-Caveat Lector- RadTimes # 117 November, 2000 An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities. "We're living in rad times!" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How to assist RadTimes: An account is available at <www.paypal.com> which enables direct donations. If you are a current PayPal user, use this email address: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, to contribute. If you are not a current user, use this link: <https://secure.paypal.com/refer/pal=resist%40best.com> to sign up and contribute. The only information passed on to me via this process is your email address and the amount you transfer. Thanks! ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- QUOTE: "Either it is true that humanity by intelligence and by the practice of mutual aid and direct action can reverse processes which appear socially inevitable, or humanity will become extinct by simple maladaptation...the rejection of power is the first step in any such intelligent reversal." --Alex Comfort, preface to 'Barbarism and Sexual Freedom' ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents: --------------- --Reclaim the Cities: from Protest to Popular Power --Bush & the Law --Seminole County: 15,000 Absentee Ballots at Stake as Lawsuit Gains --Anti-election activities in Montreal and Quebec City Linked stories: *Report Shows U.S. Arms Monitoring Improperly Implemented *'Are You Listening, Dear?' Gender May Matter *Brothel on the stock exchange? *A look at the election through cartoons ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Begin stories: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reclaim the Cities: from Protest to Popular Power by Cindy Milstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Perspectives on Anarchist Theory - Vol. 4, No. 2 - Fall 2000 "Direct action gets the goods," proclaimed the Industrial Workers of the World nearly a century ago. And in the short time since Seattle, this has certainly proven to be the case. Indeed, "the goods" reaped by the new direct action movement here in North America have included creating doubt as to the scope and nature of globalization, shedding light on the nearly unknown workings of international trade and finance bodies, and making anarchism and anticapitalism almost household words. As if that weren't enough, we find ourselves on the streets of twenty-first-century metropolises demonstrating our power to resist in a way that models the good society we envision: a truly democratic one. But is this really what democracy looks like? The impulse to "reclaim the streets" is an understandable one. When industrial capitalism first started to emerge in the early nineteenth century, its machinations were relatively visible. Take, for instance, the enclosures. Pasture lands that had been used in common for centuries to provide villages with their very sustenance were systematically fenced off - enclosed - in order to graze sheep, whose wool was needed for the burgeoning textile industry. Communal life was briskly thrust aside in favor of privatization, forcing people into harsh factories and crowded cities. Advanced capitalism, as it pushes past the fetters of even nation-states in its insatiable quest for growth, encloses life in a much more expansive yet generally invisible way: fences are replaced by consumer culture. We are raised in an almost totally commodified world where nothing comes for free, even futile attempts to remove oneself from the market economy. This commodification seeps into not only what we eat, wear, or do for fun but also into our language, relationships, and even our very biology and minds. We have lost not only our communities and public spaces but control over our own lives; we have lost the ability to define ourselves outside capitalism's grip, and thus genuine meaning itself begins to dissolve. "Whose Streets? Our Streets!" then, is a legitimate emotional response to the feeling that even the most minimal of public, noncommodified spheres has been taken from us. Yet in the end, it is simply a frantic cry from our cage. We have become so confined, so thoroughly damaged, by capitalism as well as state control that crumbs appear to make a nourishing meal. Temporarily closing off the streets during direct actions does provide momentary spaces in which to practice democratic process, and even offers a sense of empowerment, but such events leave power for power's sake, like the very pavement beneath our feet, unchanged. Only when the serial protest mode is escalated into a struggle for popular or horizontal power can we create cracks in the figurative concrete, thereby opening up ways to challenge capitalism, nation-states, and other systems of domination. This is not to denigrate the direct action movement in the United States and elsewhere; just the opposite. Besides a long overdue and necessary critique of numerous institutions of command and obedience, the movement is quietly yet crucially supplying the outlines of a freer society. This prefigurative politics is, in fact, the very strength and vision of today's direct action, where the means themselves are understood to also be the ends. We're not putting off the good society until some distant future but are attempting to carve out room for it in the here and now, however tentative and contorted under the given social order. In turn, this consistency of means and ends implies an ethical approach to politics. How we act now is how we want others to begin to act, too. We try to model a notion of goodness even as we fight for it. This can implicitly be seen in the affinity group and spokescouncil