circles of nuclear diplomacy, easing the way for their potential development. It also hedges their bets by helping Iran, who might assist them with nuclear technology in the future if the global institutions won’t.

Read about the BRICs, in case you didn’t know:

• In economics, BRIC (typically rendered as “the BRICs” or “the BRIC  countries”) is a grouping acronym that refers to the related economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

And finally, here’s Russia and Ukraine sparring over borders:

• Russia, Ukraine fail to agree on maritime border demarcation

I think this is the key point:

The agreement on the issue is crucial for the potential introduction of visa-free travel for Ukainian visitors to the European Union.

Ships pass the straits just fine, so this isn’t holding up shipping. But it holds up Ukrainian integration into western institutions. Ukraine just tilted heavily towards Russia in their last elections, and while they’re keeping up the official policies of looking west, this is a good way to slow things down a bit.

Remember the article I posted the other day about what happened to the pirates supposedly released by the Russians? Check this out:

• Russia says freed pirates didn’t reach land

Officials initially said they would be taken to Russia for trial, but the Defense Ministry said Friday they’d been released because of “imperfections” in international law. The statement was met with skepticism, especially in light of a comment made by the Russian president.

“We’ll have to do what our forefathers did when they met the pirates” until the international community comes up with a legal way of prosecuting them, Dmitry Medvedev said on the day the ship was stormed.

I guess back in the day, the practice was just to hang them by the nearest yardarm. We frown upon such things these days, but there’s no real law on the high seas. If no one figures out a way to put on genuine trials (or, you know, help Somalia), we’ll probably see a lot more of this.

In related news, I know you’re wondering what happened to the Russian journalist who was apparently forced to flee the country after casting doubts on another piracy story. Sorry, but I can’t help you with that. I’ve got an eye out, but there’s nothing new to report. Not in English, at least. Maybe some of my Russian spammers could lend a hand.

This is why we don’t trust the surveillance state. If they can’t resist needling one of their own over his needler, how are they going to treat the rest of us?

• For Airport Security, Size Matters
  Cops: New high-tech screener triggered fight over manhood insult

Negrin … and his co-workers had been training with new “whole body image” machines–the controversial kind that provide very revealing images of a traveler–when Negrin walked through the scanner. “The X-ray revealed that [Negrin] has a small penis and co-workers made fun of him on a daily basis,” reported cops. Following his arrest, Negrin told police that he “could not take the jokes anymore and lost his mind.”

• Bill to Revoke “Terrorists’” Citizenship is Like Those From Darker Periods of U.S. History

Americans accused of being involved with terrorist organizations, even if they have never been convicted of a crime, could have their citizenship revoked under a bipartisan bill that has been introduced in Congress.

This by way of Ani:

• The NYPD Tapes: Inside Bed-Stuy’s 81st Precinct

Made without the knowledge or approval of the NYPD, the tapes—made between June 1, 2008, and October 31, 2009, in the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant  and obtained exclusively by the Voice—provide an unprecedented portrait of what it’s like to work as a cop in this city.

They reveal that precinct bosses threaten street cops if they don’t make their quotas of arrests and stop-and-frisks, but also tell them not to take certain robbery reports in order to manipulate crime statistics. The tapes also refer to command officers calling crime victims directly to intimidate them about their complaints.

Worth reading to the end for this nugget:

Three weeks after his meeting with QAD investigators, on October 31, Schoolcraft felt sick and went home from work. Hours later, a dozen police supervisors came to his house and demanded that he return to work. He declined, on health grounds. Eventually, Deputy Chief Michael Marino, the commander of Patrol Borough Brooklyn North, which covers 10 precincts, ordered that Schoolcraft be dragged from his apartment in handcuffs and forcibly placed in a Queens mental ward for six days.

The Voice says they’ll be doing a follow-up on what happened to Schoolcraft. I’ll be keeping an eye out.

And finally, on to the everyday surveillance we’ve come to take for granted:

• Portland attorney Mark Ginsberg fights red-light camera ticket — and wins
• (Atlanta) Collisions at Red Light Camera Intersections Go Up

The Oregonian article has a link to the claim that the cameras reduce accidents, but it turns out to be a statement buried in another article, relying on the Portland police. No idea how the actual study stands up.

