Life and Thoughts of The One Ocean

THIS MONTH: Things that you missed but will affect the future of the world we live in.

Bush Nominates UN Ambassador (March 7): Selects John Bolton, under secretary of state for arms control and international security affairs and critic of the United Nations, as American envoy to the organization.

Bush Selects Hawk as Head of World Bank (March 16): Nominates Paul Wolfowitz, former ambassador to Indonesia and one of the chief advocates of the war in Iraq, as the next president of the World Bank.

Israel to Expand Settlement (March 21): Government announces plans to build 3,500 housing units in Maale Adumim, a West Bank settlement near Jerusalem. Palestinians call the move a violation of the peace plan.

Congress Intervenes in Case of Brain-Damaged Woman (March 20): The House and Senate vote to allow a federal court to rule whether the feeding tube should be reinserted into the mouth of Terri Schiavo, a woman who has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years. (March 22): Federal judge James Whittemore refuses to order that the feeding tube be reinserted.

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/31/2005 12:29:00 PM 0 comments

& A Beautiful Poem

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/31/2005 05:52:00 AM 0 comments

Freudian Beauty

Now I know what he's talking about coz ive lived that one day already but then the problem is that if youreally think about it ... the whole entire life is nothing but a chase after a dream or a goal ..... if it not one goal then its sevral simultaneously, or perhaps one goal after another and the beat goes on and on and on ..... but the point is that no matter what your ultimate goal may be in life, you chase after it, you crave it you desire it want it need it even dream about it and then one day comes when you get it... THEN WHAT HAPPENS THE NEXT DAY..... BOOM.... its all over, all the excitement all the rush, the mad passion and the adrenaline rush ... its all gone ..... and for some .... well right before they are about to reach that ultimate goal, right before they can touch it, feel it experiance it .. HAVE IT .... it all ends ... death embraces em and there's no coming back. One goal after another ....

Material posessions of this world even other humans can be so posessive of your soul that they just dont wanna make you leave ... damnit. that sux

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/31/2005 05:49:00 AM 0 comments

Happiest of Men?

Now when I think about that ... I say to myself ... DAMN THAT IS SO TRUE ... but as always there's a BUT in everything ... DOES THAT NOT MEAN TO SAY that in order to be truly happy one must live life by other people's standards and dictations ... I live my life by my rules but i also do find happiness in making others happy so thats kinda confusing now .... DOES that go to say that Although I may be happy, I'm not really truly happy or the happiest of men ...

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/31/2005 05:47:00 AM 0 comments

Silly Poem

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/31/2005 05:42:00 AM 0 comments

Report on Iraq Intelligence Failures: No One to Blame

A commission appointed by President Bush to analyze intelligence failures will be releasing its report tomorrow, Thursday, March 31. According to The New York Times the report "includes a searing critique of how the C.I.A. and other agencies never properly assessed Saddam Hussein's political maneuverings or the possibility that he no longer had weapon stockpiles." But despite its criticism the report really served to protect the Bush administration.
The Commission, led by Laurence H. Silberman, a senior judge on the United States Court of Appeals, and former Governor and Senator Charles S. Robb of Virginia has operated in secrecy. All the sessions have been closed to the public and media. The nine-member commission, which had a professional staff of more than 60 people, met formally a dozen times at its offices in Arlington, Virginia. Reportedly they met with President Bush at the White House to speak with him and his staff this November after the election. The Commission had formal meetings with most top administration intelligence and foreign policy officials, including interviews with former C.I.A. directors and academic experts on weapons proliferation. However, the Commission did not have subpoena power and did not seek sworn testimony.
In addition to the co-chairs the panel includes Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).; Yale President Richard Levin; former Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Charles Vest; former Pentagon officials Henry Rowen and Walter Slocombe; former Deputy CIA Director William Studeman; and former federal appeals court Judge Patricia Wald.
The Commission was created by President Bush in response to Chief Weapon's Inspector David Kay's search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Mr. Kay reported to Congress the failure of his 1,500 person inspection team to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and flatly asserted "we got it wrong," as there were no stockpiles of WMD in Iraq. In announcing the creation of the Iraq Commission President Bush stated:
"Last week, our former chief weapons inspector, David Kay . . . stated that some pre-war intelligence assessments by America and other nations about Iraq's weapons stockpiles have not been confirmed. We are determined to figure out why."
The Executive Order creating the Iraq Commission issued on February 6, 2004 directed: "The Commission shall specifically examine the Intelligence Community's intelligence prior to the initiation of Operation Iraqi Freedom and compare it with the findings of the Iraq Survey Group and other relevant agencies. . ."
Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, the report finds that after Iraq's defeat in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, international inspectors dismantled an active nuclear program - which had not produced a weapon - along with biological agents and chemical weapons. The claims of WMD were based on a series of assumptions by some, not all, of Bush's intelligence agencies, that Iraq reconstituted those programs after inspectors left the country under duress in 1998. The report finds these assumptions were seriously flawed and that it may have been a myth Saddam Hussein fostered to retain an air of power.
The report closely reviews a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq published in 2002. After the invasion of Iraq portions of the report were released, including footnotes that expressed dissenting opinions about WMD reports, including reports that Iraq imported aluminum tubes for the production of uranium, or possessed mobile biological weapons laboratories. In addition, to the U.S. being unable to find WMD, U.N. inspectors were unable to do so. According to The Times: "The report particularly ridicules the conclusion that Mr. Hussein's fleet of 'unmanned aerial vehicles,' which had very limited flying range, posed a major threat. All of those assertions were repeated by Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials in the prelude to the war. To this day, Mr. Cheney has never backed away from his claim. . . ."The classified version of the report is critical of intelligence gathering in Iran and North Korea in particular the absence of reliable human intelligence sources inside both countries. According to The New York Times:
"The commission's conclusions, if made public, may only fuel the arguments now heard in Beijing, Seoul and the capitals of Europe that an intelligence system that so misjudged Iraq cannot be fully trusted when it comes to the assessments of how much progress has been made by North Korea and Iran. North Korea has boasted of producing weapons - but has never tested them - and Iran has now admitted to covering up major elements of its nuclear program, even though it denies that it is building weapons."
Laurence McQuillan, of the Iraq Commission staff, told reporters early in the process that the Commission would not be blaming any individuals for intelligence failures, but instead would look to the future. This, of course, was a recipe for a whitewash. Whatever happened to official responsibility ­ a focus of Bush's 20000 presidential campaign rhetoric? Did the Commission ask about White House influence over intelligence estimates? This is not just a simple investigation into inaccurate intelligence; it should have been an investigation into why the United States was misled into a costly quagmire of an congressionally undeclared war and occupation.
Joseph Cirincione, a weapons-proliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications," told The San Francisco Chronicle in January: "The administration is protecting itself by narrowing the inquiry to avoid any investigation of any administration official when we need to understand the causes of one of the greatest intelligence failures in U.S. history."
This February, John Dean, President Nixon's White House Counsel, described the Commission as a "sham" because it "simply ignores the very reason he was pressured to create it." He explains "Bush established this commission to quiet the public reaction to Congressional testimony by his weapons inspector David Kay." At the time of his testimony "Kay recommended to Congress that an independent investigation be undertaken of this intelligence failure." Dean points out how Bush removed the issue from the campaign by having the Commission not report until after the election and therefore whenever the failure to find WMD came up during the campaign Bush could say his independent Commission was studying it. And, the Commission's focus was not on misuse of intelligence information or White House influence over reporting of intelligence, but rather how do we improve intelligence for the future. Dean concludes:
"They have preempted the Congress successfully by appointing a commission with little expertise in intelligence matters that will not report until after the election. They have mandated the commission to do everything but what was being demanded -- namely, that it examine the role of the Bush administration in dealing with the intelligence that was collected, then exaggerated and manipulated."
Thus, the Iraq Commission will issue its report Thursday on what may be one of the most serious intelligence failures in U.S. history. Of course, it will be critical of intelligence failures, but no one will be blamed. There will be no examination of whether the White House, State Department and Department of Defense manipulated intelligence information or unduly shaped intelligence reporting. President Bush will have escaped a challenging re-election without any serious discussion of the failure to find WMD. At this point Bush can once again proclaim "Mission Accomplished."
It is now left to Congress to fully investigate this matter. Certainly, the Commission found massive intelligence failures and overstatements by the administration, now a Congress that was cognizant of its Constitutional authority would at least initiate an impeachment inquiry with full subpoena power, testimony under oath and in public so Americans can determine whether they were merely misled into war or whether they were plunged into an illegal war on a platform on fabrications, deceptions and manipulations. Nothing short of accountability of the Presidency is at stake.
* Ralph Nader and Kevin Zeese direct the 'Stop the War' campaign at DemocracyRising.US. You can comment on this column on their blog site at www.DemocracyRising.us

