Nathaniel Eliot

You've probably seen the video of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush during a press conference. If you want to express support for Montather al-Zeidi, who is currently imprisoned and may have suffered serious abuse for his protest, I'd suggest you do two things:

1) Sign the petition to get him released.
2) Mail an old pair of shoes to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington, DC.

A special thank you to Clovis, for suggestion #2.

Still making sense from nonsense, after all these years.

I swear it was here a minute ago.

In other less well-known good politics, the FCC has approved white-space devices. Deeper analysis of both will have to wait until this rosy haze has cleared a bit.

As Wikipedia explains:

Moral hazard is the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk. The main use of derivatives is to reduce risk for one party. Subprime borrowers have a heightened perceived risk of default, such as those who have a history of loan delinquency or default, those with a recorded bankruptcy, or those with limited debt experience.

. . . the decisions that resulted in this most recent mess happened in institutions far above most of our heads. Voting, while useful to remind them that we're watching, and maybe shift the behemoth a fraction, is just a tiny part of the solution. If you would really change the world, stop bemoaning the influence of the monied and start focusing on ways to make your wealth influential.

"But we are small and weak!"
"Eat. Train. Grow."

"But they are large and strong!"
"And slow. And blind."

"But we have no chance!"
"You might be wrong. It'll be a hell of a lark, either way."

Remember: they may have all the money in the world, but we still have strawberries.

"They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control"

When tyranny comes, it will come on little cat feet.

Something must be done.

This is something.

Therefore, we must do it.

---

This is the administration that couldn't catch an aging terrorist on dialysis, or prevent a port city from all but washing away. This is the administration that systematically lied to start a war while already engaged in another. This is the administration that tried to tell you investing Social Security in the stock market would make it safer.

I wouldn't give them seven cents, were it my choice.

Thankfully, I'm not the only one to see some flaws in the above logic:

• Slacktivist: Panic, therefore, Panic
• interactiveleaf: This will not go under a cut. Read it.

Let me know if you see any other good responses.

---

Edit:tanniynim (that wishy-washy moderate) wants credit for having linked this before I did.

Couldn't have the whole day filled with joy: assume all your unencrypted internet traffic is being read, because there are published ways to do so without even breaking the rules. And like IPv6 (built to address IPv4 address exhaustion), the corporate world will ignore this until after the problem's costs dwarf the costs to switch.

On the plus side, this makes the whole telecom spying program an expensive public-relations disaster, for little added benefit. Geeks can achieve quietly, and with an only slightly bent protocol, what it takes large (and easily noticed) installation for the government to do. Granted, geeks caused the problem by being too generally trusting, but the same could be said of Americans and the current run-away government. At least the geeks fessed up and are trying to fix the problem publicly.

Encrypt your traffic, folks: HTTPS, GPG, SSH, etc. It's not a panacea (traffic analysis can still say lots about you), but it's a start. Encrypt early, encrypt often, encrypt for fun and profit (or at least, less no-fun and no-profit).

"We had to stop Pat Buchanan from gushing over Obama's speech for the sake of time. Perhaps that will tell you the story better than anything else we could say."
-- Keith Olberman



(Thanks to asim for the above video.)

The smart money is betting on him, too. Seriously, it's one of the few hours of politics I didn't want back afterward:



"America, we cannot turn back . . . not with so much work to be done; not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for; not with an economy to fix, and cities to rebuild, and farms to save; not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend.

America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone.

At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise, that American promise, and in the words of scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess."
-- Barack Obama, DNC Acceptance Speech

It's well past midnight in the well of souls, which usually means I've left work and taken up Work. In the fine traditions of lazy old "Bob", the King of Fools, here's my April Fool's prank, a day late and a punchline short.

I've been below the Mason-Dixon for four years now, modulo the long roads and cloud-hops back to the frigid lands of my ancestors. Some strange complex of distrustful impulses wants me to say that there's little difference but the weather; people are people are people, and while the names change, the faces don't. Despite that, there is difference, because while there are probably vital centers to the north, I've never known them; I've beat through the arteries and veins of their public transit, but never sunk into the flesh past the capillaries. It wasn't until I reached Austin that I started to feel that same live wire that Thompson and all his angry blissed out friends had touched a generation ago.

Because although the number of character traits is large, and the variations on each of those multiple, there is the inescapable consequence of the law of large numbers: things that would be improbable on an individual scale become expected with a big enough sample size. A big city with a thriving counter-culture is like a massive mirrored fun-house for the mildly mad. It throws up a million and one bleeding caricatures of even the most unique personality, and rubs them together in massive project-fueled orgies.

