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Fwd: Meeting Announcement
by naziluft forlot 22 Feb '05

22 Feb '05

Note: forwarded message attached. Find local movie times and trailers on Yahoo! Movies. http://au.movies.yahoo.com Received: from [65.192.186.2] by web90002.mail.scd.yahoo.com via HTTP; Tue, 22 Feb 2005 13:14:47 NZDT Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 13:14:47 +1300 (NZDT) From: naziluft forlot <nazforlot(a)yahoo.co.nz> Subject: Meeting Announcement X-Approval-Subject: BOUNCE cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net: Non-member submission from [naziluft forlot <nazforlot(a)yahoo.co.nz>] To: cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net, owner-cypherpunks-moderated(a)minder.net MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Length: 897 652-SEA FEEBDAEDFEEBDAEDFEEBDAEDFEEBDAEDFEEBDAEDFEEBDAEDFEEBDAEDFEEBDAED b7 a9 1d 72 59 e8 a7 19 9b 67 d3 85 a5 9e 01 6e 34 66 87 9a 9e 6a 1f d8 be 04 99 b5 da d1 e9 74 b4 8d 7a d2 43 9d 34 a6 e1 51 a8 86 b2 e2 56 2a 6b 39 fe 2b 68 e2 d5 85 36 e1 ff 9a ad 99 5d d4 40 f9 b8 5d b7 e4 45 d7 d6 f5 22 55 fb 84 c5 9f fc 66 79 28 57 4d e6 99 d5 c7 82 bb ae 6a 8d bf da 4a 1f 36 7f c0 09 9b 59 71 2e 0a 8b 1c 88 07 99 70 a8 a0 4d b0 8d a3 2e 14 3b 11 3c 35 94 37 9a 37 a1 f5 c9 08 fd 0c d4 fc 36 e6 74 7a 25 13 1e bd 03 d1 36 79 61 c1 87 24 7e 2e 99 9e 1e 72 a9 e7 d6 3a 81 0f 1d 89 10 2c 45 f0 31 0c 81 0a 2d 6d fa 92 30 3f e2 52 f9 82 2e 62 53 f9 df c6 be ce 43 06 47 37 ff 31 86 1d 88 9b 8e 10 3d cc Find local movie times and trailers on Yahoo! Movies. http://au.movies.yahoo.com

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The Dark Star
by R.A. Hettinga 22 Feb '05

