Letter Never Sent

Trout is of course the alter-ego of Kurt Vonnegut. Found via Metafilter: The collected fiction of Kilgore Trout.

The Gospel from Outer Space

It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian, by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.

But the Gospels actually taught this:

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes.

The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being of the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:

Oh, boy — they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!

And then that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.

So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.

And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

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Pardoned criminal, John Poindexter, needs to be sent to Camp X-Ray for this crap.

NY Times: Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans:

As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant.

Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.

Admiral Poindexter, who has described the plan in public documents and speeches but declined to be interviewed, has said that the government needs to “break down the stovepipes” that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence agency analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.

“We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge, and create actionable options,” he said in a speech in California earlier this year.

Admiral Poindexter quietly returned to the government in January to take charge of the Office of Information Awareness at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa. The office is responsible for developing new surveillance technologies in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Israeli assassinations:

Next-door neighbor Soha Ekmel, who was up early to prepare for Suhur — the morning meal before the day-long fast for the holy month of Ramadan — said troops entered her home and took her husband, Khaled.

“They told his (Sawalha’s) wife to tell him to come out. I heard her say ‘Iyad, please come out, they’re threatening to kill me if you don’t.’ There was no answer, and they asked Khaled to do the same,” Ekmel told The Associated Press. The army would not comment on the report.

At one point Sawalha lobbed a hand grenade toward the troops, lightly injuring two soldiers. After a drawn-out gunbattle Sawalha was shot and killed. Sawalha’s wife and Khaled Ekmel were taken away, Soha Ekmel said.

Even the Queen of England is scared. Intelligence author and former government operative:

IT has been the clearest hint so far that even the Queen is uneasy at the power wielded by an unelected and secret cabal made up of the so-called “permanent government” and elements within the security services.

The words she uttered to Paul Burrell are now set to reverberate around Whitehall and perhaps even penetrate Thames House, the headquarters of MI5.

The Queen has watched over a Britain dominated for 50 years by a paranoia largely generated by MI5 and a Civil Service mentality forever unwilling to accept the loyalty of generations of working men and women if they belonged to certain trade unions or left wing pressure groups.

The Pentagon is a little miffed that someone released photographed evidence of torture by American troops. This is chilling. We know that the US has released POWs to third countries to be tortured outside the jurisdiction of US law, and only God knows what they’re doing to the POWs at the ominously named ‘Camp X-Ray’ in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. You need to see these photos to see what our government has proven itself capable of.

Police to videotape protesters in case they do anything wrong:

Chicago police are expected to videotape anti-globalization demonstrators today under intelligence-gathering powers they have regained from the courts after a two-decade ban.

Department rules that took effect Oct. 25 also permit officers to pose as members of groups as long as the intelligence-gathering has a legitimate law-enforcement purpose. And the rules let officers surf the Internet to scan groups’ Web sites for information about them.

“In the past, you could only turn on the camera after a crime was committed, and you could only film the commission of a crime,” said Larry Rosenthal, a deputy corporation counsel for the city. “Now, we will have cameras out there to document demonstrators’ misconduct, as well as police misconduct if it occurs.”

Harvey Grossman, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said he fears camera-wielding police would scare people from exercising their constitutional right to protest.

“Is the cost worth the benefit?” he said. “What about city employees who want to protest corporate policies? Do you think they want their photo in a police dossier?”