You don't say?

The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression. (BBC Article)

Another one (Amendment) bites the dust

From Boing Boing

White House Kisses Goodbye to 5th Amendment
Todd says: The latest Executive Order from the War Criminal Administration facilitates and sanctions the taking away of property of anyone who is deemed to be "undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people". Left in those terms, it isn't too much of a stretch to envision this Administration deciding that any particularly vocal critic of the Iraq occupation is "undermining efforts" and thus a target for seizure of property or assets, Fifth Amendment be damned.

Big news indeed, and yet it has received scant little attention in the media. Shameful in every regard, but it troubles me even more that this latest criminal act has crossed a new threshold in reckless disregard for the US Constitution, and yet hardly a soul even knows about it.

Isn't this a grand war! Boy, I can't imagine anything that's been executed better. The motivations were so clear.
Can I genuflect now?
(Sorry, I own a home.)

FYI

Fifth Amendment - Rights of Persons
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

"Fear-addicts"

In history, there have been the Hyksos, the Hittites, the Visigoths, the Huns, the Golden Horde, the Crusaders, and countless other unnamed peoples who have arrived with sword and torch to bring devastation to society. Today they use bombs and AK-47s. And in the future, even if education raises up humanity from the gutters of ignorance there will still be those of the fanatic pathology. It is likely there will always be barbarians.

But that won't destroy America either.

You will.



I'm referring to the screeching fear-addicts who have raped the United States so thoroughly that they should be drawn up on charges of treason. The cowards who, unlike their grandfathers and earlier ancestors, want a nanny state to coddle them, hug them, and ultimately contain them in a little crib with bars and monitors and cameras. (Article)

A lot of venom in this piece. I like it. Word for word.

Lost

I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for that special offer
A guaranteed personality

I wasn't born so much as I fell out
Nobody seemed to notice me
We had a hedge back home in the suburbs
Over which I never could see

I heard the people who lived on the ceiling
Scream and fight most scarily
Hearing that noise was my first ever feeling
That's how it's been all around me

[Chorus]

I'm all tuned in, I see all the programmes
I save coupons from packets of tea
I've got my giant hit discoteque album
I empty a bottle and I feel a bit free

The kids in the halls and the pipes in the walls
Make me noises for company
Long distance callers make long distance calls
And the silence makes me lonely

[Chorus]

And it's not hear
It disappear
I'm all lost

Further Proof

I've been alternately busy and pessimistic about our species future lately so I haven't had much time to post.

Hope all is as well as can be hoped for in everyone's corner of the world.

With that, I offer another piece of evidence that the U.S. is closer to a fascist state:
Battlespace America @ Disinformation

The article discusses the formation of a new military command group (e.g. CENTCOM) that covers the US. By itself it's not a bad idea. However, considering the assault on basic American Liberties that this group known as the administration has been willing to dispatch, I can easily imagine serious abuses.

A house divided

People like to think class doesn't matter in the U.S. and that with enough pluck you can change your status of living.
Bullshit.
If I've said it once,I've said it a thousand times, THEY constantly pump the American Dream™ to keep people struggling for their Disneyland family and home. It is at the core of modern American Society. The struggle keeps our frail consumer driven economy going. Those that do very little but are in a position to profit from the system, skim from the top as the money wheel turns.
Talk like that will label me a Communist, but I'm not. I believe forces bigger than man are now in control. The systems consciousness comes from the millions of little share holders that keep needling the entity for more profit faster. Never is there a clause "unless it is evil."
With that I find this quite interesting...

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
Danah Boyd
June 24, 2007
The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

Blue/green or green blue?

I still can't decide which, fascist dystopia or dystopian fascism.

"I think what is chilling now, however, is how often 'national security' and 'terrorist threats' are used as an excuse for illegal harassment and abuse. The most disturbing trend I see is when people are asked to present identification when they are not breaking any laws." (Photography Banned in Downtown Silver Spring, Maryland)

And this from Wired via Schneier...

