POIESIS

cool, if i'm ever down that way i'll surely pm you dudes, i'd love to go take some shots.

kabar, essentially you're condoning bloodshed.. might makes right?

tyson in the ufc? that would be interesting back when he was in his prime. still, i can't see a prime tyson taking out somebody like arlovski.

whoa..what a great start to life on planet earth.

hard to verify that report. and, yes.

okay, i just looked at the one shot of rage's again and it looks like the thing has a super wide tank like bottom...sort of like that huge thing that moves the space shuttle to it's launch pad.

so what's the surrounding area like? is it just kind of plunked on the outskirts of town or is there small businesses and residential development nearby? how old is it, like 1920/30's era? i'm glad i didn't see any graff on it in those pictures, that kind of natural decay of such a brute should be left as is. i'm thinking that thing must have some value to the film industry if anything. in terms of design and architecture, that thing is fucked. whenever i see industrial fortresses like that i'm always astonished at how random, haphazard and precarious they look. also, that thing would make a fucking spectacular transformer robot.

awesome, i especially like the 4th from the bottom. what exactly was the function of this place?

it's unanimous. bruce was a scientist. tyson is a goon.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cf...=74&ItemID=9066 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ WHY IS FRANCE BURNING? by Doug Ireland November 06, 2005 DIRELAND Printer Friendly Version EMail Article to a Friend Saturday night was the 10th day of the spreading youth riots that have much of France in flames -- and it was the worst night ever since the first riot erupted in a suburban Paris ghetto of low-income housing, with 1295 vehicles -- from private cars to public buses -- burned last night, a huge jump from the 897 set afire the previous evening. And, for the first time, the violence born in the suburban ghettos last night invaded the center of Paris -- some 40 vehicles were set alight in Le Marais (the pricey home to the most famous gay ghetto in Paris, around the Place de la Republique nearby, and in the bourgeois 17th arrondissement, only a stone's throw from the dilapidated ghetto of the Goutte d'Or in the 18th arrondissement.  As someone who lived in France for nearly a decade, and who has visited those suburban ghettos, where the violence started, on reporting trips any number of times, I have not been surprised by this tsunami of inchoate youth rebellion that is engulfing France. It is the result of thirty years of government neglect: of the failure of the French political classes -- of both right and left -- to make any serious effort to integrate its Muslim and black populations into the larger French economy and culture; and of the deep-seated, searing, soul-destroying racism that the unemployed and profoundly alienated young of the ghettos face every day of their lives, both from the police, and when trying to find a job or decent housing.  To understand the origins of this profound crisis for France, it is important to step back and remember that the ghettos where festering resentment has now burst into flames were created as a matter of industrial policy by the French state.  If France's population of immigrant origin -- mostly Arab, some black -- is today quite large (more than 10% of the total population), it is because there was a government and industrial policy during the post-World War II boom years of reconstruction and economic expansion which the French call "les trentes glorieuses" -- the 30 glorious years -- to recruit from France's foreign colonies laborers and factory and menial workers for jobs which there were no Frenchmen to fill. These immigrant workers were desperately needed to allow the French economy to expand due to the shortage of male manpower caused by two World Wars, which killed many Frenchmen, and slashed the native French birth-rates too. Moreover, these immigrant workers were considered passive and unlikely to strike (unlike the highly political French working class and its Communist-led unions.) This government-and-industry-sponsored influx of Arab workers (many of whom saved up to bring their families to France from North Africa) was reinforced following Algerian independence by the Harkis.  The Harkis (whose story is movingly told by Dalila Kerchouche in her Destins de Harkis) were the native Algerians who fought for and worked with France during the post-war anti-colonial struggles for independence -- and who for their trouble were horribly treated by France. Some 100,000 Harkis were killed by the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) after the French shamelessly abandoned them to a lethal fate when the French occupying army evacuated itself and the French colonists from Algeria. Moreover, those Harki families who were saved, often at the initiative of individual military commanders who refused to obey orders not to evacuate them, once in France were parked in unspeakable, filthy, crowded concentration camps for many long years and never benefited from any government aid -- a nice reward for their sacrifices for France, of which they were, after all, legally citizens. Their ghettoized children and grandchildren, naturally, harbor certain resentments.  