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Title: Weblogs - Amygdala Funny, bracing or important posts by the house-bound Gary Farber who offers his views on news, politics, the media, history, science, and science fiction.

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Amygdala @import url(http://www.blogger.com/static/v1/v-css/navbar/697174003-classic.css);div.b-mobile {display:none;} function setAttributeOnload(object, attribute, val) { if(window.addEventListener) { window.addEventListener("load", function(){ object[attribute] = val; }, false); } else { window.attachEvent('onload', function(){ object[attribute] = val; }); } } canEdit = new Array(); Donate to American Red Cross here. All The News That Gives Me Fits Check this for links to open new windows WWW Amygdala Our Mysterious Name. Our mission. Our task. Me, Gary Farber (Battery Park, 1996). Home blog advertising is good for you Osama on the US Osama on the Jews and Crusaders My Original, Wrong, Position On The Iraq War, before it began. A Revised Opinion An Updated View What To Do In Iraq In 2006 2008: This Is Our War. Former Large Mammal, then a Flappy Bird, then bottoming out as an Insignificant Microbe, and now an Adorable Little Rodent in the Ecosystem Site Feed Feedburner RSS Feed LiveJournal Feed Technorati Links View blog authority Gary FarberCreate Your Badge Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001! Commenting Rules: Only comments that are courteous and respectful of other commenters will be allowed. Period. You must either open a Google/Blogger.com/Gmail Account, or sign into comments at the bottom of any post with OpenID, or LJ or Typepad or Wordpress or AIM account to comment. Posting a spam-type URL will be grounds for deletion. Comments on posts over 21 days old are now moderated, and it may take me a while to notice and allow them. I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting in 1974, as well as a variety of other work experience, but have been, in recent years, recurringly housebound with insanely painful now-sporadic (when I have meds) gout, an enlarged heart, and other health problems, particularly including lifelong recurring major clinical depression and bipolar disorder. I'm also sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer or researcher. I'm available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set. If you like my blog, and would like to help me continue to afford food and prescriptions, or simply enjoy my blogging and writing, and would like to support it -- you are welcome to do so via the PayPal buttons. In return: free blog! Thank you muchly muchly. Only you can help! (I'll just handle preventing forest fires while you're busy for a moment.) Show your support by subscribing for $5/mo.! Free koala bear included! They're so cute! Additional options! $25/month Supporter subscription! $50/month Patron subscription! NetworkedBlogsBlog:AmygdalaTopics:Politics, weird science, science fiction Join my network "The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will include With ease, and you beside" -- Emily Dickinson "We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace." -- Yitzhak Rabin "I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be." -- Alexander Hamilton "The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport." -- Barbara Jordan "Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule -- and both commonly succeed, and are right." -- H. L. Mencken "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." -- William Pitt "The only completely consistent people are the dead." -- Aldous Huxley "I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them." -- Karl F. Gauss "Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire, the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind; and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise the improvements of social life." -- Edward Gibbon "Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom." -- Edward Gibbon "There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times." -- Edward Gibbon "Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders and they love to chatter instead of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize their teachers." -- Socrates "Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments." -- Sidney Hook "Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness." -- Sidney Hook "Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson "We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized." -- Reinhold Niebuhr "Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land." -- David Ben-Gurion "...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them. -- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson "We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices, intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation; a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition -- to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all." -- Louis Menand "The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis." -- Dante Alighieri "He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers." -- Henry B. Adams "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge." -- Anatole France "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." -- Edmund Burke "Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology; it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding." -- Will Durant "Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?" -- Herman Melville "The most important political office is that of the private citizen." -- Louis D. Brandeis "If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable." -- Louis D. Brandeis "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." -- Louis D. Brandeis "It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon, but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept." -- Will Durant "When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music." -- Louis Menand "Sex is a continuum." -- Gore Vidal "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state." -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802. "The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible, and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...." -- Desiderius Erasmus "Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?" -- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814 "We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true, the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated. This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions." -- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944 "Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?" -- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News "The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand." -- Lewis Thomas "To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?" -- Cicero "Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue." -- François, duc de La Rochefoucauld "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." -- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson "Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example." -- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower "Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself." -- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign "Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing." -- Batman "Being evil is not a full-time job." -- James Lileks     Gary Farber is now a licensed Double Super-Secret Master Pundit. He does not always refer to himself in the third person. Did he mention he was presently single? The lutefisk is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this gefilte fish. Current Total # of Donations Since Blog Began: 698 Subscribers to date at $5/month: 72 sign-ups; 25 cancellations; Total= 47 Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 14 sign-ups; 4 cancellation; Total= 10 Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 19 sign-ups; 7 cancellations; Total= 12 This page best viewed by you. Contents © 2001-2010 All rights reserved. Gary Farber. (The contents of e-mails to this address are subject to the possibility of being posted.) And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack And you may find yourself in another part of the world Farber's First Fundamental of Blogging: If your idea of making an insightful point is to make fun of people's names, or refer to them by rilly clever labels such as "The Big Me" or "The Shrub," chances are high that I'm not reading your blog. The same applies if you refer to a group of people by disparaging terms such as "the Donks" or "the pals." (Note: I have to say I don't give that much of a damn any more.) Farber's Second Fundamental of Blogging: The more interested you are in scoring a "point" for a political "team," a "side," than in exploring the validity or value of an idea, the less interested I am in what you're saying. (Note: Partially suspended for the Duration. Later note: forget I ever said this.) Farber's Third Fundamental of Blogging: If you see a link on another blog, and use it, credit the blog. Some places I go: [weblogs, sites, and columns] People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost, Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Jay Haldeman, Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry, Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny. It's just a start. And She of whom I must write someday. You Like Me, You Really Like Me ...Darn: I saw that Gary had commented on this thread, and thought: oh. my. god. Perfect storm. Unstoppable cannonball, immovable object. -- Hilzoy ...I think Gary Farber is a blogging god. -- P.Z. Myers, Pharyngula. Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is. -- Fafnir Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent You nailed it... nice job." -- James Lileks Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise. Just saying. -- Hilzoy Where would the blogosphere be without the Guardian? Guardian fish-barreling is now a venerable tradition. Yet even within this tradition, I don't believe there has ever been a more extensive and thorough essay than this one, from Gary Farber's fine blog. Gary appears to have examined every single thing that Guardian/Observer columnist Mary Ridell has ever written. He ties it all together, reaches inevitable conclusion. An archive can be a weapon. -- Dr. Frank Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular? -- Alison Scott I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like? -- Ted Barlow ...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be. -- Tom Tomorrow Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley I look at it almost every day. I can't follow all the links, but I read most of your pieces. The blog format really seems to suit you. It also suits me; I am not a news junkie, so having smart people like you ferret out the interesting stuff and leave it where I can find it is wonderful. -- Lydia Nickerson Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'... -- Perry deHaviland ...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age. -- Brad deLong My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging.... -- Midwest Conservative Journal If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief. Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it? -- James Lileks GARY FARBER IS MY AROUSAL CENTER. -- Justin Slotman Recommended for the discerning reader. -- Tim Blair Gary Farber's great Amygdala blog. -- Dr. Frank Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan. -- Charlie Stross Gary Farber is a straight shooter. -- John Cole One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste. -- oakhaus.com One of my favorites.... -- Matt Welch Favorite.... -- Virginia Postrel Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers. -- Ogged Amygdala continues to have smart commentary on an incredible diversity of interesting links.... -- Judith Weiss Amygdala has more interesting obscure links to more fascinating stuff that any other blog I read. -- Judith Weiss, Kesher Talk Gary's stuff is always good. -- Meryl Yourish ...the level-headed Amygdala blog.... -- Geitner Simmons Gary Farber is a principled liberal.... -- Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers. -- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff. -- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you! -- John Robinson, Sore Eyes ...the all-knowing Gary Farber.... -- Edward Winkleman, Obsidian Wings Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know. -- Fontana Labs, Unfogged We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties. -- Fafnir, Fafblog! Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house. -- Fafnir, Fafblog! Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something. -- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend. -- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust.... -- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog Gary Farber! Jeez, the guy is practically a blogging legend, and I'm always surprised at the breadth of what he writes about. -- PZ Meyers, Pharyngula Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is. -- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience. -- Lenny Bailes Gary Farber gets it right.... -- James Joyner, Outside The Beltway Once again, an amazing and illuminating post. -- Michael Bérubé Archives: 12/30/2001 - 01/06/2002 01/06/2002 - 01/13/2002 01/13/2002 - 01/20/2002 01/20/2002 - 01/27/2002 01/27/2002 - 02/03/2002 02/03/2002 - 02/10/2002 02/10/2002 - 02/17/2002 02/17/2002 - 02/24/2002 02/24/2002 - 03/03/2002 03/03/2002 - 03/10/2002 03/10/2002 - 03/17/2002 03/17/2002 - 03/24/2002 03/24/2002 - 03/31/2002 03/31/2002 - 04/07/2002 04/07/2002 - 04/14/2002 04/14/2002 - 04/21/2002 04/21/2002 - 04/28/2002 04/28/2002 - 05/05/2002 05/05/2002 - 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Gone.A favorite post. Lots of links at Skippy's.Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5. 3/04/2010 04:42:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 2 comments Bookmark and Share Wednesday, March 03, 2010   I'D WATCH THAT. Wes Anderson's Spider-Man Richard C. Hoagland knows hidden truths: [...] According to Hoagland, Obama had been prepared to finally give the Constellation program the funding it required to return Americans to the Moon. But then, in December, a remarkable thing happened in the skies over Norway. Right before Obama visited Norway to receive his Nobel Peace Prize, the Russians launched a ballistic missile on a test. The missile sailed into the northern sky and then was stopped in mid-air, grabbed while it was going thousands of miles an hour. It was stopped by some kind of massively powerful mysterious device. And when it was stopped in midair, hundreds of people across Norway saw it, and some photographed it, seeing a weird spiral in the sky that was quickly labeled the “Norway Spiral.”This was a “double-whammy message” to both Obama and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, “that somebody has the power to stop us,” Hoagland told Coast to Coast host George Noory.Who? Noory asked.“Them, out there!” Hoagland replied, “…the secret space program.”The message was apparently that humanity needed to be “imprisoned” on Earth. Once Obama got the message, he immediately canceled the American lunar program. The secret space program is based on the Moon, and we’re not supposed to go there.Noory asked if this might have actually been extraterrestrial technology that stopped the Russian missile. Hoagland doesn’t believe that’s the case. He says that what is actually going on dates back to the last days of World War II. As the Allies were closing in, some Nazi scientists took their best technology and fled the Earth, apparently leaving for the Moon, forming “a secret off-world civilization.” There they set up shop and continued to develop their capabilities to the point where their technology is so advanced that they are practically god-like to us in their abilities. Halting the Russian missile is simply the most visible recent example of this, Hoagland said. “The physics are there and it’s all about who is controlling it and what they intend for us.” (My guess is that it’s not going to be nice.)But of course there’s more going on than us mere mortals stuck on Earth can comprehend. Hoagland says that “there’s a war going on upstairs.” But it’s not clear if the Space Nazis are battling each other—a Space Nazi Civil War—or if they’re battling our government and we civilians don’t know about it. Hoagland believes that terrorism, and events like the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, is the terrestrial manifestation of this war. Apparently there are members of our own government who are involved in battling these Space Nazis, but they have kept Obama in the dark. And that's why health care reform has only gotten so far.Who doesn't love Atomic toys? Build a model of Three Mile Island! Enjoy Atomic energy kits!Play Uranium! Or just educate yourself:But in the end, it's clear that all nuclear research should be conducted like this: Blogging: a great pastime for us elderly.  Fetch me my walker.You suck and so does your writing. [...] Twain himself took it on the chin from fellow Southerner William Faulkner, who called him a “hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven ‘sure fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.” [...]Virginia Woolf saw Somerset Maugham as “a grim figure; rat-eyed, dead-man-cheeked, unshaven; a criminal I should have said had I met him in a bus.”Charles Lamb wrote of Shelley: “His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with,” and James Dickey, poet and novelist, said of an iconic New England poet: “If it were thought that anything I wrote were influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes. … a more sententious holding-forth old bore, who expected every hero-worshipping adenoidal twerp of a student-poet to hang on his every word, I never saw.” Peter Sellers kidnapped Jesus. [...] Peter opened the door, white-faced. 'Please don't try to make me laugh,' he said. 'Even to smile uses 84 face muscles. I don't work out this early.'With curiosity, I entered the apartment. It was spacious and quite empty. The furniture - what there was of it - was not art deco, more art stucko, just stuck around on an expanse of white carpet.'Would you like to remove your shoes?' asked Peter.'And your belt, braces and false teeth.'I took off my shoes and gave them to Peter. He threw them against the wall.'I hate Christmas!' he shouted. 'And while you're here, you'd better stay for Easter.''Where's Lynne?' I inquired. 'I strangled her an hour ago,' said Peter. 'You can help me dispose of the body.'[...]The road was empty as we sped along. We were in the countryside, the fields passing us by rapidly.'Mein Gott!' said Peter, lapsing into Gestapo German to match his outfit. 'See those cows? They are escaped prisoners-of-war!'He slammed on the brakes, jerking us violently forward.'Kum!' he shouted, and leapt from the Bentley, now doubtless in his mind a Wehrmacht vehicle, probably the half-track favoured by Erwin Rommel.Leaping over the five-bar gate, he stood and pointed at the cows dramatically. 'You! Yes you! The game is up, Englishers!''Oh, stop mucking about Peter,' said Lynne, stamping her feet to keep warm.[...]A short time later, when I entered the dining room, Peter was struggling, or jostling, with an elegant though elderly lady.'Let us have your table, madam. You have finished your pudding and we have not begun. What is wrong with you? Have you no Christmas spirit ? You can have coffee and liqueurs in the lounge, at my expense.''How dare you! Leave my chair alone, you uncouth lout,' the lady protested.'I am not name-calling. Who is name-calling?' Sellers was talking in a slightly foreign accent.'You want me to call you names? Very well. You are a rude - and greedy - woman.'Do you mean to start again with the soup? Very well, no. Then you do not need this table. I will sit at it until you go away, Madam. Until you retire, because I am couth, not uncouth. Couth, do you hear?'He sat at the table as the lady tried to push him away.'Call yourself a Christian? What is this? Unhand me, madam.'A gentleman appeared. 'What's going on?''Charles, this man is trying to take our table.''Because we are famished. How else will we have our Christmas lunch? She is finished. You are both finished.''You bounder,' said Charles. 'I am Major Farnsworth of the Fourth Hussars, and I object to your behaviour, sir.''And I am Major Bloodnok of the Fifth Knives and Forks,' giggled Peter. 'And I object to your red nose. It's a danger to shipping. I advise you to stay well inland.'Major Farnsworth grabbed Peter, ready to haul him out of his chair. 'I'll teach you . . .' But Sellers was nothing like he appeared in the movies, you know.The Mobius Strip bagel: In a novel, this would be too heavy-handed: [...] At the end of the rally, doves were released as a symbol of peace. Unfortunately, they were set free just as fireworks burst in the sky, catching many birds in the cross-fire. Iraqacy.This is a neat site for film fans. Okay, that's enough to prove I'm alive. Post on How You Can Help Me Figure Out Where To Live, and Give Me Tips coming Real Soon Now.Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5 for everything! Space Nazis, and possibly others, via John Robinson.ADDENDUM, 3/07/10, 7:29 a.m.: Bonus comparison Bonus comparison Wes Anderson trailers.And: A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever Actually, I'm primarily verbally oriented. 3/03/2010 03:17:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 1 comments Bookmark and Share Thursday, February 25, 2010   I'M STILL DESOLATE THAT CINERAMA THEATERS AREN'T EVERYWHERE, MYSELF. Imagine a book with two words removed from every line, on either side of each page. Or, why pan-and-scan is evil, and must be destroyed, and all who perpetuate it must die: View The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 if you're a film fan, even though won't be new information: but the video demonstration is excellent. 2/25/2010 10:15:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 7 comments Bookmark and Share Wednesday, February 24, 2010   MEET EVA. What it's like to have no alternative but to live only on food stamps. [...] Back in her living room, Eva said, “When I think, I get stressed. So I try not to think, and if I do, I try to ignore everyone and stay in my own little world. You gotta pretend you have it all.” I'm in a constant state of either being in a state of panic and crippling anxiety, overwhelmed and emotionally and mentally unable to cope with doing many, or often any, of the things necessary for survival beyond the next week, or managing to have some steadier time for a few minutes or hours, by dint of getting out of thinking about any time-span longer than the next day or three, and by dint of not doing the things necessary to be done.This is self-destructive, of course. And it's one huge part of why I've been so screwed up for decades. Why can't our country do a better job of helping people meet minimal survival needs, such as safe and decent shelter, food, and a few basics of life?Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5. 