…from out of the distant past!
Watch the FEDS TRY to stick it to me!
September 9, 2003 – This will be a quicky – as I don’t have the time for foreplay and romance.
The past 5 weeks have not been good. My stress-related virus has returned – hence the general lack of new material on the pages of The Federal Observer and the number of reruns on our daily radio program Perspectives on America.
Something Strange, This Way Comes
Friday morning, I received a series of emails from columnist, Lisa Guliani, one of which, had a simple request – that I remove an article from her archives, which she had not in fact written. Apparently she had forwarded the column to me several months ago and I thought that it was her work. She has recently taken a fair amount of heat on this piece (something she does well) and requested its removal. “No problem”, I said and promptly got on it – except that it wasn’t there. I immediately told her so – she went into her archives at the Observer and noticed the same thing – although, as she said, ”it was there an hour ago”. I believed her but there was nothing I could do so I moved on with my day.
Midnight in the Garden of the Finzi Contini
Sunday night, I began my usual ritual of preparing for the next day’s issue of The Federal Observer and something just wasn’t right. It was time to defrag the computer for the week – and it just wouldn’t work. The program would only advance between six and ten percent before it would start over because ”the configuration of Windows has changed” – or words to that effect. Thanks Bill Goats – I just love Micro-Suck Network.
I contacted my web-master as I had begun to suspect that, even with all of the security we have on the Network and through my computer – some program was running in the backround and we could not locate it. Robin had me down-load several “Spy-Ware” programs, which, theoretically would search and destroy the culprits. Download complete – report found nearly thirty questionable programs and eliminated them. The problems continue. I had but an hour and a half sleep that night trying to locate and correct the problems – to no avail. Little was loaded on The Federal Observer Sunday night – and nothing would be posted Monday night either.
With Morning Comes Electra (unfortunately not Carmen)
Got up in time to put finishing touches on a dynamite broadcast for Monday morning, Energy Scam at the White House. This was the first new recording, which we have done in many months – and the quality is superb. I’ll not waste your time with a description of the program – the title says enough to whet one’s appetite.
Rather than hit the sack after the program, I decided to dig right in on a series of projects, not the least of which was packing and shipping orders – then back to the computer – still to no avail. In fact, the problems had by now compounded.
Sitting on my counter in the new studio, is a brand new Apple Power Mac G4, barely out of the box and not yet set up to go. The time has come to get to it, yet before I can bring it up on line – I have much to do – including the preparation to transfer many files from a PC to the Mac. That was going to take several days – and – oh well, the PC will stumble through for a few more days – won’t it?
Sometimes, A Great Notion
The virus attacked my body hard Monday night with horrendous coughing spells, which racked my whole body. I never woke up for the Tuesday morning program. Thanks to WWCR for having spare programs to run. The pain remained with me through much of the day and I could not function – until I got pissed off and put myself to work – out in the yard. After sweating so much of the junk out of myself and going for a swim – I was ready to tackle the computer with a vengeance.
Robin and I determined that my desk-top PC was done – finito – kaput! I now had less than 200kb of disk space remaining on the old HP – the time had come! I began by transferring as many files as I could onto 3.5” floppy disks in order to reload them into my PC based laptop. From there I would prepare to transfer into the Mac as they sit side-by-side. The reasoning of course was hoping to lighten the load of the old dinosaur so that I would have enough space to load a portable hard drive into the belly (so to speak) and complete transfer of the larger files. And then…
As I checked the ‘C’ drive to see what improvements, if any had been accomplished – I noticed something, which I had seen the other night – a series of temporary files, which I had never seen before. I’ll not tell you what they were at this juncture, but suffice it say that once I removed them – new life was bellowing from the old gray beast. We found that it had returned to over 10 million/gazillion Gb of available disk space – all from less than 200kb at one time. So if you go to Eliminate the Evidence – you had better know what you are doing – because obviously – I did not!
