From, “What right does the fact that you are a popular and successful pop-star give you to comment on political and local matters?” Tony Wilson

To, “what is your favorite colour”. Edith Bowman

PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS!

This is absolutely hilarious!

Makes you think that the hip, young advisors at the Home Office are suggesting  these things to Dr Reid just to make him look like the idiotic, out of touch dinosaur we all know and abhor.

The BBQ ‘expert’ speaks…

“He said the government’s move was a step in the right direction and the industry would co-operate – but opportunities would arise for organisations to market “premium” – allegedly untraceable – e-mail accounts.

If everyone had a single internet identity for life, like a National Insurance number, this would make it far easier to track people, he said.” Mwah hahahahahahaha!!! PMSL.

Dotted!

===

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — A man sentenced to death in Kuwait for the 1983 bombings of the U.S. and French embassies now sits in Iraq’s parliament as a member of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s ruling coalition, according to U.S. military intelligence.

Jamal Jafaar Mohammed’s seat in parliament gives him immunity from prosecution. Washington says he supports Shiite insurgents and acts as an Iranian agent in Iraq.

U.S. military intelligence in Iraq has approached al-Maliki’s government with the allegations against Jamal Jafaar Mohammed, whom it says assists Iranian special forces in Iraq as “a conduit for weapons and political influence.”

Repeated efforts by CNN to reach Jamal Jafaar Mohammed for comment through the parliament, through the ruling Shiite Muslim coalition and the Badr Organization — the Iranian-backed paramilitary organization he once led — have been unsuccessful. (Watch how a convicted terrorist became an Iraqi lawmaker Video)

A Kuwaiti court sentenced Jamal Jafaar Mohammed to death in 1984 in the car bombings of the U.S. and French embassies the previous December. Five people died in the attacks and 86 were wounded.

He had fled the country before the trial.

Western intelligence agencies also accuse Jamal Jafaar Mohammed of involvement in the hijacking of a Kuwaiti airliner in 1984 and the attempted assassination of a Kuwaiti prince.

Jamal Jafaar Mohammed won a seat in Iraq’s Council of Representatives in the U.S.-backed elections of December 2005. He represents Babil province, south of Baghdad, in parliament.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman said officials are actively pursuing Jamal Jafaar Mohammed’s case with Iraqi officials. Al-Maliki has urged American intelligence officials to share their information with Iraqi lawmakers, who could strip Jamal Jafaar Mohammed of his parliamentary immunity.

“We don’t want parliament to be a shelter for outlaws and wanted people,” al-Maliki told CNN. “This is the government’s view, but the parliament is responsible. I don’t think parliament will accept having people like [him] or others currently in the parliament.”

Al-Maliki’s political party, Dawa, claimed responsibility for the Kuwait bombings at the time but now disavows them. The Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim party was forced into exile under former dictator Saddam Hussein, who was executed in December.

The prime minister says the situation is embarrassing — not only to his government but to a U.S. administration that holds up Iraq’s government as a democratic model for the region. […]

The CNN

So. A ‘Terrorist’ turned law-maker…just like George Washington.

This man has turned from ‘Terrorism’ to democracy. What more can you want? If all the ‘terrorists’ turned from blowing up stuff to sitting in parliament, would that be a bad thing?

Some people just will not be satisfied!

The Conservative party has officially come out against ID Cards, and to cancel the scheme on coming into office. And not before time. This could and should have been done prior to the last election, or at least at any time before now instead of pussy footing around allowing Neu Labour to waste extortionate amounts of money on ‘consultation exercises’ and priming the media with ID card propaganda.

Of course the fate of the National Identity Database is unclear – will the Conservative party pledge to unravel that as well? The NHS data spine? Will they ensure CCTV cameras are licensed and their numbers reduced? Will they scrap ANPR monitoring? Reinstate Data Protection principles in government departments?

We are waiting.

02 February 2007

The mysterious lights in the sky over Archway

DOZENS of mysterious lights were spotted hovering in the sky above Archway – spreading panic among residents below.

Unidentified flying orange objects stopped traffic and left residents staring skyward in disbelief at around 5.30pm on Thursday.