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/30/2005 06:25:00 PM 1 comments

Human Rights in the US

The New York Times was almost apoplectic Sunday over a human rights "report card" issued by China's Foreign Affairs Department on the United States.
That report, a response to the annual report on China's human rights situation issued by the U.S. State Department, called attention to a number of areas where the U.S. is in violation of universally accepted norms of behavior.
Having lived for two years in China ­ a fascist-style military dictatorship where the law is simply another tool of repression for those in authority, and where people are routinely locked up, tortured, deprived of their livelihood and even their lives for such transgressions as posting comments on a website, protesting a corrupt boss or conducting prayer services in a private home, and a place where perceptions of America can be pretty bizarre--I was expecting something comic after reading in the Times that the report on the U.S. "approaches caricature."
In fact, putting aside whom it was doing the talking, the report was pretty damned accurate, and devastating.
American society is characterized by rampant violent crimes, severe infringement of people's rights by law enforcement departments and lack of guarantee of the right to life, liberty and security, the Chinese report said, noting that in addition to the threats from uniformed law enforcement, some 31,000 Americans were killed by firearms. The report also noted America's record two million prison inmates, and the fact that three times that many are on parole or probation.
Caricature? Hardly. The number of people being jailed in the U.S. is a national scandal, particularly considering the percentage who are black and Latino, and the fact that most are there for non-violent offenses. And no surprise there: Nearly every time I am on the road and see a car pulled over by a trooper, I discover that the driver is black. Unless blacks are uniquely prone to speeding, there is an epidemic of racial profiling.
American democracy is manipulated by the rich and malpractice is common, the report continues, noting that elections in the U.S. are "in fact a contest of money." Really. Can anyone honestly call this a caricature? I remember when I was teaching a group of journalism graduate students in Shanghai, I received my mail ballot from home, which at the time was a small town in upstate New York. I was happy to receive it because I wanted to show it to my class, where the students were anxious to see first-hand how American democracy works. Imagine my chagrin when I opened the envelope and saw that the ballot was composed entirely of single candidates for each post. Republicans so dominated the upstate region that no one bothered to run against them for any town or county post! "These look just like our ballots!" the students said in amazement. Nor in our current red state/blue state polity, are things much different across most of the country, where campaign funding laws, or the lack thereof, make incumbency virtually a guarantee of re-election.
In the area of economic rights, the Chinese report said poverty, hunger and homelessness "haunt the world's richest country." Here I'd have to disagree. While the figure they used (from the U.S. Census Bureau-36 million living in poverty-is correct, it is hardly a condition that "haunts" the majority living above the poverty line, since our derelict corporate media don't cover the poverty beat, and our economically segregated communities make it easy for people to ignore the suffering in the midst of plenty. Still, noting that a sixth of the nation lives in poverty is no caricature. It's a fact.
Racial discrimination? The report says it permeates every aspect of society, while the new post 9-11 homeland security regulations especially target ethnic minorities, foreigners and immigrants. Does anyone want to challenge the accuracy of that depiction?
As for the rights of women and children, the report called attention to the deplorable rate of rapes and sexual abuse, with some 400,000 children forced into prostitution and sexual abuse. This ugly reality, while also true for China, cannot be brushed aside here.
Finally the Chinese report addressed the abuse of foreigners by U.S. authorities, noting the scandalous violations of the rights of prisoners of war, the history of invasions and unprovoked military assaults on other nations, and the estimated 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq.
For my part, I was surprised the Chinese report didn't go further. It could have mentioned, for example:
the failure of the U.S. to abide by international law in allowing foreigners arrested on serious criminal charges in the U.S., including murder, to contact their embassies;the shameful inadequacy of funding for schools in poor communities, the dumping of toxic waste and the siting of pollution-causing power plants in low-income communities; and the theft of private property through improper use of eminent domain and draconian drug laws, as well as other abuses.
China is a prime human rights offender, but that should not prevent us from looking honestly into the mirror that it has held up to our own society and government.
If anything is a caricature, it is the article on the Chinese report, in which The Times appears as a caricature of real independent journalism.
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/30/2005 06:19:00 PM 0 comments