France's other immigrant workers were warehoused in huge, high-rise low-income housing ghettos -- known as "cités" (Americans would say "the projects") -- specially built for them, and deliberately placed out of sight in the suburbs around most of France's major urban agglomerations, so that their darker-skinned inhabitants wouldn't pollute the center cities of Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Lille, Nice and the others of white France's urban centers today encircled by flames. Often there was only just enough public transport provided to take these uneducated working class Arabs and blacks directly to their jobs in the burgeoning factories of the "peripherique" -- the suburban peripheries that encircled Paris and its smaller sisters -- but little or none linking the ghettos to the urban centers.  Now 30, 40, and 50 years old, these high-rise human warehouses in the isolated suburbs are today run-down, dilapidated, sinister places, with broken elevators that remain unrepaired, heating systems left dysfunctional in winter, dirt and dog-shit in the hallways, broken windows, and few commercial amenities -- shopping for basic necessities is often quite limited and difficult, while entertainment and recreational facilities for youth are truncated and totally inadequate when they're not non-existent. Both apartments and schools are over-crowded (birth control is a cultural taboo in the Muslim culture the immigrants brought with them and transmitted to their children, and even for their male grandchildren of today -- who've adopted hip-hop culture and created their own French-language rap music of extraordinary vitality (which often embodies stinging social and political content) -- condoms are a no-no because of Arab machismo, contributing to rising AIDS rates in the ghettos.  The first week in December will mark the 22nd anniversary of the Marche des Beurs (Beur means Arab in French slang). I was present to see the cortege of 100,000 arrive in Paris -- it was the Franco-Arab equivalent of Dr. Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice The Marche des Beurs was organized from Lyon's horrific, enormous suburban high-rise ghetto, Les Minguettes, with the help of a charismatic left-wing French Catholic worker-priest, Father Christian Delorme, and its central theme was the demand to be recognized as French "comme les autres" -- like everyone else ... a demand, in sum, for complete integration. But for the mass of Franco-Arabs, little has changed since 1983 -- and the integrationist movement of "jeunes beurs" created around that march petered out in frustration and despair. In recent years, its place has been taken by Islamist fundamentalists operating through local mosques -- the mediatic symbol of this retreat into a separatist, communitarian-religious politics is the slick demagogue Tariq Ramadan, a philosophy professor who uses one cosmetically democratic discourse when he's speaking on French TV, and a fiery, hard-line fundamentalist discourse in the Arab-language cassettes of his speeches that sell like hotcakes to Franco-Arab ghetto youth. (Ramadan's double language has been meticulously documented by the Arab-speaking journalist Caroline Fourest in her book published last fall by Editions Grasset, "Frere Tariq: discourse, methode et strategie de Tariq Ramadan," extracts from which have been published in the weekly l'Express.) But the current rebellion has little to do with Islamic fundamentalism.  In 1990, Francois Mitterrand -- the Socialist President then -- described what life was like for jobless ghetto youths warehoused in the overcrowded "cités":  "What hope does a young person have who's been born in a quartier without a soul, who lives in an unspeakably ugly high-rise, surrounded by more ugliness, imprisoned by gray walls in a gray wasteland and condemned to a gray life, with all around a society that prefers to look away until it's time to get mad, time to FORBID."  Well, Mitterrand's perceptive and moving words remained just that -- words -- for his urban policy was an underfunded, unfocussed failure that only put a few band-aids on a metastasizing cancer -- and 15 years after Mitterrand's diagnosis, the hopelessness and alienation of these ghetto youths and their "gray lives" has only become deeper and more rancid still.  The response to the last ten days of violent youth rebellion by the conservative government has been inept and tone-deaf. For the first four days of the rebellion, Chirac and his Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin decided to let the hyper-ambitious, megalomaniacal Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, lead the government's response to the youth's violence and arson. Chirac and Villepin detest Sarkozy, who has been openly campaigning to replace Chirac as president in 2007 (Villepin was made P.M. in the hopes that he could block Sarkozy for the right's presidential nomination), The President and his P.M. thought that "Sarko," as he's commonly referred to in France -- who won his widespread popularity as a hardline, law-and-order demagogue on the issue of domestic insecurity -- would be unable to stop the violence, and thus damage his presidential campaign.  But Sarkozy only poured verbal kerosene on the flames, dismissing the ghetto youth in the most insulting and racist terms and calling for a policy of repression. "Sarko" made headlines with his declarations that he would "karcherise" the ghettos of "la racaille"-- words the U.S. press has utterly inadequately translated to mean "clean" the ghettos of "scum." But these two words have an infinitely harsher and insulting flavor in French. "Karcher" is the well-known brand name of a system of cleaning surfaces by super-high-pressure sand-blasting or water-blasting that very violently peals away the outer skin of encrusted dirt -- like pigeon-shit -- even at the risk of damaging what's underneath. To apply this term to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing" without actually saying so. It implies raw police power and force used very aggressively, with little regard for human rights. I wonder how many Anglo-American correspondents get the inflammatory, terribly vicious flavor of the word in French? The translation of "karcherise" by "clean" just misses completely the inflammatory violence of what Sarko was really saying. And "racaille" is infinitely more pejorative than "scum" to French-speakers -- it has the flavor of characterizing an entire group of people as subhuman, inherently evil and criminal, worthless, and is, in other words, one of the most serious insults one could launch at the rebellious ghetto youth.  