Inmates Accused in Name Copyright Scheme

OKLAHOMA CITY -- Forget about digging a hole with a spoon to escape from prison. Four federal inmates are accused of going above and beyond that call.

The four were indicted Tuesday on allegations that they copyrighted their names, then demanded millions of dollars from prison officials for using the names without authorization. (Article)

I understand the abuse of the system part when they bullied the warden, however I don't understand why one can't copyright their own personal information as corporations do.

I consider any information about me to be copyrighted and should I find that data miners use it without my consent and make money off of its use then they're in violation of copyright. My given name and my web name/persona are as much mine as any thing the golden arches lay claim to.

Peace

Chompin' at the Bit

I've got to get out to the garage and start tweaking, tuning, and modding the Fairlane soon. I'm jonesin' for the grease fix.
To hold me for a while, here's a fairly well done montage of Mad Max chase scenes set to one of my favorites Ace of Spades by Motorhead.

And a link to part 1 of a 12 part dice of the whole Mad Max 2/Road Warrior flick. About 9 minutes a day before work to make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside...

Hiatus

Apologies to those that have taken the time to check in and see if I have anything interesting to say, if ever.
Several personal matters have kept me preoccupied as of late and will require a couple more weeks before I'm back in form.
Thanks...

Break

I'm still working on that wall. My hands have gone from mincemeat to ground beef as I have a habit of not wearing gloves, I'm working with 100 year old lumber, and I just don't pay close enough attention.

I'll be back to posting soon.

Real world

Blank Maxine and I are tearing down, rebuilding, and remodeling a wall in the house I live. It's quite fortunate that we own the house in which we're doing all this work, because a landlord would probably take notice and we'd lose our security deposit.
Because of this, the may be a few less dispatches over the next week or so.
I have added some reading material on the left in the form of RSS feeds that I check everyday. They are several "social barometer" sites for me.

Repent!
The major social - political - economic - environmental transition is nigh!

Skills

I'm not a survivalist per se. I don't think there is an army of blue helmeted U.N. troops under the Rockies waiting to spring and take over the country. What I do believe is that there are skills that everyone should know to keep in touch with the earth, and therefore, reality. One thing that I truly appreciate from my time in service were the various Rangers and Special Forces that I had the privilege to work with. I learned a lot. After a several years in, I had considered going into Special Forces myself an Ops/Intel Sergeant, but I just couldn't commit to the amount of time it takes to train.

With that, here's a nifty link:

Rick F. Tscherne's Ranger Digest
From the website:
A Site Dedicated To Teaching Soldiers, Campers, Hikers, & Other Outdoor Enthusiasts "How to Survive & Thrive in the Outdoors."

As a former US Army Ranger, Drill Instructor, and an advisor/trainer to the Bosnia & Herzegovina Army (1996-97) under the US State Department approved "Train & Equip Program." I have always enjoyed sharing with soldiers my personal experiences and tips on how to survive in a military outdoor environment through field expedient know-how.

Articles, survival manuals written by Tscherne (complete with a pre-order warning about course language), and gear.

Prank the Monkey

Never trust a man in a suit
by Justin Becker
Issue 9.9
Wed, February 28, 2007

If you’ve ever wanted to punk Ashton Kutcher, receive handcrafted gift boxes from Charles Manson, or pay for highway tolls with oranges, there’s a way to do it, and it’s easier than you think: Just wear a suit.
When you wear a suit, everybody trusts you right away. ‘Why would some freeloader be wearing a suit? He must be trustworthy,’ ” says Sir John Hargrave. “That’s how these corporate criminals get away with it. They’re wearing suits.”
(more at Boston's Weekly Dig)

• A link to Hargrave's site ZUG - The World's Only Comedy Site

And I own a pretty damn good suit.
(Blank Snag @ work)

Blank Maxine

As I've envisioned Complex 39 to be a multi-disciplined project of sorts, with multiple feeds documenting, through a retro-future lens, my certainty that things are getting really weird and dystopian, I've recently brought my partner of 20 years on board. I've changed all the references to her to reflect her Complex 39 pseudonym and increase the anonymity. I like the term "partner" as opposed to wife (we're not actually married), or finance, or girlfriend in this forum for obvious reasons. It is our years of collaboration which most reflects our work here.
I hope to actually expand the offerings of Complex 39 as it continues to flesh out and more contributers may be added in time. Any suggestions are welcome, but will be met with close scrutiny, skepticism, and possibly reactionary hostility.