22 Feb '05

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42719-2005Feb21?language=printer> The Washington Post washingtonpost.com The Dark Star Gloom May Have Stalked Hunter S. Thompson, but His Writing Was a Beacon By Henry Allen Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, February 22, 2005; Page C01 From Hunter S. Thompson's "Songs of the Doomed -- More Notes on the Death of the American Dream": "It has been raining a lot recently. Quick thunderstorms and flash floods . . . lightning at night and fear in the afternoon. People are worried about electricity. "Nobody feels safe. Fires burst out on dry hillsides, raging out of control, while dope fiends dance in the rancid smoke and animals gnaw each other. Foreigners are everywhere, carrying pistols and bags of money. There are rumors about murder and treachery and women with no pulse. Crime is rampant and even children are losing their will to live. "The phones go dead and power lines collapse, whole families plunged into darkness with no warning at all. People who used to be in charge walk around wall-eyed, with their hair standing straight up on end, looking like they work for Don King, and babbling distractedly about their hearts humming like stun guns and trying to leap out of their bodies like animals trapped in bags." He wrote this in Washington, in 1989. As his first wife, Sandy, once said: "Hunter tends to make things worse than they are sometimes." Thompson, at 67, was the gonzo journalist who shot himself in the head with a handgun on Sunday. He was also what you get when you combine Murphy's Law and some hillbilly Calvinist preaching the doctrine of innate depravity. He believed every man had it in him to do wrong. He also believed that if something could go wrong it would. We were all doomed, to use one of his favorite words. Hence the birth of gonzo journalism, a term he picked up from a fan letter, and one that applied only to him. He was the prose laureate of the Age of Paranoia, which began, let's say, with the election of Richard Nixon in the middle of the counterculture's nonstop mental fire drill brought on by psychedelic drugs. Then he took it further, as he took most things: "There's no such thing as paranoia," he said. "The truth is, your worst fears always come true." This was the fundamental joke that served as the fulcrum and lever of all his writing, starting with "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved." He attained "full-bore" torque, or maybe "king-hell" torque, to use his phrasing, with "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas -- A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream," followed by "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72," which George McGovern's political director, Frank Mankiewicz, called "the most accurate and least factual" account of the election. Other Thompson titles: "Generation of Swine," "Songs of the Doomed" and a short piece called "Hit Him Again, Jack, He's Crazy." You get the idea. He was from Louisville, a former juvenile delinquent and "hard case," as he liked to say: a big tense guy, 6 feet 3 with tight skin, wary eyes, short hair and a hectic way of moving, as if he were trying and failing to approximate the condition of normal. He wore aviator sunglasses and smoked with a cigarette holder. He looked like a combination of puzzled and threatening. He liked Dobermans and guns and liked to "get loaded on mescaline and fire my .44 magnum out into the dark -- that long blue flame." He spoke in bursts of words that later in his life became so unintelligible that a documentary about him provided subtitles. He had a sharp eye for the right people and he hung out with them. He had charisma. Being around him gave you the charmed but unsettled feeling of having joined an entourage. He took a lot of drugs and drank a lot of Wild Turkey. Louisa Davidson, who knew Thompson in Colorado for 30 years, said he was a Southern gentleman with moments of genius, but "he was a prisoner and slave to his addictions." He could be polite, when he wasn't picking an occasional fight, but there was nothing mellow or laid-back about him. Thompson on the '72 candidates: Being around Edmund Muskie "was something like being locked in a rolling box car with a vicious 200-pound water rat." Nixon "speaks for the werewolf in us." And Hubert Humphrey, the saint of long-ago liberalism: "There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey is until you've followed him around for a while." Strange that he became a hero to a generation known for its long-haired, "gettin' it all together," feminist, free-sex pacifists. Thompson wanted to break it all apart, and he rarely mentioned women or sex in his writing. In 1971, at the beginning of his big-time fame, he'd already written the obit for the '60s, a time when "you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning." But by then, "with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." People will forgive almost anything of writers who can astonish them and make them laugh. None of them can anymore. In his early '70s heyday, which was the last time that writers could still be heroes -- he was among the very last of them, along with Ken Kesey and Tom Wolfe, all of them outrageous in style and subject, the final heirs of J.P. Donleavy, Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger and Terry Southern, who all taught us the irreverence that Thompson made even more hilarious by taking it into the craziness that comes with sticking the big toe of your brain in the socket of "high-powered blotter acid," and "uppers, downers, screamers, laughers." He was a particular hero to journalists, whose terrible secret is that beneath all the globe-hopping and news anchor fame, they are merely clerks and voyeurs. Thompson, despite his rants about the onanistic squalor of journalism, had the bearing of an adventurer striding out to the very edges of madness and menace. He had much rep for walking the walk, which he did, but mostly he talked the talk. In fact, he'd never done very much in his life except write about it, which he did with clarity, hilarity and big-train momentum. He was a master stylist -- he once typed out the entire "Great Gatsby" as an exercise. He also created a pyrotechnic public persona called Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. How much more can we ask? He'd done a little jail time as a kid in Louisville. He joined the Air Force, which let him out two years early after a prescient commanding officer said that in Thompson's military newspaper work his "flair for invention and imagination" and his "disregard for military dress and authority . . . seem to rub off on the other airmen." He worked for small papers, wrote from South America for a now-gone Dow Jones weekly called the National Observer, drove a taxi in San Francisco while working on a novel, got in fistfights, ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo., got pulled over for drunk driving, beat a drug bust at his home in Woody Creek, near Aspen -- small-time stuff. Rolling Stone sent him to cover the fall of Vietnam -- where he could find no end of real fear and loathing -- but he split for Laos and failed to file a story worth mentioning. In 2000, he slightly wounded his assistant while trying to shoot a bear on his property. And yet readers worshiped him as a man of profound experience, to the point of playing what you might call "the Hunter Thompson game." The point of the game is to create mortal fear out of nothing more than, say, the sun flashing in a window. First man: You see that glint? Second man: Like binoculars? First man: Try 12-power Unertl glass on a Remington .308. Second man: Your first wife's boyfriend? First man: But he's a cop. Second man: Exactly. Our heads? In four seconds? Vapor, baby. This is the sort of conversation that boys have in treehouses, to scare themselves for the fun of it. Thompson's writing had the venerable American quality of boys' literature, in the manner of Hemingway, Jack London and Mark Twain. And of: old-fashioned sports writing, with its flamboyance and moralities, and the good but long-forgotten men's magazines such as True or Argosy, which honored the courage, luck and jocularity of the lone cowboys lurking in American men. Lately, with his best writing behind him, the gonzo just a collection of occasional gestures, he'd been writing a sports column for ESPN's Web site. We're left wondering what happened. He once said: "I hate to advocate weird chemicals, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone . . . but they've always worked for me." Until maybe he got wondering about the ultimate high being a 1,500-feet-per-second implantation in the neurological system. Or the paranoia got to him -- in paranoia you are your own worst enemy, and that's a tightening circle that nobody can escape, except, say, by suicide. Or it was pain and depression brought on by reported back surgery, a broken leg and a hip replacement. Or he was playing out the last moves of the Hemingway game -- the paranoid, shock-treated Hemingway who ended up with his doctor one day, crying because he said that he couldn't write anymore, he just couldn't write. Or America has finally become what he said it was, with lie-awake fears of suitcase nukes, jails full of secret uncharged prisoners with no legal recourse, and quiet applause for the recreational torture of Arabs in Iraq. Or people have stopped reading, and there are no more literary heroes. Or maybe he just killed himself, like a number of other people on any given day. He lived on his terms, he died on his own terms. Except he wasn't like a number of people -- he left us his prose, his genius persona, and his insights into the dark side of America, insights that could change your life after the laughing stopped. You would like to think that beneath the forbidding scowl of post-9/11 America, and despite the dark side, that a lot of people understand that Hunter S. Thompson was a great American. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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A night in the life of Hunter
by R.A. Hettinga 22 Feb '05