Congress asked Homeland Security's chief information officer, Scott Charbo, who has a Masters in plant science, to account for more than 800 self-reported vulnerabilities over the last two years and for recently uncovered systemic security problems in US-VISIT, the massive computer network intended to screen and collect the fingerprints and photos of visitors to the United States. (DHS Security Chief Dismisses Congress's Hacking Questions)

Intermission

Apologies to anyone looking here as of late for something new. I've been working on more mundane things that have been consuming much of my time. It also gets a little heavy seeing one's culture flush itself.

The Day America Died
posted by populist

...The spiritual wound was self-inflicted. It was something we chose to do to ourselves. The "real wound" was not a matter of what the enemy did to us, but rather the way we, as a nation, chose to respond to our enemy; the manner in which we willingly allowed the injured pride of a once great nation to bleed into such hate, to transmute into such a frenzied need to destroy our enemy. (More at Disinformation)

"They are likely to be risk-averse, stifled by fears which are more phobic than real."

Very Ballardian article brought to my attention by Schneier

Childhood Risks: Perception vs. Reality

Great article on percieved vs actual risks to children:

The risk of abduction remains tiny. In Britain, there are now half as many children killed every year in road accidents as there were in 1922 -- despite a more than 25-fold increase in traffic.

Today the figure is under 9%. Escorting children is now the norm -- often in the back of a 4x4.

We are rearing our children in captivity -- their habitat shrinking almost daily.

See Ballard's Running Wild.

Theater of the absurd

Continuing from Nothing Oils the Gears Like "Sex Offender"

Actually, what it is is an erosion of the Fourth Amendment.

MySpace Reportedly Labels Innocent Woman as Sex Offender (Threat Level)

I don't have a particular desire to protect sex offenders. It's a creepy and usually cowardly crime on the surface. It's a crime of power. However, technically speaking, in some states if you get caught in something other than missionary position, it's a sex crime. No, it's that some states want databases available to them without a crime necessarily being committed. This is what they call a lack of probable cause.
Sex crimes are also some of our own doing, as a society, with the tolerance for the sexualization of children, the infantilization of women, and the promotion of sex as power throughout the commercial world.
I've also heard the argument from parents to the effect that in this case it's ok to be irrational because it has to do with kids. Particularly their kids. No it's not ok! We are a society that teaches our kids to do the right thing, not the knee jerk emotional thing. We teach children that we are a nation of laws, not a nation of reactionary behavior. People who tolerate reactionary behavior implicitly condone others who use terror as a weapon and people who use sex as a weapon.
Part two of this absurdity is that because some AG's want to grandstand and make a name for themselves at the expense of hard won Liberty and centuries of tradition, names of folks are being purged from a database based on some other database which may or may not be accurate. A large enough database and the accuracy drops. A little inconvenience for some, but just one more accepted violation of the Bill of Rights.
Technically not a violation because the government only leaned on a private entity.
The third bit of theater, from two folks swept up the purge:

• "Davis told ABC News that she supports MySpace's efforts, but is worried that the database it built with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. will start circulating with her information in it."
• "In a sense I can understand why they do that ... But why not (also) do it for identity theft convictions, drug dealing conviction, murder convictions? Because criminals use MySpace for these things as well." (article)
  

Because we are a nation of "innocent until proven guilty" and that the state does the punishing. Does nobody stand up for anything higher than their instant sense of gratification? Scarlet letter anyone?
Lastly, most of these services only require a valid email address, which one can get from Yahoo or Goggle without actually being verified as to who you are. So what happens. Criminals hide their identity, even the stupid ones. At least if you let them operate above ground, the idiot criminals will surface.
Every time some do-gooder wants to prove to the world how great s/he is by chest thumping and sloganeering, investigations get a little harder by driving the bad guys a little deeper into the shadows.
Any half decent investigator knows this, so why does it keep happening when only the regular citizen is impacted in the long run? Aside from the grandstanding, why is their such a promotion of bad detective practices, when only innocent people will end up being investigated...