Islington police received four calls within a matter of minutes.

Witness Alix McAlister, 34, a market stall trader from Bredgar Road, Archway, said: “I just picked up my son from nursery in Bredgar Road. I had just come out of the door when I noticed what was going on in the sky.

“There were a group of them – 10 to 15 of them moving together. My first impression was that they reminded me of a squadron of aeroplanes in formation. But they didn’t have a proper formation and they were all moving at the same speed.

“I thought for a while that something was happening in the centre of London. Bombs and planes crossed my mind. But I realised very quickly that they didn’t look like any aircraft I’d seen before.

“They were coming from the north and moving south. And then they kind of stopped and they were hovering. There was no sound. They seemed to fade away and I saw more coming and then they stopped. It lasted about 10 minutes.”

Islington police informed Contact International UFO Research about the sightings. Soon after another witness contacted the Oxford-based organisation, which is devoted to solving the mystery of UFOs, and described what he saw.

A spokesman for Contact International said: “He told me he was picking his daughter up from school and he saw many people looking up in the air. Traffic had stopped and people were staring.

“He said he saw between 12 and 15 orange lights travelling across the sky. Then they would stop and then they went upwards.

[…]

Islington Gazette

hmmmmmm!

don’t go out without your binocs and cameras for the next few months chaps and chapettes!

Why not try and change the nation you’re living in?

* There are many reasons for this – every member has a slightly different motive. Many of us think our current governments are completely inadequate to support true liberty and nothing short of a revolution would change them.

[…]

Free Nation Foundation

For years I have thought that the best way of creating a new nation, short of going to another planet entirely, is to make a virtual nation inside another nation. This became crystal clear to me when I took the citizenship of Elgaland Vargaland.

Any physical nation in a nation, like Christiania is doomed to failure because it will simply be surrounded by the existing nation, and pressured until it ceases to exist.

A virtual nation inside a nation on the other hand, behaves more like a ‘Baudrillard Mass‘, with all its features and advantages:

The whole chaotic constellation of the social revolves around that spongy reference, that opaque but equally translucent reality, that nothingness: the masses. A statistical crystal ball, the masses are ’swirling with currents and flows,’ in the image of matter and the natural elements. So, at least, they are represented to us. […]

[…] this phenomenon made revolutionary explosion impossible, says Baudrillard.

The mass absorbs all the social energy, but no longer refracts it. It absorbs every sign and every meaning, but no longer reflects them… it never participates. It is a good conductor of information, but of any information. It is without truth and without reason. It is without conscience and without unconscious. Everybody questions it, but never as silence, always to make it speak. This silence is unbearable. It is the simulation chamber of the social.

As a mere shadow cast by power, the silent majority and its hyper-real conformity have no meaning and nothing to say to us. To that, terrorism responds by an equally hyper-real act equally caught up from the onset in concentric waves of media and of fascination.

It aims at the mass silence, the masses in their silence. It aims at the white magic of simulation, deterrence, of anonymous and random control […]

This is not a revolutionary explosion, which is now impossible, but a revolutionary implosion, where the mass disappears whilst in plain sight. Escape without motion. Traveling without moving. A new nation as black hole, impenetrable, irresistible, sucking all the energies and resources into it, from where they are unaccountable, unreachable and utterly liberated.

Here is how you do it.

You issue passports to a seed population of decent people for the new nation. This seed population is responsible for conveying the information (the mass is a good conductor of information) about what the new nation is. They then have the power to grant citizenship to anyone who they also feel is a decent person. You are issued with a paper passport.

By taking on the citizenship of this new nation, you bind yourself to its rules and regulations, and cease to have any obligations to any other nation, including especially the one where you live. You do not have to move house, or change anything about your activities, save that you no longer obey the laws of the state where you live, and choose to obey the laws of your new ‘motherland’.

The effect of such a maneuver is clear; in a country where such a thing took place on a large scale, the power of the state would crumble from inside, like a peach turning moldy in a time lapse film. The state would be eaten away as the new nation supplanted the old one. There would be no chaotic explosion, because this would be an actual implosion, a rapid inward erosion of power caused by the abandoning of the old state, by the mass, who were the source of power for the old state.