Bush is What Hypocrisy Looks Like

Remarks at 3/20 Burlington, VT Anti-War Rally

Brothers and sisters we rally and march this weekend to rebuild the resistance to empire. Bush, with the near unanimous support of the Democratic Party, lied us into this war and occupation
They lied about weapons of mass destruction. They lied about links between Saddam and Al Qeada! They lied about Iraq being a threat to the United States. Based on lies, they have murdered over 100,000 Iraqis, tortured countless people in the jails of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and laid waste to the infrastructure of Iraq. They have spent billions of our dollars and sacrificed over 1,500 working class soldiers on this conquest.
But across the world this weekend we march to say enough is enough. We will not stand for any more blood spilt for these lies. Mr. Bush, we demand that the US bring the troops home, not on some distant day, but now, today, so that Iraq can be free.
We the forces of the anti-war movement are the vast majority of the world, the majority of the United States and the majority of Vermonters. 59% of Americans want an end to the occupation. Vermont shocked the nation with our resolutions against the war and occupation! Here in Burlington, we voted two to one to bring the troops home now! In the words of the Christian Science Monitor, our town meetings were a revolt against war and occupation.
Faced with mass popular opposition to occupation, Bush has manufactured yet another lie-that the US aims to bring democracy to Iraq and the Mideast. Just as they have for the last five years, the media and the Democrats have accepted and repeated this new lie. Even Ted Kennedy said Bush deserves support for bringing democracy to the Mideast. The stench of hypocrisy is overwhelming.
In reality, the US has been the main supporter of dictatorships in Mideast for the last fifty years. It has backed the Shah of Iran, the Saudi Monarchy, Egypt's dictatorship, Saddam Hussein himself, and of course the Israeli occupation of Palestine. A leopard does not change its spots. The US cares nothing for democracy; it supports regimes that agree to its terms and overthrows those that disagree whether they are democratic or autocratic. The US values obedience not democracy.
Remember, just a year ago, the US staged a coup in Haiti against the democratically elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide. They have twice tried to topple Venezuela's democratically elected government of Hugo Chavez. But the worst of the hypocrisy is really in the Mideast. Against the wishes of the majority of the planet, Bush violated democracy by invading Iraq. He denied Iraqi's right to self-determination by occupying the country, building 14 permanent military bases, and asserting US control over the country's economy. This is not liberation or democratization; it is conquest.
The recent election itself was a farce, part of a long American tradition of staging demonstration elections throughout the world over the last one hundred years. The US aimed to give a democratic veneer to its permanent occupation of Iraq. The Bush administration even recognizes that you cannot have free and fair election under an occupation. Listen to what they said about Lebanon having elections during the Syrian Occupation. One of Bush spokespersons declared "How fair an election can Lebanon hold if the troops are there to intimidate voters, people running for election, or people now in office?"
What applies to Lebanon applies to Iraq. The US did not want elections and only held them under pressure from Ayatollah Sistani and the popular resistance in Iraq. The US delayed them for a year, cut deals with all parties that ran, who now support the continued occupation. They bought the parties off. So while the Iraqis who did vote thought they could use the election to kick the US out of Iraq, the opposite has turned out the be the case.
The new rigged government will support the occupation. Already regular Iraqi's are figuring it out. Walid Mohammed told the New York Times that the new government does not think, "about what the Iraqi people need. They all work for the occupier. Whatever America wants that is what will happen in the end."
The US is no more serious about democracy in the rest of the region. It is using the rhetoric of democracy to justify its plans to violate democracy by overthrowing regimes in Iran and Syria. Meanwhile it does not support democracy in Saudi Arabia where if elections were held the regime would be booted out of office. It also supports Israel and its undemocratic and illegal occupation of Palestine. We are in a weird Orwellian World-black is white, night is day, democracy is occupation.
We must reject this lie of democratization as we have all the others. The US fought this war to control the Mideast's oil reserves and thereby the entire world system. Its ambitions were imperialist. Remember that the first name they came up with for the invasion of Iraq was Operation Iraqi Liberation. They only changed it after they figured out the acronym spelled OIL!
The US aims to control the region's governments, seize its oil reserves, and thereby dominate it competitors like the European Union, China, and Japan who are all dependent of Mideast oil. The US assisted by its hit man, Israel, is planning to overthrow governments in Iran and Syria to prosecute these aims.
In fact, the entire war on terror is a smokescreen for similar ambitions throughout the world. The US intervened in Afghanistan to assert its control over the natural gas and oil reserves in the Caspian Sea. It wanted to make sure that it would control these and not Russia or China. The US is using its massive military arsenal to reorganize the world system in the interests of its corporations.
That's why we must demand the immediate end to US interventions and occupations around the world from Iraq to Afghanistan and Haiti. As founder of Iraq Veterans against the War, Mike Hoffman stated, "to those who say we can't cut and run, let's be clear. The military can't fix the problem. We are the problem."
Far from benefiting from this imperial war, we the workers and oppressed of the United States are paying an enormous price. Martin Luther King said during the 1960s, "the bombs dropped in Vietnam explode at home." What was true then is even more true today.
At the same time that Bush and the Democrats are spending billions on imperial war and occupation, they are slashing funding for unemployment benefits, education, social programs like Medicaid and Medicare, and now even threatening to destroy Social Security.
They have also shredded our civil liberties and civil rights with the Patriot Act. Worst of all, they have launched a racist witch-hunt against Arabs and Muslims. They have rounded up, detained, and deported thousands of Arabs across the country.
In the universities, the right wing has initiated a neo-McCarthyite attack on Arab professors, attempting to squelch the voices of dissent against US policy in the Middle East. They have used Ward Churchill's statements about 9/11 to justify trying to fire him and launch an attack on professors at Colombia, Northeastern, and several other campuses. We must stand up and defend academic freedom, the first amendment, freedom of speech, the right to dissent, and especially the rights of Arabs and Muslims. We must demand money for jobs and education not for war and occupation.
Our government's war on the world and its war on us here at home have built up an untapped reserve of resistance. We have an enormous opportunity and responsibility to re-galvanize an international movement against US Empire.
We should learn from the past about how to organize our movement to win this time. The head of Veterans for Peace Dave Cline has said that three things ended the Vietnam War-the mass anti-war movement in the US, the soldier's resistance inside the American military, and the Vietnamese people's fight for liberation.
It was not the Democratic Party, which was the architect of the war. We should learn this lesson. The Democrats are again on the side of war and occupation again today. They voted for the war, $81 billion to fund the occupation, the Patriot Act, the Intelligence Bill, Bush's cabinet and on and on.
Over the last year, we compromised and demobilized our movement to get behind the pro-war campaign of John Kerry. We must not make that mistake again. Instead of hoping against reality that Democratic Party will be our ally, we must help organize the three forces that can end the occupation of Iraq.
Already, the Iraqi people have built an enormous popular resistance to the occupation demanding their right to self-determination. That resistance has actually bogged down the US military, prevented Bush from launching more wars and occupation, and thereby saved countless lives. It is the democratic expression of Iraqi's fight for control of their country.
We see the beginnings of resistance inside the US war machine through Military Families Speak Out and Iraq Veterans against the War. Pablo Paredes and other soldiers have refused to fight for the empire. We have to support this resistance in order to paralyze the war machine.
What is lacking is our popular resistance in the streets, communities and workplaces of the US. We have to tap into the majority support for bringing the troops home now to re-galvanize our struggle. We need to rebuild local struggles. We can take inspiration from the counter-recruitment campaign on campuses and high schools across the country. They are exposing the lies of the recruiters and preventing them from hoodwinking working class students into becoming cannon fodder for empire. We need local actions of this sort everywhere.
At the same time we need to galvanize this local activism with mass marches on the centers of power to demand an immediate end to the occupation of Iraq. The combined struggle of such a renewed mass movement in the US, soldiers resistance inside the military, and the Iraqi resistance will end the US occupation of Iraq and prevent further US interventions.
This international struggle is the real movement for democracy and liberation throughout the world. Bush is what hypocrisy looks like; we are what democracy looks like. Now is the time to fight for an immediate end to the occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Haiti. Now is the time to fight for the US to pay war reparations to Iraq so that Iraqis can rebuild their own society. Now is the time to fight for social programs, jobs and civil liberties here at home.
It is time to rebuild our popular resistance against US imperialism and lay the foundations for a new society. Bring the troops home now! Iraq for Iraqis! Another world is possible, necessary, and we have to rebuild our mass movement to fight for it!
Ashley Smith can be reached at ashley05401@yahoo.com