I reject your reality and substitute my own - Icons

All things are in essence symbolic. The quantum waveforms collapse into "recognizable things" when we observe those things. They are more than the "things" which we recognize...a blue pen being the sum of many parts which are the sum of many more, smaller parts ad infinitum. And the blue is all the visible color that the pen didn't absorb, not to mention all the radiation that we don't perceive from reflected ultraviolet and infrared to the minute, radioactive radiance from the weak force. For convenience, we round off and use symbols. It would take altogether too long to write out Pi every time we had to describe a circle being the number is probably infinite. Or we just say cat rather than describing the animal's physio-psycho-social nature with a full relevant history.

With that, there are a several metaphors for higher ideas that have a significant impact on what is seen by observers as Blank Snag, or whatever label of convenience I or someone else assigns this entity, an image which is a metaphor for some composite of experience of direct and indirect history and a confluence of time lines and decisions that bring us all to this point...oops...this point...wait...this point...damn...wait...now!

Reality is what you can get away with. - RAW
I know this quote in my bones. My head doesn't always agree, but at the core I know reality is malleable. It's just the who decides to mold it part that's at issue? You or some advertising jerk in marketing land, pimping death in a burger promising comfort and salvation at the hands of their friendly but homicidal clown?
I keep icons that represent who I am, who I want to be, and what I stand for before me to keep me from getting sucked into complete mediocrity. If you look on the lower right of this blog, you will see an incomplete list of the characters that populate my imagination and support the amalgamation of experience known as Blank Snag. I've also been known as other labels to other people in other relationships as well.

What are the fictional icons that have contributed to Blank Snag? Again, I keep a list on the side to remind me of those things I use to communicate with myself and others. I keep metaphors before me, not as a substitute for any specific aspect of being, but as a summarization for convenient discourse. Icons are also an exchange between the external and the internal, educating us on one hand as a representation of an external idea and reminding us of important lessons on the other as we shape those icons to fit our identity. It's a busy world and sometimes we get caught up worshiping false icons; the icon of not being late for work, the icon of that asshole who took your parking place, the icon of the jerk who bumped you on the subway.
Icons can be a powerful tool for meditation and focus, yet can be abused and be the source of restricting and limiting one's knowledge of the world. The question is, do you absorb the icon or does the icon absorb you?
We all group and categorize information into systems that we understand whether we're conscious of it or not. Some folks compartmentalize in sections that they might not have names for while others hold information like spreadsheets with clearly defined row and column headers. Short term memory tend to be more compartmentalized than long term. Symbolic association helps remind one of important facts and features.

I'll stop there for now. Discussion of symbols continues deep into tangents that I'd like to address at a later time in more detail. I want to touch on the use of icon for control (Mohamed, Jesus, "Bob") and the use of icon for understanding, communication of ideas, and focus (Mohamed, Jesus, "Bob"). Also Quantum Sorcery, Chaos Magic, and other magic systems uses the idea of icon or "sigil" as a tool for influencing events through will. Icon's in marketing and social control, from Britney Spears, to Mickey Mouse. Also, icon's in semantics and the use of semantics in systems of control.

The nice thing about having a robust pantheon of archetypes, it's a lot easier to detect other people's bullshit when they throw up their own totems of control. Small penis, talk about guns. Xenophobic, talk about welfare mothers and terrorists. Uncertain about moral/ethical values, talk about heathens, infidels, and criminals.

Icon's in more or less tangible forms than I use, shape us all. What we remember about our past is selective. We choose to remember, consciously or subconsciously that which we want to remember and shape our understanding of reality based on those memories. It is an impossibility to remember all things, so we remember select things. We create images of who our parents were, who our influential teachers were, what movie characters we like, and so on. The truth is, the value of things in our past is largely based on the value we assign it.

Like a remote TV control, take the unit out of Their hands and take charge of the icons in your own life.