And that's the funny thing about revolutions. Each of them depends on some new collective thought, some common spark that is just ever so much closer to the actual territory than all of the other maps available. Mythology, farming, cities, sail-borne trade, and industrialization: all carry the common thread that those who understood early profited enormously, generally at the expense of everyone else. This digital revolution is of the same scale, and if you can swallow that, the possibility that geeks and freaks have it a bit better sussed than the common man follows quite easily.

And if I stopped there, many of you would think it a happy ending. As the old Buddhist parable goes: "how do you know that this is a good thing, in the end?"

Because there's several things people forget about revolutions. The first is that they are bloody, and the fearful often hesitate until they are either left behind, or strewn parts-wise across the landscape. The second is that they generally come right around again to where they started. Witness the Bohemian Grove, where many of the current powers that be in America go on retreat. Read that tasty little description with eyes half-unfocused, and tell me you didn't just read the description of a regional Burn (big fucking party, for those of you who aren't, you know, in the know).

Some would say these vagabond men of power hold no legitimate claim to the title Bohemian, which was originally ascribed to the lowest of lowly poets. Many mainstream-culture refugees identify with the grubby proletariat leanings of that ancient group, and hate to see its name sullied so. But I suspect that the truth is both closer to the surface, and far harder to stomach, than ersatz revolutionaries wish to admit: these are the true Bohemian descendants. They floated up the social ladder of Industrial revolution, borne to greater heights by the heat of great change. Now flush with success and white-man's burden, their children continue to blow air onto that old spark, despite its steady decline in fuel. After all, morality is mostly momentary, but cliques have continuity.

I've been through the valley, and that long cold shadow chilled me but couldn't freeze my icy northern blood. Nor does the apostate hell of the Western man, the failure to make one's imprint upon history, scare me; ego-death banished the idea that I alone must fix all the problems, along with the terrified surrender which that idea often brings. And I am a populist to the core; I've starved once too often to take that back, had I not had it scribed to my skin.

Let our aging gentry have their last few years of power, and their silly celebrations in the woods; I've no hope to affect a Bohemian mien long enough to touch them, and the fiery gusts blow elsewhere now. But Burner or its brethren I could be believably as. And when (not if) in the thrashing of the new social order a Robespierre emerges to wield men as weapons, I will be standing uncomfortably close to him. If I am not (for perhaps our tin-pot dictator reads blogs), one of my million mad clones will be.

And bonnie bloody Robby will have a much harder time of it, then. As the old Buddhist parable goes: "how do you know that this is a bad thing, in the end?"

I was raised by very liberal parents, and largely hold with their values. Cynicism nearly pushed me to vote in the Republican primary this year; I was prepared to "throw my vote away" on an issues candidate (Ron Paul), rather than support the Loyal Opposition who abdicated their role when it was most important. Your candidacy, and the close contest between you and Mrs. Clinton, changed my mind.

However, for many voters in both parties, it has not. Ron Paul has a large and vocal following because he's taken on a fundamental problem with our current government: the loss of balance of powers to the two-party/lobbyist system. Your campaign has addressed this, but its only a single oblique point among many.

Barring catastrophe, McCain will be the Republican nominee; barring miracle, Ron Paul will not be. Before McCain's completely locked it (and party loyalty closes the ranks) is the time: reach out to the Ron Paul campaign for help in rebuilding and bolstering our Constitutional protections. Despite your differences on economic policy, I hope both your campaigns can benefit from a common commitment to restore our government to its founding principles.

Such a move would also illustrate your ability as a statesman to engage not just allies, but opposition. This would stand in stark contrast to Hillary Clinton's ability to galvanize the Republican party against her. Suggesting him for a running mate might be ill-advised, but engaging Paul and his supporters in a bipartisan call to fix our government can only help.

(Sent to Obama via his campaign website.)

I was all set to vote for Ron Paul in this upcoming primary. Admitting this (even obliquely) has invariably forced my (largely liberal) friends into expressions like those seen on gas-pressure ads: overly-dramatic contortions of pain and nausea. How the hell could I support that nutcase?

The answer is both really simple, and really complicated. The simple answer is that he's divisive: the longer his campaign continues, the more damage he'll do the eventual Republican front-runner. This usually brings on the "relief" portion of the commercial, often with the same speed, so I usually leave it at that.

What's harder to convey are the reasons why I genuinely support the man. The best dirt on him thus far did more to implicate his hiring and editorial practices than his racial sensitivity; even so, his public positions often rankle: on abortion, immigration, and health care, he's a fairly average Republican. What distinguishes him is neither charismatic flair nor scads of leadership credentials, but his dogged insistence on Constitutional principles. The places of agreement don't matter so much, especially in the primary, as the areas where he disagrees: foreign policy and civil liberties. Instead of the fear-mongering, saber-rattling, and moralizing of the front-runners, he brings the debate back to what Republicans should be good at: pointing out the excesses of large government, and pushing back against the (often well-intentioned) intrusions of it into our lives.