2/24/2010 09:07:00 AM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 1 comments Bookmark and Share Friday, January 29, 2010   DON'T WE DESERVE THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY? Murray Hill, Inc. is running for office. Remember: freedom isn't really free.And why should it be, why you can buy it just for your own corporate interests from Congress?But best of all, why not just elect the corporations directly to office as persons, now that the Supreme Court has made clear their rights?I hope people also recall Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants.To use someone else's summary: "The Space Merchants takes place in a future where advertising agencies effectively rule the world. Literally, that is. In the United States, Senators and Congressmen are no longer elected from the various states, but from corporations controlled, not by stockholders, but by the advertising agencies, and each representative has voting power in proportion to the annual billing of his company/agency. A senator from a large agency, for instance, has 30 votes in the Congress, while one from a small agency has only one or two. Similar conditions prevail around the world: Russia (the Soviet Union at the time the book was written) is now RussCorp. And a former little third-world country is now the merchandising giant, Indiastries, where the entire country, thanks to an advertising agency, has been turned into one vertically and horizontally interlocked corporation. They mention, for instance, "the Senator from Du Pont Chemicals."That was 1952But Pohl and Kornbluth weren't farseeing enough: they didn't anticipate actually electing the corporations themselves, as persons, to office.View The Rest Scale: 3.75 out of 5. 1/29/2010 11:32:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 1 comments Bookmark and Share Monday, January 25, 2010   HEALTH CARE REFORM WON'T SAVE ME. I'm asking for your help. For several years I've, finally, been in the process of applying for Social Security Disability, something I desperately needed to do decades earlier, but wrongheadedly struggled to avoid as my life spiraled into hell.Many people have helped me along the way, some of you included, and now I've hit another emergency juncture and my only alternative is to plead for your help and hope a few of you will throw me another lifeline. MY MENTAL ILLNESS is the primary disability, though I also have other ailments (gout, high blood pressure, and a lot of little things). I'm bipolar. I suffer lifelong severe clinical depression, and panic/anxiety disorders to the point of almost complete disability. I range up and down to some degree depending on my prevailing biochemistry, my circumstances, and my treatment. But I'm always, at best, near the verge of being thrust back into the hell of just wanting to kill myself because I can't stand the minute-to-minute overwhelming fear, and all the other desperate feelings that are so impossible to explain to a sane person, save as the product of chemicals flooding my brain, turning it a place of living hell.I've long known that pretty much everyone first applying for Social Security disability for depression is denied, and can only be approved via appeal, and likely multiple appeals.A few weeks ago I finally was notified that my disability application was being denied. I completely expected this result, but still, lacking resources, and knowledge of timing, I found myself unprepared for the appeal. Simultaneously, I've been given notice by my current landlord here in Raleigh, North Carolina, that I have to move from my present circumstances to some new place to live (my original notice a few weeks ago was for a move ASAP; I've wangled a temporary extension, but still have to move as soon as reasonably possible). Simultaneously, because my SS disability application has been denied, my current mental health help from the State of North Carolina (via the Easter Seals organization) has been cut off. I had had a therapist every 2-4 weeks, and psychiatrist every 3 months, plus medications. I'm appealing that cut-off, too.Three crisi simultaneously: a place to live, reobtaining treatment, disability application to appeal. I can't overstate how little able I am to cope with even one crisis at a time, as a rule.Or even one difficult thing at a time. And for me, almost everything is difficult.I am, alas, mentally and emotionally ill. It's not easy to say that, but at the age of 50, with severe clinical depression first having struck at least by the end of my teen years, I've come to face it.It's something I've struggled with, mostly unsuccessfully, my whole life, and I almost certainly will have to struggle with the rest of my life. I range from, when stressed, completely dysfunctional, no matter how absolutely life-critical doing something is, to minimally functional, accomplishing the basics of keeping fed and showered and a mild amount of optional activities, like desperately striving to stay in communication with friends.Being crazy is crazy-making, it turns out.I HAVE NO SUPPORT NETWORK of family, or local friends, alas. And I desperately need one, but in lieu of that, I'm asking here for the only substitute I can: your help. (I would desperately like to afford to move to another state, to a place I didn't hate, and could afford, and a locale I had some friends, but that isn't financially feasible for now.)The most frightening part of the appeal process is that now they tell me they want evidence of my disability going back many decades, and I just don't have that official proof. But that's stuff you can't help me with.HOW YOU CAN HELP: overwhelmingly, through taking out a monthly subscription to my blog for at least six months, if not a year or more; stress on the "more," if possible, though obviously people should only do what they're completely comfortable with, and no one can predict the future. That is, click the PayPal buttons below or in the sidebar so that you agree to automatically send at least one $5/month donation to Amygdala/me every month, hopefully until my disability application is finally approved. Subscriptions can be taken out in any combination of the $5/month or $25/month or $50/month increments. So someone could donate $15/month with three $5/month subscriptions. Or $30/month with one $25 subscription and one $5/month subscription. Or $125/month with two $50/month and one $25/month subscription. And so on. Individual donations in any amount can also be made at any time! But the stability of knowing subscription payments will be coming in in six months or more is what I MOST need. You can cancel your subscriptions at any time, of course, though naturally I hope you won't, or at least not without advance warning. A couple of weeks ago I had hoped that I'd be able to find a room with utilities somewhere here in the Raleigh/Durham area for around ~$350/month, and I'd thought that if I could just get approximately another $125/month in subscriptions, I could survive. Realizing just how expensive food is, along with the other small emergencies and expenses that spring up, and after having lost $50/month worth of subscriptions in the past month, I've realized I need at least another $200/month to survive. So I'm asking you, in desperation, if you've ever enjoyed my blog, or my comments somewhere, or I've helped you out in some way, or if you're simply feeling able to help out someone in need, someone in overwhelming pain and fear, to please consider taking out one or more subscriptions to my blog for a year or more, possible, and help me survive at least another year. Four people at $50/month could do it. Or ten people with $5/month each, plus two at $25/month and one at $50. Or whatever. Anything you can do will be endlessly appreciated. All I can say is that I try to pay help forward. Thanks.I'd like to explain the history here, but I also don't want to overwhelm people with length. Ideally I should write up a separate post with a fuller history, but experience tells me that I find this sort of thing so upsetting and depressing to write that I'm apt to do exactly what my circular problem is: not write that post, no matter how much I need to. But maybe sooner or later. Meanwhile, try William Styron's Darkness Visible.INSIDE MY HEAD.It's so hard to explain to sane people how I could wind up this way, and what it's like. How I've gotten here is a long long story, but the essense is that lifelong crippling disease of depression that overwhelms me over and over again, and always, at best, hovers just at the edge of my ability to stave it off, always trying to force its way back into total control, total despair, total self-hatred and self-loathing, and a kind of psychic siren of agony and loneliness.I range up and down, in pain and functionality, depending on circumstances, and my biochemistry, and how much my meds are or aren't helping. (Currently buspirone and Lamictal.) When I'm doing better, I'm able to chat and do minimally functional stuff: make myself go out on walks, do some of the more important errands, give an appearance of semi-normality. When I'm doing worse, I cry, I cower in bed, I'm overwhelmed by fear, I can't leave my room, I can't go outside, I can't cope with other people at all, I can't write, I can't communicate. In between, I'm mostly frantically trying to maintain some communication with friends, and argue online, simply to keep myself alive, to make myself get out of bed, to feel and think of something beyond the utter despair, to keep myself alive just another day, just another week, just another, maybe, month. I post online so much -- when I do -- because if I didn't I'd have no sanity left at all. It's almost the only connection I have with people.It's a struggle. It's a form of therapy. It's desperation. I can't overstate how overwhelming and out of control these feelings that overpower me so constantly are. That's the hell of it. No matter how much you know that it's biochemistry, that doesn't stop the tsunami of emotional devastation that floods your entire sense of self. It's a living hell. I'm always just trying to maintain the barest minimum of functionality. But anything that stresses me makes my panic disorder fly out of control. I go into panic attacks. I have to run and hide, literally. I can't get out of bed. The more important something is, the more fearful I become of it, and the more unable I become to do it, or even approach it. I live my life in overwhelming fear, and the rest of the time is in between periods of overwhelming fear. Yes, I have a lot of fuckups in my head and my brain biochemistry. I wouldn't wish them, or my life, on my worst enemy.(It's hereditary, by the way; my father had similar problems, arguably even worse.)And, yes, the therapy and meds in the past year have helped. But they only help if my circumstances allow me to have a place to live and continue working on improving my mental health, and GETTING STABILITY IN MY LIFE.I hope you'll help. Subscription, please?Thanks. Thanks so much if you do.PayPal account not necessary to donate or subscribe!$5/month subscription:$25/month Supporter subscription! $50/month Patron subscription! ADDENDUM, 3:59 p.m.: That's two $5/month subscriptions so far. Please keep them coming.ADDENDUM, 4:29 p.m.: That's five more $5/month subscriptions altogether so far, and one $50, and a bunch of singleton donations! Yay, you people. (Of course, this sort of thing comes in a quick spurt that only lasts a day or two, and I keep that in mind.)ADDENDUM, 4:47 p.m.: Another $50/month, plus two more $5/month for a total of 7 new $5 subscriptions so far today plus the two $50s! (Please be warned that I'm, goddamn alas, not going to be running out of need in the near future.)ADDENDUM, 1/26/10, 10:38 a.m.: a bunch of other donations and subscriptions have come in; with luck, more today, before linking blog posts disappear off the front pages of said blogs; I know from experience that wonderful as these spurts of help are, blog-based pleas only effectively last a day or two while said posts are visible. I'll update again tomorrow.Typically, of course, while I take much comfort from the supportive mail and particularly the lessened insecurity of subscriptions (and donations), I find, this morning, instead of feeling happy and comforted, that I'm full of angst and worry about how long the subscriptions will last, and I'm fighting constant mental flashes to the future experience of watching subscription cancellations eventually flooding into my Inbox. I can't escape the almost absolute conviction that I'm doomed to always have disasters strike, to exist in a state of almost continual disaster and oncoming horror, since I set them up myself by my endlessly continuous dysfunctionality.I schedule my panic attacks in advance, as well as impromtu -- kids, this takes a professional, so don't try it at home.