Today is a kind of watershed moment when the Internets respond to attempts to censor shit by banging down the back door, but a load of ‘Net peoples have chosen instead to go black.

Daily Kos  has an action line to protest the twin online-control orbs SOPA ‘Stop Online Piracy Act,’ (US House) and PIPA ‘Protect Intellectual Property Act” (US Senate), which reportedly are designed to shut down access to overseas websites that traffic in stolen content or counterfeit goods, but like a lot of other surveillance-state-of-affairs, there’s more than just bullshit flying.
Copyright law can be a step away from censorship: “Like many other tech companies, we believe that there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking U.S. companies to censor the Internet,” a Google spokeswoman told Reuters on Monday.

And today (Wednesday) Google has a black band over its name on its search site, and Wikipedia leads to a Gothic-looking spot which proclaims “Imagine A World Without Free Knowledge,” in protest of the upcoming Congressional bills.
Along with Wiki, Reddit and Boing Boing, among others were also going black for awhile to protest.
Even HuffPost had a huge, black box at the top of his home page (where a photo/headline usually appears) early Wednesday, and supplies a factoid page here.

All authority hates freedom — one wonders how the popular uprisings in the Middle East, even the Occupy movement here in the US would fare under these laws, and how would freedom really be effected because as it is now, the real freedom is in the ability to get the truth out there.
Even in the most totalitarian regimes on earth, a little iPhone camera can change the outlook of the whole, entire world — in a real sense, currently there can’t be a total news black out and we need to keep it that way.

An understanding via the LA Times:

Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative, said the bills set “a horrendous precedent globally” and that much of the content users put online — such as open publishing, crowd-sourced information gathering or comments sections — could all become “incredibly dangerous” if the bills passed.
“We would end up in a situation where we’re trying to do needlepoint with harpoons,” he said.
“You can’t target only pirated information, content or media without getting tons of collateral damage that removes entirely legal content.”
As a screenwriter, East Hollywood resident Steven Darancette, 40, uses Wikipedia often for background information. But he isn’t too concerned about the website going dark Wednesday, saying he supports the protest.
“If I need to get research, I’ll just Google,” he said.
“There are also these things called books.”

The way-big problem, though, is once that door is opened, then locked back again by SOPA/PIPA there’s no going back, the freedom of pure communication will be lost in an Orwellian influenced society, and that ain’t good at all.

Meanwhile, in Connecticut a woman lost her parents and children in a house fire: “It is a terrible, terrible day,” Mayor Michael Pavia told reporters at the scene of the fire. “There probably has not been a worse Christmas day in the city of Stamford.”

(Illustration found here).

Some bad things are worse than others, but as the world continues to construct its own coffin, the news in the immediate future won’t be pretty.
Maybe its the high-level ability to communicate anything really quickly — there’s no hush, hush any more, not for any length of time any way, and the pulse of life will only quicken as the days grow shorter, quicker.
Technology might have made it too easy to fail.

And be driven crazy.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:

A 1-year-old boy survived on Christmas after being thrown out of a second-floor window in San Jose by his mother, who then leaped out after him, police said.
…
Baby and mother were rushed to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center.
The baby, whose name is being withheld, is in fair condition in the pediatrics unit where doctors are checking for possible brain injury, said Donna Etchell, a nursing supervisor.
He is expected to survive.
…
“We are exploring the possibility that she does have some mental health issues,” he (Sgt. Jason Dwyer, a police spokesman) said.
“It’s not something we can talk about at length, but we do believe that did have something to do with the motive and why she took the actions that she took today.”
…
“Everybody’s going to put their heads together and try to figure out the best thing to do,” he said.
“It’s not the kind of call we want to go to ever, especially on Christmas Day.”

Or maybe any other day.

Close with Mark Twain: Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain’t so.
Not by humans, anyway.

Happy Monday!

Once we started burning coal in machines, however, clock-shit hit the time-fan.
A good, good-night’s sleep for hundreds of years: Agrarian cultures built their societies around sunlight, waking up with the sun to toil in the field and heading home as the sun lowered beneath the horizon. But the industrial revolution brought with it the freedom to unshackle us from nature’s clock.
Now madness.

Early Monday morning here on California’s north coast, bright and clear, and cold.
Rained all weekend, but cleared yesterday evening and now we’re in for a couple of nice days and then back to rain again.
Daylight Saving Time is another attempt by mankind to have complete control of his/her environment, but no one turns their back on nature, it rules the show.
One of the biggest problems facing life in 2011 is the arrogance of man.