As the rebellion has spread beyond the Paris suburbs as far south as Marseilles and Nice and as far north as Lille, Sarkozy has been thundering that the spreading violence is centrally "organized." But on the telephone this morning from Paris, the dean of French investigative reporters -- Claude Angeli, editor of Le Canard Enchaine -- told me, "That's not true -- this isn't being organized by the Islamist fundamentalists, as Sarkozy is implying to scare people. Sure, kids in neighborhoods are using their cellphones and text messages to warn each other where the cops are coming so they can move and pick other targets for their arson. But the rebellion is spreading because the youth have a sense of solidarity that comes from watching television -- they imitate what they're seeing, and they sense themselves targeted by Sarkozy's inflammatory rhetoric. The rebellion is spreading spontaneously -- driven especially by racist police conduct that is the daily lot of these youths. It's incredible the level of police racism -- they're arrested or controlled and have their papers checked because they have dark skins, and the police are verbally brutal, calling them 'bougnoules' [a racist insult, something like the American "towel-heads", only worse] and telling them, 'Lower your eyes! Lower your eyes!' as if they had no right to look a policeman in the face. It's utterly dehumanizing. No wonder these kids feel so divorced from authority."  A team report in today's French daily, Liberation (where I was once a columnist), interviews ghetto youths, and asks them to explain the reasons for their anger. And, the paper reports, "All, or almost all, cite 'Sarko'....a 22-year old student says, 'Sarkozy owes us his excuses for what he said. When I see what's happened, I come back to the same image: Sarkozy when he went to Argenteuil, raising his head and thundering, Madame, we're going to clean all that up. Result? Sarko sent every body over the top, he showed a total disrespect toward everybody" in the ghetto." A 13-year-old tells the Liberation reporters: "'It's us who are going to put Sarkozy through the Karcher...Will I be out making trouble tonight?' He smiles and says, 'that's classified information.'" Another 28-year-old youth: "Who's setting the fires? They're kids between 14 and 22, we don't really know who they are because they put on masks, don't talk, and don't brag about it the next day ... but instead of fucking everything up where they live, it would be better if they held a demo, or went and fucked up the people and the stores in Paris. We've got minister, Sarko, who says 'You're all the same.' Me, I say non, we all say non -- but in reply we still get, 'You're all the same.' That response from the government creates something in common between all of us, a kind of solidarity. These kids want to get attention, to let people know they exist. So, they same to themselves, 'If we get nasty and create panic, they won't forget us, they'll know we're in a neighborhood where we need help."  Yesterday, when Sarkozy -- who is Minister of Religion as well as Interior Minister -- wanted to make an appearance at the Catholic Bishops' conference in Paris, they refused to let him speak -- and instead, the Bishops issued a ringing statement denouncing "those who would call for repression and instill fear" instead of responding to the economic, social, and racial causes of the riots. This was an unusually sharp rebuke directed squarely at Sarkozy.  Under the headline "Budget Cuts Exasperate Suburban Mayors," Le Monde reports today on how Chirac and his conservatives have compounded 30 years of neglect of the ghettos by slashing even deeper into social programs: 20% annual cuts in subsidies for neighborhood groups that work with youths since 2003, cuts in youth job-training programs and tax credits for hiring ghetto youth, cuts in education and programs to teach kids how to read and write, cuts in neighborhood police who get to know ghetto kids and work with them (when Sarkozy went to Toulouse, he told the neighborhood police: "You're job is not to be playing soccer with these kids, your job is to arrest them!") With fewer and fewer neighborhood cops to do preventive work that defuses youth alienation and violence, the alternative is to wait for more explosions and then send in the CRS (Compagnies Republicaines de Securite, hard-line paramilitary SWAT teams). Budget cuts for social programs plus more repression, is a prescription for more violence.  That's why Le Monde's editorial today warned that a continuation of this blind policy creates a big risk of provoking a repeat of 2002, when the neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the runoff.  And a majority of the country, empoisoned even more by racism after the violence of the last ten days, seems willing to accept more and more repression: a poll released last night on France 2 public TV shows that 57% of the French support Nicolas Sarkozy's hard-line approach to the ghetto youths' rebellion, now spreading right across France. Sarko's demagogy seems to be working -- at least with the electorate -- but it won't stop the violence, it will only increase it.   Doug Ireland, a longtime radical journalist and media critic, runs the blog DIRELAND, where this article appeared Nov. 6, 2005.