Oh!

At the end of the day the colors of the flag are a little more faded

.

"It's that we're doing it ourselves"

Bruce Schneier on Big Brother:

The fear isn't an Orwellian government deliberately creating the ultimate totalitarian state, although with the U.S.'s programs of phone-record surveillance, illegal wiretapping, massive data mining, a national ID card no one wants and Patriot Act abuses, one can make that case. It's that we're doing it ourselves, as a natural byproduct of the information society. (Essay)

...and consumer society. I'm all for free market, but so are THEY and THEY're not our friends.

Whiplash segue.

THEY are the Artificial Intelligence entities that are the institutions that feed off of our toils known as a corporation. It's the entities that when viewed as a whole are functioning single "beings." These beings exist to feed the multi-neural (shares of stock) impulse to generate profit and revenue in the shortest amount of time as possible. Everyone wants huge returns on their investments while abdicating their responsibility to understand the consequences of the actions that their companies take in the effort to satisfy the maximum profit condition. This creates an organization that behaves like a being with all sub-sets having to behave more-or-less how the whole entity wants them to behave or else be purged. With limited liability, each sub-function is able to function with less conscience than might normally be employed.
This creates a whole that can be considered a psychopath.

From Wikipedia's article on the 2003 documentary The Corporation (available in 23 parts at YouTube):

The Pathology of Commerce

Dr. Robert Hare, a consultant to the FBI on psychopaths, draws parallels between a psychopath and the modern corporation. His findings corroborate the following behavior:

• Callous unconcern for the feelings of others
• Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships
• Reckless disregard for the safety of others
• Deceitfulness: Repeated lying and conning of others for profit
• Incapacity to experience guilt
• Failure to conform to the social norms with respect to lawful behaviors

And think about it. These entities spend billions of dollars every year trying to BELIEVE or researching how to get you to BELIEVE. They spend billions to influence human behavior. They spend billions to influence human laws.
No, the alien entitiy that threatens human existence won't be in the for of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a leather jacket and chasing some tween. It won't look like a green slime from space chasing a theater full of kids.

No, THEY look entirely different

Link to The Corporations website.
The movie trailer...

"Harry" Tuttle Lives!

Return

I've been busy, damnit!

When life conflicts with art.
A death of a cat/friend/family member, a construction project, and a wedding in Canada.

While driving, I had some podcasts to pass the time. Boing Boing had a great interview with Mr. Jalopy of Hoopty Rides. Check it out the site for some great...um...projects. Hard to explain.
A good quote from Mr. Jalopy "If you can't open it, you don't really own it."

REpurpose
I've tried to keep political commentary to a minimum, but every week I get more and more indignant. It's all I can do not rip the heads off of twittering idiots who want to continue to debate the rightness of the current American administration. There's nothing to debate.

THEY'RE A BUNCH OF LYING, ANTI-AMERICAN, NEO-FASCIST, CORPORATE CRIMINALS WHO WILL SAY ANYTHING TO PROVOKE YOUR BASEST, MOST VILE INSTINCTS TO MAINTAIN POWER AND BLEED THE COUNTRY OF ITS CAPITAL! THEY DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOU, YOUR FAMILY, YOUR COMMUNITY, OR YOUR COUNTRY!
THEY WANT YOUR MONEY!

Complex 39 envisions a not quite post-apocalyptic future in which the world is controlled by corporate mechanizations and the few highest placed profiters of the system. I think we've turned a corner that we're not coming back from. In the U.S., citizens are programed for consumption compliance and socio-political ambivalence. As with a frog in a pot, it's all about being slow enough so the frog doesn't know he's being boiled alive.

To paraphrase Penn Jellett, "living well beneath your means gives you an immense amount of power." Cut costs, live well, get off of the credit-go-round. Almost everything THEY offer is to keep you enslaved to the system. There's no end to it in their world. There's no real retirement from it.

With that, I also use this space to organize the myriad of sites/ideas/points-of-reference that support my own blend of living art in that aesthetic frame of reference.