22 Feb '05

<http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=1O4IK4JJKT1JRQFIQMFSN…> The Telegraph A night in the life of Hunter (Filed: 22/02/2005) The day Hunter S Thompson introduced Hugh Davies to Wild Turkey bourbon, guns and his Rocky Mountain wilderness We started drinking Wild Turkey at noon. The Woody Creek Tavern had only just opened and Hunter S Thompson swung round on his usual stool at the bar, just across from the pool table he had tried to blow up the week before. "Hey Dude, what's up?" he said in a voice matured by a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse. He spoke in a stop-start, throaty rasp, occasionally missing out words in sentences. At times, it was hard to understand him. We had first met years before when he was a sports reporter in Washington DC. We kept in touch through his riotous years as the Mad Doctor of Gonzo Journalism, author of Kerouac-like screeds such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Rolling Stone's most individual writer. His reputation for being difficult rarely spilled over to his relations with the media because he loved drinking with reporters. This time, we met as he was being sued for allegedly groping a former porn queen, Gail Palmer, in a hot tub at his home, Owl Farm, up Buttermilk Mountain near Aspen, Colorado. He was alleged to have snarled to the woman's companion: "Get her out of here, or I'll blow her head off." This I could have believed as his love for bourbon, cocaine and mind-numbing pharmaceuticals was only matched by his addiction to munitions. I noticed that the barman, ordinarily used to the mad doctor's eccentric behaviour, was keeping his distance, pouring large measures of whisky into his shot glass and then retreating swiftly to the other end of the bar. Hunter said he'd upset the proprietor by testing a detonator and explosives on a table leg, scattering cues and pool balls, and smoking out the bar. As usual, his voice was on fast-forward, as he sped past the incident to rant on about "the generation of swine" now running Aspen, where he had lived since the 1960s. As I was trying to elicit details about the porn queen's visit, Hunter raced on, confessing that he had opened fire late at night on the house of a multi-millionaire neighbour, Floyd Watkins, because he didn't like his attitude. There had been some altercation over Hunter's environmental concerns. Watkins said the mad doctor's brain was "fried with drugs". Hunter called him "crazy". The mad doctor jabbed a Dunhill into his cigarette holder and plucked two Mexican peppers from a bowl on the bar. Handing me one he said: "Try this. It helps when you're as mad as hell." He lumped Watkins, who kept three tigers in a cage at the gate of his home as well as swans on a man-made lake, with the Hollywood figures who had second homes in Aspen, worth millions of dollars. "The greed-heads are taking over," he said. He recalled his early years in Aspen when he arrived with Jack Nicholson, Bob Rafelson of Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces fame, Glen Frey and Don Henley of The Eagles and Jimmy Buffett, to "cool out" in the Rockies. "Now, it's all networking, corporate money and day-glo fur," he said. "It's fat cat money - and I hate the swine." As he spoke, his best friend, Bob Braudis, dropped into the bar to say hello. Bob, the sheriff of Aspen, was almost Hunter's literary equal. As he sipped beer, he quoted Homer from his days as a student at Harvard. Hunter said: "Bob and I go back 20 years. He's had to arrest me more than once." The sheriff, I later learned, periodically rounded up friends to help the mad doctor clean up his house. At 6pm, Hunter said it was time to go. He ordered up a last Wild Turkey and, clutching it in one hand with his other on the wheel of his Chrysler pick-up, we went up the mountain road. Owl Farm, covering 127 acres, was at the top of a bluff. The entrance was hung with steel models of vultures and three gargoyles. Inside, on a desk, was his old Apple Power Book computer. Hanging over it was a rubber bust of Richard Nixon wearing a scout hat. I got him to talk about the porn queen. "Ungrateful swine, the lot of them," he muttered, unravelling a parcel. Inside was a *44 Magnum. "Come into the garden," he said. We went out into the gloom. There were two targets. He said: "Look, I'll try for the target with the Mickey Mouse face. I'll imagine it's Michael Eisner, the Disney chief. You try and hit the old television set." He loaded the gun and handed it to me. It was so heavy that I needed both hands to steady the barrel. I missed. Hunter, despite a day on the bourbon, blew the target away. Once again, as he once wrote, the Lord of the Karma enjoying an activity he said was "better than sex". -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Hunter S Thompson
by R.A. Hettinga 22 Feb '05