structures for decision making at direct actions. Both supply much needed spaces in which to school ourselves in direct democracy. Here, in the best of cases, we can proactively set the agenda, carefully deliberate together over questions, and come to decisions that strive to take everyone's needs and desires into account. Substantive discussion replaces checking boxes on a ballot; face-to-face participation replaces handing over our lives to so - called representatives; nuanced and reasoned solutions replace lesser-of-two - (or three) evils' thinking. The democratic process utilized during demonstrations decentralizes power even as it offers tangible solidarity; for example, affinity groups afford greater and more diverse numbers of people a real share in decision making, while spokescouncils allow for intricate coordination - even on a global level. This is, as 1960s' activists put it, the power to create rather than destroy. The beauty of this new movement, it could be said, is that it strives to take its own ideals to heart. In doing so, it has perhaps unwittingly created the demand for such directly democratic practices on a permanent basis. Yet the haunting question underlying episodic "street democracy" remains unaddressed: How can everyone come together to make decisions that affect society as a whole in participatory, mutualistic, and ethical ways? In other words, how can each and every one of us - not just a counterculture or this protest movement - really transform and ultimately control our lives and that of our communities? This is, in essence, a question of power - who has it, how it is used, and to what ends. To varying degrees, we all know the answer in relation to current institutions and systems. We can generally explain what we are against. That is exactly why we are protesting, whether it is against capitalism and/or nation-states, or globalization in whole or part. What we have largely failed to articulate, however, is any sort of response in relation to liberatory institutions and systems. We often can't express, especially in any coherent and utopian manner, what we are for. Even as we prefigure a way of making power horizontal, equitable, and hence, hopefully an essential part of a free society, we ignore the reconstructive vision that a directly democratic process holds up right in front of our noses. For all intents and purposes, our movement remains trapped. On the one hand, it reveals and confronts domination and exploitation. The political pressure exerted by such widespread agitation may even be able to influence current power structures to amend some of the worst excesses of their ways; the powers that be have to listen, and respond to some extent, when the voices become too numerous and too loud. Nevertheless, most people are still shut out of the decision-making process itself, and consequently, have little tangible power over their lives at all. Without this ability to self-govern, street actions translate into nothing more than a countercultural version of interest group lobbying, albeit far more radical than most and generally unpaid. What the movement forgets is the promise implicit in its own structure: that power not only needs to be contested; it must also be constituted anew in liberatory and egalitarian forms. This entails taking the movement's directly democratic process seriously -- not simply as a tactic to organize protests but as the very way we organize society, specifically the political realm. The issue then becomes: How do we begin to shift the strategy, structure, and values of our movement to the most grassroots level of public policy making? The most fundamental level of decision making in a demonstration is the affinity group. Here, we come together as friends or because of a common identity, or a combination of the two. We share something in particular; indeed, this common identity is often reflected in the name we choose for our groups. We may not always agree with each other, but there is a fair amount of homogeneity precisely because we've consciously chosen to come together for a specific reason -- most often having little to do with mere geography. This sense of a shared identity allows for the smooth functioning of a consensus decision-making process, since we start from a place of commonality. In an affinity group, almost by definition, our unity needs to take precedence over our diversity, or our supposed affinity breaks down altogether. Compare this to what could be the most fundamental level of decision making in a society: a neighborhood or town. Now, geography plays a much larger role. Out of historic, economic, cultural, religious, and other reasons, we may find ourselves living side by side with a wide range of individuals and their various identities. Most of these people are not our friends per se. Still, the very diversity we encounter is the life of a vibrant city itself. The accidents and/or numerous personal decisions that have brought us together often create a fair amount of heterogeneity precisely because we haven't all chosen to come together for a specific reason. In this context, where we start from a place of difference, decision-making mechanisms need to be much more capable of allowing for dissent; that is, diversity needs to be clearly retained within any notions of unity. As such, majoritarian decision-making processes begin to make more sense. Then, too, there is the question of scale. It is hard to imagine being friends with hundreds, or even thousands, of people, nor maintaining a single-issue identity with that many individuals; but we can share a feeling of community and