This morning it’s hard to focus.
Arduous to even type, much less filter a topic to run with and express facts and whatnot.

During the weekend news stuff kept happening, people did shit, some of it real dumb and events kept creating ripples in all kinds of different directions without a plan, without a scheme.
Big news on the CBS News early loop is the horror at Penn State — none of the reporting indicated this Sandusky guy was even married, children, or nothing.
If he wasn’t married, and at his age, there’s a clue, sherlock.

A sick-ass news story to start the week (although the story broke on Saturday).

Then there’s the protest at the White House yesterday on President Obama’s upcoming decision regarding that literal snake in the grass, the Keystone XL pipeline, but no matter what the public feels like, Obama will decide as he has the last three years — on the side of the 1 percent.
So mega-depressing to have follow the very-worst president in US history by one so, so disappointing and so useless in the long run — people shouldn’t vote for him ever again, but wait!
Who to vote for then?
The entire GOP presidential field is bat-shit crazy, and really don’t give a shit — as witnessed by Herman Cain’s coasting uphill even after all the sexual-harassment issues.
Neither Cain nor GOP voters seem to care — or the media, especially after that Cain slap-down Saturday, which in days of yore would have made every journalist worth his salt go after the guy tooth and nail.
Nowadays, though, he’s a star on ‘Meet the Gregory.’

Planet earth and all its inhabitants are in a most-terrible fix.
And who the livin’ f*ck gives a fat-goat’s ass to what happens to this Kim Kardashian?

Via Emily Dickinson’s ‘A Clock Stopped‘

A clock stopped — not the mantel’s
Geneva’s farthest skill
Can’t put the puppet bowing
That just now dangled still.

An awe came on the trinket!
The figures hunched with pain,
Then quivered out of decimals
Into degreeless noon.

It will not stir for doctors,
This pendulum of snow;
The shopman importunes it,
While cool, concernless No

Nods from the gilded pointers,
Nods from seconds slim,
Decades of arrogance between
The dial life and him.

Good Monday, to ya!

Only one-quarter of those surveyed say news orgs get the facts right, a new low since 1985 when the question was first asked.
Two-thirds (66 percent) say stories are often inaccurate, a new high.
And nearly three-quarters of Americans believe that journalists try to cover up their mistakes, rather than admit them.

(Illustration found here).

Also in the Pew Research survey: …and 80 percent say news organizations are often influenced by powerful people and organizations.
And local news are trusted more than those national organizations — 69 percent vs 59 percent.
No wonder the US (and the world) is going to shit in a wire basket — much better information, and less biased information can be gathered from the foreign press, at least from what I’ve gathered.

In an example from The Daily Howler on the execution of Troy Davis last week — no real details on evidence were presented by anybody, including the fabled Gray Lady:

The headline on Wednesday’s editorial called the impending execution “a grievous wrong.”
Among other things, you read this:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (9/21/11): Seven of nine witnesses against Mr. Davis recanted after trial.
Six said the police threatened them if they did not identify Mr. Davis.
The man who first told the police that Mr. Davis was the shooter later confessed to the crime.
There are other reasons to doubt Mr. Davis’s guilt: There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime introduced at trial, and new ballistics evidence broke the link between him and a previous shooting that provided the motive for his conviction.

Say what? The man who first told the police that Mr. Davis was the shooter later confessed to the crime? And Davis was executed anyway?
What happened to the guy who confessed? The editors didn’t say.

Some mess there.

A mega-major problem is media attention span.
Firedoglake on Sunday looked at the nearly-unreported dust-up on Wall Street last week via an interview with Paul Weiskel, a photographer who has been taking photos of the occupation.
Weiskel talks reality:

They had to continually bring in more people and towards the end I honestly felt like it was very close to a police state.
I’ve been very hesitant to say the phrase “police brutality” because we don’t live in Syria.
We don’t deal with that type of police repression but today the New York Police Department did violently crack down on peaceful protesters, who definitely have legitimate claims, and I was flat out disgusted.