When criticality is reached you will have created your new country without anything more than the sound of a printing press making passports.

Moving to an island puts physical limits on the size of the nation that you create. By doing it in this way, you create a state of in situ expatriates, that can exist anywhere on the globe. There is no reason why this state could not spread to all western countries, freeing them all through this process of implosion.

That is a more interesting proposition than moving to a remote location, and paying to do so.

This brings us to the issue of buying an island to escape to. The Free Nation Foundation comes from a community that understands the power of people getting together in large numbers to facilitate a task with a single protocol as the base tool, in this case, Bittorrent used for swapping large files. The idea above is P2P like, swarm like, efficient (no one has to travel or relocate)…it is 21^st century.

In the above scenario, the passport and citizenship are the protocol, and the spread of them creates the large file (or rank and file) of new, free citizenry that supplants the existing structure.

The BBC Trust is carrying out its first Public Value Test (PVT) – a new procedure that must be applied when the Trust considers applications from BBC management for the approval of new BBC services. Here are the answers that yours truly gave:

Question 1
Do you agree with the BBC Trust’s proposal to approve the new BBC on-demand services, subject to the modifications outlined in the Trust’s report of its provisional conclusions?

Yes, as long as it caters for everyone equally.

Question 2
In a market in which most broadcasters are expected to be offering on-demand services, would you agree that it is a priority for the BBC to be investing in this area?

Absolutely, and the BBC should be at the forefront of the move to digital services. Since these services are driven by software, and the cost of distributing this software is near zero, the BBC should, as it has done in the past, collected the best engineers (in this case, software engineers) in the UK to work on projects that benefit the world, just as it did in the days of the Wold Service on Shortwave.

Question 3
The BBC Trust has proposed setting a limit of 30 days as the amount of time that programmes can be stored on a computer before being viewed. As this is a nascent market, there is currently no clear standard on the length of the storage window. On balance, the Trust thinks 30 days is the right length of time. How long do you think consumers should be able to store BBC programmes on their computers before viewing them?

They should be able to store them indefinitely. They pay for them since they are license payers, and in any case, they have the right in law to record shows on video tape for personal use, which can be kept forever. There is no reason why an artificial limit should be placed on how long a show can be kept. It must be said also that if the BBC refuses to provide what everyone wants, everyone will simply take what they want, and Auntie will be left out of the loop. The people who proposed these limits are obviously computer illiterates. People are swapping and storing everything they want already, which is protected by the law, so this 30 day limit is simply foolish, ill considered and actually wrong. Just because you can design a system in this way doesnt mean that you should.

Question 4
The BBC Trust concluded that public value would be created by allowing series stacking. This would allow viewers to catch-up with all episodes of a series for the duration of its run. The Trust recognised that although it would provide increased opportunities to view BBC programmes, it could also deter people from buying DVDs or using commercial video-on-demand services. Do you consider series stacking to be a useful feature? What kind of series would you expect to be included? Should there be any limitation on the number of episodes of a series made available for catch-up or the length of time for which they can be viewed?

No there should not. I can now get whatever I want from The Internets. If Auntie allows me to get it from her, in pristine quality, then I will do that. If not, I will go to Mininova. All the programmes of the BBC should be made available in this way. There is no technical reason why this should not be the case. If I can get whatever I want from the BBC, you can get accurate statistics on what is and is not popular. Should you fail to provide what I want, you will be in the dark as to what is really going on. These stats are every valuable.

Question 5
How important is it that the proposed seven-day catch-up service over the internet is available to consumers who are not using Microsoft software?

There is absolutely no reason why BBC content should not be available to every computer user. If you were to consult with the software developers who work at the BBC, you would have been told this. YouTube, Google Video and every other video service, like the cross platform ‘Democracy’ player are examples of how this is done. That you are even asking this question shows that you are computer illiterate, and have not asked the right people about this subject. The BBC should be running its own software development departments, and the results should all be open source. The BBC player would become the defacto standard for the next generation of television delivery. BBC engineering used to be world class and a symbol of innovation and greatness. It should be so again in the digital age. What has to happen to achieve this is that the software engineers need to be put in charge of this, and the computer illiterate removed from the decision making process.