22 Feb '05

<http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=1O4IK4JJKT1JRQFIQMFSN…> The Telegraph Hunter S Thompson (Filed: 22/02/2005) Hunter S Thompson, who shot himself on Sunday, aged 67, was the explosive, funny and frequently shocking self-styled "Mad Doctor of Gonzo Journalism". Where Tom Wolfe and the "orthodox" New Journalists were observers, Dr Thompson (he had a doctorate in Divinity, bought by mail order) cast himself as catalyst and participant, charging into situations with a headful of hallucinogens and a safari jacket weighed down with guns and bottles. His most famous book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), concerned a trip to Vegas with his 300lb Hawaiian-shirted Samoan attorney, supposedly to cover a motorcycle race and a national drug enforcement convention. But in carrying out the assignment Thompson largely ignored both events and instead focussed on his own antics. The opening paragraph set the tone: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like: 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive... ' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" Later on Thompson remarks: "This is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted." Before becoming national affairs editor of Rolling Stone magazine in 1970 (a title he held until 1999), Thompson had worked as a freelance, writing relatively straight reports on sports and South America, plus an excellent book about the Hell's Angels (1966), some of whom became close friends, until the book appeared and they beat him up. He invented "Gonzo" journalism when he and his favourite colleague, the British cartoonist Ralph Steadman, were sent by Scanlan's Magazine to cover the 1970 Kentucky Derby (held at Thompson's home town of Louisville). Unable to produce a piece, Thompson ripped pages straight out of his notebook, numbering them and sending them to the printer. The technique was fuelled by terrifying quantities of drugs, alcohol and tobacco. He wrote later that Gonzo was "a style of 'reporting' based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism - and the best journalists have always known this". He also admitted his own work was not Gonzo, that it was all a failure because he was unable to write or report his reactions to events literally as they occurred. He said that "the writer must be participant in the the scene while he's writing it", and that such instantaneous effort was beyond him. In the 1960s and early 1970s Thompson was also celebrated for his excoriating political reporting - the writer Nelson Algren called him the finest political reporter in America, whose "hallucinated vision strikes one as having been, after all, the sanest". Thompson's coverage of the McGovern-Nixon election in 1972 resulted in his best book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973), in which he famously characterised the Republican candidate as speaking to "the Werewolf in us, the bully, the predatory shyster". "Jesus! Where will it end?" Thompson mused. "How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?" Nixon's victory effectively brought an end to Thompson's career as a political journalist, although he became a self-confessed "Watergate junkie". While he went on to write several more extraordinary books, including The Great Shark Hunt (1980), he later became more widely known for his own bad behaviour, and as the model for Duke, the dope-addled character in the comic strip Doonesbury. Journalists who visited Thompson at his cabin discovered that it was fatal to try and drink with him. Thompson's biographer E Jean Carroll described his routine: "3pm rise. 3.05 Chivas Regal with the morning papers, Dunhills. 3.45 cocaine. 3.50 another glass of Chivas, Dunhill. 4.15 cocaine. 4.54 cocaine. 5.05 cocaine... 9pm starts snorting cocaine seriously. 10pm drops acid. 11pm Chartreuse, cocaine, grass. 11.30 cocaine, etc, etc... 12.05 to 6am Chartreuse, cocaine, grass, Chivas, coffee, Heineken, clove cigarettes, grapefruit, Dunhills, orange juice, gin, continuous pornographic movies. In later years, the biographical note in Thompson's book described him as living as a "freelance country gentleman" and existing "in a profoundly active Balance of Terror with the local police authorities". Hunter Stockton Thompson was born at Louisville, Kentucky, on July 18 1937. His father sold insurance and died when Hunter was 14, an event that propelled the boy, so he recalled, into becoming "an outlaw". Thereafter, his mother became alcoholic and slovenly, while Hunter became a leader of his gang, and was much admired by girls. Aged 18 he was jailed for his part in a robbery, and he took a writing course in prison. On release, he joined the United States Air Force, doing sports writing for a base newspaper in Florida until his commanding officer noted that "his flair for invention and imagination" and "rebellious disregard for military dress and authority seem to rub off on the other airmen". Honourably discharged, Thompson took, and was quickly fired from, a job with the Middletown (New York) Record, then did a traineeship at Time magazine. He worked for a bowling magazine in Puerto Rico and in 1960, at least partly in emulation of Jack Kerouac, drove across country to California. While living at Big Sur, he began work on The Rum Diary, an autobiographical novel based on his beginnings as a journalist in Puerto Rico, which was eventually published in 1998. After investigating the beatnik scene in San Francisco, Thompson spent two years in South America, sending dispatches to the National Observer. Returning to San Francisco, he combined freelance journalism with driving a cab, before being commissioned by Random House to write Hell's Angels. The first reporter to meet with the Hell's Angels on their own turf instead of relying on police information, Thompson rode with them for a year. In 1963, Thompson moved to the Rockies so that he would be free to live by his own anarchic rules - among his stunts were blowing up the pool table in his local bar and driving around drunk with a glass of bourbon in hand. Not surprisingly, he deplored Aspen's subsequent fashionability, the influx of "Day-Glo fur and Manhattan chic". In a bid to "prevent the greedheads from moving in" he ran for sheriff in 1970 on a "freak politics" ticket, promising to turf the streets, rename Aspen Fat City and put dishonest marijuana dealers in the stocks. He lost by 1,533 votes to 1,068. Thereafter he resorted to "direct action", using what he called "firepower demonstrations", such as firing 50 shots from his automatic rifle over the house of an arriviste property developer. In 1990 he was accused of assaulting a former porn film actress who had come to his house to interview him. The woman, Gail Palmer-Slater, accused Thompson of "squeezing and twisting her left breast and threatening to blow her head off" after she refused to join him in his hot tub. Thompson said she was drunk, and was seeking publicity for a new range of sex aids and manuals. A police raid on the house turned up white powder, explosives, a 12-bore shotgun and a.22 calibre machine-gun. Claiming he was a victim of a revitalised police state unleashed by the Bush administration anti-drug hysteria, Thompson suggested a newspaper headline: "Life-style police raid home of crazed Gonzo journalist. Eleven-hour search by six trained investigators yields nothing but crumbs." He promised to enliven the the court case by showing the actress's movies Hot Legs and Prisoner of Paradise at the Aspen Opera House. Not that criminal proceedings interfered with his lifestyle. "The whiskey stores opened at seven, and I didn't have to be in court until ten," he wrote in Songs of the Doomed. The charges were soon dropped, after potential witnesses failed to co-operate with the prosecutors. "We beat them like stupid rats," Thompson declared. "We beat 'em like dogs." Stopping in Aspen to load his car up with beer, he then sped off, firing blanks. Fearful of "growing old and helpless", he admitted in interviews that suicide had occurred to him, saying in 1998 that he planned to fill his house with "cold liquid glass" so it was preserved forever, with him inside, "and people can come and look through the front window". Hunter S Thompson married first, in 1963, Sandra Dawn Conklin. They had a son, Juan, "and seven miscarriages". She left him in 1978. He is survived by his second wife, Anita Beymunk. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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End of story for Hunter Thompson
by R.A. Hettinga 22 Feb '05