a striving toward some common good that allows each of us to flourish. In turn, when greater numbers of people come together on a face-to-face basis to reshape their neighborhoods and towns, the issues as well as the viewpoints will multiply, and alliances will no doubt change depending on the specific topic under discussion. Thus the need for a place where we can meet as human beings at the most face-to-face level - that is, an assembly of active citizens - to share our many identities and interests in hopes of balancing both the individual and community in all we do. As well, trust and accountability function differently at the affinity group versus civic level. We generally reveal more of ourselves to friends; and such unwritten bonds of love and affection hold us more closely together, or at least give us added impetus to work things out. Underlying this is a higher-than-average degree of trust, which serves to make us accountable to each other. On a community-wide level, the reverse is more often true: accountability allows us to trust each other. Hopefully, we share bonds of solidarity and respect; yet since we can't know each other well, such bonds only make sense if we first determine them together, and then record them, write them down, for all to refer back to in the future, and even revisit if need be. Accountable, democratic structures of our own making, in short, provide the foundation for trust, since the power to decide is both transparent and ever amenable to scrutiny. There are also issues of time and space. Affinity groups, in the scheme of things, are generally temporary configurations - they may last a few months, or a few years, but often not much longer. Once the particular reasons why we've come together have less of an immediate imperative, or as our friendships falter, such groups often fall by the wayside. And even during a group's life span, in the interim between direct actions, there is frequently no fixed place or face-to-face decision making, nor any regularity, nor much of a record of who decided what and how. Moreover, affinity groups are not open to everyone but only those who share a particular identity or attachment. As such, although an affinity group can certainly choose to shut down a street, there is ultimately something slightly authoritarian in small groups taking matters into their own hands, no matter what their political persuasion. Deciding what to do with streets in general - say, how to organize transportation, encourage street life, provide green space, and so on - should be a matter open to everyone interested if it is to be truly participatory and nonhierarchical. This implies ongoing and open institutions of direct democracy, for everything from decision making to conflict resolution. We need to be able to know when and where citizen assemblies are meeting; we need to meet regularly and make use of nonarbitrary procedures; we need to keep track of what decisions have been made. But more important, if we so choose, we all need to have access to the power to discuss, deliberate, and make decisions about matters that affect our communities and beyond. Indeed, many decisions have a much wider impact than on just one city; transforming streets, for example, would probably entail coordination on a regional, continental, or even global level. Radicals have long understood such mutualistic self-reliance as a "commune of communes," or confederation. The spokescouncil model used during direct actions hints at such an alternative view of globalization. During a spokescouncil meeting, mandated delegates from our affinity groups gather for the purpose of coordination, the sharing of resources/skills, the building of solidarity, and so forth, always returning to the grassroots level as the ultimate arbiter. If popular assemblies were our basic unit of decision making, confederations of communities could serve as a way to both transcend parochialism and create interdependence where desirable. For instance, rather than global capitalism and international regulatory bodies, where trade is top-down and profit-oriented, confederations could coordinate distribution between regions in ecological and humane ways, while allowing policy in regard to production, say, to remain at the grassroots. This more expansive understanding of a prefigurative politics would necessarily involve creating institutions that could potentially replace capitalism and nation-states. Such directly democratic institutions are compatible with, and could certainly grow out of, the ones we use during demonstrations, but they very likely won't be mirror images once we reach the level of society. This does not mean abandoning the principles and ideals undergirding the movement (such as freedom, cooperation, decentralism, solidarity, diversity, face-to-face participation, and the like); it merely means recognizing the limits of direct democracy as it is practiced in the context of a demonstration. Any vision of a free society, if it is to be truly democratic, must of course be worked out by all of us - first in this movement, and later, in our communities and confederations. Even so, we will probably discover that newly defined understandings of citizenship are needed in place of affinity groups; majoritarian methods of decision making that strive to retain diversity are preferable to simple consensus-seeking models; written compacts articulating rights and duties are crucial to fill out the unspoken culture of protests; and institutionalized spaces for policy making are key to guaranteeing that our freedom to make decisions doesn't disappear with a line of