More obliquely, however, I want to put the fear of the mob back into politics. Adam Curtis' BBC documentary The Century of the Self illustrates how modern psychology has been used to build large, and largely invisible, means of social control: the last episode covers the successful campaigns of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who wooed swing voters almost to the exclusion of their stable constituency. If two party politics is going to devolve to betraying your supporters for a little edge, than I want to encourage more treachery in the supporters. Ron Paul's biggest threat is not that he supports such strange policies, but that he draws support from otherwise liberal voters by doing so. That can only give gas pains to those who I really think deserve them: those who worry more about shaving points in a close race than defending and advancing their proclaimed principles.

Ultimately, it is the counter to my simple argument that has likely destroyed my plans for this election. Clinton and Obama will probably still be neck and neck at the Texas primary on March 3rd. I find I prefer Obama for many reasons (e.g. - his well-considered speeches), the most cynical of which is that Clinton would galvanize Republican voters against her. Republicans aren't stupid: if I'm thinking of crossing the lines to damage their chances, they can do the same. I'd rather vote to have this close race go the way I'd prefer, than to have some small influence on the other side (and politics as a whole).

But (cue the bloated expressions) it was a tough call.

You know what would make me happy, this election season? Kucinich and Ron Paul take their respective primaries, politely battle it out until November 2nd, and . . . and . . and a pony. A pony would also make me happy.

Here's to the 2008 Clinton vs. Giuliani run-off, and may the best beast win.

Today, George Bush declared his intent to ignore the Fourth Amendment, on his mad dash to impeachment or empire: Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq.

Particularly stunning are the following snippets:

(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.
[snip]
Sec. 4. I hereby determine that the making of donations of the type specified in section 203(b)(2) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(2)) by, to, or for the benefit of, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order would seriously impair my ability to deal with the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, and I hereby prohibit such donations as provided by section 1 of this order.

Sec. 5. For those persons whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, I find that, because of the ability to transfer funds or other assets instantaneously, prior notice to such persons of measures to be taken pursuant to this order would render these measures ineffectual. I therefore determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1(a) of this order.

The layman's translation:

1. George can now take all your money, on the thinnest of pretense: guilt-by-association with suspected criminals.
2. Once he's taken your money, it's illegal for other people to help you out.
3. He doesn't have to give any warning.

Two years is too long to wait, folks. Impeach him now, before we stand, King's Men to the last, staring without recourse at the shattered eggshell of "American liberty".

Instead of calling a congressperson and demanding they impeach a president on his way out of office, would it not be more prudent to, say, ask her to work on fixing any of the thousands of other problems our country has?

No.

Nixon took a walk, and his VP pardoned him. Many Americans said, at the time, that pursuing it further would be folly, that we should get back to healing the nation.

Does this look like a healed nation?

We need to find the fuckers responsible. All the fuckers, not just the sacrificial lamb they give us, and not just the "head of state" they puppet around. We need to pull them into long televised sessions in Congress, where junior congressmen from podunk states can ask embarrassing questions that they can't deflect. We need to bring as many up on charges as possible, and then we need to bring the hammer down.

Letting them get away with it only encourages the next batch to be craftier.

In an effort to reduce cognitive load (the mental load average I've mentioned before, I tend to cache and queue various information, such as todo items. I've been working to streamline this; even so, I still suffer from buffer overflow (todo lists getting too full to comfortably manipulate) and stale caches (copies of old, invalid information).

One of the overflowing queues is my del.icio.us todo+post, where I keep links to support my longer musings. Unfortunately, writing like that takes a lot of time, for a relatively low-priority task; when I'm overloaded, I end up not clearing the queue, and the complexity of sorting and correlating links goes up as the number of links do.

So instead, I'm gonna just push them out with as little work as possible. This is a little of where my head's been at lately; sorry, I just don't have the time to explain it all:

Personal

• My brother will be training for Blue Man Group! Rock the fuck on, Tim!