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/30/2005 05:41:00 PM 0 comments

Just Another Bush Lie?

The account of American troops capturing Saddam and pulling him from his subterranean hovel has turned out to be just another Bush lie.
Sergeant Nadim Abou Rabeh, who participated in the operation that netted Saddam, was quoted in the Saudi newspaper "Al-Medina" saying that the Iraqi leader was actually captured the day before and that "the public version of his capture was fabricated." The entire event was apparently choreographed by a Pentagon public relations team.
"I was among the 20 man unitwho searched for Saddam for 3 days in the area of Dour near Tikrit, and we found him in a modest home in a small village and not in a hole as announced," Rabeh admitted. (UPI )
"Not in a hole"? You mean Saddam actually stood up and faced American Marines?
"WE CAPTURED HIM AFTER FIECE RESISTANCE DURING WHICH A MARINE OF SUDANESE ORGIN WAS KILLED," he said.
Uh, oh. This could be trouble. After all, the American version presented Saddam as trembling coward cringing in his spider-hole afraid to face the American warriors. Now, Rabeh is saying that he stood and fought "like a man". This is not the image that the Washington spin-meisters wanted to convey. They wanted to humiliate the deposed tyrant by showing him recoiling from the American ubermenschen. That way they could show the virtuousness of the invasion and bolster the importance of the White House chicken-hawks who follow the campaign from their bunkers on the Potomac.
Unfortunately, the entire story turned out to be bogus. Saddam may be a genocidal maniac, but anyone who knows the details of his personal history, knows he's no coward. He scaled the ranks of the Ba'ath party through audacity, coercion and treachery. No one gets to the top spot on the Ba'ath food chain through squeamishness. The portrayal of Saddam as disoriented and fearful is pure performance-art; just like the suggestion that he was living underground is probably just a sham. (That part always seemed fishy) Most likely, he was drugged and dumped in the "spider-hole" to meet the requirements of (Bush's) Hollywood production team. In fact, members of the Kurdish Peshmerga, who were operating in the vicinity at the time, disputed the administration's sketchy narrative from the get-go. Their story was much more consistent with Sergeant Rabeh's.
So, we can add another fairytale to the Bush chronicle of deception. The Saddam capture will feature prominently along with the other wartime fictions like Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch, the phantom WMDs, and the toppling of Saddam's statue in Fidros Square. Every one of these was skillfully fashioned by a Bush PR team trying to maximize public approval by creating a storybook narrative. It's 100% baloney.
The whole incident smacks of Rumsfeld's "Strategic Information" program; a new department entirely devoted to stage-managing events like Saddam's arrest. Apparently, the War Dept wants to downplay the daily carnage by orchestrating phony "docu-dramas" for the folks at home. Well, they'd better turn it up a notch. Bush's clumsy vaudeville may be designed to draw more support for the war, but box-office flops like this can really take a chunk out of one's credibility.
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/30/2005 05:39:00 PM 0 comments

1984 was 21yrs ago! "Big Brother" comes of age!

If you do your research, you will come to find out that most of the laws that are being passed today using the Bogus 9-11 Scam to strip away the American citizens of their constitutional rights, were actually penned down in the 1980's. The same dick-chenney team was at play then and its getting their way now.

I have a question: Who is a bigger dick-tator? Bush or Saddam?

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/30/2005 05:26:00 PM 0 comments

SAVE TOBY !!!

Website Says 'Send Me the Money or I'll Kill The Bunny!' Updated: Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2005 - 3:44 PM
WTOP's Brennan Haselton has more reaction to the Save Toby website.
Brennan Haselton, WTOP Radio
Elmer Fudd would undoubtedly be proud, but others have a much different opinion of a new website that delivers a blunt message -- "Send me some money, or I'll kill the bunny!"
The Save Toby website shows a cute little rabbit named Toby who the website operator says will be dinner unless $50,000 in donations are received by June 30.
The website operator says the money is to help take care of the bunny, who was found under a porch after an attack by an alley cat.
Some people we talked to think the whole thing is sick, a horrible way to make money, and that the website operator has a little too much time on his hands. People we talked to also had mixed opinions on whether it is real.
However, we found one person who says that he likes rabbit, especially with brown gravy and onions.
The website claims that it has received $15,000 in donated funds. There is also a store where you can buy Save Toby coffee mugs, bumper stickers, and even thongs. If you like to eat rabbit, there is also a page with recipes.
So is it all a joke? So far, the website's operator has declined to comment.
(Copyright 2005 by WTOP Radio. All Rights Reserved.)

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/30/2005 05:03:00 PM 0 comments

Please take a Minute and check this out!

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/30/2005 04:45:00 PM 0 comments

HEY BUSH YOU FUCKIN IDIOT

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/30/2005 04:32:00 PM 0 comments

Well Done GODADDY!

Go Daddy Software Inc, the second-largest domain name registrar in the US, this week slammed the US Department of Commerce for "trampling the right to privacy" by closing down anonymous registrations in the .us domain.

4 Mar 2005, 10:33 GMT - The DoC's National Information and Telecommunications Administration, which has responsibility over .us, has given companies that sell .us domains until today to shut down any "private registration" services they may have.

NTIA instructed NeuStar Inc, which is the contractor that runs .us, to inform companies including Go Daddy that private registrations services are, and always have been "inconsistent with registrars' obligations" under the contracts.

"Here we have a situation where we have a bureaucrat... who arbitrarily made a decision that will violate the privacy of thousands of law abiding Americans," Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons wrote on his web site earlier this week.

Parsons is calling for a letter-writing campaign, and says he already has some law enforcement officials and members of the House and Senate who agree with him.

Registering a domain name in most of the popular domains has always meant handing over your name, address, telephone number and email address to be included in a publicly searchable database known as Whois.