• Russia releases pirates at sea and in the presence of no media

Russia took the ten men into custody Thursday after military forces stormed the Russian oil tanker that had been hijacked. One pirate was killed and the rest taken into custody, with officials saying they would be prosecuted in Moscow, until the mysterious announcement Friday that they had been released.

“If the pirates really were let go, it should have been done in the presence of journalists,” Mikhail Voitenko, the editor of the online Marine Bulletin. He went on to suggest they may have been killed at sea instead of released.

I tried to source that last story since they make a good point that no one else seems to have picked up on.  I looked up Mikhail Voitenko, and what do you think I found?

• Journalist flees Russia after Arctic Sea piracy story

Mikhail Voitenko, editor of the online maritime bulletin Sovfracht, said he had left the country after receiving a menacing late-night phone call. Voitenko said an unidentified man called him on the night of 1 September and warned him he was “stepping on the heels of some serious people”.

Speaking from Istanbul, where he is now in hiding, Voitenko said he was bluntly informed that these “guys are out for revenge. I was told: ‘They are very unhappy with you. But they don’t want unpleasantness’.” Voitenko said the man urged him to leave Russia as rapidly as possible.

The Arctic Sea is the ship I posted about the other day that was seized in the Baltic Sea (not the Arctic- yes,I know.) Apparently Voitenko was one of the major voices suggesting it was carrying arms.

• Time for a nuclear samba

Iran has all but agreed that Brazil should be the mediator between Tehran and the United Nations – rather than the axis of the US, Britain and France inside the UN Security Council, plus Germany – to finally settle the Iranian nuclear dossier. According to the Fars news agency, after his visit early this week to New York, Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, in a phone call with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, told him that Iran had agreed with the Brazilian proposal for a nuclear fuel swap deal for the Tehran research reactor, which produces medical isotopes for cancer treatment. The proposal will be discussed in detail when Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva visits Tehran by the end of next week.

• Brazil to build new nuclear reactor: report
• Is Brazil Developing the Bomb?

Lula da Silva’s self-confidence is indicative of Brazil’s claim to the status of a major power — including in military terms. The military claim is reflected in the country’s National Defense Strategy, which was unveiled in late 2008. In addition to the mastery of the complete nuclear fuel cycle — which has since been achieved — the document calls for the building of nuclear-powered submarines.

It sounds harmless enough, but it isn’t, because the term “nuclear-powered submarines” could in fact be a cover for a nuclear weapons program. Brazil already had three secret military nuclear programs between 1975 and 1990, with each branch of its armed forces pursuing its own route. The navy’s approach proved to be the most successful: using imported high-performance centrifuges to produce highly enriched uranium from imported uranium hexafluoride, so as to be able to operate small reactors for submarines. At the appropriate time, the country’s newly acquired nuclear capabilities were to be revealed to the world with a “peaceful nuclear explosion,” based on the example set by India. The 300-meter (984-foot) shaft for the test had already been drilled. According to statements by the former president of the National Nuclear Energy Commission, in 1990 the Brazilian military was on the verge of building a bomb.

And this one here is a game-changer, or could be:

• Report: IAEA to discuss Israel’s nuclear activities for first time

Israel would probably do well for itself by declaring its program and joining the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and much better to do it voluntarily than to be dragged kicking and screaming. Not much chance of that happening, however.

• Kanellos the Greek protest dog

Apparently he’s got his own blog, but it’s all greek to me.

• Russia jails ‘pirate’ over Arctic Sea ship mystery

This is a ship that disappeared from the Baltic Sea last year. The Russians said it was piracy, which would have been the first act of piracy in the Baltic in as long as anyone could remember, but no one really believed that story. Intercepted arms shipments was the buzz. There are still no answers.

• The Road to Area 51
  After decades of denying the facility’s existence, five former insiders speak out

“We couldn’t have told you any of this a year ago,” Slater says. “Now we can’t tell it to you fast enough.” That is because in 2007, the CIA began declassifying the 50-year-old OXCART program. Today, there’s a scramble for eyewitnesses to fill in the information gaps. Only a few of the original players are left.

According to the wikipedia, the OXCART program produced a plane that was the precursor to the SR-71.