Total Information Awareness Day! or 'Orwell's Priapism'

After watching the Guardian Interview with Snowden (the name of the first character killed in Joeseph Heller's 'Catch 22') I knew that I'd have to finally speak up and let everyone know that we need a national holiday in honor of this monumental breach of national security.

Let's make 6-9-13 the first annual Total Information Awareness Day!

I'd like to point out that the interview was a fairly benign indictment of the supervision being applied to the technology of information surveillance. When the tools are out there, somebody is going to use them. Period. Who uses those tools and what constitutes legal use of them is what we need to deal with. 

It isn't just the monitoring that had Snowden's hackles up. It was the record. If the NSA stores and records EVERYTHING that passes back and forth then your entire electronic footprint is potential evidence in a trial or as grounds for a warrant. Just like you can get pulled over for a wide right turn or a loud muffler as a means to initiate a search, almost anything one has done/said/has been recorded doing can be used to justify further search and/or arrest. What I don't understand is precisely how Snowden's actions are a danger to the US. People are decrying him as a traitor, and while, yes, he is technically, I fail to see how this blown whistle aids terrorists. Are terrorists going to start communicating and organizing offline? Will we see a return to dead drops, microfilm and shadowy hand signals? Will the Jihad not be televised? Will pigeons be strapped with 140 character messages written in invisible ink?

Don't forget that this NSA nonsense started well before Obama was in office. I was working in silicon valley during the last administration. Rice and Cheney were regulars on the Google campus, this madness has been in the works for a while. A program the size of this doesn't pop up in four years. Don't get me wrong, the whistle has been blown on his watch, he has to man up and make the right next move. He IS accountable, I'm just saying that it sure didn't start with him.

So, mark it on your calendar, 6.9.13 - Total Information Awareness Day- because if this story fades into the noise with the rest of the 24 hour news cycle and the necessary debate never materializes in congress or in the White House, then at least you can point to the day that apathy won out over liberty.

Solzhenitsyn's Orphans

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” 

A.S.

Al Queda began as a gang of raggedy orphans in the Afghani outback. These were the mongrels of the Soviet occupation, children forced by the rockets and shells of the Red Army into madness and horror. They lost their parents, siblings, sometimes their entire families to rockets and shelling and bombs just big enough to blow an eight year old to pulp. They grew up swinging around on the torched skeletons of Migs and T-62 tanks wary all the while of the delayed fuse mines that had been fiendishly crafted into toys and fountain pens that had been scattered about by the Soviet gunships.  

Al Queda began as a nation of children forged on the anvil of high explosive. 

I wonder how many of those first jihadis had been whipped by the hand of semtex or C4? How many of them were (are) the owners of brains rattled and rewired by mild injuries? These kids were the inheritors of neuropathologies the western world is only beginning to understand. And we have them to thank for it, those blasted children. When we stepped onto the playground of carnage the Soviets built for these orphans they taught us about brain injuries. 

What we know now is that mild brain trauma can lead to a variety of crapped out connections in the three pound soul. In the brain, data flows like water, if one path is blocked, more will form. Nature will find a way to get you to think. 

Bomb blasts set the jelly of the fatty brain into a rippling, instantaneous dance. The flabby lobes of the apparatus shake like a fat man risking death on Wal Mart a trampoline, and the effect is infinitely more heinous. Should the frontal lobe slap wetly against the orbitofrontal cortex, pinging off of the dual chambers of the sinuses and the fourth wall of the forehead, traumas that darken all of the best parts of the soul result. Our soldiers are returning from the wars with damaged synapses and bottles of psychotropics. These poor youngsters are often confronted by a bleak road littered with unemployment, suicide and drug abuse here at home.

But this scarring goes doubly for children. Their young brains are so hungry for survival that they will actually heal and scar over the debris. The data that overflows the levees of their dark and broken neural anatomy cuts new and permanent channels that circumscribe all of the hardware needed to understand compassion and warmth. The afflicted individual is often ripped away from his own feelings. These souls are forever left standing outside the party of genuine human emotion. The self a phantom limb to the body of the world it inhabits. What we call psychopathology, with all of its bloody import, is one result of this of twisted neural healing.

Al Queda, orphans raised by the war and retrofitted with a sort of animal pathos in place of empathy. 

They  must have been ripe fruits for the zealots and the warlords. 

And now, twelve years later, a despot and a terminally ill pedagogue are dead. Hundreds of thousands are dead. Tens of thousands of bombs have been detonated along roadsides, in markets and dropped from the sky. Like the soviets before us, we have sewn thousands more orphans broken between the ears.

That place, between the ears of children, in the raceways of thought as it tumbles about between the front and the rest of those immature brains, that is the place we have struck Solzhenitsyn's line.

That tweaked petition letter I just promised.

The Gateway Pacific coal export terminal looks like the wrong end of the deal for Idaho. It would increase congestion and noise with more coal train traffic, pollute the air and local waterways, harm existing businesses, delay emergency responders, damage aquatic ecosystems and fishing grounds at the terminal site, and increase tanker traffic and the potential for serious shipping accidents. 

It would be loud and nasty, ruin sportsmen's fishing and really trash up the communities it would run through. It is an idea that is bad for the businesses and the residents of every town it would pass through.

Worst of all, the taxpayers will be footing the bill.

This is another example of corporate welfare, of the poor giving to the rich. I know that must sound pedantically socialist, but this is a crappy deal.

Why would anyone want to pay to have a 79 Oldsmobile with a family of possums living in the trunk towed into their front yard and set up on cinderblocks? I urge you to consider all of these impacts from a quality of life perspective as well as one of impact to the ecosystem. 

Good luck with your Environmental Impact Statement.

I'm curious about incorporating pictures into my posts. This is a try at it.  Please excuse the quality of the webcam photo - I realize I look like hell.

My favorite coffee mug. 

Around my 37th birthday.

Now a new one.