And the media interest tends to be non-so-called professionals:

I think with the increase in technology the ability to exchange this news, what’s going on, is pretty much equal if you look at the quality of video coming out, if you look at the quality of pictures coming out—if I could say that.
The main difference is the audience that you have.
There were a lot of tweets saying that right now CNN is running a segment on have dating rules changed in the best decade while people are getting pepper sprayed and beaten by cops on street corners in New York. So, it is a very orchestrated blackout by the media but once we get the audience they’re going to see the images and they’re going to be very high quality and very thought-provoking images.

And black outs?
One must remember that if the national media don’t want you to know something, you won’t know it.
Case in big point: In 2008 the New York Times ran a massive expose on those TV “military analysts” who gave most-wonderful commentary in the opening days of the Iraqi war and how they were in fact on the payroll of the Pentagon in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.
The NYT even won a Pulitzer Prize for the story, but a vast, huge chunk of US peoples haven’t a clue — the TV news outlets, CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, etc., all blacked out the story — and the only news report on the expose was a segment on PBS.

In the mid 1970s when I started at the Montgomery Advertiser in Montgomery, Alabama, right out of J-school into the entry-level slot of police reporter, journalism was in its golden age buzz.
On the strength of Watergate, us news room types were a proud bunch as we thought what were doing was not only the neatest job in the whole-wide world, but we were there for the public’s right to know and understand.

That was way-long ago and really far, far away.

(Illustration found here).

In the reckoning of things, this is a massive news cycle I’m leaving for awhile as everything is hitting the fan, from the US and world economies, to weather, to war, and even a well-received revival of the ‘Ape’ movies.
The news will just have to cease for at least five days.

I’m traveling via AmTrak to central California to visit with three of my daughters — one coming from Tennessee — and hopefully it should be a good time had by all.
And to the scant handful of peoples who visit this site on any kind of regular basis — please don’t forget me.

Have an awesome week!

Standing on the corner
Suitcase in my hand
Jack is in his corset and jane is in her vest
And me I’m in a rock and roll band
Riding in a stutz bearcat jim
Those were different times
And the poets studied rules of verse
And all the ladies rolled there eyes
Sweet jane
Sweet jane
Sweet jane
– Mott The Hoople, ‘Sweet Jane‘ (Words and music by Lou Reed)

Creativity is just one delicious side effect of doing a bowl.
Somehow smoke opens new imaginative horizons where the creative factor weighs heavy in the air, alighting like a room full of bong smoke — oh the flow without interruption.
Marijuana lets loose those dogs of words: Last speculative point: marijuana also enhances brain activity (at least as measured indirectly by cerebral blood flow) in the right hemisphere. The drug, in other words, doesn’t just suppress our focus or obliterate our ability to pay attention. Instead, it seems to change the very nature of what we pay attention to, flattening out our hierarchy of associations.

(Illustration found here).

It’s in that high state where the flattening out come in real handy and the creative juices kick in.
Ironic, or maybe it’s just a jagged little pill for innovative thought, but Alanis Morissette agrees:

“As an artist, there’s a sweet jump-starting quality to [marijuana] for me.
I’ve often felt telepathic and receptive to inexplicable messages my whole life.
I can stave those off when I’m not high.
When I’m high — well, they come in and there’s less of a veil, so to speak.
So if ever I need some clarity … or a quantum leap in terms of writing something, it’s a quick way for me to get to it.”

Cop a buzz and you’re head over feet.

And now it appears one of the best-known and most-creative peoples in all of history, Bill Shakespeare, might have been a stoner, and a clue is Sonnet 76:

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

Shakespeare might have been more inventive than first realized, and research peoples want to find out for good.
In 2001, scientists at the The South African Police Services Forensic Science Laboratory in Pretoria analyzed the stems and bowls of 24 clay pipes — including a number found in the garden of Shakespeare’s home in England — and found traces of tobacco, suggestive evidence of cannabis, and mysteriously, two of the pipes showed signs of what looks like cocaine.
National Geographic explained: The analysis was made after a South African scientist had a hunch that reference to the “noted weed” in one of Shakespeares sonnets may have been the bard’s way of extolling the effects of cannabis. “There were very low concentrations of cannabis, but the signature was there,” said Inspector Tommy van der Merwe, of the Forensic Science Laboratory.

And with the Bard: Of the pipes that were found in the garden of Shakespeare’s home at New Place, several tested positive for cannabis. “We can’t prove that Shakespeare smoked these pipes, but we do now at least know what his contemporaries were smoking,” Thackeray says.