In recent years, registrars including Go Daddy and Network Solutions Inc have introduced "proxy" services, where the registrar keeps your contact data on file, but submits its own corporate details to Whois instead.

Parsons said Go Daddy introduced its Domains By Proxy service after hearing from a "terrified" female customer who said she had been stalked by a man and was afraid he would be able to find her using a Whois lookup.

Whois is also used by law enforcement, in the rare cases where criminals with web sites provide their true contact information when registering their domain, and by corporate lawyers who want to send threatening letters to web site owners.

The NTIA said in a letter to NeuStar that an accurate Whois database for .us domains "provides an assurance of accuracy to the American public and to law enforcement officials who rely upon this information".

"All registrant data is the property of the US government, and as such must be correct, current and complete," the NTIA said in a letter signed by Joseph Watson, associate administrator at the NTIA.

Jeffrey Neuman, director of law and policy at NeuStar, said that NeuStar is simply enforcing NTIA policy and its own registrar accreditation agreements, and that the decision was made by NTIA, not NeuStar.

"Our position on .us is enforcing our contracts," he said. "We don't have a position on proxy services." NeuStar sent a letter to registrars last month saying the NTIA "directed NeuStar to phase out the offering of such services".

Companies including Go Daddy will no longer be permitted to offer proxy services in .us as of today, but will get until January 26 2006 to phase out all their existing anonymous registration customers, the NeuStar letter said.

Neuman said that one of the bad things about proxy services is that if a proxy-offering registrar was to go out of business or somehow lose all its registrant data, the registry would have no records of who owns what domain.

NTIA has nominal control over all of the internet's domains, but Neuman noted that this decision affects the .us domain only. Go Daddy, NSI and others can continue to offer proxy registrations in .com, .net and other domains.

But Parsons is not so sure. He wrote: "I assure you, .us is just the first battlefield, it's the test to see if we will allow our privacy to be taken away. If we allow this to happen, the next step is to take away our right to privacy for .com and other top-level domain names. And then, if we lose this privacy, who knows what's next to go."

Neuman, who is on the Whois reform task force at the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers, disagrees. "I can say with confidence that what is happening in .us is not what is going to happen in .com," he said.

Parsons said he and his lawyers had been to Washington DC to argue Go Daddy's case, but were stonewalled. "Those affected by this decision were afforded no opportunity to provide commentary as to what effect or hardship it might have upon them," he said.

While Go Daddy's proxy service makes it impossible to get a hold of somebody's Whois data via a simple lookup, it is not completely anonymous. Law enforcement and lawyers can still get hold of contact data, but they have to ask Go Daddy directly.

© 2005 Computer Business Review Online

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/30/2005 04:22:00 PM 0 comments

Your Right to have an Unlisted Phone Number will desappear next!

By Kim Zetter

02:00 AM Mar. 04, 2005 PT

The U.S. Commerce Department has ordered companies that administer internet addresses to stop allowing customers to register .us domain names anonymously using proxy services.

The move does not affect owners of .com and .net domains. But it means website owners with .us domains will no longer be able to shield their name and contact information from public eyes.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center said the move violates First Amendment rights to anonymous free speech. And the representative of one of the largest domain-registration companies is concerned that customers who have been victims of stalkers won't be able to protect their privacy without changing their web address to a domain that offers anonymity.

Wired News has learned that the edict came a month ago from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Commerce Department agency that advises the president on telecommunications and information policy. The agency ruled with no warning and without any discussion with the companies accredited to sell and register .us domains. The domain companies were told they would lose their right to sell .us domains -- the official, top-level domain for the United States -- if they didn't comply.

The NTIA did not return a call for comment. But it told registrars it was not setting a new policy with the directive -- it was simply enforcing a provision in a pre-existing contract that the registrars had violated. But Christine Jones, general counsel for Go Daddy, the largest registrar of .us domains, disputed this.

"This has nothing to do with them clarifying an existing contract," Jones said. "We've been selling proxy registrations for three years; they knew it but never said anything against it. They established a new policy, and for them to say otherwise is pure crap." The .us domain has been around since 1985. For nearly 20 years, it was used exclusively by schools and libraries, as well as state and federal government offices. But in April 2002, it was opened to the public for use -- with the stipulation that domain owners either be U.S. citizens or have a business in this country or some other direct connection to the country.

On Feb. 2, the NTIA sent a letter to NeuStar, the company responsible for administering the .us domain and for accrediting companies that sell the domain addresses.

The letter, obtained by Wired News, called on NeuStar to notify such domain registrars as Network Solutions, eNom and Go Daddy that they should cease allowing proxy registration for .us domains by Feb. 16.

The letter also called on registrars to correct existing proxy registration information -- including name, phone number and postal and e-mail addresses -- from .us customers and update the public Whois database for those domains by Jan. 26, 2006.

The law requires that registrars deposit the name and contact information for domains in the Whois database. But a handful of the 80-plus accredited companies that register .us domains offer a proxy service, for a small fee, that lets owners conceal their true contact information from the Whois database. Of the 300,000 .us domains that Go Daddy has registered, 23,000 are proxies.

The NTIA directive applied only to .us domains, because the NTIA doesn't set policy for other domain names, such as .com and .net. In the letter it sent to NeuStar, the NTIA said its move was intended to increase the accuracy and reliability of Whois information for the public and for "law enforcement officials who rely on the information." It would also allow the NTIA to contact website owners if their domain registrar goes out of business and to transfer their domain to another registrar.

But Go Daddy's Jones said the NTIA's edict would not ensure that registration information was accurate, because those who really want to conceal their identity or true contact information would provide fake information -- even if it violated the terms of agreement for purchasing a .us domain.

She also said nothing about proxy registration currently prevents law enforcement from getting the information it needs. Registrars place the true contact information for domain owners in an escrow account, which law enforcement officials can obtain with a subpoena.

It's possible legal action could prevent the NTIA and Department of Commerce from having their way -- privacy advocates say the directive violates First Amendment rights to anonymous free speech.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC, said the Supreme Court has ruled on at least four occasions that the right to speak anonymously is protected by the First Amendment. He believes this allows individuals the right to express themselves on the internet without having to reveal their identity.

"The government simply may not require people who wish to speak to present their actual name as a condition of speaking," Rotenberg said. "This tradition of anonymity is deeply rooted in constitutional history, and it is very troubling when the U.S. government attempts to impose true-name disclosure requirements on people who are simply seeking to speak online."

Jeffrey Neuman, director of law and policy for NeuStar, said the Commerce Department was within its rights to eliminate proxy services because it is responsible for setting all rules governing .us domains. He added that only a small number of people use proxy services and would be affected by the ruling.

