Entries from November 2007 ↓

Okay, I my previous parody of a news story about the U.S. gov’t targeting anyone with non-mainstream religious belief was supposed to be over-the-top and dystopian.

However, Cnet news today had a piece on directions the government is taking to combat terror by policing the potential hotbeds of terror. It seems there are those in the government of this fair country who get together in secret little meetings and make guidelines (rules come later?) about stopping homegrown terror. We should all, apparently, be concerned about the following dangerous things:

• anyone with an “extremist belief system”
• anyone who believes that “the U.S. government is infringing on their individual rights”
• anyone who believes that “the government’s policies are criminal and immoral”
• the internet (because it facilitates violent ideologies and because it “allows anyone to set himself or herself up as an authority figure.”)

I guess that last one chaps the hides of the folks who are annoyed that they already have too much competition for the title of “authority figure.”

I have got to get my dual Canadian citizenship going. You Canadians seem to be losing your civil rights at a slightly slower pace. I’m tellin’ ya, sometimes I think we’re about 3 friggin’ baby steps away from totalitarian rule disguised as homeland security.

Say, I think I’ve figured out the problem. It’s all because the government is infringing on my individual rights. Why, it’s not too much to say that some of the current governmental policies are downright criminal and immoral. I invite all like-minded individuals to use this here internet to facilitate a discussion of these radical ideals. After we have a few meetings, we’ll set one of us up as an authority figure. Doesn’t matter who. Pretty much anyone.

The (American) media industry is apparently pushing a law that would leave Canada’s consumers among those with the fewest media use rights on the planet.

Michael Geist reports that Industry Minister Jim Prentice is preparing to fast-track a Canadian carbon copy (except worse) of the horrendously terrible DMCA that has caused lots of problems in the U.S.
Mr. Geist (linked on boingboing) suggests the new law will hand unprecedented power to media companies to restrict the way you use their media, even if you have legally purchased it. For instance, no sharing your music or video, no matter what (in some bills such as these, it is technically illegal even to loan a CD to a friend). No shifting your media between devices (even if you own them). There will be DRM protection on most everything, and you will be legally in trouble if you break the DRM if, for instance, you want to rip a copy of BSG Season 1 from DVDs to your laptop’s HD so you can watch it on the plane; or if the company that produced your crappy DRM-disabled music goes out of business and no longer offers support.

In addition, this law is likely to remove traditional legal protections such as fair dealing, satire and parody. Make a silly remake of a Wal-Mart commercial: you broke a law. Show 3 minutes of The Simpsons to your class at school: you broke a law. Rip your CDs to your MP3 player: You broke a law.

Geist says, “Once the bill is introduced, look for the government to put it on the fast track with limited opportunity for Canadians to appear before committees considering the bill.”

So, if it comes up, kill it fast, much like a horrible dragon, or a zombie dragon, or something else that’s horrible and should be killed fast.

Otherwise, welcome to the corporate fiefdom. We Americans, having more experience in this area, will help you adjust to the reduced levels of liberty and justice.

Click the following links and then press play on the page that pops up. You won’t be sorry :)

1. Rucksack
2. Smile
3. American Tourist Friends
4. Red Shirt
5. Voiceover Artists

Emma Clarke, the lady who has (recently) been the voice of the public announcements on the London Tube apparently recorded a few of her own messages and put them on a blog (now offline). There’s a discussion about whether she should have done this, and whether the London Transit folks should have killed her freelancing contract with them, but I don’t care. I think the messages are Extremely Delicious :)

….aaaaaand maybe this is (one of) the reason(s) she got canned: Pinstripe Suit

(link to boingboing story where I found this)

Perhaps the squid-ink spaghetti (yesterdays’ post) broadened my mind a little. I just had a sandwich with leftover turkey, black beans, a bit of mayonnaise, and apricot preserves on some yummy whole wheat bread.

Before any of you judging judgers start to get all judgmental and judge me, let me say it was pretty good.

That is all.

Dead Chevy for Sale in Alamo

ONE: I was at Target today, and on the endcap, where they put the closeouts, there was some spaghetti. It was black. Pitch black. Pretty cool, no? After I got it home and started making dinner, I chanced to look at the ingredients (while I was chatting online with hot babes my hot babe, Alex). Let me reproduce for you the ingredients box on this package of spaghetti:

INGREDIENTS: SEMOLINA, SQUID INK, FERROUS LACTATE (IRON), NIACIN, THIAMIN MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID.

