Hidden email messages

[electricmonk]

I have HTML email turned off so most of my spam just says this "This is a rich text (HTML) message that does not contain a plain text body."

But everynow and then one will have a plain text message that has nothing to do with the actual content of the spam. Here's one I got tonight, the subject was "Save thousands in under one minute...quickest quoute":

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Off-shore contract drilling differs from contract drilling on land in many ways. Most land contractors agree to drill a hole to a certain depth for a fixed cost. Thus, the drilling hazards encountered on land are normally borne by the drilling contractor. Since off-shore contractors normally furnish equipment on a day-rate basis, most risks in connection with a hole drilled offshore are borne by the operator. Operators have representatives aboard off-shore rigs which they have engaged to direct the actions to be taken in the event problems are encountered while drilling.

A typical land rig costs between $500,000 and $1,100,000. A self-contained offshore rig costs from $3,500,000 to $7,500,000. Thus, off-shore contractors have a much greater investment in equipment than do land contractors. For this reason, the number of competing off-shore firms is smaller.

This account makes clear that the most important factor for Zapata Offshore was contracts from the big oil companies of the Seven Sisters Anglo-American cartel, the world oil oligopoly which during these years defended its domination of the world oil market with the assassination of Enrico Mattei, the President of the Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, the Italian State Oil Company, who had dared to undercut the arrogant looting methods of the Seven Sisters and challenge the oligopoly in north Africa and the Arab world. In the early years of Zapata Offshore, contracts had come from Gulf Oil and Standard Oil of California, as we have seen. During the early 1960's, more and more contracts came from components of Royal Dutch Shell, the Anglo-Dutch heart of the Seven Sisters cartel, the dominant strategic force in the oligopoly. Zapata Offshore soon had British insurance, British contracts, British investors, a British director, and drilling sites in British Commonwealth oil fields in many parts of the world. This should come as no surprise: after all, Prescott Bush's partner, Averell Harriman, had been Franklin D. Roosevelt's special envoy to Churchill during the first years of World War II, and Averell later married the divorced former wife of Churchill's son Randolph.
Although Zapata Offshore was a company of modest dimensions, Bush nevertheless created a network of subsidiaries which was suspiciously complex. This topic is difficult to research because of the very convenient disappearance of the Zapata Offshore filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington for the year 1960-1966 which were "inadvertently" destroyed by a federal warehouse. This is the kind of convenient tampering with official records from which Bush has benefitted again and again over his career, from the combat report on the San Jacinto in 1944 to the disappearance of the Hashemi-Pottinger tapes and the shredding of Iran-contra documents more recently.

Some illumination is provided by a short profile of the Zapata Offshore corporate substructure researched by a Mr. Allan Mandel and submitted to Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough on October 13, 1964, in the midst of Bush's attempt to unseat the senator. This report was based on "Standard and Poors, oil industry publications, personal interviews with Interior Department officials."
At this time, Mr. Mandel found, Zapata Offshore owned 50% of Seacat-Zapata Offshore Compnay, which operated the drilling rig NOLA III in the Persian Gulf.

[punpirate]

1. Don't exactly know about the email...

... but the quote is from Tarpley's book on the Bushes.

Cheers.

[Bossy Monkey]

2. Was there an attachment?

This is usually a result of a virus. The last couple of these I got were the bugbear trojan, which raids people's address book and sends itself out to them. The subject lines are predetermined, but the text in the body of the email is chopped out of some random document on the victim's hard drive. A tipoff (if there's an attachment) is that said attachment has a double file extension. (Last one I got was xls.exe) Sometimes machines get infected with a damaged copy of bugbear; if you don't have an attachment, this might be the explanation.

It's a fairly new virus (since June); if you haven't updated your antivirus package's virus definitions lately, you need to do that, then run it.

Edit: Boy! Never get old. Turns out Bugbear isn't that new at all, but is from last September or so. According to the list of email subject lines given for it at McAfee, you probably don't have Bugbear. Still, it's likely to be some kind of trojan, virus or worm, and anyway it's never a bad time to update your virus definitions and run your antivirus program.

[electricmonk]

3. No virus on my end

I'm pretty diligent on that front. Update definitions twice a week, full scan every morning at 7am, both incoming and outgoing emails are scanned. That's also why I have html turned off. The only attachments I get on these messages are the .htm ones which I don't open.

Most of the messages are short poem types that's why this long one stood out.