Neuman said he didn't know why the government had not objected to anonymous registrations before now. But he said the department discovered earlier this year that registrars were offering anonymous services that were not in compliance with its Whois policy requiring registrars to provide accurate contact information about domain owners. Therefore, the department ruled it should stop.

"The NTIA is saying this is not a new policy," Neuman said. "They never approved the offering of proxy domains, and they're simply enforcing an already existing policy."

But Go Daddy's Jones said NeuStar and the government knew anonymous proxy registration had been offered since the company began selling .us domains three years ago. She said NeuStar had asked Go Daddy at the time how it intended to verify that proxy registrants had the right to own a .us domain. "The old provision said you had to have accurate contact data, and we've always had accurate contact data," Jones said. "They've changed it and expanded it to now say there can be no proxy registrations. It's brand-new language. So for them to say this is not a new policy is absolutely not true."

© Copyright 2005, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/30/2005 04:20:00 PM 0 comments

FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHTS!

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration ("NTIA") (http://www.ntia.doc.gov/), the telecommunications and Internet arm of the Department of Commerce, has disallowed private registrations for .US domain names.

This unfortunate decision was made by the NTIA, without a hearing or an opportunity for a response by those affected -- in fact; there was no due process of any kind. It's ironic that the NTIA has taken away our first amendment rights to privacy for the one domain name (.US) that is specifically intended for Americans. These bureaucrats stripped away the privacy that you're entitled to as an American; on the only domain name that says that you are an American.

Even while the NTIA has ruthlessly criticized ICANN in the past for lack of transparency, the NTIA itself has been evasive and untruthful about the entire process, and has yet to provide a satisfactory explanation for the move.

After giving only two weeks' notice, the NTIA has stated that they would not consider any arguments and that its decision is final, leaving thousands of .US domain owners confused and exposed.

This is NOT how our government is supposed to operate. Immediate repercussions for .US domain owners include:

LOSS OF protection from stalkers and harassers.
LOSS OF protection against solicitation and unwelcome visitors for home-based Web businesses.
LOSS OF protection for loved ones associated with a family Web site or domain name.
LOSS OF protection against SPAM and phishing (an email falsely claiming to be a legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft).
LOSS OF protection against attempts to steal identities and/or money.
LOSS OF protection against general solicitations via phone and/or fax.
LOSS OF the right to operate a Web site anonymously.
LOSS OF the ability to speak anonymously (a First Amendment right confirmed by the Supreme Court).

If this decision is allowed to stand, it could lead to an attempt to take away privacy on other domain names and other areas that are important to you. If you care at all about your right to privacy, this is where you need to take a stand -- even if you don't own a private domain registration.

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/30/2005 04:17:00 PM 0 comments

Have you heard any of these???

I may not be Fred Flintstone, but I bet I can make your bed rock.

I can't find my puppy, can you help me find him? I think he went into this cheap motel room.

Your body's name must be Visa, because it's everywhere I want to be.

Let's do breakfast tomorrow. Should I call you or nudge you?

Yo Baby, you be my Dairy Queen, I'll be your Burger King, you treat me right, and I'll do it your way.

Is it that cold out or are you just smuggling tic-tac's.

You with those curves, and me with no brakes ...

Aw, girl, I'm gonna have to put you on my "To Do" List!

Save a horse -- ride a cowboy.

Your eyes are as blue as window cleaner.

Inheriting eighty million bucks doesn't mean much when you have a weak heart.

If you're going to regret this in the morning, we can sleep until the afternoon.

What do you say we go back to my crib and do some math: Add a bed, subtract our clothes, divide your legs, and multiply

Your place or mine? Tell you what? I'll flip a coin. Head at my place, tail at yours

Love is a sensation, caused by a temptation, to feel penetration. a guy sticks his location in a girl's destination, to increase the population for the next generation, did you get my explanation, or do you need a demonstration?

I have a six inch tongue and I can breath through my ears

My boys over there bet that I wouldn't be able to start a conversation with the most beautiful girl in the room. Want to buy some drinks with their money?

Am I dead, Angel? Cause this must be heaven!

Apart from being sexy, what do you do for a living?

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/30/2005 01:48:00 PM 0 comments

The Biggest Erection!

Three couples went to Lake Tahoe for a weekend but didn't have reservations. They were amazed to find only two rooms left in the whole area. Each room had one bed. They took the rooms & decided to have the three women share one bed & the three men share the other.
In the middle of the night, 1 man got up to leave. Another man asked him, "What are you doing?"

The first man answered, "I'm going to see my wife."

The second man asked, "What do you mean you're going to see your wife?"

The first man said, "I'm going to see my wife. I've got the biggest erection I've ever had."

The second man said, "Well, then, take me with you."

The first man said, "Why should I take you with me?"

The second man answered, "Because you're holding MY dick."

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/30/2005 01:42:00 PM 0 comments

Mario Again!

Video code provided by MusicVideoCodes.com

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/29/2005 05:41:00 AM 0 comments

Right within!

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/29/2005 04:51:00 AM 0 comments

Have You Had Yours Today?

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/28/2005 05:32:00 AM 0 comments

Out n About!

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/27/2005 04:15:00 AM 0 comments

:-)

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/26/2005 04:46:00 AM 0 comments

Thought of the Day !

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/25/2005 02:56:00 PM 0 comments

Happy Good Friday !

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/25/2005 02:53:00 PM 0 comments

And It doesn't come easy!

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/24/2005 03:30:00 PM 0 comments

KNOW Thy Wife !!!