bye bye.

krakatau, i don't know if they aired those fights...i haven't seen the finale yet.

phill niblock-ten auras, muhahahahahahahahahahahaha!!

wow rage, every single one of those is fucking primo. that place looks like something out of madmax.

saturday night. prelim fights before the main events. melvin/davis. sam morgan fought josh burkman(from the first welterweight fight against melvin) and got ko'd 21 seconds in from a head clash. poor guy likes to get ko'd. keith fought kerry schall and won as well.

so marcus davis lost to melvin... that's kinda funny seeing that marcus didn't think melvin was in the same class as everyone else on the show, including himself.

bush orders staff to attend ethics briefings

i'm going with hughes on the 19th, but i think quarry will beat franklin.

^heh, yes, very odd. i also like the fact that nas must have to look around real slow with no sudden jerks to keep his cap on.

^don't worry, tonite are most def the finals. i'm so addicted to this shit it's ridiculous. i'm also rooting for luke in the welterweight bout. however, i think he could have some trouble with joe if he's taken down.. but if he does what he said he would do if he had to fight joe("just go nuts") i think it will be pretty rough and there will be either a knockout or lots of blood. i hope he enters the octagon tonite in full ninja gear. i also hope to see him smile lots when getting punched in the head. he's got that psycho edge going for him which i haven't seen from joe. as for the heavyweights, i'm rooting for rashad all the way. why are you pissed keith lost? the dude said like 2 words the whole season. maybe he's a funny guy, but you never got a chance to like the dude since he was never on camera. plus he has one of the cheesiest pre-fight mad faces i've ever seen. as for brad, i missed the fight with seth, so i don't know what he's gonna be like. however, he wears a cowboy hat...which makes me wonder about his judgement. i think the diaz/diego fight is going to be interesting...i have no idea who will win that. i'm probably pulling for diego. the florian/cope fight i have no idea. i saw florian get dominated last year by diego, but haven't seen anything since, and i've never seen cope fight.