22 Feb '05

<http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20050221-115003-…> The Washington Times www.washingtontimes.com End of story for Hunter Thompson By Stephanie Mansfield THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published February 22, 2005 Outlaw, druggie, Dunhill-smoking, Chivas Regal-drinking, anti-establishment literary icon Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide after becoming depressed about the United States' shift toward conservatism, said one longtime friend who spent the weekend at the Aspen, Colo., home of the late "gonzo" journalist. "He was depressed about the state of society," said Loren Jenkins, foreign editor for National Public Radio in Washington. A vehement opponent of President Bush, Mr. Thompson, 67, "was feeling maudlin about the current conservatism sweeping the country," Mr. Jenkins said. "He felt he'd had a long run, trying to create a freer society in the '60s and '70s and he felt it had all been closed down." Mr. Thompson's body was discovered Sunday by Juan Thompson, his son by his first wife, Sandra Dawn Thompson. His second wife, Anita, was not home at the time. The family issued a statement asking for privacy. In recent months, Mr. Thompson had suffered injuries and other health problems. While others expressed shock at Mr. Thompson's death, close friends " including Mr. Jenkins " did not. "Everyone who knew Hunter knew that he lived by his own rules and that he would end his life by his own rules," Mr. Jenkins said. But other friends said yesterday that Mr. Thompson seemed to be in good spirits during the past week. "I was there Friday evening at his home and left him at midnight," said longtime friend and neighbor Michael Cleverly. "We had a lovely evening. He was very upbeat. I'd have been less shocked if he had shot me rather than himself," said Mr. Cleverly. "He is the last person on the planet Earth I would expect of that." Mr. Cleverly, who knew Mr. Thompson for 25 years, said the writer " who lived at a compound called Owl Farm " had several assignments in the works, including a book of his photography. "He was in the midst of a productive life. My only speculation was that [the suicide] had to be an impulse, not something he'd been dwelling on." Mr. Cleverly also attended Mr. Thompson's annual Super Bowl party, and said friends were not aware of anything troubling the writer, except he had suffered "a terrible year physically." According to Mr. Cleverly, the writer fell in Hawaii and broke his leg. He also had back surgery and pain from an artificial hip. Yesterday at his favorite haunt, Woody Creek Tavern, patrons and writers gathered to remember Mr. Thompson, perhaps best known for his drug-fueled 1971 narrative "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," which was made into a 1998 movie starring Johnny Depp. Recently, Mr. Thompson had been a regular columnist for ESPN.com Web site, and his columns had been collected into a book. Passionate about sports, Mr. Thompson gained a loyal following of younger readers who were not yet born when his name, along with Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote, became synonymous with a new style of observational, stream-of-consciousness magazine writing. He rode with the Hell's Angels " the subject of a 1966 book that established him as a leading practitioner of so-called "New Journalism" " and wrote a widely praised account of the 1972 presidential campaign and, like George Plimpton, became adept at participatory journalism. "There was an undercurrent of madness to his work," fellow writer Gay Talese said yesterday. "The story was always inside his head. It wasn't necessarily what he saw. His power was his disenchantment by just about everything in front of him." His last column recounted a 3 a.m. phone call to actor and friend Bill Murray, who portrayed Mr. Thompson in a 1980 movie, "Where the Buffalo Roam." Mr. Thompson had invented a new, "truly violent leisure sport" he called "shotgun golf," in which each player attempts to shoot his opponent's golf ball with a 12-gauge shotgun. "He was so vital and had endless number of friends," said Gaylord Guerin, owner of the Woody Creek Tavern. "He was an absolute genius." With his aviator sunglasses, cigarette holder and broad-brimmed hat, Mr. Thompson was the inspiration for the "Uncle Duke" character in cartoonist Gary Trudeau's "Doonesbury" strip. Known to magazine editors as a prima donna who turned in outlandish expense accounts and demanded high fees, he nevertheless earned respect for his entertaining rants. Mr. Jenkins said Rolling Stone once sent Mr. Thompson on assignment to Vietnam. Rather than cover the war, he spent his entire stay in a Saigon bar getting drunk and arguing on the telephone with editor Jann Wenner, who had canceled the writer's health insurance. He inspired a generation of future writers with his vivid first-person accounts of adventures fueled by alcohol and illegal drugs. "I hate to advocate weird chemicals, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone ... but they've always worked for me," Mr. Thompson once said. He later admitted exaggerating his drug consumption, but truth never seemed to get in the way of a good story. Mr. Jenkins described his late friend as "who Mark Twain might have been if Twain had discovered acid." Flipped out and freaked out on everything from psilocybin mushrooms to peyote, Mr. Thompson wrote in the same vein as William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski. He especially admired the works of "beat" writer Jack Kerouac and Irish novelist J.P. Donleavy. But Ernest Hemingway was always an influence, and Mr. Jenkins said Mr. Thompson's death by self-inflicted gunshot reflected that influence. "There is a bit of the Hemingway thing," said Mr. Jenkins. "Both writers had their greatest success very early in their careers, and both created a persona built on that." While politically an enemy of all things Republican, Mr. Thompson proudly proclaimed himself a life member of the National Rifle Association and was known to keep a small arsenal of firearms at his home. Born in Louisville, Ky., on July 18, 1937, Hunter Stockton Thompson was a self-described "wild boy." After high school, he served two years in the Air Force during which he edited the base newsletter and wrote sports stories for a local newspaper. He then worked as a freelance correspondent for several newspapers and magazines before joining Rolling Stone, where he coined the term "gonzo journalism." Always worried about finances, Mr. Thompson churned out a series of books, including "The Great Shark Hunt" (1975), "Generation of Swine" (1988) and "Better Than Sex" (1994). A novel he wrote in the early 1960s, "The Rum Diary," was published in 1998, and he published a collection of short stories in 1991. "He kept everything," said Mr. Jenkins, referring to a cache of material " letters, faxes, memos and old articles " Mr. Thompson stored in his basement. One of Mr. Thompson's more colorful antics occurred in 1970, when he ran unsuccessfully for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo., on the "Freak Power" ticket. The gonzo candidate " whose platform included changing the name of Aspen to "Fat City" and decriminalizing drugs " decided to shave his head, so he could denounce his crew-cut Republican rival as "my long-haired opponent." Copyright ) 2005 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. Return to the article Cl -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Code name "Killer Rabbit": New Sub Can Tap Undersea Cables
by R.A. Hettinga 22 Feb '05