So I was just outside a couple of days ago and got talking to my neighbour and he invited me into his house to show off his new home entertainment system, complete with a big leather swivel recliner (more sofa than a chair). Very Impressive indeed with Dolby Surround Sound, big wide screen telly and Loud as hell. So I’m sitting there and he’s sitting in his BIG DADDY CHAIR as he called it (why do guys come up with the most moronic names ever for material things; its like they already have theirs and their partner’s body parts for naming, why go around naming everything else too? Okay maybe my car too has a name that happens to be my SLB or short for Sexy Little Bitch, but that’s the Only material thing I have named) and he’s flipping through all these channels that I didn’t even know existed and complaining about their picture quality, and tells with a crooked grin and a wink, his teeth showing, “yeah, I got it as a present from my wife”. I’m almost shocked, “the whole thing?” Another huge smiled flashed at me, “that’s right; and this sofa”
When I was walking back home, I was envious of his good fortune and for the first time in my life I could understand why men marry. To receive home entertainment systems with big screen TVs and all the sports channels on the planet and to top it all off the biggest reclining mammoth sofa! Understood that it’s a nice thing to have wife just so she can fulfill all your childhood fantasies and let you have all the big boys toys that your mom would’ve never let you even think about! Finally the word ‘wife’ had a new meaning to me and a whole new respect.
I was just outside and the same neighbor’s wife came back from shopping and with her baby and al the shopping bags, I offered to help and took all the shopping for her into the kitchen. Okay Nice; So I go into the kitchen and his wife’s there and she’s trying to feed something to their third kid; still a toddler. I tell her “Hey! That’s Awfully Nice of you to buy that whole entertainment system for him” with a smile on my face.
She barely takes her eyes off the baby and rolls her eyes and shaking her head says, “Yeah; that should keep him out of my hair”.For a moment I’m shocked and I have no clue what to say or even how to react to that. There was the husband sitting outside with a huge smile on his face and almost projecting the image of being ‘the man of the house’ and how he’s respected so much almost to the point of being worshipped that his wife has even, to prove that point, bought him the ultimate throne to rest his royal ass on; yet here’s the wife singing a totally different tune!
I’m laughing and telling her “you’re not serious are you?”
She doesn’t have any problems telling me how if he is at home he is always poking his nose into her business and when he’s home he’s supposed to be happy with the kids and all but instead the kids (who happened to be at school) hate being at home with him, all day they are at school and when they come home they wait for him to come home and all he does is boss them around and I just cant take it anymore, always trying to boss everyone around (Okay I know this and I can sympathize with it because he has tried to show me how to clean the front of my house HIS WAY, and man I wanted to shoot him.) So the only logical thing to do was to find a way that will make him mind his own business and not care about what me or the kids are doing! This way he comes home, spends a few minutes with the kids and they go to sleep and he’s already fixed in his chair. I have nothing to worry about and don’t need to deal with any of his crap. Followed of course by a big smile from one ear to the other.
She just put the whole word of ‘wife’ into a whole new context for me. LOL.
Don’t feel so excited about the idea of getting myself a wife anymore Thank God. Almost feel sorry for the same man now that I was envious of a few days ago for having such a great wife! LOL

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/24/2005 07:00:00 AM 0 comments

:-)

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/23/2005 03:51:00 AM 0 comments

Dear The One Ocean,

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/22/2005 10:15:00 AM 0 comments

I Wonder Why ?

You will never know if you are right for someone or not… 100%... See One of the couples I knew … After 15 years of marriage the wife one day woke up and looked at her husband sleeping beside her and she did not like the man who was in her bed, who was snoring, the man who she fell in love with head over heals when she was 20 and married when she was 21. The man who was her best friend her lover and her husband and not to mention the father of her children! But today lying next to him she felt that she didn’t know at all who this man was and why she had given him her body, her love, her happiness and given up her family for… Who was he? She dint know and worst of all she didn’t know why she was in his bed. They got divorced. The children used to call me uncle because I saw them grow up only a few houses down from my house in my neighbourhood and I feel sorry for them, but their mother left them and before she left she had a huge battle to fight with herself. She knew that the man in her life was a good father but he was not a good husband. She realized that if she stayed with him any longer she would completely loose who she was. Completely be destroyed by him as a woman and would hate her life and think it not even worth living. She knew that he would be good to the kids and would take care of them and she had nothing to worry about and she was right… It’s been about 3 years already since she left him. The kids are growing up. He hasn’t remarried, although I think he is dating now. I don’t know how long it took him before he started dating again. I don’t know where that woman is now. I haven't talked to the man in about a year. The wife used to talk to me right before and during their divorce, probably as she talked to anyone in the neighbourhood that cared to listen. Then one day she was gone. I don’t know how he coped with the kids and what he is doing now or how he is managing now. I simply haven't been to their house anymore since he is not as friendly a neighbour as he once was, or maybe it was his wife that was the friendly neighbour always saying hello to everyone! I don’t know. All I do know is that a woman can never be 100% certain about anything until its over and Only then she knows for sure... Just Because she can look back at her life and ask herself if it was all worth it; all the sacrifices she made, all the actions she took and all the decisions she made. Pity the men who have to live with uncertain women!
Women who Think they know what they want, what they are doing and believe that they are right in doing so, but realize its not and they had been wrong all long. But by then its already too late and they have altered lives of others permanently. Perhaps even scared them emotionally.

Do you know of an uncertain woman?

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/22/2005 09:33:00 AM 1 comments

I Say Lets take over the World: Vote for Bush!

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/22/2005 03:10:00 AM 0 comments

IRS

Man to his Wife: Honey do you think I should wear the navy blue suit or go casual in jeans and a t-sirt for the IRS meeting?
Wife: I'm going to tell you what my mother told me before our honeymoon "It doesnt matter what you put on dear, you're going to get F&%$#D anyway!"

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/21/2005 03:41:00 PM 0 comments

23rd Try

Or somewhere thereabouts I managed to get the video to play. The reason why it took me so many tries is because I was trying to get rid of the little “music code provided by” ad at the bottom of the video. Sadly enough as you can see its still there and that shows my knowledge of HTML ! Yippeeee!!!
You might be wondering how come I am in the Industry and don’t know about the HTML coding. Simple! I went to law school and then just decided to get involved in business and ended up here. I don’t write any code myself :-)Okay SO if you KNOW how to REMOVE that little bit, don’t just sit there, go and write me a comment. I will need to figure out how to change the skin of this little page sometime in the near future. Unless someone helps me out!

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/21/2005 09:47:00 AM 0 comments

A little experiment!

Now his is an Experiment, lets see if it works. I want to change the skin on this page but I dont know how to and haven't had the time to research it online. So if you wanna help me out, leave me a comment on how to do that.

Video code provided by MusicVideoCodes.com

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/21/2005 09:24:00 AM 0 comments

I know Why Its So Hard !!!

There are too many people in this world that is part of the problem. There’s just too much choice and everyone is searching for someone but they don’t even know themselves what exactly it is that they are looking for. Days go by, and soon months turn into years and then people compromise and settle down with whomever they happen to be in with at the time. Forgetting all the people they gave up, searching for “THE NEXT BEST THING” hoping this next best thing would be the Prince Charming or Anastasia/Cinderella of their dreams. Almost 7 billion people and yet it’s so hard for anyone to find their other half/ their life partner/ their soul mate. Think of Adam and Eve. Forgetting the facts about how they were created. They had it easy. Boy Meets Girl. End of Story. Result: a thousand or so babies. Now, Times have changed. Now it’s more like: Boy Meets Girl. Girl plays hard to get. Boy tries harder. Girl decides to humor Boy. Boy gets bored. Girl realizes she likes him. Boy is already meeting another girl. Girl vows to act differently next time. She meets a different boy. He plays with her heart, her body, and her emotions THEN gets bored. Girl decides she has found the love of her life. Boy is already meeting a more interesting Girl. The same story goes both ways. To be honest. Boy meets Girl. Boy & Girl are stupid enough to fall in love. They decides to humor Each other and stay together (could be a few days, could be a few years). One Day Boy realizes that he wants to spend the rest of his life with Girl and Love her till his death. Girl wakes up and realizes she is no longer in love with him. (Again can happen both ways) Girl leaves Boy. Boy swears on his life that he will break every Girl’s heart after using her and playing with her emotions and her body, just like he was played by Girl. Oh, Life was so simple for Adam and Eve; they really did have their Paradise on Earth. Even though they were kicked out of Eden

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/21/2005 03:34:00 AM 0 comments

How True !

