Diary Entries on Will Brady's website

economic treason updates | WorldCom: Buford Yates pleads guily to [USA] Federal Court saying he was "...instructed to overstate earnings by $5 billion between October 2000 and April 2002..." in order to mislead the investing public. He admitted to helping hide billions of dollars in expenses. His attorney, David Shertler, said Yates "...strenuously objected to making these adjustments..." but he apparently do so anyway after he had been told they had "...been approved by the highest levels of WorldCom management..." Sentencing is set for January 2003, he might get 10 years in prison and a million dollar fine. |
     WorldCom II: New York State's Office of the Comptroller released a document that shows a clear relationship between former founder and chairman of WorldCom Bernard Ebbers and Citigroup'c Travelers Insurance division | Seems that is an equity owner in some 460,000 acres of timber land in Tennessee purchased by Ebbers in 1999 for about $400 million dollars | Travelers part was to lend Ebbers $134 million of the deal | In exchange, Travelers got a 2.5 perent stake in the equity²
     Although the paper trail has been established, and the documents released a month ago, neither Travelers nor Citigroup have acknowledged this | Citigroup did admit to being a "...long time lender to the timber management companies..." indicating that "...the loan had nothing to do with WorldCom's dealings with Salomon Smith Barney..., who was WorldCom's lead underwriter of $5 billion in debt |
     Counsel to New York State Comptroller's Office, H. Carl McCall, stated recently that "This information yet again shows the relationship between Citigroup and Ebbers went deeper than the investing public was let to believe and it is outrageous that these facts were not clearly disclosed" |
     As counterpoint, a Citigroup PR flack said that "a small equity interest in arranging a loan is a perfectly routine consideration" and that the size of the equity interest "...was insufficient in size to require disclosure... |
     However, such a loan would lend greater weight to give reason to Citigroup in propping up WorldCom's stock, as was done in Jack Grubman's August 1999 recommend to buy WorldCom stocks, which he continued to promote until only 3 months before WorldCom tanked in July of this year |

andrew gordon moore's 'Hunter Orange' scarecrow

in the woods in autumn | Hunter orange⁴ is the practical fashion choice right now | Even if you are out on land you have legally exclusive use of, it is hunting season after all, and you don't know where a stray bullet or arrow might be coming from | If you are like me, and tend to traverse through land where you don't know the location of the property bounds (I oughta know but don't always) all the more reason for this fashion caution |
     Hiking in the woods also brings to mind ~for me~ the skill of orienteering⁵ | Seems to me that, even more important than focusing on hunting safety {since not everyone is interested in this] knowing how to orient oneself in the woods is an essential skill to possess | What is orienteering? Simply the ability to successfully navigate through the wilderness without getting lost or injured | I recall a time, when I lived in the Adirondacks, when search and rescue parties had to go after two adult males from the New York City metro area to find them after a winter hike went awry | Stupidos! It was not the first but the second time they had gone hiking in that part of the world without adequate preparation | Had they, as the children on the US Orienteering Federation website knew even the basics of using a compass and map, and had some sense of reading the terrain, they would not have required the loose knit band of volunteers to save their sorry butts not once, but twice |
     Getting back to Hunter Orange, while putting togther this edition of the blog, I came across a homepage I kind of liked ~ discussing a range of other wilderness and hunter safety concerns | Put up by one Gordon Berlier based in Colorado but clearly Quebequois in heritage | He's a hunter, trapper, wilderness travel guide and master hunter education instructor | While he has posted extensive written info on hunting ethics, hunting safety, muzzleloaders, his site is also a valuable resource for water saftey and wilderness exploration survival skills |
     Oh, and as to the background color, don't worry, I plan on returning it to the old color on my next entry |

NARPA Conference Update | The annual conference for this valuable human rights advocacy group is coming up | This year's theme is Rights Under Seige | It will be held in Portland, Oregon from 21 through 24 November 2002 | The NARPA website can be reached at http://www.narpa.org and the conference highlights page is found at http://www.narpa.org/narpa2002.htm |