riot police. It is time to push beyond the oppositional character of our movement by infusing it with a reconstructive vision. That means beginning, right now, to translate our movement structure into institutions that embody the good society; in short, cultivating direct democracy in the places we call home. This will involve the harder work of reinvigorating or initiating civic gatherings, town meetings, neighborhood assemblies, citizen mediation boards, any and all forums where we can come together to decide our lives, even if only in extralegal institutions at first. Then, too, it will mean reclaiming globalization, not as a new phase of capitalism but as its replacement by confederated, directly democratic communities coordinated for mutual benefit. It is time to move from protest to politics, from shutting down streets to opening up public space, from demanding scraps from those few in power to holding power firmly in all our hands. Ultimately, this means moving beyond the question of "Whose Streets?" We should ask instead "Whose Cities?" Then and only then will we be able to remake them as our own. ---- Cindy Milstein is a faculty member at the Institute for Social Ecology (see <http://www.tao.ca/~ise/> for more on the ISE as well as a companion essay to this one by Ms. Milstein, "Democracy is Direct") and a board member for the Institute for Anarchist Studies. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bush & the Law <http://www.consortiumnews.com/112300a.html> November 23, 2000 Texas Gov. George W. Bush seemed to misunderstand one of the most fundamental concepts of the American system of government during his harsh attack on the Florida Supreme Court. Angered by the court's ruling that Florida law permits hand recounts, Bush accused the court of using "the bench to change Florida's election laws and usurp the authority of Florida's election officials." The Republican presidential nominee then stated that "writing laws is the duty of the legislature; administering laws is the duty of the executive branch." Bush left out the third component of the U.S. system, a fact taught to every American child in grade-school civics class, that it is the duty of the judiciary to interpret the laws. It is also the responsibility of the courts to resolve differences between parties under the law. Besides suggesting a profound ignorance of the U.S. political system, Bush's intemperate language on Wednesday sent a strong message to aggressive Republican demonstrators who were busy intimidating the election canvassing board in Dade County. After delays caused, in part, by repeated Republican challenges, the board had ordered a county-wide hand recount. The partially completed recount showed Vice President Al Gore cutting into Bush's lead by 157 votes, with the potential of giving Gore enough votes in Dade County alone to erase Bush's 930-vote lead. But faced with the Florida Supreme Court's deadline of Sunday for submission of new figures, the board decided to forsake its full recount. That negated Gore's unofficial 157-vote gain. The board decided to review only the 10,000 disputed ballots for which counting machines had failed to detect a vote for president. Still, the Gore camp hoped those disputed ballots would supply a substantial net gain for the vice president. However, confronted by shouting pro-Bush partisans, many from Miami's hard-line Cuban-American community the board reversed itself again. It halted the recount entirely and reverted back to the original count that had most favored Bush. If left standing, the board's decision probably assures that thousands of potential votes for Gore will go uncounted and that Bush will win Florida by several hundred votes and thus the presidency. In winning the Electoral College with Florida's 25 electoral votes, Bush would become the first nationwide popular-vote loser to take the White House in more than a century. Gore's national lead now exceeds 325,000 votes and Gore's popular-vote total makes him the second-largest presidential vote-getter in U.S. history. Nevertheless, Bush would get the presidency, and the chance to preside over a system of governance that he seems to barely comprehend. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Seminole County: 15,000 Absentee Ballots at Stake as Lawsuit Gains <http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/21/politics/21SEMI.html> By MICHAEL MOSS November 21, 2000 A local judge agreed yesterday to hear a lawsuit seeking to throw out the 15,000 absentee ballots cast in heavily Republican Seminole County, Fla. At issue is a decision by the county supervisor of elections to allow Republican Party workers to correct Republican voters' incomplete absentee-ballot applications that had been rejected in the weeks before the election. The supervisor, Sandra Goard, a Republican, has acknowledged that at the same time she let other flawed applications (DEMOCRATIC) pile up in her office because she became too busy to notify the people who had sent them that they had been rejected. Gov. George W. Bush garnered 10,006 absentee votes in Seminole County, just northeast of Orlando, compared with 5,209 for Vice President Al Gore. A local lawyer, Harry Jacobs, a Democrat, filed suit last Friday maintaining that Ms. Goard broke a Florida law requiring that only the voter, members of the immediate family or a guardian provide all information for the ballot application. Yesterday Judge Debra Nelson of Seminole County Circuit Court, who disclosed at a hearing on Saturday that her campaign manager was a local Republican official, denied a motion to have Mr. Jacobs's suit