"I reject your reality and substitute my own." - Adam Savage (MythBusters)

Just remember when using icons..."the map is not the territory." (A. Korzybski)

Pause

Rhinovirus

Meta

One of Blank Snag's incarnations

Ballard radio

Links open in new window/tab.
Here's a link to seven half-hour mp3's of JG Ballard stories as dramatized on the CBC's Vanishing Point (If you can't get quick time to work there try this link). Of all Ballard's work that I have read, The Dead Astronaut made a particularly strong impression on me. When I was a child I had wanted to be an astronaut as many young children do and had even made it in to school studying Aerospace Engineering for a couple of semesters before joining the Army.
But, as far as being an astronaut goes, and I hope I don't sound bitter, it seems to me to get to that level in any profession it takes more single-minded obsessiveness than I'm capable of. For me, maybe I lack focus, but there are just too many interesting things out there to spend so much time doing just one of them.
It was in fact The Dead Astronaut that largely inspired the title of this blog, although at the time I only had the impression of the story in my head and not the story itself. Often I have a sense of melancholy for the death of the Space Age, the waning days of transcendent and maybe naive hope that America and much of the world had held as embodied by Collins, Aldrin, and Armstrong. Early on, even after tragedy, people held strong to the ideal. My generation experienced some of that, but I also remember the images of Nixon on TV when I was very young and maybe a bit of Vietnam. Then, after a peanut farmer, an actor was made president and was shot by a man who was inspired by a cult movie. Somewhere along the way, we fired one of our employees in Panama and one of our bogeymen walked away leaving us to scramble to find another lest the people get any ideas. Decaying space age enthusiasm killed 14 more, however not as many seemed to care about the second as they did the first. A quick war for oil preceded another one, with many of my fellow soldiers suffering from an ambiguous illness known as Gulf War Syndrome.
Many other things happened as well that has brought us to this point. Are we the first generation to believe that society's in decline? Studies have shown that ours is the first not expected to do as well as our progenitors. And our successors of half to one step seem content with their world of gimmickry technology and shiny things.
Now Ballard's land and mindscapes haunt me, as I watch Toffler's Thirdwave unfold while the jestor that made me laugh and gave me hope passed a short time ago.

RE/Search Publications has some great Ballard publications. I highly recommend starting with this independent publisher (V.Vale) for an introduction to Ballard's work.

Thanks to Rick McGrath for making these radio programs available. He's got a wealth of Ballardian Dystopia available online.

Links

• The Terminal Collection: JG Ballard First & Variant Editions.
• JG Ballard Radio Dramas on The Vanishing Point

Warning!!!

They say that computer whizzes and such can track people fairly easily on the net. While I'm more comfortable than most, I'm not an expert. So I was surprised by how much information I could gather on visitors to Complex 39.
Now I feel obligated to warn everyone...the vanity counter below, at the bottom of the page will put a cookie on your machine (most sites do). The very act of clinking to a webpage anywhere can log your visit.
This is the information I have for the week (I won't post anything particularly sensitive). As you can see I can go deeper and view by city and by IP. Those details I'll keep private, but that doesn't mean blogger itself isn't keeping track, or google, or your ISP, or that sex tracking cookie, or....

I spent a lot of time concerned with keeping my identity private so I could happily continue in the intelligence or investigation field. Then I decided, if THEY don't like what I have to say about intelligence issues then fuck 'em, I don't really want to work where THEY are, humping the bosses leg, feeding them what THEY want to hear, lying to the "client" or "consumer" to keep the dollars rolling and not offending any of THEM. I don't want to work in Rah! Rah! fucking Law Enforcement if THEY want to keep doing the same old, tired bullshit that hasn't changed a damn thing since time immemorial. Crack a few fucking skulls, point fingers at the reprobates, and fucking call it a day. Hor-fucking-ray for the home team! God fucking bless you if you want to take that fucking barrel over the waterfall, but me...I've gotta get going on to a place where I can fucking live with myself. Fuck the oil kleptocrats, the product oligarchs, and the fucking theocracy cabal. I'm gonna find a nice non-profit or NGO and go help some people. Don't get me wrong, there are necessary services provided, but when the product is so manipulated and the manpower purged of anyone who might disagree...that's not intel, that's the manufacturing of (sur?)reality and consent.

Proposed IAO logo. It proved to be too creepy.

My former affiliation

Thank you. Thank you very much...
Now I've gotta take my meds for this fucking ulcer.

And by the way... a big "hello" and I'll try to keep my fucking country out of yours to all the foreign visitors (Is there really a foreign on the net?).

Additional resources
Bruce Schneier - Schneier on Security
CCleaner - freeware system optimization and privacy tool

One of those...

..who are you quizzes. To a degree, I'll agree. Probably whose character's do you identify with in this case.