While we're on the subject of human rights, don't forget to take advantage of the President's New Freedom Commission's PUBLIC COMMENT FORM to send a clear message that non-coercive, recovery oriented practices should be continued, even accelerated, not stopped |

And [talking about Panopticon] let Marcia Ann Valenstein, M.D., MS, know your thoughts about centralized information and monitoring system (IMS). She is actively "...exploring mental health providers' concerns and feedback... about actual and proposed mental patient registry programs | It's part of her job as a researcher in the Veteran's Administration National Psychosis Registry⁵ | As such, it may be valuable for her to know how folks who have been so identified (as well as others) feel about such iniatives |

Website changes to come | You can expect to see a number of differences occur this winter | Most importantly, after years of thinking about it, I plan on making the weblog page the opening page to the >online< journal site | It is, after all, the most frequently changed page I do so it seems logical to have that as the opener page | readers shall be able to maneuver from there |
With the rondak.org site, I don't expect to make too many changes except to update broken links and clean up the look of some of the pages | I do intend to get rid of all the pictographs on the contents pages of both sites until I can get around to doing some efficent [and low bandwidth size images to use there | And I plan on combining the journal and rondak.org index pages | For those of you who don't know what these are, they are the pages which simply list links to other sites that can be found scattered across this site | I know there are those who prefer to start at such a list when visiting anywhere, this shall make maintainence more efficient (albeit eventually encyclopedic) |
For another thing, I have finally broken down and have been playing around with Dreamweaver web authoring software | This site has just gotten too complex to keep up to date manually | I'm also interested in modifying the look of the site, making it more uniform in appearance, more congruent with one another | I'm also toying with the idea of some sort of site map and plan on doing a serious rewrite of the "index¹" to the site |

site footnotes:
1- the site's index Not an index in the standard, book reader's understanding | rather, a list of websites that this page links from all in one place arranged [roughly] alphabetically and/or by subject |
2- 2.5 percent: Let's do the math here folks | While Travelers lent more than 25 [that's twenty five] percent of the money, they only get a measly two and one half percent ownership of the land? | On what was acknowledged was a "high risk investment" | Am I missing something here? Incidentally, the sources for these two WorldCom stroies were two signed pieces in mainstream media. The first from the Associated Press, dated 2 Oct 02 by Devil Barrett; the second in the Sunday New York Times, dated 3 November 02, in MarketWatch by Gretchen Morgenson |
3- Andrew Gordon Moore has his own website with other works on display | Check it out at A G Moore Gallery | Well crafted works evocative of the New England coastline
4- Hunter Orange is required of hunters themselves | Makes sense to me that other folks using the same areas of woodlands at the same time require it of themselves | Each state in the USA has different rules as to quantity and depending on the type of hunting one is doing | The International Hunter Education Association [IHEA] website provides aHunter Orange Rules Chart for the USA and Canada |
5- Orienteering is not a difficult thing to learn | Once into it, you'll find there are competitions for skills acquired and its also a great way to meeting people who like the wilderness, or who just like to know where they are going | Some other orienteering sites include: International Orienteering Federation, US Orienteering Federation, and the Bay Area Orienteering Club's very helpful Resources page |

weather: Overcast skies mixed with dazzlingly clear blue skies | good days for stacking the woodpile | Only have 3 to 4 more cords to split and stack [or about half through what I'll use during the winter]

e-mail changes | due to circumstances beyond my control, I have had to change one or two of my old e-mail addresses | New mail can continue to come to the @rondak.org address | A completely new address is now will-b@earthlink.net | Regrets for this inconvenience |

other stuff || internet access tools || ECONOMIC TREASON: Do travesties like ENRON make your blood boil? There's a new discussion group on the Yahoo Groups website. It's still new, so the discussion has just begun. Participants are welcome. Stop by, sign up, and add your POV.