Question 6
Should the BBC be allowed to offer book readings from its radio services as audio downloads over the internet?

Yes, and they should pay a per download royalty to authors.

Question 7
The BBC Trust concluded there was fine balance between public value and market impact in deciding whether to allow the BBC to offer audio downloads of classical music. While such downloads could help introduce new listeners to classical music, they could also deter purchases of commercial recordings. What is your view on whether – and to what extent – the BBC should be allowed to offer radio broadcasts of classical music as audio downloads over the internet?

People can already get whatever classical music they like from the internts. There is no reaso why the BBC should not allow people to download recordings that already belong to them (the license payers) since downloading is no different to streaming. There are already tools for every operating system (the software that manages your computers hardware) that allow you to save streamed content for playback later; offering downloads of programmes simply saves the license payer having to edit the streams manually. You all need to understand the true nature of digital content, and stop trying to manufacture dry water. Water is wet by nature, and digital media is by its nature copyable. Your job is to help the license payer, not hinder her. It is up to commercial operators to adapt to the new reality, rather than holding back the new age; rather like buggy whip manufacturers preventing the combustion engine. The profits of special interest groups should not come before the benefit of the public.

Question 8
How important is it to you that the BBC provides some means for parents to control which of its programmes are accessible on-demand to children? Is such a facility necessary or is it more a matter for parents to exercise controls over how children use the internet?

This is important, and trivial to impliment. Speak to your software developers about how this can be done. They already have the knowledge you seek.

Question 9
What are your views on whether the BBC should offer content from non-BBC providers on the on-demand service on its website?

If the BBC can make money from delivering the content of other companies, then that is a good thing. Those companies should pay for the service of being hosted and distributed by the BBCs new digital distribution service. The money earned could be used to ease the burden of the license payer.

Question 10
What are your views on whether and how the BBC should make available on-demand content on services run by other providers – such as multi-channel services or internet-based audio and video downloading services?

Same answer as 9.

Question 11
Do the revisions proposed to BBC Service Licenses to allow the new services to go ahead seem appropriate?

I have not read them.

Question 12
Are there any other issues you would like the BBC Trust to consider in relation to the proposed services?

You should consider seriously and impliment the points I have made about Open Source software, the pre-eminence of BBC engineering and the ubiquity of service issues. There is absolutely no excuse for getting this wrong. You have the expertise in house, and on tap in the public. Whatever decision you make, we will take what we want from the BBC, and use it in ways that we see fit, whatever decision you make. Your choice now is wether you want to be at the centre of the action or on the periphery.

Now it’s your turn.

Cameras Protecting Other Cameras

There is a proposal in Scotland to protect automatic speed-trap cameras from vandals by monitoring them with other cameras.

Then, I suppose we need still other cameras to protect the camera-watching cameras.

I am reminded of a certain building corner in York. Centuries ago it was getting banged up by carts and whatnot, so the owners stuck a post in the ground a couple of feet away from the corner to protect it. Time passed, and the post itself became historically significant. So now there is another post a couple of feet away from the first one to protect it.

When will it end?

[…]

Snarfed from Bruce Schneier’s Blog

It will end Bruce, when everyone reflexively smashes any ‘security’ camera that is operated by the state.

What people do in their own property is their own business, i.e. in Marks & Spencer they can have cameras wherever they like because it is a PRIVATE space. It is your choice not to shop there if they make you feel uncomfortable. Believe me, they will remove them in an instant if their profit margin is hurt by cameras.

Cameras that are in the public, operated by the state are a different thing entirely. The streets and the public spaces are precisely that, PUBLIC, belonging to EVERYONE and no authority has the right to surveil you while you are in public. You have the right to go about your business without being filmed, especially by the police.

All of these cameras should be smashed as a matter of civic duty. I have said this before, and so has Jultra, and so have many others. The fact that they have to put cameras on the cameras means that…its starting.

What would be excellent is if some geek put together a portable microwave gun that destroyed the circuits / CCD in a CCTV / Congestion Charge camera, so that you could kill any camera from a distance discreetly and effectively.