Perhaps you didn’t notice the unexpected ingredient in there. Riboflavin?! <tgsvoice>That’s awesome!</tgsvoice>. No, seriously. It’s amazing how one single ingredient can make the whole list very, very weird. But it tasted fine with some sauce and cheese. I had seconds.

TWO: I have been avoiding booking my flight to see Alex, not because I don’t want to see her, but because I hate the expense and hassle of the entire process. Well, I got into the groove, and on a whim I checked the usually-insanely-restrictive continental.com rewards flight availability, and I found a flight! My travel for Christmas will cost me $10 instead of $500! So I celebrated by buying $75 worth of DVDs on amazon.com.

THREE: I have only committed one of the major sins today (not including Lust, cause I figure I get a bit of a free pass now, when it’s directed at my wife… what!? you knew what I was when you started reading this post). I have compensated for the lack of variety with frequency. Today I think I have committed about 3,000 separate instances of Sloth.

That is all.

by M.F. Luder
November 16, 2007

The intelligence community is defending the addition of non-mainstream Caucasian Protestant groups to its racial-ethnic-religious profiling guidelines. In a press conference this morning, national security associate director John C. McGrathnick described surveillance and cataloguing of “pre-fundamentalist Caucasian Protestants” as a natural next step in the progression of demographic profiling by police agencies. Under the new practices national and local agencies, from the FBI and NSA to community police forces, will be required to maintain lists of “potential asymmetricalities” in American communities. Individuals and groups placed on these lists will for the first time include Caucasians and Protestant Christians whose lifestyles and religious beliefs fall outside the norm, under the rationale that non-mainstream religious and cultural groups are at higher risk for producing terrorists and other national security threats.

“It’s not just a case of keeping tabs on people who are different,” says McGrathnick. “It’s a matter of priorities. Non-mainstream religious and cultural groups frequently have beliefs and ways of life where adhering to the American status quo is not the most important value. It’s simple logic. If you believe that God, or Jesus, or Buddha, or whoever, is more important than being a good neighbor, and a law-abiding citizen, then it’s a no-brainer that you’re a potential threat to this nation.”

Under the new guidelines, for example, Free Methodist groups in Washington State are not considered high-risk groups, while Free Baptists in Alabama are. Last-wave New-age Acolytes in Southern California are not on the list, but Latter-day Saints in Southern Utah are.

The degree of devotion that individuals show to their “alternative ideologies” is also an important factor in whether or not they will be subject to police scrutiny.

“We are not nearly as concerned, as a security-minded nation, about the tendencies of individuals whose behavior patterns show little influence from their alternative ideologies,” said McGrathnick.

Thus, Reform Jewish synagogues are not being catalogued, while Hasidic Synagogues are high on the list.

“When you come to understand just how much of daily life is influenced by some of these alternative ideologies, you begin to comprehend the level of security threat such people represent to this nation,” said Angela Merdin, Assistant Secretary of National Security Matters. “We are finally facing the glaring fact of White political-religious extremism in this country. Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, Eric Rudolph, Jim Jones, David Koresh, the Ruby Ridge incident… the list goes on and on. If those kinds of people are able to exist in this country, then we’ve clearly got a problem with certain groups and mindsets.”

Although Merdin has described the demographic profiling as “nothing for ordinary citizens to be concerned about,” she also hinted that individuals and communities listed as potential threats may be required to maintain their own registration with national and local police agencies in the future, or face legal consequences such as permit revocation or financial asset seizure.

Civil liberties groups have already voiced strong protests, several promising lawsuits. However, according to Alan Jackman of the Civil Defense Action Group, there is a concern that these efforts are doomed due to “…the American public’s willingness to rubber-stamp anything with ‘national security’ in the title, since 2001.”

The above is a totally fictitious parody, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental, just like in the movies (luckily, so is this, at least for a little while, although similar plans have been proposed in other U.S. cities). I wrote this less to make definitive statements than to keep thinking about the questions.

I…

I mean I… it’s just… just…

So awesome. After years of recommendations, I just watched Donnie Darko for the first time. It felt like a combination of American Beauty and Twin Peaks (second season). Deeply freaky. So surreal that “surreal” doesn’t quite capture it. I’m still in a melancholy, sad, happy, blissed mini-mood from it. More reasons it’s awesome:

• Best 80s soundtrack I’ve heard in a very long time. Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, Tears for Fears… great stuff.
• Drew Barrymore is every brainy teenage boy’s fantasy English teacher.
• Mary McDonnell can do no wrong.
• Maggie Gyllenhaal is pretty awesome, too.
• Come on, it’s got Patrick Swayze as a creepy new-age feel-good guru. Also, blast-from-the-bast Katharine Ross as a very expensive therapist.
• Wonderful depiction of combined teen horror/loneliness/angst, and even a less-creepy-than-usual treatment of teen sex.