Sidebar I
Since four days after moving into this house, I have experienced problems with two of my telephone lines – the two, which I use for The Federal Observer. Static seems to come on the line at very unusual times, causing the fax machine to stop working and conversations to be somewhat unintelligible. Repair came out days after we moved in – and wouldn’t you know – they found no problem – and the problem cleared up – for about four weeks. Then it began again and they sent out another one, who subsequently replaced all of the protectors in the phone box and did some rewiring, as the old wire was pretty brittle. No problem – for three weeks – and then it began again on Monday – along with a few other things – like lights going on in the phone when no one was on it? Technician number 3 – who has now spent the better part of two days working on it. He called as he left to let me know that he had done all he could at this time – that we would have to watch (er – listen) to see if it happened again. Eight hours later it did – someone is seizing the line – and it looks to me like the Alphabet Soup boys must be training some virgins to tap the lines – except that they’re too dumb to do it right. Guess I get to call them in the morning again. Thanks General Azzcroft! I really like your Homo-Land Suck-urity! Why don’t you take the entirety of the Patriot Act (Parts I and II) and stuff it where the full moon doesn’t shine! And now Lisa’s Friday morning comes back to haunt me…
11:00 p.m., Pacific Time – Mars has moved to the south-west of the Moon
Earlier tonight as I concluded file transfers for the evening, and after I had eliminated the Eliminator from my hard drive, I decided that it was time to get on line and see if anything had sped up and that maybe the old gray beast had in fact roared back to life. My home page of course is The Federal Observer – what you thought Farah? When I opened the page I noticed something strange [and this is where the paranoia steps in – except that it isn’t] – through no intervention of my own, Carl Worden’s recently recycled column, IRS vs. KUGLIN had disappeared.
Late last week, while looking at my Stats program, I noticed something highly unusual about this article, which had originally been posted on August 10, 2003 – it was drawing more visitors than any ten other columns in the archives – fresh columns or old. That indicated to me that it might be wise to re-post it with a fresh date – and that is what we did on Friday morning. My emails to Carl over the next day or so indicated that we were seeing nearly 5,000 visits per day to that month old column. Highly unusual – and it looks like we have hit someone’s nerve because they are keeping the pressure on The Federal Observer.
Sidebar II
With all of the other strange things, which have been happening – now Lisa’s story takes on greater validity. Oh – did I mention that she was a guest on Alex Merklinger’s Mysteries of the Mind radio program last Thursday night for three hours? Alex’s nightly radio show reaches 42 counrties around the world and a fairly vast market in America. Lisa mentioned The Federal Observer< numerous times and the topic of conversation for the three hours was centered on her column The United States: A Corporation, not a Country. Interesting, as this column was the first from Lisa that we had ever posted on the Observer – over a year ago.
If Willys Wasn’t an old Jeep – I Would Think That I Had Them
After I noticed Carl’s column missing from the Front Page, I immediately went to the Administration Archives to see if it too had disappeared – but it had not – but it had reset itself to its original posting date of August 10th. Now I know that someone is snooping into the business of The Federal Observer.
Suffice it to say that thems gubbmint boys must think that I’m a real desperate character! What a bunch of oafs – instead of dealing with the REAL terrorists in this land – Junior’s boys and girls just sit around dreaming up new ones that won’t blow up trains, planes and buildings. My only danger to them is what I speak on the radio and what many talented Americans (and an occasional foreigner) write – and we choose to post on this web-zine. Gee – what happened to big-boy Farah-con? Did he sell out to them?
It has been said that the pen is mightier than the sword – but if you ticker-tape azz-wholes come looking for me – ya better come ready pilgrim – cause I am packin’ – and it ain’t fudge!
I’ll see you at Sundown,
A veteran of Viet Nam, student of history (both American and film), Jeffrey Bennett has broadcast for over 24 years years as host of various programs and has been considered the voice of reason on the alternative media – providing a unique and distinctive broadcast style, including topics such as health and wellness, news, financial well-being, political satire (with a twist), education and editorial commentary on current events through the teaching of history. In addition, he is the CEO of Kettle Moraine, Ltd.