I am: William Gibson The chief instigator of the "cyberpunk" wave of the 1980s, his razzle-dazzle futuristic intrigues were, for a while, the most imitated work in science fiction.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Radiation - Alvin Toffler

When I talk of those that have particularly influenced my thinking, I've chosen the keyword radiation as their metaphor. Information is all about us, radiating energy like the product of the weak force, mutating our beings. Alvin Toffler is one of the most influential on my meta-political understanding. When using his models, such as Third Wave, War/Anti-war, and Future Shock, individual incidents seemed to fall into place in the bigger picture. I felt I was an infinitely better intelligence analyst having read his works.

Third Wave is the post-industrial society. Toffler would also add that since late 1950s most countries are moving away from a Second Wave Society into what he would call a Third Wave Society. He coined many words to describe it and mentions names invented by others, such as the Information Age. (Wikipedia. More...)

One of the prepositions made by Toffler that struck me when I read Third Wave in the 80's, was that the transition to Third Wave socio-economics would usher in a new "Dark Ages" during the transition. Toffler estimated that within twenty years we would see an increase in religious and tribal style violence as people's increasing anxiety about changing economies drove them towards increasing xenophobia, lashing out at the "other." His view was that this gnashing of teeth period (my phrase) would last around twenty years as cultural change has increased exponentially due to the modern speed of communications.

Toffler Associates - Corporate Website
Alvin and Heidi Toffler {Futurists} - Personal Website

Purpose

My muse is not with me today, so this is going to be a bit terse and matter of fact.
Complex 39 (look it up) is a place where I (Snag) can organize my dispatches regarding the state of the world. "Why the fuck would anyone want to read this, when there's so many other sources of information?" one might ask.
Well, I'm operating on a few principles I think might be unique:

• Complex 39 is an attempt to blend Art, Journalism, and Commentary in a multitude of media types.
• Complex 39 isn't an attempt for the absolute truth. As A. Korzybski has said "The map is not the territory." This is only a map. However, this map is an attempt to rip off the routine of daily existence that have dulled our senses and see the seething, froth of humanity as we apes interface with technology. Hopefully a closer look at the pornography of violence, the ever pervasive agents of social control, the transmogrification of civilization, the underground technological pirates...
• Complex 39's stylistically somewhere between Post-war America and cyberpunk.

So who the hell is Snag?
Hopefully that will be fleshed out overtime. Here's a quick run down to this point:
Born in the industrial north of the U.S. just before Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins made contact with another planet. Born shortly after the Kennedy assassination and cover-up. Born shortly before the Neo-Con's first major criminal enterprise known as the Nixon administration and subsequently Watergate.
I grew up nomadically, moving every couple of years across the U.S. My single mother was always searching for something unknown. Intellectual challenges I suppose. Spiritual quests maybe?
My brother is a drummer in a band and a pretty cool guy. He majored in Art History and works for a prestigious museum in Boston. He would like to move into curations.
I've done everything from roofing to working in an industrial laundry to managing a restaurant to salvaging demolition sites.
I spent 11 years in the U.S. Army. Most of it part-time. First as a medic, then administration, then intelligence/security management. For six years I was an intelligence sergeant with the military police. I was adept at the M16, M60, and grenades. While I served these things happened:

1. The Tanker War - "Operation Earnest Will"
2. U.S. Invasion of Panama
3. Second Persian Gulf War - "Operation Desert Storm"
4. "No-Fly Zone" War
5. U.S. Intervention in Somalia
6. NATO Intervention in Bosnia - "Operation Deliberate Force"
7. U.S. Occupation of Haiti
8. U.S. Embassy bombings and strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan (The bin Laden War)

I've built and raced a 1963 Fairlane 500 with a modified 315 cubic inch "Windsor" motor. I'm self-taught. I'm interested in grease cars. My good friend and the lead singer of the Kings of Nuthin', Torr, has been a big help in my automotive knowledge.
I was a punk rocker/bootboy in my adolescence. I was a fan of Fear, Black Flag, The Exploited, and Dead Kennedys. I drank beer with Colin of G.B.H. around a fire, in a corn field, at a show in Kansas. I spent many years hanging out in a place called the Outhouse.
Along with Schroedinger, Feynman, Heisenberg, et al, Joe Strummer and Johnny Cash are my spiritual advisers.
I'm currently a criminal investigator in the private sector. I'm good at understanding intention from behavior. I can beat people up. I'm good at investigating financial based crimes. I think it's odd and a little depressing that THEY (society...the law...the corporate powers...) allow me to hurt people if needed in the course of my job.
My gal Blank Maxine of twenty years is a brilliant photojournalist (that's her work in sidebar).

Out for now...