Now they want to dig up Bill’s bones.
From Fox News (h/t Raw Story):

Paleontologists are looking to examine the remains of William Shakespeare, hoping to unlock the mysteries of the life and death of the world’s most famous playwright — and to prove that the poet once puffed.
The bard is buried under a local church in Stratford-upon-Avon. And a team of scientists, led by Francis Thackeray — an anthropologist and director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa — have submitted a formal application to the Church of England for permission to probe the site where he sleeps, perchance where he dreams.
…
“We have incredible techniques,” Thackeray told FoxNews.com, referring to the “nondestructive analysis” the team has planned. “We don’t intend to move the remains at all.” Instead the team will perform the forensic analysis using state-of-the-art technology to scan the bones and create a groundbreaking reconstruction.
…
Thackeray claimed the devices were used to smoke cannabis, a plant actively cultivated in Britain at the time. The allegation has provoked disbelief and anger among some fans of the bard.
Prof. Stanley Wells, honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, told the Daily Mail, “I would be happy if they did open it up because it could put an end to a lot of fruitless speculation.”
“If we find grooves between the canine and the incisor, that will tell us if he was chewing on a pipe as well as smoking,” Thackeray told FoxNews.com, citing similar evidence found in Virginia.

However, there’s the curse Bill put on his grave:

Others may have issues with digging up the body, which goes directly against the late playwright’s dying wishes.
Shakespeare, famously fearful of the happenings of his own remains after his death, had a curse engraved on his tomb: “Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare,/ To digg the dust encloased heare;/ Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,/ And curst be he that moves my bones.”
Philip Schwyzer, a senior lecturer at Exeter University, told Reuters that “Shakespeare had an unusual obsession with burial and a fear of exhumation.
The stern inscription on the slab has been at least partially responsible for the fact that there have been no successful projects to open the grave.”

Dude, it’s just bones — chill a second, then re-fill the pipe.

Someone asked why I invited Jon Stewart to be the first guest on the Journal’s premiere in 2007.
“Because Mark Twain isn’t available,” I answered.
I was serious.
Like Twain, Stewart has proven that truth is more digestible when it’s marinated in humor.
– Bill Moyers

A sad state of journalism when its top program and its most-popular individual is a fake — I’m not faking it though, when I laugh my ass off at Stewart and company’s take on the horrid events of our time.

(Illustration found here).

Moyers was on Stewart’s show last week and they discussed that 2007 interview, while concluding the current situation with US journalism is shitty at best, and near-criminal at worst.
And the bottom line, Moyers says: “a lot of news organizations no longer do much reporting.”

However, who gets the last, real laugh?

TV viewers ain’t faking it, though.
From Raw Story:

Comedy Central and “The Daily Show” both surged in the May Nielsen ratings, posting their best numbers yet. “The Daily Show” dominated its time slot across all of television, cable and broadcast, and boasted a very impressive 19 percent increase in viewership in May alone.
Meanwhile, according to Mediabistro’s TV Newser, Fox News suffered an overall decline in viewers in the highly sought-after 25-to-54-year old demographic for May, with total ratings down 10 percent.
Bill O’Reilly’s viewership dropped 9 percent, Sean Hannity’s 6 percent, with Greta Van Susteren and Glenn Beck suffering the steepest losses with Van Susteren’s “On the Record” losing 12 percent of its audience and Glenn Beck sliding a whopping 17 percent.
…
The new Nielsen numbers show that “The Daily Show” averaged 2.3 million viewers, beating every program on Fox except Bill O’Reilly’s average of 2.8 million.
“The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” beat all other cable and broadcast programming in a number of categories, including having the most affluent viewers and the most active web-sties.

The story also points out the drop in the ratings for fringe, bat-shit crazy ranters off the right wing: Some of the fall-off in Beck’s numbers may be attributable to the fact that his show is going off the air, but it has been a consistent loser in the ratings for several months. The drop in public interest is echoed in ratings for radio shows hosted by Beck and Rush Limbaugh, which have each lost a third of their listenership in the last year, according to the radio polling group Arbitron.
US peoples are apparently getting sick and tired of all the bullshit.