another persuasive breakdown of the indictment and how fitzgerald's language hints at cheneyslime being the big fish... http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20051104.html A Cheney-Libby Conspiracy, Or Worse? Reading Between the Lines of the Libby Indictment By JOHN W. DEAN ---- Friday, Nov. 04, 2005 In my last column, I tried to deflate expectations a bit about the likely consequences of the work of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald; to bring them down to the realistic level at which he was likely to proceed. I warned, for instance, that there might not be any indictments, and Fitzgerald might close up shop as the last days of the grand jury's term elapsed. And I was certain he would only indict if he had a patently clear case. Now, however, one indictment has been issued -- naming Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby as the defendant, and charging false statements, perjury and obstruction of justice. If the indictment is to be believed, the case against Libby is, indeed, a clear one. Having read the indictment against Libby, I am inclined to believe more will be issued. In fact, I will be stunned if no one else is indicted. Indeed, when one studies the indictment, and carefully reads the transcript of the press conference, it appears Libby's saga may be only Act Two in a three-act play. And in my view, the person who should be tossing and turning at night, in anticipation of the last act, is the Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney. The Indictment: Invoking the Espionage Act Unnecessarily Typically, federal criminal indictments are absolutely bare bones. Just enough to inform a defendant of the charges against him. For example, the United States Attorney's Manual, which Fitzgerald said he was following, notes that under the Sixth Amendment an accused must "be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation." And Rule 7©(1) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure requires that, "The indictment . . . be a plain, concise and definite written statement of the essential facts constituting the offense charged." That is all. Federal prosecutors excel at these "plain, concise and definite" statement indictments - drawing on form books and institutional experience in drafting them. Thus, the typical federal indictment is the quintessence of pith: as short and to the point as the circumstances will permit. Again, Libby is charged with having perjured himself, made false statements, and obstructed justice by lying to FBI agents and the grand jury. A bare-bones indictment would address only these alleged crimes. But this indictment went much further - delving into a statute under which Libby is not charged. Count One, paragraph 1(b) is particularly revealing. Its first sentence establishes that Libby had security clearances giving him access to classified information. Then 1(b) goes on to state: "As a person with such clearances, LIBBY was obligated by applicable laws and regulations, including Title 18, United States Code, Section 793, and Executive Order 12958 (as modified by Executive Order13292), not to disclose classified information to persons not authorized to receive such information, and otherwise to exercise proper care to safeguard classified information against unauthorized disclosure." (The section also goes on to stress that Libby executed, on January 23, 2001, an agreement indicating understanding that he was receiving classified information, the disclosure of which could bring penalties.) What is Title 18, United States Code, Section 793? It's the Espionage Act -- a broad, longstanding part of the criminal code. The Espionage Act criminalizes, among other things, the willful - or grossly negligent -- communication of national-defense related information that "the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation." It also criminalizes conspiring to violate this anti-disclosure provision But Libby isn't charged with espionage. He's charged with lying to our government and thereby obstructing justice. So what's going on? Why is Fitzgerald referencing the Espionage Act? The press conference added some clarity on this point. Libby's Obstruction Has Blocked An Espionage Act Charge The Special Counsel was asked, "If Mr. Libby had testified truthfully, would he be being charged in this crime today?" His response was more oblique than most. In answering, he pointed out that "if national defense information which is involved because [of Plame's] affiliation with the CIA, whether or not she was covert, was classified, if that was intentionally transmitted, that would violate the statute known as Section 793, which is the Espionage Act." (Emphasis added). (As noted above, gross negligence would also suffice.) But, as Fitzgerald also noted at his press conference, great care needs to be taken in applying the Espionage Act: "So there are people," he said, "who argue that you should never use that statute because it would become like the [british] Official Secrets Act. I don't buy that theory, but I do know you should be very careful in applying that law because there are a lot of interests that could be implicated in making sure that you picked the right case to charge that statute." His further example was also revealing. "Let's not presume that Mr. Libby is guilty. But let's assume, for the