22 Feb '05

<http://wcbs880.com/topstories/topstories_story_049165912.html/resources_sto…> WCBS 880 | wcbs880.com Experts: New Sub Can Tap Undersea Cables * USS Jimmy Carter Will Be Based In Washington State Feb 18, 2005 4:55 pm US/Eastern The USS Jimmy Carter, set to join the nation's submarine fleet on Saturday, will have some special capabilities, intelligence experts say: It will be able to tap undersea cables and eavesdrop on the communications passing through them. The Navy does not acknowledge the $3.2 billion submarine, the third and last of the Seawolf class of attack subs, has this capability. "That's going to be classified in nature," said Kevin Sykes, a Navy spokesman. "You're not going to get anybody to talk to you about that." But intelligence community watchdogs have little doubt: The previous submarine that performed the mission, the USS Parche, was retired last fall. That would only happen if a new one was on the way. Like the Parche, the Carter was extensively modified from its basic design, given a $923 million hull extension that allows it to house technicians and gear to perform the cable-tapping and other secret missions, experts say. The Carter's hull, at 453 feet, is 100 feet longer than the other two subs in the Seawolf class. "The submarine is basically going to have as its major function intelligence gathering," said James Bamford, author of two books on the National Security Agency. Navy public information touts some of the Carter's special abilities: In the extended hull section, the boat can provide berths for up to 50 special operations troops, like Navy SEALs. It has an "ocean interface" that serves as a sort of hangar bay for smaller vehicles and drones to launch and return. It has the usual complement of torpedo tubes and Tomahawk cruise missiles, and it will also serve as a platform for researching new technologies useful on submarines. The Carter, like other submarines, will also have the ability to eavesdrop on communications-what the military calls signals intelligence-passed through the airwaves, experts say. But its ability to tap undersea fiber-optic cables may be unique in the fleet. Communications worldwide are increasingly transmitted solely through fiber-optic lines, rather than through satellites and radios. "The capacity of fiber optics is so much greater than other communications media or technologies, and it's also immune to the stick-up-an-attenna type of eavesdropping," said Jeffrey Richelson, an expert on intelligence technologies. To listen to fiber-optic transmissions, intelligence operatives must physically place a tap somewhere along the route. If the stations that receive and transmit the communications along the lines are on foreign soil or otherwise inaccessible, tapping the line is the only way to eavesdrop on it. The intelligence experts admit there is much that is open to speculation, such as how the information recorded at a fiber-optic tap would get to analysts at the National Security Agency for review. During the 1970s, a U.S. submarine placed a tap on an undersea cable along the Soviet Pacific coast, and subs had to return every few months to pick up the tapes. The mission was ultimately betrayed by a spy, and the recording device is now at the KGB museum in Moscow. If U.S. subs still must return every so often to collect the communications, the taps won't provide speedy warnings, particularly against imminent terrorist attacks. "It does continue to be something of a puzzle as to how they get this stuff back to home base," said John Pike, a military expert at GlobalSecurity.org. Some experts suggest the taps may somehow transmit their information, using an antenna or buoy-but those modifications are easier to discover and disable than a tap attached to the cable on the ocean floor. "Unless they have some new method of relaying the information, it doesn't serve much use in terms of warning," Bamford said. He contended tapping undersea communications cables violates a number of international conventions the United States is party to. Such communications could still be useful, although the task of sorting and analyzing so many communications for ones relevant to U.S. national security interests is so daunting that only computers can do it. The nuclear-powered sub will be commissioned in a ceremony at 11 a.m. Saturday at the submarine base at New London, Conn. The ceremony marks the vessel's formal entry into the fleet. The former president, himself a submariner during his time in the Navy, will attend. After some sea trials, the ship will move to its home port in Bangor, Wash. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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RE: SHA-1 results available
by John Young 22 Feb '05

22 Feb '05

Yiqun L Yin writes 21 February 2005 about when the full SHA-1 paper will appear: We have submitted the paper to a conference for peer review, and we should receive a notification of the review results by early May. We plan to publish the paper after incorporating the comments from the review, and will let you know around that time.

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palm beach HIV
by Justin 22 Feb '05

22 Feb '05

Given the release of Palm Beach HIV+ patient information via "accidental" attachment to a widely-distributed email, should agencies with access to confidential information implement mandatory access control and role-based security so that, barring problems with the RBAC/MAC software, confidential data cannot be accessed by roles that have external network access? http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-paidslist21feb21,0,… I haven't found the list yet, but I found this: http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/opinion/epaper/2005/02/11/a20a… "In Palm Beach County, one of every 35 blacks is HIV-positive. That is compared with one of every 492 whites." Calling Tim May! Calling Tim May! -- Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. --Hemingway, Esquire, April 1936

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U.S. Withholding Satellite Data
by Eugen Leitl 22 Feb '05

22 Feb '05

Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/22/0539254 Posted by: timothy, on 2005-02-22 07:33:00 from the derives-from-a-mandate-from-the-masses dept. plover writes "Because of Congressional legislation passed quietly in 2003, the Air Force Space Command will no longer [1]distribute space surveillance data via NASA. There was supposed a three year transitional period where the data was to be made available via a NASA web site, but earlier this month their transitional server went down hard, and NASA has decided to not rebuild it. (It was scheduled to be shut down on 31 March 2005 anyway.) The only way to obtain satellite data now is by signing up with the official [2]Space-Track website. Part of the agreement to obtaining data from their site is that you agree to not redistribute their data. Of course, [3]amateurs are still free to redistribute [4]their observations, [5]including those of classified satellites." References 1. http://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/notice.asp 2. http://www.space-track.org/ 3. http://www.satobs.org/satintro.html 4. http://www.amsat.org/amsat/sats/n7hpr/satsum.html 5. http://home.t-online.de/home/R.Kracht/top50.htm ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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PCs do thousands of years of work
by R.A. Hettinga 21 Feb '05