dismissed, and gave him permission to begin gathering evidence. Since it can no longer be determined which ballots went with which applications, Mr. Jacobs is asking that all the absentee ballots in the county be invalidated. "I'm very satisfied," Mr. Jacobs said after Judge Nelson's ruling, adding that he intended to begin questioning elections office employees and other prospective witnesses as early as today. Jim Hattaway, an Orlando lawyer representing Ms. Goard and the Seminole County canvassing board, said that he was "not surprised or disappointed" but that he expected to prevail once the merits were argued. The situation in Seminole arose after the Republican Party mailed tens of thousands of ballot applications to registered Republicans around the state. The Democratic Party did the same for registered Democrats, and each party preprinted on its applications some of the personal data that Florida began requiring in 1998 after a scandal involving absentee voter fraud in Miami. Voters receiving the mass- mailed applications needed only to sign the forms and write in the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. But the Republican mailings left off the required voter registration numbers; voters' birth dates were mistakenly printed on the Republican forms instead, a party official said. Some counties accepted the flawed Republican applications, taking it upon themselves to add the missing voter identification numbers. Ms. Goard rejected the applications outright, then allowed two Republican workers to spend as long as 10 days in her offices correcting and resubmitting the forms. The flawed applications that instead piled up at Ms. Goard's office were either Democratic forms or applications filed entirely at the initiative of individual voters. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Anti-election activities in Montreal and Quebec City VOTEZ BIEN, VOTEZ RIEN! MONTREAL, November, 22, 2000 -- In just five short days, like sheep to slaughter, millions of so-called citizens of the Canadian state will be heading to the polls to exercise their "right" to choose the men and women who will invariably screw them over for the next 3-5 years. Elections Canada, ever mindful of increasing voter apathy, especially among youth, has been running ads in a desperate bid to reverse the consistent trend of low voter turnouts. Meanwhile, cities and towns across Canaduh are replete with glad-handing politicians, tedious media coverage, excessive election advertising, not to mention the increasing level of hot air that, despite the cold weather, is about as welcome as a kick to the groin. Beyond the mainstream drivel about elections, diverse and spontaneous anti-electoral and pro-democracy efforts have arisen in Quebec, building on previous abstention campaigns during elections and referendums. The anti-election efforts, while autonomous, share several common themes: the belief that genuine democracy resides in extra-parliamentary organizations and collectives that positively reflect values of mutual aid, solidarity and self-activity; the idea that electoral politics, as well as parliamentary democracy, are sham processes that only serve to reinforce prevailing power structures; and the confidence that encouraging effective resistance and revolt to capitalism and the state is invariably more valuable than some "x" on a ballot every couple of years. One organized anti-election effort is occurring in Quebec City, where two local anarchist groups -- le Groupe anarchiste Emile-Henri and le Collectif libertaire le Maquis -- are sponsoring an abstention campaign. On election night, they are holding an anti-election party at the appropriately named "Sacrilege" bar on St-Jean Street near Vieux Quebec (across from a church). The campaign includes a publicly displayed and signed declaration in favour of real democracy and against parliamentary elections, as well as a poster depicting a naive "Foghorn Leghorn" caricature obliviously voting into a ballot box that is really a KFC bucket bearing the image of Colonel Sanders. The poster is accompanied by the caption: "Don't be the turkey of the farce ..." ["Ne soyez pas le dindon de la farce."]. The poster can be viewed at <http://montreal.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=129>. Some activists at Laval University in Quebec City are planning street theatre on election day. Actors, blindfolded and gagged, will be robotically placing ballots into a box in a futile and never-ending circle. The posters and theatre in Quebec City are not the only anti-election agitprop that has appeared in the past weeks. Election signs on the major highway between Quebec City and Montreal (a 2-3 hour stretch) have been systematically covered with graffiti. Posters have also in Montreal reading "Elections are useless." Another depicts a ferris wheel with logos of the major political parties in Quebec. The latter poster can be viewed at <http://montreal.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=115>. A relatively new anarchist publication in Montreal, "Le Trouble", has also dedicated space in its recent issue to anti-election articles and images. A photo of an electric chair is accompanied by the caption: "Yes, democratic institutions are reformable ... with new chairs in parliament! Against elections and for electrons!" An editorial, with the title "Vote well, don't vote" [Votez bien, votez rien!], advocates "acting" instead of "electing" ["agir au lieu d'elire"] and ends with the rhyming declaration, "to the social question, no electoral solution" ["A la question sociale, pas de solution electorale!"]