Coming soon - Our attempt to augment home heating oil with Biodiesel. It's cleaner and costs about fifty cents to a buck a gallon to make.

"Knowledge is power" - Sir Francis Bacon

Last Word
First off, to make it clear, the rest of the world is at best thinking we (U.S.) as a nation are nuts. So many think we're just evil, arrogant, hateful bastards. At the wedding I attended recently, the Canadians were very gracious, but it was clear that there was a deep disappointment with our "War on Terror."

What I really want to say is that the war wasn't/isn't lost.

The war in Iraq was over in about a week or so.

The occupation, Operations Other Than War (OOTW), Low Intensity Conflict (LIC), counter insurgency operations, and/or civil war will last generations. The violence on the streets off Baghdad is nothing new nor unforeseen unless one is unschooled in basic history or if one is in the government and charged with protecting the nation, criminally incompetent. So if someone is yammering about someone saying "soldiers lives wasted" or "the war is lost", tell them to shut the hell up. They don't know shit about war if they're claiming we're at war. We're at a simmering pot of bullshit. We're at a never ending occupation of a former "country" that's sucked down $500 billion thus far. We're presiding over a region of disparate peoples who really don't want to live together.
We're there because the boomers wanted SUV's in their aging hippy-dippyness rather than wake up after the first major oil crisis. The boomers ignored their responsibility to stay alert and vigilant to the same forces that got us into the likes of Vietnam. I don't ignore the responsibility of the coming generations to do something, but they were there first and they're massive in numbers. They're a political and economic powerhouse and they could have done something in the 70's that would have helped avoid all this.
I digress...

The fact is, right or wrong, the war is over and we won.
But then we stayed there and an occupation is not war.

Atom Tan

Now the corporations stopped! Stopped pushing fast food Been a multiple shooting Downtown at the bank Reluctantly the panic begins To catch fire But it did not affect The steady sale of junk The state office looked It looked like Hollywood With make-up bleeding all over the cracks Wo he blew his lines Facing the cameras He suffered the first All live heart attack Oh you've caught an even atom tan The motor-cyanide Cyanide suicide He finally found the brick wall in his life Shining up his engine He dressed right up for it At the top of the speedo He crumpled the bike There's plenty people runnin' runnin' for cover- Hoping at best to hold off all the rest Once last stand at the bunker fire Machine gun and pitchfork at breast Oh you've caught an even atom tan But it isn't so easy So easy for lovers Chained in love stained at the top of the tower The pink hearse is leaving at funeral speed Driving your heart Away with the flowers All night I waited I waited for a horseman His ever faithful His Indian friend I'm not the only one Of the caped crusader fan club watching the sky For mankind's prayers Oh you've caught an even atom tan Calamine

Gunman kills 21 on Virginia Tech campus By SUE LINDSEY, Associated Press Writer BLACKSBURG, Va. - A gunman opened fire in a dorm and classroom at Virginia Tech on Monday, killing 21 people and wounding another 21 before he was killed, police said. I actually trained at a Military Ops/ Urban Terrain (MOUT) site near there once. Added 4/16/07 I may be the only one who thought about this, but I want to make clear that I intended no connection between the shootings and MOUT training. It was just odd that of all the places I've traveled, the one place I can recall being in VA was near Blacksburg, of which I saw none of. I can't even remember the name of the post.

Paper Dragons

Over the coming years the China/Taiwan issue will cease to exist. The Chin will neither liberalize nor remain totalitarian. As a people, the "Cultural Revolution" could never have lasted there. It's not that they can't be egalitarian, but culturally they are a patient people not given to whiles and whims of modern politics.
Now a middle class grows in China as America's shrinks and U.S. companies (among others) are finding ways to profit of off a dying superpower. Corporations are not interested as to where their profit comes from, as long as it comes.
As I've always said, if you want to stabilize a nation/region, don't bomb it into submission...encourage a large middle class. People are less likely to die for something if they have something to live for.