(Yes, I know a bunch of therapeutic techniques at this point to at least interrupt and deal with the negative thoughts as thoughts; working on self-talk has been a huge part of my therapy: it's the physical sensations of terror that are biochemically produced by brain and hormones and body that cause the whole-body feelings is much harder to retrain from lifelong habits. I'm working on trying to practice meditation, and other therapies, to deal with those, as I can, but it's just, you'll pardon the expression, an up and down thing.Yes, I know that both mind and body are intertwined, and that what one does with one has a huge effect on the other, and that someone with my conditions has to constantly work on both.If I'm late sending a thank-you note for your subscription or donation, let me apologize in advance: this stuff all makes me overwhelmingly anxious, and I procrastinate. Anyway, not trying to make excuses, but I hope you'll be understanding, with my apologies, if I'm not always Speedy Gonzalez in responding personally.ADDENDUM, 1/26/10, 2:05 p.m.; it's been a couple of hours since the last donation/subscription, and the blog hits have dropped down to around 80 or so per hour, so we seem to be in the dying tail of the fundraising moment. But, hey, prove me wrong! :-)ADDENDUM, 1/29/10, 11:11 a.m: Hi, everyone. Sorry, I didn't mean leave such a gap, but I was kinda hoping the last two days that there might be some further links and or hits/donations/subs/etc., and I didn't want to give the impression that the need had disappeared. Only a handful of new subs and donations drifted in during the last two days, but in the rush of Monday and Tuesday, I've garnered in new subscriptions: 4 @ $50 =2005 @ $25 =12531 @ $5 =155So I have a temporary income stream, that lasts as long as people don't start cancelling subscriptions, of around $1100/month, starting now, for now, which is enough to move, along with the approximately $2000 donated to add to my savings of about $1700. Of course, that has to make a full budget for everything, so I'll have to keep down what I spend on hookers, drugs, and Vegas visits. Most of all, I know that it's a peak figure, as over coming months subscriptions will inevitably start drifting away, eventually in droves. But it's enough to get me into some other living arrangement, and boy does that make me feel endlessly better. I can't thank people enough. I'm still in speechless mode, actually, but didn't want to dawdle further on this addendum. More, as always, later. Sooner or later.ADDENDUM, February 1st, 12:33 p.m.: Jeez, housing is even more expensive and dodgy, when I look really closely at it, than I thought. Definitely going to have to spend more than I thought earlier, unless I'm very lucky. :-(ADDENDUM, February 3rd, 11:05 p.m.: This is what I get for being obsessive about reading apartment ads for days, and being depressed about how dangerous and horrible the tenants' reports are on places I had, at first glance at ads, thought sounded find, and, anyway, my procrastinating on getting to a number of the thank-yous I owe people for subs and donations: my first cancellation of a new sub a few minutes ago. A $5/month one, but, still, already the falling away has begun. :-( Sorry, lots of anxiety attacks again in past few days, terribly interfering with writing things up so far. Um, please don't cancel your subscriptions?ADDENDUM, 2/08/10, 4:41 p.m.: I very much need to do a new post on where I'm at with searching for a new place to live, etc., but I'm still catching up on all sorts of other stuff! And, yes, still, of course, fighting constant battles with overwhelming anxiety, fears, terrors, etc., about anything the remotest bit stressful, which includes anything that reminds me of anything worrying....One clarification: I'm really hoping that people who subscribe can commit to at least a year, if possible. In all honesty, my fears are overwhelmingly about where I'll be in nine months, and a year, and two. My problems are the opposite of short-term. I don't *expect* anyone to make any commitments, but the more people can, the endlessly more of a relief it is. Meanwhile, thanks so so much to all who have given support in any way! And I'm *trying* to catch up on sending out belated thank yous. 1/25/2010 11:16:00 AM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 27 comments Bookmark and Share Wednesday, December 30, 2009   EIGHT YEARS OF BLOGGING. Happy blogiversary to Amygdala!Eight years ago today, on December 30th, 2001, we opened shop.Crudely and clumsily at first, but finding our way within a few weeks. 8,884 posts including this one. (Irritatingly, Blogger now only allows editing of the most recent 5,000 posts, so I can't correct linkrot on any of the older posts any more.)By our second week we'd figured out how to bold post headers, and started to get into the groove.Regrettably, we've long become a somewhat erratic blogger -- a product of my bipolar/clinical depression/panic disorders illnesses, and other health issues -- but if we can get past the current crisis (and we've gone a couple of years, almost, since the last crisis, at least), I certainly do plan on returning to as much blogging as I can.More on my current problems, regrettably, in a few days. We'll be having a fund-raising drive of maximum proportions, due to a maximum of need. We desperately need some new subscriptions, due to multiple crisi striking, which I'll elaborate on soon. The PayPal buttons are on the left sidebar. But meanwhile: eighth anniversary! Yay, me! 12/30/2009 11:46:00 AM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 4 comments Bookmark and Share Tuesday, December 29, 2009   BAD TIMES. Things are bad. I'll be writing about some details soon, but I'm still trying to cope, avoid panic attacks, adjust, apply my therapeutic techniques, and slowly cope as best I can. Details to come. Anyone who can possibly take out a subscription to help me out, via the PayPal buttons on the left sidebar, whether $5/month, $25/month, anything in between, or the fantastic $50/month Patron option, would be doing me a world of good. Or just hitting the donation button would help. This is a crisis.More to come.Does anyone have a spare attic, basement, small room, they'd like around $200/month rent on? Most serious question. I'm extremely quiet. Move to any state within consideration.ADDENDUM, January 7th, 2010, 4:28 p.m.: So I'm still juggling balls, and the situation evolves from day to day: I'll still be getting back to y'all with more info in a few days, but it'll still be a few days from now before I know more about what I'm doing and what my options are. Check back next week.ADDENDUM, January 18th, 2010, 4:29 p.m.: Okay, sorry. I hate asking for help so much that, combined with all the anxiety and depression it gives me, as well as from my circumstances, that I've been procrastinating like mad on my followup post. It's very painful to explain how and why you're a lifelong sufferer of severe clinical depression, anxiety and panic disorders, bipolar, etc., can't support yourself, have struggled for years with trying to get disability, etc., and are asking for help. But I'll be back with that post. 12/29/2009 10:47:00 AM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 1 comments Bookmark and Share Friday, December 25, 2009   HAPPY MERRY. View The Rest Scale: can you stand it, or will your brain explode? 12/25/2009 05:19:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 4 comments Bookmark and Share Wednesday, November 11, 2009   GET CLOSE. The new Ron Howard movie: give a minute and ten seconds of your time for it, please: Glenn Close on making the film. [...] But in her private life, she watched both her sister and nephew suffer from mental health disorders in silence. It was that silence, Close decided, that caused the most damage and shame to those living with psychological illness. Close: [...] I also have the challenge of confronting the far less entertaining reality of mental illness in my own family. As I've written and spoken about before, my sister suffers from a bipolar disorder and my nephew from schizoaffective disorder. There has, in fact, been a lot of depression and alcoholism in my family and, traditionally, no one ever spoke about it. It just wasn't done. The stigma is toxic. And, like millions of others who live with mental illness in their families, I've seen what they endure: the struggle of just getting through the day, and the hurt caused every time someone casually describes someone as "crazy," "nuts," or "psycho".Even as the medicine and therapy for mental health disorders have made remarkable progress, the ancient social stigma of psychological illness remains largely intact. Families are loath to talk about it and, in movies and the media, stereotypes about the mentally ill still reign.Whether it is Norman Bates in Psycho, Jack Torrance in The Shining, or Kathy Bates' portrayal of Annie Wilkes in Misery, scriptwriters invariably tell us that the mentally ill are dangerous threats who must be contained, if not destroyed. It makes for thrilling entertainment. [...]It is an odd paradox that a society, which can now speak openly and unabashedly about topics that were once unspeakable, still remains largely silent when it comes to mental illness. This month, for example, NFL players are rumbling onto the field in pink cleats and sweatbands to raise awareness about breast cancer. On December 1st, World AIDS Day will engage political and health care leaders from every part of the globe. Illnesses that were once discussed only in hushed tones are now part of healthy conversation and activism.Yet when it comes to bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress, schizophrenia or depression, an uncharacteristic coyness takes over. We often say nothing. The mentally ill frighten and embarrass us. And so we marginalize the people who most need our acceptance.What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, more unashamed conversation about illnesses that affect not only individuals, but their families as well. Our society ought to understand that many people with mental illness, given the right treatment, can be full participants in our society. Anyone who doubts it ought to listen to Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatry professor at Johns Hopkins, vividly describe her own battles with bipolar disorder. [...]The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that by the year 2020 mental illness will be the second leading cause of death and disability. Every society will have to confront the issue. The question is, will we face it with open honesty or silence? NBC: Reporter: [...]Today, we understand that alcoholism is a disease. And so we understand that people may be alcoholics, and they can recover, and go on, and live. People can have cancer, and recover, and go on, and live. Does that same thing need to happen with mental illness? Glenn Close: That's a *huge* message that is so very important. Yes.ABC: [...] According to the National Institute of Mental Health, about one in four adults in the United States have a diagnosable mental disorder Read The Rest Scale: 4.5 out of 5; I wish you would, please. 11/11/2009 07:31:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 4 comments Bookmark and Share Saturday, November 07, 2009   AND THE LAND OF THE FREE. A visual aid: More.Read The Rest Scale: 4.5 out of 5; it's your mandatory minimum. America: we're #1! We're #1!More, including: [...] One in 36 adult Hispanic men is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 adult black men is, too, as is one in nine black men ages 20 to 34.The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that one in 355 white women ages 35 to 39 is behind bars, compared with one in 100 black women. Pew report. 