21 Feb '05

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/science/nature/4270241.stm> The BBC Thursday, 17 February, 2005, 08:16 GMT PCs do thousands of years of work By Jo Twist BBC News science and technology reporter A global network of computer users has clocked up more than 4,000 years' worth of computer calculations in under three months as part of a huge grid project. Since November, thousands have joined the World Community Grid (WCG) which uses idle computer time to help solve serious health and social problems. Over 4,000 "teams" have been running a simple program which processes proteins for the Institute of Systems Biology. The Seattle-based institute is working out the role of proteins in bodies. The calculations completed so far by the thousands of ordinary desktop computers mean that the WCG has done 22% of the total analysis needed for the institute's Human Proteome Folding Project. "It makes me feel great because it is easy to sit back and let it run," Graham Hood, a community administrator for the 63-member My Online Team, told the BBC News website. "I can't think of a better way to put spare time into good use," added the watchmaker based in Birmingham. By the time the project ends it is predicted that more than 20,000 years of computing will have been done. Technical trouble-shooter As well as being a keen "protein cruncher", Mr Hood has also filled the role of technical trouble-shooter for those in the WCG community who fear viruses - not the biological kind. Participants only need to know how to install the software - no other expertise is required to be part of the effort. But that means some who take part may not necessarily be so savvy about technology and computer security either, which could cause problems. The software required to take part in the WCG is small, simple, and does its calculations without users realising it. "If you took 10,000 people and said it is costing you this amount a week to run your computer, would you prepared to donate that money to charity or put this program on the computer and it costs you nothing?" Graham Hood, My Online Team Small, encrypted files of protein data are automatically downloaded via a secure server when users connect to the net. With the current concern over spyware and viruses, WCG members have needed to ensure they remain secure online, but configure their systems to let the right kind of encrypted data in and out. Spyware are programs that surreptitiously install themselves on computers to gather information about users. They can slow computer processors and clog systems. "If you have a PC at home, it is more simple," said Mr Hood. "But if you are in corporation and you want to put 40 computers on the grid, due to the fact that networks have to be so secure, firewalls will block information getting back to the grid. "People have to get past the firewall in a safe manner." On the community's forums, advice is given out readily. The project is also a way of contributing to a good cause that avoids scam "charity e-mail" phishing attempts - e-mails which pretend to be from legitimate charities. This kind of scam recently hit tsunami relief fund-raising efforts. "If you took 10,000 people and said it is costing you this amount a week to run your computer, would you prepared to donate that money to charity or put this program on the computer and it costs you nothing?" Of course, a resource like cash is always a welcome relief for charities too, but at least computers which get more powerful year on year can do something useful, too. Premier processing league The teams and individuals also earn points for the processing and calculations each has done. Those with the most points, worked out and balanced against the specification of the computer and net connections speeds, are ranked in a league. The "Premiership" tends to comprise those who might have more than one processor linked up to the WCG. "One person from Hollywood has a render farm with 30 processors in it. So he is doing in one day what I have done in three months," explained Mr Hood. But Mr Hood and his team have crawled steadily up the rankings to be the 13th most prolific team, contributing more than 300 computers to the endeavour. Earning processing points and having rankings gives people something to aim for, aside from the greater humanitarian goals, according to Mr Hood. Each protein has to be analysed five separate times to be sure of results. The hope is that a better understanding of the roles certain proteins have will lead to the development of cures or better treatments for diseases like cancer, HIV/Aids, and malaria. Protein analyses can take years to complete on powerful supercomputers alone. A global network of desktop computing power doing the analysing means that time can be reduced to a matter of months. The WCG project, backed by IBM, is similar to others, like the successful Seti@home run by the Search for Extra Terrestrial Life project which examined radio signals for signs of alien communication. Another, the Smallpox Research Grid, linked together more than two million volunteers from 226 countries to speed-up analysis of 35 million drug molecules in the search for a treatment. The subjects of study for the WCG teams are chosen by an international advisory board of experts specialising in health sciences and technology. The board evaluates proposals from leading research, public, and not-for-profit organisations, and aims to be involved in up to six projects a year. E-mail this to a friend Related to this story: Computer grid to help the world (20 Nov 04 | Technology ) Sun offers processing by the hour (02 Feb 05 | Technology ) ET fails to 'phone home' (28 Mar 03 | Science/Nature ) Computing power aids alien hunters (19 Aug 02 | Technology ) RELATED INTERNET LINKS: World Community Grid Download WCG software IBM Seti@home Grid forum Human Proteome Folding Project Institute of Systems Biology My Online Team Folding@Home The BBC is not resp -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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