Obsolete Your Idols

This is National Novel Writing Month. You may or may not remember that I 'won' that in 2003 by writing a time travel porn novel. Hey, I hit 50k words, even though they're utterly unpublishable. It counts.

I've tried to compete in NaNoWriMo a couple times since then but something has always gotten in the way. So I'm not doing it this year, either. But I do like the sensations receiving in my brain from the act of writing so I am going to try some writing this month.

Specifically, I'm celebrating National Letter Writing Month, a contest I just made up.

I'm going to try to write a letter for each day of this month and send it off. For this year's NaLeWriMo, I'm focusing on political issues. Because, like Arthur Silber, I'm concerned about how things are going. So, referring to The Consumerist Guide, here's the text of my first hand-written letter. It's to one of my Senators, Barbara Boxer, on the topic of Iran.

The Honorable Barbara Boxer                     November 1, 2007
112 Hart Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington DC 20510

Dear Senator Boxer,

I've been a Californian for two years, volunteering my time and skills to
various local user groups and non-profit organizations, as well as working
as a Unix system administrator.

I'm writing to you about Iran.  I'm afraid that our country will soon
be thrown headlong into a needless and devastating war upon Iran.  
I think that Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, who was so perceptive on the matter
of Iraq's nuclear program, is again correct in his assessment of Iran's
capabilities.  Iran is years away from being any kind of nuclear threat.
I saw news stories indicating you'd co-signed a letter to the President
expressing concern about the heated language he's been using in reference to
Iran.  Thank you for doing so.

Please put that sentiment into law by advancing S.759, prohibiting the
use of funds for military operations in Iran.  As a member of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, you are in an excellent position to do a great
deal of good.  Please have a meeting scheduled to discuss it or co-sponsor
it before matters deteriorate further.

Sincerely,
Shannon Prickett

Oh, and good luck to the NaNoWriMo participants this year, especially the returning ones who might have not quite made it before. It's hard to get back on a horse which has thrown you once. Keep at it!

(If you're a Californian who wants to write a letter on a similar topic, the pertinant staffer seems to be Sean Moore.)

Assuming you haven't given up completely, a bill which might do something about Habeas Corpus so yay for that.

Today I recycled over twenty solicitations for contributions from alleged politicians and activist organizations. I have never sent money to any of them. I also set aside solicitations from four organizations, to whom I have previously given money.

Here's the deal. The first one to actually do something useful which makes the world a better place and lets me know about it without bundling it with a solicitation for donation gets money.

From now on, I'm going to recycle without reading anything which even smacks of begging me for money. Stop panhandling me. Get to work, you greedy parasites.

You may recall that I have long supported impeachment for this administration. I remember promises to restore dignity and honor to the office. I remember promises to protect the environment, the Constitution, and the country.

So now there's Yet Another Impeachment Effort. I don't have a lot of optimism that this puppet show will go anywhere but what the hell, I put my name on the list.

I'd rather be rioting in the streets but, you know, I've got bills to pay. You could go add your name to the list. Or not. Don't do something just because I told you to do it, that's the stupidest reason to do something. But do think about whether sufficient treason has been committed by these short-sighted selfish criminals.

I dreamed that the atheists, the progressives, the secular humanists, the socialists, the environmentalists, the anarchists disappeared from the Earth during the night. All of the people accused of being in a vast conspiracy to disrupt business and spoil politics and corrupt morals. The only people left on Earth were the people who identify as persons of faith, who worry most that someone else somewhere is having fun, that value money above all things, that howl for violent revenge upon anyone who disagrees with them.

Some countries were more changed than others. America was virtually unchanged in the visible places. The news still appeared as normal and the same editorials were still written blaming failures upon those vanished millions, disowning all responsibility. The corporations still issued press releases and managers still met. Many of them had fewer employees, though few of the managers noticed other than to bring in consultants to sit in the now empty cubes. Few of the temporary agencies were able to dispatch any employees, as many of them were gone. The Federal and State governments were at full strength and still tended to the important business of letting lobbyists buy them lunch.

The Midwest was emptier, but no one noticed. The coastal cities were emptied, but no one cared.

Then the President declared himself President Elect for Life. The congress passed law after law, making every action a crime but providing exemptions for those above certain income levels or those entities recognized by the courts as corporations. The air became brown, the oceans became red, the earth glowed by night, as pollution was unregulated. People with less power were preyed upon by those with more and it was legally sanctioned. Newspapers and television reported that the rapes and murders were the work of the God-less Left, who had never left but were in hiding, lurking behind every corner, lying in wait. They kept the uninformed in a state of panic and rage. The ones in power lived like decadent emperors until someone with more power came and took it away from them.