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/20/2005 04:48:00 PM 0 comments

Travelocity.com / travelocity.co.uk Beware!

So I travel a lot and mostly use expedia.com and expedia.co.uk, both of which I am a VIP member. The VIP membership gives you priority booking That’s all, is free and has nothing glamorous about it. Also a member on expediacorporate.com. Again nothing special there either, just the typical internet fares for flights and hotels and you get what you pay for or make a booking for. However since I was feeling adventurous I decided to search for "the cheapest airline fares online" and well by sheer luck or maybe it was my turn to get shafted, ended up on travelocity.com website. Since the trip was between England, USA and involved travelling between the States, I decided to do a search on both. Compared all the rates offered on Travelocity with expedia, cheaptickets, hotel, orbitz, hotwire and priceline.com and surprisingly found out that both travelocity.com and travelocity.co.uk were cheaper for traveling within USA and to and from England respectively. So after being very pleased with my discovery I ended up making a total of four bookings online. One with the UK site to take me to and from USA and another three with the US site. Or a total of ten flight segments. In total I saved close to $150.00 Obviously I was well pleased with myself. BUT, turned out that my flight destinations' included one stop happened to be in Germany. And required me to have a Visa. Now, considering that I was supposed to be flying west from London and going to the Chicago. It hardly occurred to me that the one stop which they reveal after the booking could actually be in the east of England. I thought it was probably on the east coast. So as soon as my London flight was confirmed and I received the details. I was searching fo a phone number to call them. Turned out that the UK office was closed at the time and that I had to call the following morning. I decided to email them anyway and let them know that this was unacceptable as I was only traveling into London two days before and would not have any time atoll to go to an embassy for Germany and obtain a visa before traveling therefore I need that flight cancelled unless they can provide me with an alternative. The following day I called them and got through to an flights agent who assured me that there was not a problem she could go ahead and cancel my flight for me at the cost of only 70 British Pounds. I asked her to find me an alternative, she did but the only problem was I would have to pay 70 Pounds to cancel the first booking or pay a convenient 25 Pounds to change the booking to the new one which was only 83 pounds more expensive. So I would only be paying an additional 108 British Pounds. I demanded to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor was a lady who came on the phone and asked me that why had I not resolved this matter with her colleague? Informed me that she had been listening and monitoring her colleague as she was spending too much time on the phone with me. !!! I tried to explain to her that she was trying to find me an alternative solution because of the fact that flight details were not revealed to me before booking the flight. Made her understand that I had actually sent an email within Minutes of finding out that the flight booked was something I would not be able to travel on! The bottom line was she told me "You will have to pay 100 Pounds to cancel it, and that’s the best I can do, I can cancel this ticket for you right now minus the "100 Pounds cancellation fee". I tried my best to contain my anger and told her that I was just told a few minutes ago that the cancellation fee was 70 Pounds. She snapped back at me with "Sir, that was almost an hour ago when you first called and my colleague was making a special concession for you as she could sympathize with your situation but unfortunately you did not take her up on that offer and the company policy is that we charge "100 Pounds for a cancellation of this type because our request for ticket issue has already been forwarded to the airline and a ticket has already been issued". I told her to not cancel the booking but hold it, whilst talking to her on the phone I was already on the second line to get the airline on the phone. Got straight through and gave them my details and booking details. The gentleman on the phone told me that Yes The booking had been made but since it was within the 24 hour cancellation period. The booking agent will get a full refund as no tickets had been issued yet. I conveyed the information received back to the travelocity supervisor and she flat out refused to accept it saying that she knew what she was talking about and the airline agent didn’t. The guy at the airline wasn’t too happy and gave me booking numbers and some other agent markers or whatever they're called which I conveyed back to the travelocity supervisor. She then sheepishly told me that She didn’t have that information on her system and according to her "booking Office" the request had been made and ticket issued and she had other clients to take care of and this is really taking too much of her time and unless I agree to let them charge me 100 Pounds I would loose all the money and soon according to company policy I would not be entitled to any refund at all. I received the refund, along with her name and title and all other information I needed to make an official claim. Went back online to make my bookings for the London - Chicago flight. Lost another $80 but got a flight that made a stop-over in Boston. Lost half a day in Chicago as well, that I would've had otherwise with the initial booking. Contacted travelocity.com with all details and reference numbers both from the airline and the travelocity booking office. They refused to acknowledge any legitimate fault of theirs. Obtained the cancellation times of the particular booking from the airline and the booking time and it turned out that my booking was infact never completed by travelocity but was a tentative booking and was not to be confirmed until after the initial 24 hours by the airline. Apparently a lot of booking agencies did that, they would hold the seat, receive the payments and then the seats would be automatically confirmed after 24 hours unless cancelled. According to travelocity.com they were had to pay penalty charges to the airline for canceling my booking, I was told this over the phone. I sent an email requesting them to tell me the same in writing. They refused to reply and instead informed me that my dispute claim was closed as I had already collected my refund. I've tried to give as fair and accurate account of my dealings with travelocity.com and travelocity.co.uk. I'm sorry if it was a bit long to read but I really hope that people will read this and stay away from their website. It has been a serious disappointment and a major cause of numerous headaches. The only reason why I now have gone back to expedia is because of their reliability and simply because I have yet to find an online travel agent that provides a better service for a world traveler who makes bookings from foreign places and hardly ever in the originating city of travel at the time of the booking.

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/20/2005 04:12:00 PM 0 comments

Lazy Sunday

"You're nobody, til somebody loves you," Frank Sinatra

I've slept in today and got up late! So far having a really lazy laid back sunday. Decided to sort through some old boxes and came upon one with all the letters and cards and whatnots I've received all over the years from friends, family. Going all the way to when I was a kid away at school. Now looking back at it all, I'm not quite sure what to do with it all.

Memories... good memories, bad memories... words scibbled on paper with hasty hands full of emotion, full of love. Sometimes even full of hope and often wisdom. Reading these makes me feel as if time stood still, just for a moment, for that brief moment in time, until I snap back to reality and... There's nothing left... except memories alone, no longer good, no longer bad... But just simple memories from the past, long forgotten so long ago.

Perhaps that is where they belong.

Perhaps....

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/20/2005 08:41:00 AM 0 comments

But Where is She?

"Someone told me there's a girl out there with love in here eyes and flowers in her hair," Led zeppelin.

posted by The One Ocean @ 3/02/2005 08:40:00 PM 0 comments