BBQ has an (shock) article by a named author on The Great Satan’s lust to be able to destroy everything:

The declassified document is called “Information Operations Roadmap”. It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.

Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.

[…]

The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.

All these are engaged in information operations. […]

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military’s psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.

“Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience,” it reads.

“Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public,” it goes on. […]

“In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States – even though they were directed abroad,” says Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive. […]

Late last year, it emerged that the Pentagon had paid a private company, the Lincoln Group, to plant hundreds of stories in Iraqi newspapers. The stories – all supportive of US policy – were written by military personnel and then placed in Iraqi publications.

And websites that appeared to be information sites on the politics of Africa and the Balkans were found to be run by the Pentagon. […]

When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone.

It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system.

“Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will ‘fight the net’ as it would an enemy weapons system,” it reads.

The slogan “fight the net” appears several times throughout the roadmap. […]

And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to “provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum”.

US forces should be able to “disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum”.

Consider that for a moment.

The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.

Are these plans the pipe dreams of self-aggrandising bureaucrats? Or are they real?

The fact that the “Information Operations Roadmap” is approved by the Secretary of Defense suggests that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon.

And that the scale and grandeur of the digital revolution is matched only by the US military’s ambitions for it.

[…]

The article. The paper.

Now you know for sure that the worldwide ID / Biometric Net project is being cast in these terms by the Pentagon. Mark My Mords™ the documents exist.

This document states clearly that everyone other than those at the Pentagon is the enemy. ‘The Mass’, in the Baudrillard sense, is the enemy. YOU are the enemy.

But you know this!

A programmer colleague writes:

Civil Disobediance is the only answer. On a rather predictable note the eye scanning has been dropped as all the machines run Windows and keep crashing ! Laughably the Uk has based it’s whole IT policy on MS Software so none of it is likely to ever work properly, however I am ready to resist.

This is very insightful. If the Linux advocates had been more successful in convincing HMG to adopt GNU / Linux / Open Source, these absurd, immoral and draconian projects would be more likely to succeed, since the infrastructure would be robust.

A rare instance where its a good thing that Linux is not being adopted.

Looking for a Walter Nurnberg book on ebay… came across this… do these THINGS get everywhere, everytime?

Now you’re going to tell me that’s religious imagery, aren’t you?

Interestingly morbid news…

(Oh, and people who store information would be able to decide in advance when and to whom it would be disclosed, using DNA or biometrics to confirm identity.)

For full story see:
seattlepi.nwsource.com/business

To read the patent application go to:
uspto.gov

[…] Now the question that immediately comes to mind is which ‘officials’ (aka installed Bolshevik coup faction) within the Home Office ? Is it that radical foaming menagerie of creatures that good people tried for decades to keep away from power, often to the response of ‘conspiracy theorist’ etc.

Hell, well whatever. Sadly that effort just wasn’t enough and when you’re dealing with evil in its purest frorm, dealing with a total hatred of humanity, of society, of the most basic foundations of freedom, accompanied by a desire to topple that society, to destroy it, to create a dire hopeless world of technological, legal and constitutional permanent revolution where everyone is sufficiently plebified into a grey terrified goo, then we can afford to be, and need to be, a lot more aggressive.

You see this kind of story will be treated by its critics as something along the lines of a ‘concerning misunderstanding about relationship between individual and state’, an overreaction to crime and terrorism, but what makes me strongly believe it is not a misunderstanding and overreaction, but truly indicative of a deep-rooted palsied disorder, that manifests as a hatred of freedom and quite serious plot a to otherthrow society altogether is that this latest and most horrific of attacks is hardly in isolation.

Is this a state mistakenly doing all the wrong things, in a well intentioned way to try to keep the public ‘safe’ as some would have you think, or is it a state truly gone wrong ?

We’ve seen recently the bad breathed ever-angry (former-) communist John Reid, trying to inflict the worthless ID cards onto visitors working in the UK, and that unfortunately proves the point. There isn’t a UK anymore, there is no nation, it’s a just container, a cage to practice this crippling socialism protecting the world globalisation/banking hub.