This movie may well be good enough to break my R-ban for (I mean for owning; I already broke it by watching it). On the other hand, it has a pretty steady stream of crudeness. Not sure I want to own that. But anyway, it rocked on. I loved it.

Yes, that is what you, astute reader, should be asking yourself right this minute. The answer is “in the other room, drying off.” Why? Because I peed on him. Yes, I urinated on my cat.

It was not my fault. He has developed some tear-around-the-house-at-high-speeds habits lately. So, when I lifted the seat and took a wizz – after closing the bathroom door incompletely, as it turned out – this little yellow fuzzball jumped up on the toilet (apparently believing it would have a lid on it, as it does when he practices athletic high-speed kittening all day when I’m at work). Somehow he avoided falling in, but he did not avoid getting his head entering the, um, stream.

So the next step was to catch him (tearing off at high speed) before he contaminated any more of my house, rinse off his head, and put him in the back bedroom. Stupid cat.

Know what? Christmas is coming! I’ve hit on a project to make a present or two. This makes me happy, and makes me look forward to the holiday. I find that when all I do is buy presents, I really don’t look forward to it as much.

In other news, OSU continues to stomp heads. Yay! And the weather here is perfect and gorgeous. Just cool enough not to need the A/C all night, but not so cold that I need more than a light blanket. Sigh. “Fall” and “Winter” here are pretty sweet. And for summers… there’s always Ontario.

If god = good, then god+n must be super-good!

Can you tell I am fascinated by this whole curandero/a concept? I think it’s a combination of the rich symbolism and iconography, plus the clear element of human need, plus the logical insanity of putting a representation of pagan Death in front of three crucifixes.

Anyway, here’s a folk cure a couple of my students described in class the other day. It’s for mal del ojo (evil eye).

First, you get an egg. The brown ones apparently work best. Then you rub the egg all over the person who has mal del ojo. Seriously. All over them. Then you crack the egg into a bowl (in water? I think just in a bowl… man, I can’t remember) and place it under the bed of the person who has the problem. In the morning, you look at it. If it looks like an eye, then the person did indeed have mal del ojo and is now cured. If not, then I don’t know… you’re screwed.

Interestingly, you can both get and give the evil eye without intending to. The way it was explained, if you just look at someone too long, or with a strange expression, or something, you can become an unwitting vector for mal del ojo. One way to deactivate its effects before they set in is to touch the person you may have inadvertently cursed. This is why, apparently, some Hispanic women (and men? I dunno), after staring in adoration at a child or a baby, will want to touch said child/baby. Which creeps the White Folks out. See? Cultural misunderstanding!

heeeeeeeeere souly souly souly souly…

So, it’s Day of the Dead. Did I have a lame Halloween night? The answer to that is a resounding YES. But it was nice, anyhow. Did some time on my cycle trainer while I watched some high-quality X-Files. What more could a fella want?Also, I think I have (at least temporarily) fixed the rear brake on Señor Pulga. It’s not terribly satisfactory, however. It’s really really hard to drill a hole through a stainless steel bolt. :(

In other other news, there’s an excellent editorial on Wired’s “Security Matters” Blog today. It’s about how the “War on Terror” is becoming “… an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected. It’s a war on different.”

Cutting & Pasting:

The problem is that ordinary citizens don’t know what a real terrorist threat looks like. They can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a tape dispenser, electronic name badge, CD player, bat detector or a trash sculpture. Nor can they tell the difference between terrorist plotters and imams, musicians or architects. All they know is that something makes them uneasy — usually based on fear, media hype or just something being different…

The police cordon off the area, make arrests and/or evacuate airplanes, and in the end the cause of the alarm is revealed as a pot of Thai chili sauce, or flour, or a utility bill, or an English professor recycling or a cell phone in an airplane seat. Of course, by then it’s too late for the authorities to admit that they made a mistake and overreacted…

…these incidents only reinforce the need to realistically assess, not automatically escalate, citizen tips…

Equally important, politicians need to stop praising and promoting the officers who get it wrong. And everyone needs to stop castigating, and prosecuting, the victims just because they embarrassed the police by their innocence.

Causing a city-wide panic over blinking signs, a guy with a pellet gun or stray backpacks is not evidence of doing a good job: It’s evidence of squandering police resources. Even worse, it causes its own form of terror, and encourages people to be even more alarmist in the future.