Letter Never Sent

I get more and more sick of our government when I learn of its abuses, especially those of so-called law enforcement. As I got older, I realized that The Law is not synonymous with Goodness and Virtue. And activites and things that are illegal are not necessarily unethical. Once you come to these conclusions you are forced to question the legitimacy of the authority that government wields. In our country, whose government was based upon the radical ideals of liberty and personal freedom, one is constrained from enjoying the full benefit of these ideals. The money that buys influence in government determines policy and little is done on the basis of ethics or virtues. It’s not as if you are even given the choice to be a citizen of the U.S. Government. If you are born here, you are subject to the laws, regardless of whether they’re right or not. Our government, at it’s core, is fundamentally coercive. I don’t have the right as a taxpayer and citizen to demand that my government not use my taxes to fund activities that I find repugnant, like warfare and capital punishment. I don’t have the freedom to decide what sorts of things I put in my body. Freedom of speech is similarly inhibited. It’s possible that every thing I say here could be monitored in some way if law enforcement decided it was in the interest of national security or some such ridiculousness. Throughout much of our century the FBI, as part of our own democratic government, compiled files about people whose patriotism and loyalty they questioned. Many of these are available now as a result of The Freedom of Information Act. People like Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lennon, etc. All of this stuff can be extremely disheartening, but I do believe that one day there really will be true freedom and democracy and we will all have the opportunity to live in an ethical society. A society where people will be allowed to come to there own conclusions. Maybe it will be a little like Star Trek.

Here are some excellent quotes from our founding fathers on the issue of the separation of church and state as food for thought:

“The United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian doctrine.” — George Washington

“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” — Thomas Jefferson

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.” — Thomas Paine

“I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.” — Thomas Jefferson

“The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.” — Abraham Lincoln

(Quotes as listed in the books Salvation for Sale, by Gerard Thomas Straub, and The Real Frank Zappa, by the late, great Frank Zappa.)

There is some evidence that the U.S. Government tested ElectroMagnetic Pulse weaponry during the Kosovo War. And I thought EMP blasts existed only in science-fiction and Starcraft. Apparently, a homemade EMP device can be created using readily available electronics and radio transmitters, New Scientist article. It would be neat if people could figure out cool ways to disrupt the electronics used by the government to snoop on its citizens. Imagine pulling up next to a cop with a laptop. As he hunts and pecks his fat fingers over the keyboard…you hit the EMP. Zap! Laptop dead. That would be hilarious. This could come in handy if he was pulling up your info on the computer before he gives you a ticket. Someone could manufacture a device that would fit in your trunk and then when you get pulled over. Toasted laptop! As technology unfolds better ways to control the populace it’s nice to see that even as things get more and more sophisticated there are still means to disable them.

Remember when I wrote about seeing the classic 1976 film, Network? MSNBC had a pretty decent piece about it today. The article makes the connection between Network and the current trend in Reality TV, as well as “Mad Prophet” Alpha-Male types like Rush Limbaugh, and the increasing trend in corporate globalization. From the article in MSNBC:

Another character in another �Network� scene offers a corporate worldview that�s chilling for its insights into the future we live now. Arthur Jensen, the head of UBS�s parent company (played by Ned Beatty), condemns Beale for revealing on the air how $2 billion was obtained from a Saudi conglomerate to support the financially ailing UBS.
�You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won�t have it!,� Jensen thunders, decrying Beale�s old-school vision of the world. �There are no nations, there are no peoples, there are no Russians, there are no Arabs, there are no third worlds, there is no West! There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T, DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.�

Some nice Smiths/Morrissey links. They were one of the best bands of the 80’s. The Pretty in Pink Soundtrack is one of my favorite albums. Please, please, please let me get what I want… I actually watched it again the other day on TNT or something. Some parts of it are excruciatingly cheezy. And, Andrew McCarthy’s character’s name?…Blaine! Terrible.

• The Arcane Old Wardrobe
• Complete Smiths/Morrissey Discography
• The Random Smiths Lyrics Generator

Oh, on the subject of books, I’ve just just started reading Iain M. Banks who I had heard so much about from Susan. He’s this great author who writes some really excellent science-fiction. For some odd reason, it was hard to get his work in the u.s. for a while. I one of the books I have it says Not for sale in The United States. I would compare him to the masters of far-future sci-fi like Asimov, Herbert, or Dan Simmons. Banks creates whole worlds. Many of his books involve the same universe within a humanoid civilization known as The Culture. In the first book I read, Excession, many of the most fascinating characters are the giant spaceships who possess individual personalities. In some science fiction AI are quite usually boring. I just picked up another of his books, Against a Dark Background, at my great local bookstore, Adventures in Crime and Space. Unfortunately, it’s out-of-print so you might have trouble finding a copy.