The truth is this. All members of Parliament, all members of the civil service, all donors to political parties, all figureheads in the police, and people in the media who as far as Murdoch and the Sun go…well we’ll come onto that in another time, but anyway all those who are trying to do this are the enemy of the country and are an enemy of all people. There is no other way to say it and they going to have to be dealt with one way or another.

Additionally, I’m sorry to say the bumbling police officer carrying out politically-distorted duties, or the stupid contractror just installing X-ray cameras in lamp posts and elsewhere is inevitably making themselves a legitimate subject of reprisals, just as that pedophile who has been moved into the estate over the road from you is. It’s not enough to be just doing your job anymore, as good people like Craig Murray have said.

[…]

Jultra!

Thats the way we like it. The absolute truth said plainly and with some balls.

I just saw this:
http://speak.ytmnd.com/

Which brought me to here:
http://www.custommusicrecords.com/

Via the google…

I like it!

Do you have a spare moment?
Or two?

Visa Denied: How Anti-Arab Visa Policies Destroy US Exports, Jobs and Higher Education In the aftermath of 9/11 US visa processing in the Arab world has ground to a halt.

US consulates formerly striving to outsource key visa processes to travel agencies before the terror attacks are now paralyzed and fearful. Under funded and insufficient security review processes leave Arab executives, prospective students, and vacation travelers in limbo for years or looking for alternative destinations. Shabby treatment of those who successfully run the visa gauntlet leaves many vowing never to return to the US. How much has it cost? The damage assessment is now in:

• Total US manufacturing jobs sustained by Arab market demand reached 215,000 in the year 2005, but could have been 420,000 with more effective and non-discriminatory US visa policies.
• Arab business and tourist travelers remained at half their 2001 levels, creating five year travel related service losses of $1.775 billion and 4,126 potential service jobs.
• In 2005
  Arab student enrollment in the US higher education system reached only 66% of the 2001 level. The US higher education system lost $1.989 billion in revenue and 9,000 education and support service jobs.

The 200 page Visa Denied report quantifies the damage done to US exporters, travel related service industries and the higher education system. Visa Denied recommends steps to correct and realign a severely degraded system to the true opportunity cost of flawed and sometimes discriminatory policies. Visa Denied traces a path from freewheeling days of outsourced national security of the State Department “Visa Express” system exploited by 9/11 hijackers toward the secure, efficient, and color blind visa policy American stakeholders expect and deserve.

Table of Contents and Free Chapters
(All 11.3 MB PDF)

1.0 Executive Summary (.1 MB PDF)

2.0 Free Travel and Free Trade: The US National Interest (1.4 MB PDF)

3.0 The Trade Consequences of US Visa Barriers (6.4 MB PDF)

Affected Industries
Key US State Stakeholders
4.0 Turning Away the World’s Highest-Spending Tourists (.4 MB PDF)

5.0 Cutting America’s Link to Tomorrow’s Leaders (1.3 MB PDF)

Fixing the Fulbright

6.0 Country-Level Damage Assessment
United Arab Emirates
The Dubai Ports World Debacle
Politics vs. National Security Concerns
DPW Analysis and Lessons Learned
Saudi Arabia
2005: A Year of Missed Opportunities
Egypt
Kuwait
Algeria
Qatar
Iraq 7.0 Conclusions: Restoring Visitors and Trade
Appendix – Opportunity Cost Methodology
Travel and Tourism
Arab Students
Arab Market Imports from the US

[…]

http://www.irmep.org/visa.htm

And there you have it.

What this report had better say, is that this 100,000,000,000 dollars is just the beginning and that all of that money was spent in other countries. This money is not sitting in the pockets of people waiting to spend it on america and its products and services, it is GONE, and will continue to evaporate, and the effects of this will last generations; more than the number of generations that The Lord Of Darkness predicts the bogus war on turrr is set to last.

What this article also doesn’t go into is the effect of the loss of influence on the world caused by people never getting to see the inside of the USA, and of course, the rise in influence of other countries as students come back thinking like Germans, Russians, Chinese etc etc.

Told you so.

It’s a new category don’t cha know!

…and that link should point to one of the articles predicting people abandoning the good ‘ol usa as a place to visit, and of course, my google fu is fucked up today and i cant find one….bleh!