Description of the Mexican election circus elaborately suspended by rusty chains and pulleys over the class confrontation summarized by the same author a few days ago (see: Mexico, there's a riot going on, also from 'Counterpunch', posted here last week).  Inasmuch as it documents plain facts of fraud whose 'exposure' seems likely to change precisely nothing, perhaps the text can be read as a sort of funeral sermon for the faith in representative democracy recently renewed on Latin America's behalf by Western leftist well-wishers.
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross07072006.html

Mexico's Surreal Elections
Anatomy of a Fraud Foretold

By JOHN ROSS

Mexico City.

Mexican elections are stolen before, during, and after Election Day. Just look at what happened in the days leading up to the tightest presidential election in the nation's history this past July 2nd.

Since their introduction, RFID tags have been the subject of intense debate between privacy, consumer rights, and civil liberties groups and the companies that produce or employ them. Through their near invisibility and the fact that, unlike bar-codes and magnetic strips on credit cards, they can be read silently and imperceptibly from a short distance, RFID tags introduce the potential for violations of privacy in unprecedented ways. Benjamin Mako Hill catches up with the state of the art

Pushing a shopping cart full of food out the supermarket door without stopping – the price of the goods in your cart is tallied and automatically debited from your bank account. Invisible checkpoints where police can identify you and the precise contents of your wallet or purse – down to the amount of cash you’re carrying and a log of when and where those notes changed hands. With the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, such scenarios, while still far-fetched, are becoming increasingly possible.

Speaking of the alien

Summary Notes:

SINCE WE ARE INCREASINGLY ENTERTAINED and PERPLEXED by the procession of POLYMORPHOUS DIRIGIBLES, most often FAG SHAPED or SAUCEROUS, which have plagued the world's skies since TIME IMMEMORIAL, so Dr. Jonathan Hoag, having FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE of such AIRBORNE APPARITIONS, wishes to put forth CERTAIN DIVERSE THEORIES for the existence of these and other ANOMALOUS OCCURRENCES, in order to DISPEL any CONFUSIONS arising out of said circumstances; and these shall be called the TALES of the INTERCONNECTED.

No. 1, Blot on the Landscape

II The revolution shall not be criticised?
In response to ISEA98 Micz Flor, organiser of Revolting temporary media laboratory, asks "why now, why revolution?" Is the current popularity of the term and its associated icons anything more than Middle Youth talking to itself in the latest of a long line of fashionable lingos?

IV Net.Politics Q&A
"What does the Net mean for politics?" Anarchists, nazis, extropians, pornographers, sex-crazed teenagers, book-worm teenagers, budgerigar fanatics, isolated octogenarians, hairdressers - you name it, the Net is home to them all. Or is it? Who gains ascendance within cyberspace? Who has the power in this, the latest technological utopia? Is the Net just a tool or is that popular description just another disingenuous trick - the powerful letting the powerless play with hand-me-down toys while they get on with more serious business. We asked a not-so-random selection of net users what they think.
With an introduction by McKenzie Wark

X The other Tony B.

JJ King explores the possibility of UFOs and the project that might reveal them

Slavoj Zizek takes us through the Four Fundamental Concepts of the Millenium.

Are we fully aware of how uncanny our obsession with the Millennium Bug was? Were we really dealing here with the threat of a simple mechanical malfunctioning? Of course, the digital network is materialised in electronic chips and circuitry; but one should always bear in mind that this circuitry is in a way "supposed to know": it is supposed to give body to a certain knowledge, and it is this knowledge — or, rather, its lack (the inability of computers to read "00") — that caused all the worries . What the Millennium Bug confronted us with was the fact that our ‘real’ life itself is sustained by a virtual order of objectivised knowledge whose malfunctioning can have catastrophic consequences. Jacques Lacan called this objectivised Knowledge — the symbolic substance of our being, the virtual order that regulates the intersubjective space — the ‘big Other’.