moment, that the allegations in the indictment are true. If that is true, you cannot figure out the right judgment to make, whether or not you should charge someone with a serious national security crime or walk away from it or recommend any other course of action, if you don't know the truth.... If he had told the truth, we would have made the judgment based upon those facts...." (Emphases added.) Finally, he added. "We have not charged him with [that] crime. I'm not making an allegation that he violated [the Espionage Act]. What I'm simply saying is one of the harms in obstruction is that you don't have a clear view of what should be done. And that's why people ought to walk in, go into the grand jury, you're going to take an oath, tell us the who, what, when, where and why -- straight." (Emphasis added) In short, because Libby has lied, and apparently stuck to his lie, Fitzgerald is unable to build a case against him or anyone else under Section 793, a provision which he is willing to invoke, albeit with care. And who is most vulnerable under the Espionage Act? Dick Cheney - as I will explain. Libby Is The Firewall Protecting Vice President Cheney The Libby indictment asserts that "[o]n or about June 12, 2003 Libby was advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Division. Libby understood that the Vice President had learned this information from the CIA." In short, Cheney provided the classified information to Libby - who then told the press. Anyone who works in national security matters knows that the Counterproliferation Division is part of the Directorate of Operations -- the covert side of the CIA, where most everything and everyone are classified. According to Fitzgerald, Libby admits he learned the information from Cheney at the time specified in the indictment. But, according to Fitzgerald, Libby also maintained - in speaking to both FBI agents and the grand jury - that Cheney's disclosure played no role whatsoever in Libby's disclosure to the media. Or as Fitzgerald noted at his press conference, Libby said, "he had learned from the vice president earlier in June 2003 information about Wilson's wife, but he had forgotten it, and that when he learned the information from [the reporter] Mr. [Tim] Russert during this phone call he learned it as if it were new." So, in Fitzgerald's words, Libby's story was that when Libby "passed the information on to reporters Cooper and Miller late in the week, he passed it on thinking it was just information he received from reporters; that he told reporters that, in fact, he didn't even know if it were true. He was just passing gossip from one reporter to another at the long end of a chain of phone calls." This story is, of course, a lie, but it was a clever one on Libby's part. It protects Cheney because it suggests that Cheney's disclosure to Libby was causally separate from Libby's later, potentially Espionage-Act-violating disclosure to the press. Thus, it also denies any possible conspiracy between Cheney and Libby. And it protects Libby himself - by suggesting that since he believed he was getting information from reporters, not indirectly from the CIA, he may not have had have the state of mind necessary to violate the Espionage Act. Thus, from the outset of the investigation, Libby has been Dick Cheney's firewall. And it appears that Fitzgerald is actively trying to penetrate that firewall. What Is Likely To Occur Next? It has been reported that Libby's attorney tried to work out a plea deal. But Fitzgerald insisted on jail time, so Libby refused to make a deal. It appears that only Libby, in addition to Cheney, knows what Cheney knew, and when he knew, and why he knew, and what he did with his knowledge. Fitzgerald has clearly thrown a stacked indictment at Libby, laying it on him as heavy as the law and propriety permits. He has taken one continuous false statement, out of several hours of interrogation, and made it into a five-count indictment. It appears he is trying to flip Libby - that is, to get him to testify against Cheney -- and not without good reason. Cheney is the big fish in this case. Will Libby flip? Unlikely. Neither Cheney nor Libby (I believe) will be so foolish as to crack a deal. And Libby probably (and no doubt correctly) assumes that Cheney - a former boss with whom he has a close relationship -- will (at the right time and place) help Libby out, either with a pardon or financially, if necessary. Libby's goal, meanwhile, will be to stall going to trial as long as possible, so as not to hurt Republicans' showing in the 2006 elections. So if Libby can take the heat for a time, he and his former boss (and friend) may get through this. But should Republicans lose control of the Senate (where they are blocking all oversight of this administration), I predict Cheney will resign "for health reasons." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former counsel to the President.

is that directed at me isor?

will you regret not slammin' a hot stripper? yes. in 5 years will the ramifications be a big deal? probably not. and you'll have a good memory and story to brag about.

*deucepost

jbrsh, those 35mm holga's are looking nice... i tried that in the summer and it turned out pretty lousy, looks like you had much better luck. could've been that i used a roll of flim that i found basically jammed in a sewer grill though..