And what do the all those figures mean?
From tvbythenumbers: For the month of May 2011, “The Daily Show” averaged 2.3 million total viewers and a 1.2 P18-49 rating. Versus May 2010, “The Daily Show” grew an astounding +19% in total viewers, with incredible double-digit ratings growth across all key demos including P18-49 (up +21%), P18-34 (+22%), P18-24 (+21%), M18-34 (+18%) and M18-24 (+21%).
One just can’t beat that, and it is an indication not only how well the Daily Show is performing, but also how shitty every other media outlet is doing.

And Fox News not only sucks at journalism, but the organization is obviously plain, dumb-ass stupid.
In a story this weekend on Sarah Palin’s latest adventures, and to illustrate the segment, the Fox graphics department showed a photo of Tina Fey imitating the former Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008.
A news organization that’s not really a news organization using a illustration of an actress faking a display of a presidential candidate that’s really not a presidential candidate.

Well, gosh, darn, that is so not Paul Revere.
Who?

“You can’t be afraid of words that speak the truth.
I don’t like words that hide the truth.
I don’t like words that conceal reality.
I don’t like euphemisms or euphemistic language.
And American English is loaded with euphemisms.
Because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality.
Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it.
And it gets worse with every generation.
For some reason it just keeps getting worse.
– George Carlin

Fear is a real-funny word, quoting George again: “I don’t have a fear of heights. I do, however, have a fear of falling from heights.”
Nowadays, it seems, US peoples are living on a kind of extremely-ironic fear, seemingly adjusting to all kinds of scary stuff, with the biggest fright coming from shit that don’t exist.

Although there’s more than enough of reality to be feared, US peoples love their fantasy-fright to be attached to something to be touched.

In the last decade, Osama bin Laden and his cohorts have created a fear of fear itself, a terror of being caught up in terror.
Even though this fear is way down on the to-be-frightened scale — a Cato report of unlikely fear: In almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States.
Yet when anyone says “Nine-eleven” the fear factor goes off the charts and emotional bullshit fills the airwaves and brain waves, creating a beyond-fear-based lie.
And US peoples are mega gullible when it comes to terror coming from terrorists.

Paul Woodward puts US fear nicely in context via War in Context:

You can’t talk like a five-year old without ending up thinking like a five-year old, yet this is the mentality many Americans bring to bear when they look at the world through the prism of 9/11.
America is at war with “bad guys” and on Monday morning “we got him” — the baddest guy of all.
To the non-American ear there is something at turns amusing then disturbing about the fact that full-grown adults, including literate and less literate presidents, can, without any sense of irony, use this kind of comic-book language.
Yet beneath these simplistic expressions is a sense of innocence that Americans cling to, born from the notion that this is a nation that can do no wrong; that at worst America can be misguided but its errors will ultimately never obscure its intrinsic virtue.
What 9/11 and its aftermath did was to widen the gap between the way America sees itself and the way it is seen by the world.
If some of us might have hoped that this nation had grown up a bit over the last decade, there has been little evidence of that over the last few days.
…
The American story is a story of power and virtue we keep telling ourselves as though it would quickly be forgotten or disbelieved if not reinforced through constant repetition.
Yet what might be conceived as a form of self- and national affirmation serves no good if it refuses to accommodate reality.
If our self-image is not informed and modified by the perceptions of others, it is no more than a conceit — a picture we can only believe in by refusing to see ourselves through the eyes of others.

The real fear is what is real.
Climate change is real — but, oops, it’s just not scary enough yet, though, US peoples in the southeast, and now on the flood plains of the midwest, would think different.
Peak oil is real, yet no one is ready to give up his SUV.
Both of those fears are fears based on some real-bad reality, but no where as frightful are Osama and his boys.

And the economy — be afraid, be really, really scared as shit.
Paul Krugman in his New York Times column this morning looks at invisible monsters.
Some nuggets:

From G.D.P. to private-sector payrolls, from business surveys to new claims for unemployment insurance, key economic indicators suggest that the recovery may be sputtering.
…
It’s not as if our political class is feeling complacent.
On the contrary, D.C. economic discourse is saturated with fear: fear of a debt crisis, of runaway inflation, of a disastrous plunge in the dollar.
Scare stories are very much on politicians’ minds.
Yet none of these scare stories reflect anything that is actually happening, or is likely to happen.
And while the threats are imaginary, fear of these imaginary threats has real consequences: an absence of any action to deal with the real crisis, the suffering now being experienced by millions of jobless Americans and their families.
…
Which brings me back to the destructive effect of focusing on invisible monsters.
For the clear and present danger to the American economy isn’t what some people imagine might happen one of these days, it’s what is actually happening now.
Unemployment isn’t just blighting the lives of millions, it’s undermining America’s future.
The longer this goes on, the more workers will find it impossible ever to return to employment, the more young people will find their prospects destroyed because they can’t find a decent starting job.
It may not create excited chatter on cable TV, but the unemployment crisis is real, and it’s eating away at our society.
Yet any action to help the unemployed is vetoed by the fear-mongers.
Should we spend modest sums on job creation?
No way, say the deficit hawks, who threaten us with the purely hypothetical wrath of financial markets, and, in fact, demand that we slash spending now now now — which might well send us back into recession. Should the Federal Reserve do more to promote expansion?
No, say the inflation and dollar hawks, who have been wrong again and again but insist that this time their dire warnings about runaway prices and a plunging dollar really will be vindicated.

Don’t be scared, just take off those rose-colored glasses and you’ll be fine.

In fact, any private aspect of our daily lives is open to be scrutinized, filmed, recorded and posted on some government watch list just in case there’s a need, any need at all.
And the shit part is that you don’t have to be a terrorist, a criminal, or even a bad person who kicks puppies, or slaps little babies hard in the face — you just have say or do something the powers-that-be, or in our particular case nowadays, the right-wing hard-cases, do not like or agree with and whim-wham, thank-you ma’am, you’re under surveillance.

(Illustration found here via Google Images).

A case in point is from the illustration link above (Wired magazine) which details a situation reported from September 2007 where a co-founder of the AIDS Housing Network is placed under an unknown government observation routine.
As if:

Flynn is a co-founder of the AIDS Housing Network.
One day before an AHN rally, she went to New Jersey to visit her parents.
She noticed a car with New York plates parked outside their house.
When she drove home to Brooklyn that night, the car followed her — and was joined by two others.
She did all the detective story check-your-tail maneuvers: making random turns, changing lanes, parking. They continued to follow.

And when Men-In-Black like cars followed her home, two other vehicles were already there with occupants watching laptops — even at 4 a.m. the assholes were still there.
Despite a personal investigation, Flynn could not discover the IDs of the culprits.

Since her experience, Flynn has continued to organize, though she says she’s not so enthusiastic before, and has seen other activists pull back.
Was she really followed?
We might never find out.
But when we hear stories about political activists losing their civil liberties, we shouldn’t assume that they’re potentially violent folks bent on smashing Starbucks and the capitalist state.
They might just want a cure for AIDS.

One sad, fearful tale.
Similar to this story reported in early March: An Egyptian-American college student who says he has never done anything that should attract the interest of federal law enforcement officials filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the FBI for secretly putting a GPS tracking device on his car.
And, of course, the FBI replied that they were just following “well-established Department of Justice and FBI guidelines,” which should tell you everything.

And to unsettle one’s self, there’s the government’s use of biometric technology, which in its actual defintion is freakin’ frightful – The word “biometrics” is derived from the Greek words ‘bios’ and ‘metric’ ; which means life and measurement respectively. This directly translates into “life measurement.”
No shit, Sherlock.
From Raw Story:

A recent announcement by the Federal Bureau of Investigations detailing plans to embark on a $1 billion biometrics project and construct an advanced biometrics facility to be shared with the Pentagon has the American Civil Liberties Union on red alert.
…
The FBI’s forthcoming biometrics center will be based on a system constructed by defense contractor Lockheed Martin, and part of that system is already operating today in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
Starting with fingerprints, and creating a global law enforcement database for the sharing of those biometric images, the system is slated to expand outward, eventually encompassing facial mapping and other advanced forms of computer-aided identification.
To help ramp up the amount of data flooding into this center, the FBI said that electronic fingerprint scanners would be sent to state and local police agencies, which would be empowered to capture prints from any suspect, even if they haven’t been arrested or convicted of a crime.
…
“That’s what we’re really talking about here: a shift in American values, from a place where you can live your life unencumbered by government scrutiny to one where you really have to worry whether the government is watching you either through a video camera, or a police officer who could step up and potentially ask you for a fingerprint at any time,” (Chris Calabrese, an ACLU’s legislative counsel in Washington, D.C.).
…
“What we have instead is secret watch lists, where people don’t know they’re on the list, they don’t know the standard for putting them on the lists and there’s no way to get off the lists,” Calabrese said.
“That’s a serious problem.”
“We’re not opposed to technology, but we are seeing technology advancing rapidly and often times legal protections aren’t keeping up.
When it’s now technologically possible to do things like capture a facial recognition image and use the various cameras across a city to track somebody using that image automatically … When that’s technologically possible, the only barrier between us and widespread mass surveillance is legal protections.
They don’t exist right now, in many cases.”