. A lesser known local endeavor is the Montreal chapter of the Edible Ballot Society (EBS), part of a larger initiative in the Canadian state. The EBS originates in the province of Alberta, home to major dinosaur remains, as well as real living fossils in the form of right-wing wingnuts like Premier Ralph Klein and Stockwell Pray, the leader of the Canadian Reform Alliance Party (CRAP). Perhaps in reaction to the particularly wretched kind of politician produced locally, several EBS activists in Alberta ate their ballots at advance polls, and intend to engage in more ballot destruction on election day. The EBS motto is: "Don't vote, it just encourages them!" Chapters exist across Canaduh. Montreal EBS efforts have been modest, including a sticker and postering campaign. The poster is accompanied by the slogan, "Never mind the ballots!" The overall EBS webpage is at: <http://edibleballot.tao.ca> The efforts in Quebec and Canaduh resemble recent anti-electoral and pro-democracy efforts in the U$A and elsewhere. The "Anarchists Against Voting" website <http://www.infoshop.org/voting.html> and the "Direct Democracy, not Election Hypocrisy" effort <http://www.directdemocracynow.org> provide more detailed information. All of the anti-election/pro-democracy efforts in Quebec are distinctly hostile to political parties, even the marginal ones like the Marijuana Party (aka the "Bloc Pot"). Local anarchists have been known to taunt the merry-marijuana crowd with the words, "If you want to smoke pot, don't change the government, change the world." However, some local anti-election activists have confessed certain sympathy for a newly formed Montreal-based political party called the Parti Populaire des Putes (the People's Prostitutes' Party). The PPP is comprised of sex workers and former sex-workers that organized this summer against a campaign by businesspeople and right-wing residents targeting drug users, street workers and homeless people in Montreal's Centre-Sud neighborhood. The neighbourhood, in Montreal's east-end, is slowly being gentrified. The PPP's campaign slogan provides some insight into their view of parliamentary democracy: "Vote for the PPP, and elect a REAL whore to Parliament." Like the members of the PPP, the individuals and groups involved in anti-electoral efforts in Quebec are actively involved in local grassroots campaigns, groups and collectives. They are activists and organizers working against poverty, police brutality, ecocide, racism, sexism, prisons and capitalist globalization, while promoting solidarity efforts and alternative forms of organization and social change. Many of the anti-election activists will be involved in a community squat project in Montreal that will be publicly revealed in December, as well as organizing against the Summit of the Americas meeting in Quebec City next April. More info on these issues will be forthcoming in the coming weeks and months. ---- by Jaggi Singh [EMAIL PROTECTED] Montreal (November 22, 2000) for a-infos, indymedia, act-mtl, damn and others anti-copyright anti-election websites: Anarchists Against Voting: <http://www.infoshop.org/vote.html> Direct Democracy, not Election Hypocrisy: <http://www.directdemocracynow.org> Edible Ballot Society: <http://edibleballot.tao.ca> Quebec anti-election contacts: Edible Ballot Society (Montreal): [EMAIL PROTECTED] Le Groupe anarchiste Emile-Henri (Quebec City): [EMAIL PROTECTED] Le Collectif libertaire le Maquis (Quebec City): [EMAIL PROTECTED] Le Trouble Newspaper (Montreal): [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linked stories: ******************** Report Shows U.S. Arms Monitoring Improperly Implemented <http://www.jointogether.org/jtodirect.jtml?U=83952&O=265226> A recent U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) report found that the Pentagon's Foreign Military Sales (FMS) end-use monitoring system for arms is not being properly implemented. ******************** 'Are You Listening, Dear?' Gender May Matter <http://tm0.com/IHT/sbct.cgi?s=80180978&i=281541&d=676844> Supporting what many women have long suspected, new brain research shows that men give only half a mind to what they hear, listening with just one side of their brains while women use both. ******************** Brothel on the stock exchange? <http://www.theage.com.au/news/20001127/A39257-2000Nov26.html> "Melbourne's largest legal brothel, the Daily Planet, may soon be listed on the Australian Stock Exchange." Daily Planet manager Pat Lowry says he will create a unit trust within three months of receiving State Government's approval and issue stock a few months thereafter. (11/27/00) ******************** A look at the election through cartoons <http://slate.msn.com/CartoonIndex/00-05-09/CartoonIndex.asp> ******************** ====================================================== "Anarchy doesn't mean out of control. It means out of 'their' control." -Jim Dodge ====================================================== "Communications without intelligence is noise; intelligence without communications is irrelevant." -Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC ====================================================== "It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society." -J. Krishnamurti ______________________________________________________________ To subscribe/unsubscribe or for a sample copy or a list of back issues, send appropriate email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. ______________________________________________________________ <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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