Soon there was widespread bloodshed as heavily armed militias shot it out with one another, squabbling over sordid deals gone awry. The warfare escalated all over the world. Then nuclear weapons were deployed, tactically. Not between nations, for many of them had already fractured into fiefdoms, but between faiths. In the US, the Mormons and the Dominionists and the Catholics had a three way nuclear exchange. Other countries had more complicated fights and feuds and there were many more attempts to use nuclear weapons than there were successes, as some were second hand, sold from ancient American stockpiles by the corporations which controlled the American lands.

Eventually, it was quiet, as the few survivors developed terminal illnesses from the pollutants in the wrecked environment. Almost every animal had been wiped out, through hunting or clumsiness. Almost every human had died from being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or being too greedy, or by believing in a lie. Not one of them went to Heaven or anything like it. They just lay where they were and their heart stopped and their brain stopped.

Then those who had disappeared were brought back. They had seen it all happen. They saw the wreck and ruin of life on Earth as it stood. They all cried out, "Let us fix it! Let us help! Let us undo the damage!" Because it's what they'd always feared. It's what they had tried to fight when they were on Earth. It was their worst nightmare.

So they were put back on Earth, at the same place and time they had been taken away. They knew all that would happen if they let things develop without them. They remembered how it would all end in death and desolation. They knew that would spend lifetimes and be rewarded with the contempt and disdain of the selfish, the foolish, the evil and the merely banal. But they remembered how much more awful the alternative was.

What a freaking nightmare.

If only criminals are concerned for their privacy then sign me up for some criminal behavior. I can think of lots of things I do which aren't crimes but which I wouldn't want captured on camera; administrating Windows, for starters. This on top of the already ongoing and illegal spying that's been happening on Americans.

So, feeling antagonized, I responded in typical fashion. I gave money to

• the ACLU
• the EFF
• the EPIC

And then just to cover all my bases of flight from the panoptic scan, I also gave some money to

• Amnesty International USA
• the Sierra Club

This should resolve all future debate.

Santorum. Senator Rick Santorum.

Devil pointed me at this collection of early advertising.

Check this out. Site with some tools about personal data. G'wan. You know you want it.

Courtney pointed me at The Yes Men and they immediately became one of my new favorite reading sites.

Impeach the miserable failure.

Gratuitous google bomb courtesy of my noticing some nitwits trying to bomb Michael Moore with that tag. Tit for tat in this dilemmatic prison.

Here's a webpage with some answers to FAQs about being sued by the RIAA.

It's the kind of thing you want to have read before you need it, much like the ACLU reference card about how to handle being arrested by police.

Here's the text of Thomas Paine's Common Sense pamphlet.

Is it just me or does it still seem pertinent?

Fair elections, verified voting, Bev Harris. Are you paying attention? This is important.

I got pointed to this site, which aims to make obvious how boldly and badly the current occupant lied about his stance on HIV/AIDS research and to try to see that the person awarded the office in 2004 will do something about the ongoing world-wide epidemic. I guess they'll have actual candidate responses to their survey in January, so check back, then.

Those of you who have been living under a rock may not realize that your votes are at risk of never being counted at all. Here are some links. You should probably at least check out the Wired ones so you can hold informed conversations with the people who retain some notion of preserving a semblance of representational democracy. You know, cranks.

• Ad Hoc Touch Screen Task Force Report
• Analysis of Diebold
• Story about Bev Harris
• King County is using known broken machines
• Wired article
• Another Wired article

I gather California has recently passed a law saying that their voting machines must provide a receipt to prove that a vote has been scored as desired by the voter. By 2005. Yeah. Right.

But news is boring so read these other websites which can point you at other resources.

• Bev Harris's site
• Verified Voting and other pipe dreams
• California, savior of the nation

Prof. Membrane hooked me up with another spiffy website. This is China Mieville's Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read. I'm surprised at how many of these I've actually read in my aimless meanderings.

Because I know you loved the all-seeing eye in the pyramid from the Total Information Awareness program so much the first time around, I'm sure you'll queue up to support MATRIX, the return of everything knowable about you being collated in the search for ... anomalies. But then again, what have you got to hide? You're all perfectly normal, right? Right.

I'm sure other people have had more insightful commentary on this new/old program but, frankly, it scares the piss out of me. I have everything to hide. I'm a human being. Not a rat in a cage.