And what got me interested in this shit this morning was a Monday column in the New York Times by Paul Krugman, who flashed on the recent situation where a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin started a blog on the nefarious doings of the state’s GOP.
The historian wrote the Republican governor, the infamous Scott Walker, has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”

So what was the G.O.P.’s response?
A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians.
If this action strikes you as no big deal, you’re missing the point.
The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. And that demand for copies of e-mails is obviously motivated by no more than a hope that it will provide something, anything, that can be used to subject Mr. Cronon to the usual treatment.
…
Someone like Mr. Cronon can stand up to the pressure. But less eminent and established researchers won’t just become reluctant to act as concerned citizens, weighing in on current debates; they’ll be deterred from even doing research on topics that might get them in trouble.
What’s at stake here, in other words, is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding. Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down.
It’s up to the rest of us to see that they don’t succeed.

Shades of the AIDs worker, huh?
Just watch that camera angle, and don’t use e-mail.

As the entire world appears to be going full-steam bat-shit insane, the announcement yesterday of the death of movie icon Elizabeth Taylor most-oddly gives life a more normal feel to it, a reassuring sense that time is still the same, that people grow, mature, and then die.
Taylor’s obit gush-releases a flash backward to an era seemingly so, so long ago when there was always a notion that tomorrow would arrive safe and sound.
Nowadays, though, there’s this sensation that maybe, just maybe tomorrow won’t ever get here, and there’s even great doubt about making it through this afternoon — time and events are becoming one and the same, like listening to a terrifying thunder-and-lighting storm explode closer and closer to the right now.

If you’re under 40-years-old, most-likely you just known Taylor as a half-nuts old lady involved with the AIDS epidemic and friends with Michael Jackson, but in reality she was a long-time shining example of Hollywood’s influence over the great American Dream.
And impact of media in a black and white world.

What a difference a generation makes.
In the early 1960s, at the height of her popularity and power, Taylor was a most-enjoyable bad girl, developing an image that although seemingly contrary to the then-current feel-good fantasy of JFK’s Camelot, kept the world at an attentive edge of its seat, waiting to see what kind of craziness she’d come up with next.
She and Richard Burton, seen with Taylor in the above photo, would consume a lifetime’s worth of antics in a few short years — their romance, which included two marriages (a marriage, a divorce, then a re-marriage) were the stuff of which Hollywood was legend.
And those were the days of no paparazzi, no TMZ, no gushing 24-hour-cable TV outlets and no freakin’ Dancing with the Stars – just a few movie magazines like Screen Stars, Screen Stories, and Movie Stars.

In 1966, Taylor and Burton made “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” a freakish, knock-down, drag-out example of how a bad marriage could go worse.
Although the play on which the film was made, written by Edward Albee, was an off-tune of the old-time ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,’ the incision of Virginia Woolf gave it a mysterious quality of intellect.
According to Albee (via Wikipedia):

I was in there having a beer one night, and I saw “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror.
When I started to write the play it cropped up in my mind again.
And of course, who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf . . . who’s afraid of living life without false illusions.
And it did strike me as being a rather typical, university intellectual joke.

A joke on everybody.
Woolf herself was something of a literary nutcase — Nicole Kidman won an Oscar in 2002 for portraying Woolf in the film, ‘The Hours’ — Woolf committed suicide in 1941 by putting rocks in her overcoat, walking into the nearby River Ouse and drowning.
In a tell-tale last letter to her husband, Woolf seemed to communicate the feelings of herself, but seemingly also told the tale of the nowadays.
Again, from Wikipedia:

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again.
I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times.
And I shan’t recover this time.
I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate.
So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.
You have given me the greatest possible happiness.
You have been in every way all that anyone could be.
I don’t think two people could have been happier ’til this terrible disease came.
I can’t fight any longer.
I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work.
And you will I know.
You see I can’t even write this properly.
I can’t read.
What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you.
You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good.
I want to say that — everybody knows it.
If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
V.

Yes, Virginia, be afraid, be very afraid.