I saw a few interesting things today. At Slashdot I saw a link to a really neat exhibit on the Library of Congress website. They have some photographs from a Russian photographer who used a fascinating early color photographic process. His name was Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii and in the years 1909-1912 he was commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II to photograph the extensive Russian Empire. These photographs are fascinating because the color is so vivid and yet still quite realistic looking, The color is just slightly saturated. Also, the photos are from a period where color photography was extremely rare. The process involved using 4 different glass plates and lenses, one for the black and white negative and one for each color. Anyway, the photos are outdoors for the most part and are almost like using a time machine. Several of them would make great backgrounds. I like this one a lot. These photos remind me of some of these old encyclopedias I had that had photos from the early part of the 20th century. There were pictures from all around the world. There were one or two volumes dedicated to a certain part, like Western Europe, Northern Africa, etc. I wish I still had them.

Speaking of color, do you know if your color blind? If you’re male, you might be one of the lucky 10% who are. If you don’t know if you are or not, try this test. And, if you are color blind, blame your mother.

Our good friend Favio Saavedra recently appeared in audio form on part of the BBC website. You can hear him waxing philosophical about the democratic opportunities presented by the internet and distributed means of communication. The topic was mainly about politics and the internet. The title was: “Can the Web save democracy?” Here’s the website here. It was funny hearing him talk to a BBC anchor with a serious british accent. You can get to the audio right here. (You’ll need RealPlayer, vomit!) Or, if you like I captured the RealAudio and converted it to mp3 with Streambox VCR. It’s a great program. You can use it to capture crappy Real Audio or Video files. You can try searching for it. It’s available if you know where to look or who to ask. *hint, hint*

In other news, Bush is pushing for missile defense. Yeah, I think the best way to run this country is to give trillions of tax-payer funds to crooked defense contractors to build a ridiculous missile defense. We sure do have some screwed up priorities. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

Intellectual property has been on my mind for a long time. The internet is a garden of eden for people to trade anything with one another. Business sees the internet as a way to market products another way to plug people in and to create ‘brand loyalty’, interactive tv, but it has so much more potential. Much of that potential is being realized to the detriment of those would seek to control it. Most of what is great about the internet is invisible to the profiteering brigands of ‘e-commerce’. The idea of an economy based upon sharing with one another is beyond their grasp. An economy not intent on merely accumulating piles of cash. That is what the internet is becoming to the dismay of these new mandarins, the riaa’s and the mpaa’s of the world. Some interesting articles today: one about internet pirates (everyone) getting sneaky.
There was a good story about China blaming internet cafes for societal ills, but I couldn’t find it again. The concept of communication that is decentralized and which supercedes national boundaries scares many a government including our own evil empire. Incidentally, the american government is developing a domestic military presence to deal with ‘domestic’ issues.

Wow, I finally got the webcam up and running again. That means that I’ve been having screwed up computer stuff for almost two months. I’ve also been building a second computer out of leftover parts. I had everything except for an extra monitor to go with it and then yesterday what should I find next to the dumpster but a 17″ monitor! The gods must have been watching over me. Computer hardware can be really annoying though too. Just tonight as I was setting up my secondary system I changed the BIOS settings and then when I rebooted the computer it halted on the screen where it detects your hard drive. To add further injury, it was then impossible to enter the cmos menu to change anything. I almost started crying. It was just too much to bear. I finally gathered myself and found some information on the web about how to reset the cmos. Evidently it’s as simple as removing the cmos battery for a few minutes. I felt stupid but I was glad it was as simple as that.

Oh, I found a guy online with access to all 39 episodes of The Mysterious Cities of Gold. He has them in VCD format, but he’s going ahead and encoding them all in divx format. So, anyone that wants them come by irc and find me. I’ll let you borrow them. wink wink. I’m actually amassing quite a collection of cartoons and television shows. Just tonight I downloaded and watched GI JOE: The Movie. It was pretty weird. I hadn’t seen in it in about 10-15 years. Burgess Meredith as Globulus!