11/07/2009 01:38:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 3 comments Bookmark and Share Thursday, November 05, 2009   AREA 51. On November 5th, 1958, I came into the world, six weeks premature. I believe it was sometime early in the morning, between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m., though I could easily be confused in my memory of what my mother told me. My own memory of the event is a tad vague.I am now 51. Forgot to schedule anything special to do, although my options are rather limited, in any case. Probably I'll stroll up to the supermarket in the afternoon for a small pastry or two. Sure would be nice to have someone around here to celebrate with, but c'est la vie.And may you have a good day, as well.ADDENDUM, 10:53 a.m.: I have to say that the person who sent money as a gift was very kind and generous, and that money does make a wonderful gift, especially to a poor person who is always worried about money! :-) But, failing that, just putting me on your blogroll, if you haven't, would certainly be enjoyable for me, as well.And it was nice of Jim Henley to give me the gift of links, even if he does think it's tacky to thank a linker. 11/05/2009 12:01:00 AM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 7 comments Bookmark and Share Tuesday, November 03, 2009   TERMINATE THIS. The Terminator franchise is up for sale: [...] An auction is set for January for Halcyon Co. to sell the rights to future "Terminator" pics, TV series, DVDs and merchandise as part of its bankruptcy process.An exec with FTI Capital Advisers, retained by Halcyon, issued a bullish outlook Monday, saying there's been strong interest building since the investment bankers began sending out materials last week to prospective buyers. Why? [...] When Halcyon purchased the “Terminator” property for $30 million in 2007, it became the latest in a series of owners that previously included the producer Gale Anne Hurd and the now-defunct production company Carolco. Though the latest entry in the film series, “Terminator: Salvation,” grossed $369 million worldwide on budget of $200 million, Halcyon filed suit in August against a hedge fund that had provided the money to buy the series rights, saying that a backer at the fund engaged in fraudulent dealings, and filed for Chapter 11 in September. The company’s founders, Derek Anderson and Victor Kubicek, told a bankruptcy court that the “Terminator” franchise was worth $70 million. Joss Whedon has an offer: An Open Letter to the Terminator Owners. From a Very Important Hollywood Mogul Dear Sirs/Ma'ams,I am Joss Whedon, the mastermind behind Titan A.E., Parenthood (not the movie) (or the new series) (or the one where 'hood' was capitalized 'cause it was a pun), and myriad other legendary tales. I have heard through the 'grapevine' that the Terminator franchise is for sale, and I am prepared to make a pre-emptive bid RIGHT NOW to wrap this dealio up. This is not a joke, this is not a scam, this is not available on TV. I will write a check TODAY for $10,000, and viola! Terminator off your hands.No, you didn't miscount. That's four -- FOUR! -- zeroes after that one. That's to show you I mean business. And I mean show business. Nikki Finke says the Terminator concept is played. Well, here's what I have to say to Nikki Finke: you are a fine journalist and please don't ever notice me. The Terminator story is as formative and important in our culture -- and my pretend play -- as any I can think of. It's far from over. And before you Terminator-Owners (I have trouble remembering names) rush to cash that sweet cheque, let me give you a taste of what I could do with that franchise:1) Terminator... of the Rings! Yeah, what if he time-travelled TOO far... back to when there was dragons and wizards? (I think it was the Dark Ages.) Hasta La Vista, Boramir! Cool, huh? "Now you gonna be Gandalf the Red!" RRRRIP! But then he totally helps, because he's a cyborg and he doesn't give a s#&% about the ring -- it has no power over him! And he can carry it AND Frodo AND Sam AND f@%& up some orcs while he's doing it. This stuff just comes to me. I mean it. (I will also offer $10,000 for the Lord of the Rings franchise).2) More Glau. Hey. There's a reason they're called "Summer" movies. He's got more.I suggest Nathan Fillion as John Connor's cousin. And Alan Tudyk as an another experimental Terminator model. I know exactly how to film it cheaply, too: More: Bonus video link.Joss answers questions about his offer.And it looks like there will be more Dr. Horrible.Read The Rest Scale: 3 "oh God, oh God, we're all going to die"s out of 5.ADDENDUM, 4:19 p.m.: Bonus video for anyone who likes both Buffy and neo-BSG: Last video via Susan Palermo Piscitello on Facebook. 11/03/2009 01:48:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 0 comments Bookmark and Share Friday, October 30, 2009   EVERYBODY LOVES DEMONIC CANDY. I've been meaning to do a follow up on Afghanistan, along with so many other topics, as always, but now we catch up on the important news: crucial Halloween tip! Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network Warns Americans Of ‘Demonic’ Halloween Candy.I'm pretty sure that's what caused The Most Inappropriate Halloween Costumes Possible.Alternatively, maybe they were trying too hard to fill this job.I assume they've taken this guy down by now. Stop writing so much: Otherwise, this may happen: a relationship warning: © 2002 Geek Culture.Keep in mind you never know who might be reading you. If only they kept an eye on these evil types: beware of Shire 419 letters.If you don't, you may be subject to rage:I'm sure this sort of music calmed him right down. More here.I demand an end to the war on shortness, and this guy is on my side: More pics at the link. I never did figure out the purpose of his nose, though.We all have to take a new, more compassionate, look at the mutant problem. Could anyone hate Kitty? I think not.About this scene? It probably won't be part of this project: Okay, maybe you want to get away from such geeky genre stuff. Go fast this way: With enough boost, you might get out here: (Via John Robinson.)It couldn't cost as much as a gallon of Tuscan whole milk. But if travel tires you out, you might try your usual: Bowling. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback.Anyone would want to get away from living in Nazi Soviet Muslim North Terrorist Korean MaoHitlerstan: But if you don't want to live there, you should try filtering reality. Sound familiar?Speaking of sounding familiar? This means war again!Fortunately now we have Vader on our side. And he's going to be enforcing our contracts for a very long time.Does that thought drive you batty? Relax, it's not that bad: Fruit Bats Found to Practice Oral Sex.Batman, of course, always said that criminals were a cowardly and superstitious sort, but his were rarely this stupid.I hate to think of what awaits them, so I'm going to think of my new favorite video of all time.  Boom-day-atta-boom-day-atta-boom:Yes, it's xkcd, the musical.Via John Robinson. Based on this xkcd.Read The Rest Scale: oh, yeah, all of them, baby.  Oh, and will Ursula K. Le Guin's A Pillow Book for Cats be her next Hugo Winner, Nebula Winner, or both?Yes, do read the whole brief thing, if you at all like cats.ADDENDUM, 4:32 a.m.: I forgot to sign my post:Via these folks.Enjoy your demonic Halloween candy.Via Bobbie Smith on Facebook: Make A Cylon Jack-O-Lantern: Star Wars pumpkins. 10/30/2009 08:47:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 0 comments Bookmark and Share Wednesday, October 28, 2009   LET'S BURN ALL THE BIBLES. Except for one. Whose idea is this? Amazing Grace Baptist Church's. Pastor Marc Grizzard claims the King James version of the Bible is the only true word of God, and that all other versions are "satanic" and "perversions" of God's word.On Halloween night, Grizzard and the 14 members of the Amazing Grace Baptist Church will set fire to other versions of the scripture, as well as music and books by Christian authors.“We are burning books that we believe to be Satanic,” Pastor Grizzard said.“I believe the King James version is God’s preserved, inspired, inerrant, infallible word of God… for English-speaking people."All other religious or Christian texts are sacreligious, the pastor insists. The list of books being burned will include works written by "a lot of different authors who we consider heretics, such as Billy Graham, Rick Warren… the list goes on and on,” Pastor Grizzard said.Also on the pastor's list of heretical authors — Mother Teresa, according to a full list that was previously available at the Amazing Grace Baptist Church's Web site. The Church's Web site — which is no longer available — calls the event 'Burning Perversions of God's Word,' and urges parishioners to "come celebrate Halloween by burning Satan's bibles." Calls to the Amazing Grace Church were not returned Thursday.The website is gone, but not the Google cache.And if anything is Satanic, it's their choices of color and web design. Green, yellow, and red, on burning flames? Jesus, indeed! The event has not been cancelled, mind; it's now only: This event is not open to the public. Only our members and those by special invitation from the pastor only. All others are tresspassing.  Apparently God's work needs to be done in secret.If some of this seems a tad incoherent, that's because it is.  But it's inspiring to know that they're burning Satan's music, such as country, and some oldies but goldies.And I have no problem with Chuck Colson being denounced as a heretic.Reassuringly: I'm omitting the part where they give their phone number.  But in case you had any doubts about what a fine thing this is: [...]It goes on like this at some considerable length, quoting various biblical passages, and explaining that: [...] Those writing perversions are not something new, it's an old trick of the devil.One might almost get the idea the pastor, or his webmaster, feels a tad defensive, and needs to justify book-burning.  And in case you find the page at all confusing, we're informed: [...] Everything Satan and Eve said is in Black. Everything God said is in RED. Everything I say is in GREEN. As I said: Satanic web design.It does go on and on, and I'll spare you, but ya gotta love this part:[...]Again, he goes on and on.  One other bit, and I'll just quote, rather than keep up the screen shots: [...] 5. Why don't you be more concerned with winning souls that wasting your time concerning the Bible?It's not anyone's business but since so many concern individuals are asking here goes. We have a visitation time three times a week. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturdays we go out into our community and share the Gospel with the lost. Since our church has started we have had eight souls saved from hell. Praise God. Praise God. But, wait, there's more! [...] 6. Why are you celebrating Halloween?We are not celebrating Halloween. We are making a statement against satan and what Halloween stands for. When most of the world will be dressing up, and giving out candy we will be burning satans perversions, music and books. Kind of like sticking it in his face, so to speak. While most churches see nothing wrong with Halloween we do. One church down the road from us is having what they call an "Eternity House," instead of a haunted house. I am assuming they are going to present hell in a negative way, and then present the plan of salvation. That is awesome. I believe this is a great idea. Some may ask, "why don't you do something similar to try to reach out to the community?" Which is a legitimate question. We do things that reach out to the community, and as stated above we do try to reach people with the gospel. Every event that any church does is not necessarily a "soul winning" event. This book burning is not to reach the lost, but to make a statement about our stand for the Word of God. And finally: [...] 7. Why don't you include all the emails instead of just the ones who support you? Because I don't want to. Okay, then.Alas, for my evil, because I believe what I'm doing here is called damning someone with their own words. Oh, damn.Read The Rest Scale: 3 hell yeah's out of 5. Hallelujah.BONUS LINK, 8:35 p.m.: What kind of unholy creature could you create if you get a member of this church together with someone from the Ayn Rand dating service?ADDENDUM, October 29th, 1:05 p.m.: Thanks, Crooks and Liars! Thanks, Avedon!ADDENDUM, October 30th, 4:40 p.m.: Please send me your demonic candy. 