The FBI is citing a provision of the Patriot Act to send letters to journalists telling them to secretly prepare to turn over their notes, e-mails and sources to the bureau!

Mark Rasch who is a former head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit, and now serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Security Counsel at Solutionary Inc, has an article in Security Focus. Here.

Tags: Saswat, USA, Media

The Human Resource Development Minister of India, Murli Manohar Joshi, met the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee to discuss with him his resignation from the Council of Ministers.

Kind of funny because he actually resigned on September 19. the power hunger still has kept the right wing politician awaiting chargesheet on October 10 (for inciting communal violence).

In the misdeeds, folks don’t have conviction. But what if the misdeeds are all the deeds they commit?
Shame!

Tags: Saswat, Hinduism, India

Press Trust of India reports today that Italy's national grid operator, GRTN, might switch off electricity supplies to a limited number of household consumers “It will not happen today, maybe (it will happen) tomorrow.''

Ridiculous. Considering two things: one, the newsworthyness of such a trivia, which has not happened and if it will, it will affect few consumers, and no one knows if it will even happen.
Two, PTI was established to generate news for the Third World for the consumption of the members of the Non Aligned News Pool. This was necessary because there was too much trivia news by Reuters, AP, AFP.

I wonder how will short power cut for day in Italy affect Indians who suffer power cuts daily. Maybe to take solace that if the Churches can suffer, so can we?

Tags: Saswat, Media, India, News, Italy

India and China have eased visa restrictions. Great going guys. Both on the same route to be American puppets. And finally recognize the common grounds!

Indo-Sino Bhai Bhai!

Tags: Saswat, China, India

To protest against the continuing presence of British and U.S. forces in a sovereign country, thousands of anti-war protesters from across Britain walked through Central London to demand an end to the ‘occupation’ of Iraq.

Tony Blair replicas had distorted names of ‘B.Liar’.

Old British working class humor has not had a demise yet. Thanks to B.Liar!

Tags: Saswat, USA, UK

My resistance to post-modernists is huge. Partly because I think they make the dissident movements effete by their convenient generalizations. Partly also because I don’t see the vagueness as clearly as they do. Either of us has to be less intelligent to perceive the halos. Let me be the one, then.
In the meantime, I found Stuart Hall in his “On postmodernism and articulation: An interview with Sturat Hall”, (ed. Lawrence Grossberg) say this about Baudrillard. How very accurate. Did I tell you how much I love this man, Hall, who refuses to be a mere legend.

“Let's take Baudrillard's argument about representation and the implosion of meaning.This seems to rest upon an assumption of the sheer facticity of things: things are just what is seen on the surface. They don't mean or signify anything. They cannot be 'read'. We are beyond reading, language. meaning. . . . I think Baudrillard's position has become a kind of super-realism, taken to the nth degree. It says that, in the process of recognizing the real, there is nothing except what is immediately there on the surface. ... But there is all the difference in the world between the assertion that there is no one final, absolute meaning - no ultimate signified, only the endlessly sliding chain of signofication, and, on the other hand, the assertion that meaning does not exist. ... Therefore, I don't agree with Baudrillard that representation is at an end because the cultural codes have become pluralized. I think we are in a period of the infinite multiplicity of codings, which is different. We have all become, historically, fantastically codable encoding agents. We are in the middle of this multiplicity of readings and discourses and that has produced new forms of self-consciousness and reflexivity.”
(from Journal of Communication Inquiry (1986), 10(2), 45-60)

Tags: Saswat, Philosophy, Media, Communism