10/28/2009 12:19:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 11 comments Bookmark and Share   A BAD CASE OF FICTIONAL AMNESIA. People do not, in fact, forget who they are in real cases of the various sorts of amnesia that exist. When people contract fictional amnesia, it's always a story made up for a reason. Really: SEATTLE - The girl New York police called "Jane Doe" first drained her bank account of more than 400 dollars before disappearing from Hanville on the Kitsap Pennisula according to a spokesperson for the Kitsap County sheriff's Department. Authorities identified the 18 year old as Kingston High School student Kacie Peterson.The blonde-hair blue-eyed teen last showed up for class at Kingston High school on Wednesday September 30th according to Scott Wilson from the Kitsap Sheriff's Department. Two days later her family reported her missing.On October 9th she showed up on the streets of New York City without knowing her name or where she was from. "She was disoriented and the citizens had told uniformed officers that she was actually in the fetal position. The officer at that time obtained medical attention," said Christopher Zimmerman of the New York Police Dept. The New York police released her photo and asked for nationwide assistance in identifying her. A CNN viewer from Maryland called in with a tip which led investigators to positively identify her.According to investigators, after vanishing Peterson took cash from her bank account, spent money at a WalMart in Poulsbo, bought some items at a Thriftway in Kingston and then left her bike outside an Albertson's grocery store in Kingston. That is where the financial trail stopped.Investigators say Peterson had a rocky relationship with her father over her academic performance. In June she moved from her father's house in Colville, in Eastern Washington. According to investigators the teen moved in with a friend of her now deceased mother. Peterson took off after learning her father was coming to visit says Wilson.Peterson enrolled in couple of classes at Kingston High School but school officials told authorities that she wasn't there long and didn't have many friends.Peterson's father has been working with missing person's detectives. This isn't the first time Peterson has suffered a case of amnesia. That's "amnesia," with air quotes. Her father told investigators in May she vanished. He later found her lying near a stream on his property. When she woke up at the hospital the dad told detectives she didn't remember her name or where she was from.Authorities say family members are flying to New York City to reunite with Kacie.Authorities still want to know how she ended up in New York City. Wilson says this is not a criminal matter. I'm sure it wouldn't help Kacie Peterson or her family to press charges, but it seems perfectly clear that this was a run-of-the-mill runaway case, where either for some reason the police were amazingly gullible, or where they simply chose to play out her story to help get her identified. Most missing teens don't get reported as missing persons, so those who sell a story can be problematic to identify. In this case, the girl went with what had worked before: why wouldn't it work again, in her view? In real amnesia: Global amnesia is a common motif in fiction despite being extraordinarily rare in reality. In the introduction to his anthology The Vintage Book of Amnesia, Jonathan Lethem writes: Real, diagnosable amnesia – people getting knocked on the head and forgetting their names – is mostly just a rumor in the world. It's a rare condition, and usually a brief one. In books and movie, though, versions of amnesia lurk everywhere, from episodes of Mission Impossible to metafictional and absurdist masterpieces, with dozens of stops in between. Amnesiacs might not much exist, but amnesiac characters stumble everywhere through comic books, movies, and our dreams. We've all met them and been them. [...]Amnesia is so often used as a plot device in films, that a widely-recognized sterotypical dialogue has even developed around it, with the victim melodramatically asking "Where am I? Who am I? What am I?", or sometimes inquiring of his own name, "Bill? Who's Bill?"In movies and television, particularly sitcoms and soap operas, it is often depicted that a second blow to the head, similar to the first one which caused the amnesia, will then cure it. In reality, however, repeat concussions may cause cumulative deficits including cognitive problems, and in extremely rare cases may even cause deadly swelling of the brain associated with second-impact syndrome. Lethem's anthology sounds pretty good, by the way.But as soon as I read claims such as this: [...] The Administration for Children's Services, which is caring for the girl, said as far as psychologists can tell, her amnesia is genuine. I thought: what a bunch of crap. Stuff like this should have offered any reader with no prior medical knowledge a clue: [...] Amnesia is a common device used in popular novels and in movies and television shows, but it usually occurs with the person's sense of identity intact, according to the Mayo Clinic, unlike the fictional device used. [...]She may also have been the victim of a severe concussion or have a heretofore undiagnosed (by those who know her now) neurological (perhaps degenerative) disorder that caused her to lose her identity. True amnesia presents with an individual having problems processing new memories or learning new information. ACS personnel say she is studying GED material and seems to not have a problem retaining the information, making her case even stranger. Or, in other words: liar, liar, pants on fire.You'd like to think that sf folks wouldn't be so gullible, either.Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5. 10/28/2009 11:29:00 AM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 0 comments Bookmark and Share Wednesday, October 21, 2009   DANCING IN THE DARK. [Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings, as a guest post.]On December 31, 2009, three provisions of "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001," aka the "PATRIOT Act" sunset and expire. Bills to reauthorize or amend these three provisions have been moving through the Congressional Judiciary Committees in the past two months. The three sections are: SEC. 206. ROVING SURVEILLANCE AUTHORITY UNDER THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE ACT OF 1978.Section 105(c)(2)(B) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1805(c)(2)(B)) is amended by inserting 'or in circumstances where the Court finds that the actions of the target of the application may have the effect of thwarting the identification of a specified person, such other persons,' after 'specified person'.This is also known as "the John Doe" provision. SEC. 215. ACCESS TO RECORDS AND OTHER ITEMS UNDER THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE ACT.Also known as the section dealing with "national security letters," by which: The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a designee of the Director (whose rank shall be no lower than Assistant Special Agent in Charge) may make an application for an order requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities [....] The third is: SEC. 805. MATERIAL SUPPORT FOR TERRORISM. What are these about, and why should we care?, you ask.As the ACLU explains: National Security Letters (NSLs). The FBI uses NSLs to compel internet service providers, libraries, banks, and credit reporting companies to turn over sensitive information about their customers and patrons. Using this data, the government can compile vast dossiers about innocent people. Government reports confirm that upwards of 50,000 of these secret record demands go out each year. In response to an ACLU lawsuit (Doe v. Holder), the Second Circuit Court of Appeal struck down as unconstitutional the part of the NSL law that gives the FBI the power to prohibit NSL recipients from telling anyone that the government has secretly requested customer Internet records. Material Support Statute. This provision criminalizes providing "material support" to terrorists, defined as providing any tangible or intangible good, service or advice to a terrorist or designated group. As amended by the Patriot Act and other laws since September 11, this section criminalizes a wide array of activities, regardless of whether they actually or intentionally further terrorist goals or organizations. Federal courts have struck portions of the statute as unconstitutional and a number of cases have been dismissed or ended in mistrial. FISA Amendments Act of 2008. This past summer, Congress passed a law to permit the government to conduct warrantless and suspicion-less dragnet collection of U.S. residents' international telephone calls and e-mails. This too must be amended to provide meaningful privacy protections and judicial oversight of the government's intrusive surveillance power. How are NSLs abused? Through NSLs the FBI can compile vast dossiers about innocent people and obtain sensitive information such as the web sites a person visits, a list of e-mail addresses with which a person has corresponded, or even unmask the identity of a person who has posted anonymous speech on a political website. The provision also allows the FBI to forbid or "gag" anyone who receives an NSL from telling anyone about the record demand. Since the Patriot Act was authorized in 2001, further relaxing restrictions on the FBI's use of the power, the number of NSLs issued has seen an astronomical increase. The Justice Department's Inspector General has reported that between 2003 and 2006, the FBI issued nearly 200,000 NSLs. The inspector General has also found serious FBI abuses of the NSL power. Nearly three and a half years ago, I wrote: [...] But first, here [link rotted] we see that 9,254 "national security letters" were unilaterally issued by the Administration (without warrants, as per the PATRIOT ACT) in 2005; lots more here. Otherwise: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretaps/searches:* Submitted 2,074 applications in 2005 to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for wiretapping and searches of spies and terrorists. (1,758 in 2004)* 2 of those were withdrawn before the court ruled. One was modified and resubmitted and approved by the court). (3 withdrawn, 1 re-submitted 2004)* 2,072 were approved by the secret FISA court, but 61 were substantially modified. (1754 approved, 94 modified in 2004) And Section 215 Orders for Business Records: * Submitted 155 applications for business records (and maybe tangible things, like that guy's iPod)* None withdrawn by government* FISA court approved all 155 but modified 2 substantially FISA Court: clearly turning down too many warrants. Sarcasm is more than called for when our liberty is at stake.5 Myths About the Bush Administration's Use of National Security Letters. We have no reason as yet to think the Obama Administration is doing better. Julian Sanchez last week looked at an example from 2005 of very funny business with an NSL.There have been two main bills introduced to "reform" the problems in these three sunsetting provisions of the "PATRIOT Act," as well as several other problematic aspects of both the "PATRIOT Act" and subsequent surveillance law revisions, including the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which you'll recall gave the telecoms immunity from lawsuits, and which Senator Obama voted for.One is the Feingold bill, the so-called "JUSTICE Act": U.S. Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jon Tester (D-MT), Tom Udall (D-NM), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Daniel Akaka (D-HI) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) have introduced legislation to fix problems with surveillance laws that threaten the rights and liberties of American citizens. The Judicious Use of Surveillance Tools In Counterterrorism Efforts (JUSTICE) Act would reform the USA PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendments Act and other surveillance authorities to protect Americans’ constitutional rights, while preserving the powers of our government to fight terrorism. The JUSTICE Act reforms include more effective checks on government searches of Americans’ personal records, the “sneak and peek” search provision of the PATRIOT Act, “John Doe” roving wiretaps and other overbroad authorities. The bill will also reform the FISA Amendments Act, passed last year, by repealing the retroactive immunity provision, preventing “bulk collection” of the contents of Americans’ international communications, and prohibiting “reverse targeting” of innocent Americans. And the bill enables better oversight of the use of National Security Letters (NSLs) after the Department of Justice Inspector General issued reports detailing the misuse and abuse of the NSLs. The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Wednesday, September 23rd, on reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act. What would the "JUSTICE Act" have done? A lot and a little. A lot of good, and still only revising the "PATRIOT Act" very little, indeed. Infuriatingly, but utterly unsurprisingly, the proposed minor changes of the "JUSTICE Act" are far too radical for the Obama Administration, and much of the the Congress, and so Senator Patrick Leahy, chair of the Senate Judicary Committee proposed yet far thinner soup: the "USA PATRIOT Act Sunset Extension Act of 2009."Let's look at the "radical" proposed improvements of the Feingold, et al, "JUSTICE ACT": [...] Title I – Reasonable Safeguards to Protect the Privacy of Americans’ RecordsSections 101-106 – National Security Letters The bill rewrites the National Security Letter (NSL) statutes to ensure the FBI can obtain basic information without a court order, but also adds reasonable safeguards to ensure NSLs are only used to obtain records of people who have some connection to terrorism or espionage, and to provide meaningful, constitutionally sound judicial review of NSLs and associated gag orders. Section 107 – Section 215 OrdersThe bill would reauthorize the use of Section 215 business records orders under FISA, but with additional checks and balances to ensure these orders are only used to obtain records of people who have some connection to terrorism or espionage, and to provide meaningful, constitutionally sound judicial review of Section 215 orders and associated gag orders. This is elementary stuff, these proposed Section NSL changes: National Security Letters shouldn't be used in mere criminal investigations. Who would object to such a clarified restriction, which was supposed to be inherent in the first place? And who would object to judicial review, particularly of the unprecedented gag orders constraining telling anyone you've gotten an NSL letter? Repeat: gag orders wouldn't be eliminated. The bill merely requires judicial review. Next, "sneak and peek" searches, where the FBI or other agency breaks into your home or business, searches it, and leaves without you ever being informed, wouldn't be eliminated -- such searches would remain perfectly legal! -- but they'd be restricted to terrorism investigations. [...] Section 201 – “Sneak & Peek” Searches The bill would retain the Patriot Act’s authorization of “sneak and peek” criminal searches but eliminate the overbroad catch-all provision that allows these secret searches in virtually any criminal case. It would shorten the presumptive time limits for notification, and create a statutory exclusionary rule. Is this objectionable to any reader? Or should we just do away with the Fourth Amendment entirely?The Feingold "JUSTICE Act" would have made a number of small changes in the FISA law: too many to list here, but one of the more significant would have been: [...] Section 301 – FISA Roving WiretapsThe bill would reauthorize roving FISA wiretaps, but eliminate the possibility of “John Doe” roving wiretaps that identify neither the person nor the phone to be wiretapped. It would require agents to ascertain the presence of the target of a roving wiretap before beginning surveillance. Julian Sanchez did a fine job of explaining Why Congress should not renew the PATRIOT Act's "lone wolf" provision. [...] The extraordinary tools available to investigators under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), passed over 30 years ago in response to revelations of endemic executive abuse of spying powers, were originally designed to cover only "agents of foreign powers." The PATRIOT Act's "lone wolf" provision severed that necessary link for the first time, authorizing FISA spying within the United States on any "non-U.S. person" who "engages in international terrorism or activities in preparation therefor," and allowing the statute's definition of an "agent of a foreign power" to apply to suspects who, well, aren't. Justice Department officials say they've never used that power, but they'd like to keep it the arsenal just in case.As with so many of the post-9/11 intelligence reforms, the lone wolf provision has its genesis in the misguided assumption that every intelligence failure is evidence that investigators need more power.[...]Courts have generally been extraordinarily deferential to the executive in the realm of foreign intelligence, and have suggested that the Fourth Amendment's protections against warrantless searches apply only weakly, if at all, in this context. But when it comes to domestic national security investigations, a unanimous Supreme Court has ruled that the usual restrictions remain largely intact. The court clearly saw the involvement of a "foreign power" as providing the distinction between the world of the criminal law's Fourth Amendment protections and the hazy arena where the executive enjoys far greater latitude. The "lone wolf" provision recklessly blurs that line, defying the common sense meaning of an "agent of a foreign power," and giving investigations that belong in the first world a dubious statutory foothold in the second.[...]Justice Department officials have suggested that the definition would cover a suspect who "self-radicalizes by means of information and training provided by a variety of international terrorist groups via the Internet," making a Web browser the distinction between a domestic threat and an international one. Activities "in preparation" for terrorism, according to the legislative history, may include the provision of "personnel, training, funding, or other means" for an attack.While it's difficult to be an unwitting "member" of a terror group, nothing in the law requires that the contribution a lone wolf makes to terror activities be a knowing one. And while definitions of an "agent of a foreign power" applicable to citizens explicitly prohibit investigations conducted wholly on the basis of protected First Amendment activities, PATRIOT appears to permit "lone wolves" to be targeted merely on the basis of advocacy. Finally, while the criminal law requires "preparation" for terrorism to include a "substantial step" in the direction of carrying out an attack, the Justice Department has suggested that FISA's definition does not. Thus, not only may lone wolf suspects be monitored despite the absence of ties to a terror group, they may not even need to be engaged in criminal conduct. So if you or anyone you have contact with "advocate" anything the FBI or another agency finds suspicious, hey, that's enough to get not just you wiretapped, but roving wiretaps instituted that need not identify you specifically, nor any specific phone, but if you happen to use one of those phones, or have any contact at all with anyone engaged in such suspicious advocacy, well, prepare for government agents enjoying all your "private" communications.Sanchez further explains the abuses, and why the law, as per the "JUSTICE Act," should be curtailed. Among other aspects: [...] Yet on the basis of such claims, a panicked Congress signed off on almost limitless authority to vacuum up international communications — authority that we already know has resulted in systematic "overcollection" of purely domestic conversations, and even resulted in the interception of former President Bill Clinton's e-mails.In theory, the purpose of building "sunset" provisions into these new powers was to allow — indeed, to force — Congress to consider what changes might be needed in the event of such misuse. Given the incredible secrecy of intelligence investigations, this would be a dubious check even under ideal circumstances. But what's truly astonishing is that even known abuses don't seem to have given legislators second thoughts about resisting administration demands.Among the reforms in Feingold's JUSTICE Act was a measure requiring targets of "roving" wiretaps to be identified, as is required under criminal wiretap statutes, rather than merely described. Unlike criminal taps, FISA eavesdropping tends to be extraordinarily broad, with any innocent communications picked up "minimized" later. Yet "minimization," the legal procedures meant to protect the privacy of innocent Americans when their communications are swept up in a FISA wiretap, does not mean deletion. In a 2003 case, US v. Sattar, prosecutors submitted 5,175 recordings made under FISA that had not been "minimized." Yet, faced with disclosure obligations at trial, it turned out that they were able to produce a far greater volume of recordings: more than 85,000 audio files.Given that breadth, the risks inherent in "John Doe" warrants, which neither name a specific phone line or Internet account in advance nor identify a target, are obvious. Indeed, a 2005 Inspector General report on the FBI's translation backlogs revealed that among the eighty-seven years' worth of foreign language material recorded FISA in 2004 alone — a tiny fraction of what the NSA collects — there were an undisclosed number of "collections of materials from the wrong sources due to technical Sanchez explains even further. [...] Suppose, for instance, that a FISA warrant is issued for me, but investigators have somehow been unable to learn my identity. Among the data they have obtained for their description, however, are a photograph, a voiceprint from a recording of my phone conversation with a previous target, and the fact that I work at the Cato Institute. Now, this is surely sufficient to pick me out specifically for the purposes of a warrant initially meant for telephone or oral surveillance. The voiceprint can be used to pluck all and only my conversations from the calls on Cato’s lines. But a description sufficient to specify a unique target in that context may not be sufficient in the context of, say, Internet surveillance, as certain elements of the description become irrelevant, and the remaining threaten to cover a much larger pool of people. Alternatively, if someone has a very unusual regional dialect, that may be sufficiently specific to pinpoint their voice in one location or community using a looser matching algorithm (perhaps because there is no actual recording, or it is brief or of low quality), but insufficient if they travel to another location where many more people have similar accents.[...]We also know that individuals can often be uniquely identified by their pattern of social or communicative connections. For instance, researchers have found that they can take a completely anonymized “graph” of the social connections on a site like Facebook—basically giving everyone a name instead of a number, but preserving the pattern of who is friends with whom—and then use that graph to relink the numbers to names using the data of a different but overlapping social network like Flickr or Twitter. We know the same can be (and is) done with calling records—since in a sense your phone bill is a picture of another kind of social network. Using such methods of pattern analysis, investigators might determine when a new “burner” phone is being used by the same person they’d previously been targeting at another number, even if most or all of his contacts have alsoswitched phone numbers. Since, recall, the “person” who is the “target” of FISA surveillance may be a “group” or other “entity,” and since I don’t think Al Qaeda issues membership cards, the “description” of the target might consist of a pattern of connections thought to reliably distinguish those who are part of the group from those who merely have some casual link to another member. Remember: [...] FISA wiretaps are covert; the targets typically will never learn that they occurred. FISA judges and legislators may be informed, at least in a summary way, about what surveillance was undertaken and what targeting methods were used, but especially if those methods are of the technologically sophisticated type I alluded to above, they are likely to have little choice but to defer to investigators on questions of their accuracy and specificity. Even assuming total honesty by the investigators, judges may not think to question whether a method of pattern analysis that is precise and accurate when applied (say) within a single city or metro area will be as precise at the national level, or whether, given changing social behavior, a method that was precise last year will also be precise next year. Does it matter if an Internet service initially used by a few thousands—including, perhaps, surveillance targets—comes to be embraced by millions?[...] What is absolutely essential to take away from this, though, is that these loose and lazy analogies to roving wiretaps in criminal investigations are utterly unhelpful in thinking about the specific problems of roving FISA surveillance.This cries out for reform.And, of course, all the info goes here, as James Bamford updates: On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015."[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story. Then there's the issue of "sneak and peek." [...] The “sneak and peek” provision of the USA PATRIOT Act was used 1291 times in Fiscal Year 2008. Of those, it was used five times for “Terrorism” purposes. So, .0038% of the time, the “sneak and peek” provision was used to combat terrorism; which was, of course, the Act's original purpose. On the other end of the spectrum, it was used 843 times (65% of the time) for “drug offenses”. Clearly, this is a blatant violation of any interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, except where it's superseded by the USA PATRIOT Act. See the full study done by the Administrative Office of United States Courts in July 2009 for details. The last issues I'll cover regarding the proposed revisions the "JUSTICE Act" would have made are these two highly important changes: [...] Section 501 – Domestic Terrorism The Patriot Act’s overbroad definition of domestic terrorism could cover acts of civil disobedience by political organizations. The bill would limit the qualifying offenses for domestic terrorism to those that constitute a federal crime of terrorism.Section 502 – Material SupportThe bill would amend the overly broad criminal definition of material support for terrorism by specifying that a person must know or intend the support provided will be used for terrorist activity. What crazy ideas are these?!Again: the "PATRIOT Act" is supposed to be used to fight terrorism. It's not supposed to provide a grab bag of tools to be used against any criminal or every person. Should this be controversial? Can anyone concerned with fighting terrorism explain the problem with these amendments?But what we're apparently going to get is some version, as combined with the forthcoming House bill, of S. 1692: USA PATRIOT Act Sunset Extension Act of 2009.Compare the two bills and current law. It's a very simple chart. What's wrong with Leahy's "Sunset Extension Act" (supported by the White House)? [... The] bill, introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chair of the committee, passed with bipartisan support but has been denounced by civil liberties groups and privacy advocates. [...] Critics of the Leahy bill assert that the legislation does little to address the well known civil liberties concerns and extends sweeping law enforcement surveillance powers with little to no safeguards. For instance, as passed out of committee, the bill renews the roving "John Doe" wiretap authority that allows the federal government to obtain a wiretap order without the requirement to name the target or specify the phone lines and e-mail accounts to be monitored. Further, it offers little or no reform of other controversial Patriot Act provisions.Reform of National Security Letters (NSLs) was also limited in the legislation. NSLs are used by the Justice Department like subpoenas to seek information from companies, such as Internet service providers and phone companies, about their subscribers. The Feingold-Durbin bill had included increased standards for NSL issuance, limitations on the types of information that can be obtained by NSLs, limitations on non-disclosure orders for NSLs, and limits on emergency use of NSLs. The Leahy bill only requires that the government draft an internal statement showing that the information sought is somehow relevant to an investigation. Conversely, the Feingold-Durbin standard would require discussion of specific facts, a much more rigorous standard. However, the committee noted that the Obama administration supports a relevance standard like that found in the Leahy bill.[...]Some of the provisions to protect civil liberties that the administration opposed, such as the restrictions on NSLs, were proposals that Obama had supported as a senator. In particular, Obama had supported the SAFE Act (S. 737) in 2005 that attempted to reform Section 215 orders that require anyone to produce tangible records relevant to an investigation to protect against international terrorism, including business records. The SAFE Act had been unanimously reported by a Republican-controlled committee and included the requirement of a link between records sought and a terrorist or other agent of a foreign power. Durbin proposed an amendment to the Leahy bill that would have added this standard, but it was voted down due to the administration’s opposition.Some committee members reacted negatively to the committee vote to accept the Leahy bill for Senate debate. Feingold expressed his disappointment in the final version of the bill. Feingold likened the Senate Judiciary Committee to a "Prosecutor’s Committee" and stated that the bill "falls well short of what the Congress must do to correct the problems with the Patriot Act." This position was echoed by some advocates, including Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, who proclaimed that "the opportunity for real reform will not come again anytime soon. Congress needs to do the right thing, even if Obama will not."Some minor reforms were included the final Leahy bill. The bill included reforms for "sneak and peek" searches and requires the executive branch to issue procedures to minimize the use of NSLs. However, these changes were not enough to garner the support of Feingold or many of the civil liberties groups following the legislation. Meanwhile, the press coverage of all this has generally stunk or been next to nonexistent. Fox News and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal have done what you'd expect, of course, including the latter publishing a misleading op-ed by former Bush attorney general Michael Mukasey.The New York Times has barely reported on any of this, with one adequate editorial on October 8th, and a foreshadowing article back on September 19th.Marcy Wheeler has been doing 10,000 times better coverage at Emptywheel. And now the battle goes to the House where House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties Subcommittee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), and Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security Subcommittee Chairman Bobby Scott (D-Va.) yesterday introduced the USA Patriot Amendments Act of 2009. It's pretty much the same as the Feingold, et al, "JUSTICE ACT." The rest is covered in H.R. 3846, FISA Amendments Act of 2009.Conyers has also introduced further attempts at reform and oversight including "The Department of Justice Inspector General Authority Improvement Act of 2009," which would: [...] authorize the Department of Justice Inspector General to investigate attorney misconduct within the Department of Justice. Under current law, all allegations of wrongdoing by the Department of Justice attorneys are required to be investigated by the by the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, rather than the Inspector General. In contrast with the statutorily independent Inspector General, the Office of Professional Responsibility is supervised by the Attorney General.This limitation on authority does not exist for any other agency Inspector General. The Department of Justice Inspector General Authority Improvement Act of 2009 will make the authority of the Department of Justice Inspector General consistent with that of all other agencies and will prevent future abuses and politicization within the Department. And the "The Inspector General Authority Improvement Act of 2009," which would: [...] provide the Inspectors General of the various agencies the authority to issue subpoenas for the testimony of former employees or contractors as part of certain investigations. Under current law, a critical witness can avoid being interviewed by an Inspector General, and thus seriously impede an investigation, by simply resigning from the agency. These loopholes badly need to be closed.Now you know what to write and call your Representative about.Before I finish this post, although it's digressive, in the spirit of Hilzoy and Katherine R., I'd like to at least mention that the Supreme Court on Tuesday: [...] agreed to decide whether federal courts have the power to order prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay to be released into the United States. And that You Can't Trust A Tortured Brain: Neuroscience Discredits Coercive Interrogation.Yesterday, at the UN: The U.N.'s top investigator on torture and punishment called Tuesday for a new U.N. convention to protect the rights of detainees, saying many are held for years and sometimes for a lifetime in inhuman and degrading conditions. In Canada: The Conservative government faced new questions yesterday about what it knew about the alleged torture of Afghan prisoners after opposition parties pounced on an explosive new book by the former head of the Canadian Forces, Rick Hillier.After published allegations of torture surfaced in 2007, Conservative ministers denied they had any previous knowledge of problems with the transfer of detainees. But Hillier now suggests he was aware of allegations possibly as early as 2006. He writes that he also warned officials in Ottawa that prisoner transfers would stop in the fall of 2007 unless inspectors visited Afghan jail continuously. And you may have noticed that a few days ago in Britain, High Court Approves Releasing U.S. Intelligence Documents on Torture. Finally, in a ludicrously minor step, Senate allows more transfers of detainees to U.S. for trial. Yes, they concluded that it's actually possible detainees won't use their magical al Qaeda Mr. Miracle super escape powers. Woo and hoo.It's not all bad news, if you look at the trivial: Amherst, MA, has volunteered to take two Guantanamo prisoners. Standish, Michigan, however, is wavering.But at least not all elected Americans are crazy, even though most of the national Republicans, and too many of the national Democrats, are.Finally, on a much-needed lighter note -- sort of -- Q&A: Our Threatiest Threat.Now, go call, write, and visit your Representatives about the bills above. Do it today, tomorrow, or the rest of this week. Do it for America. Do it because it's right. 10/21/2009 12:57:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page | Other blogs commenting on this post 0 comments Bookmark and Share var site="s10amygdala" Site Meter   This page is powered by Blogger. Visitor Map
 

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