Politics

• The Fallacy of Infinite Power
• Iran: U.S. Is in No Position to Attack
• Going to Canada? Check your past: Visitors with minor criminal records turned back at border (nearly happened to me, on my last trip to NH)
• "Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday."
• Was the 2004 election stolen?
• In praise of John Wilkes: how a filthy, philandering dead-beat helped secure British—and American—liberty
• "I contend that approval voting is where it's at."
• Charges Sought Against Rumsfeld Over Prison Abuse
• Bush Moves Toward Martial Law
• The worst Congress ever: How our national legislature has become a stable of thieves and perverts - in five easy steps.
• A M.A.D., M.A.D. World
• Dr. Dahlia Wasfi speaks at Iraq forum
• "You [Marines] are a proud member of what should be the most consummately professional force of warriors the world has ever seen and you are disciplined enough to engage in a firefight under the rules of the goddamned LAW OF GROUND WARFARE"
• Clear Evidence 2006 Congressional Elections Hacked
• It's Official: Chuck Rangel is Insane
• Christian Coalition president-elect quits over lack of focus on poverty
• The Responibilities of Being Free
• Will We Win by Losing?
• I Stand With Amanda: "2008 is going to be a fucking knife fight, Johnny, and we cannot afford any more 'Yes sir, may I have another' Democrats in elections. [...] Fill your hands, you sons a bitches.
• Rep. Ackerman: ‘A Platoon Of Lesbians’ Could ‘Chase Us Out Of Baghdad’
• 2002 Barack Obama Interview: Against Iraq proves he's damn near prescient
• Obama's `Netroots' Take On Clinton's Big Bundlers in 2008 Race
• Gonzales: ‘There Is No Express Grant of Habeas Corpus In The Constitution’
• EU considers visa snub against US: "The European Commission has suggested making US diplomats apply for visas, in retaliation for the US's refusal to waive visas for people of 10 EU states."
• Could a New Strongman Help? Far from proving Democracy's value to the Middle East, we have proved, by its absence, how useful totalitarianism was.
• U.S. Set to Begin a Vast Expansion of DNA Sampling

  Health: Physical, Mental & Social

• Drink Those Antioxidants - the upside of coffee addiction
• American Fashion and the Social Construction of Evil
• The Elfland Invasion, or Dr. Atkins Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Well Myself: "No wonder the rest of the world is in a blind panic when they see us coming. We are the God Damned Fairies, foretold in the tales of poor Irish peasants."
• Two Phrases That Destroyed American Culture
• Living in America’s Fringe Economy
• How Thinking Can Change the Brain: "Dalai Lama helps scientists show the power of the mind to sculpt our gray matter."
• Pablo Calculates the True Cost of Bottled Water: "Nearly seven times as much water used to make it than you actually drink"
• Being Poor: "Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs."
• Drapetomania: "with proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many Negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented."

Technology

• Our Cyberpunk Present: Script-Kiddie Botnets = Gangster Supercomputers (in three parts: one, two, and three)
• Humanity Lobotomy: Net Neutrality Open Source Documentary
• One-Laptop-Per-Child: "[It's reported that] Libya is getting 1.2 million laptops along with servers and support, etc. for $250 million" (whatever you want to say about Gaddafi, he's got the right idea here, and some gorgeous bodyguards, too)
• Data stored in live cells
• Emotiv’s man-machine melding interface technology: a non-invasive, direct mental interface to computers

Random & Amusing

• History of Religion: "Want to see 5,000 years of religion in 90 seconds?"
• Guarding Darfur: a virtual Green Lantern Corps is defending a virtual Darfur, in Second Life
• Questionable Content: "FlashLARP PotterSpace", a grand idea if I ever heard one
• Get Fuzzy: "I have decreed that all squirrels are terrorists."
• Narbonic: "Some Oompa-Loompas told me to go to Burning Man" (from an old web comic about Mad Scientists which made a disturbing amount of sense to me)

I'm sorry, who are we protecting here?

My girlfriend Anna is a Russian immigrant; she moved here in her early teens, and still speaks with a (lovely) accent. She showed me Moscow on the Hudson, a Robin Williams movie about a Russian defector to the U.S., mostly for a quote (which I can't find, or remember well) that illustrates the nostalgia inherent in the Russia character.

Something else struck me, however. Vladamir Ivanoff ends up defecting, but spends a fair amount of time prior to that hushing his grandfather and his friend the clown, both of whom are openly critical of the Russian government. At first blush, his defection seems almost comically plotted, caused more by circumstance and temptation than a desire for freedom, for he was overtly no enemy of the government. In reconsidering, however, I see what was actually intended; Vladamir was just as determinedly un-Soviet, but afraid that associating with vocal dissidents would endanger his hopes for escape.

---

There's been a lot of criticism of the current administration, which on the whole I think is good. The bastards that brought us Total Information Awareness and the most recent global punch-up are finally getting a small sliver of what they deserve.

Here's the thing, though. The bastards are on the run, but they've left their tools lying behind. The next group of bastards into the office (and make no mistake, there will be one) will now have even more power to detain, harass, obstruct, imprison, and otherwise silence those critical of their policies, under the aegis of yet another unending War against an abstract term.

Boy, doesn't that ring some bells. All we need now are some gritty black and white advertisements starring a middle-aged man in a wife-beater: "This is your brain. This is your brain after a terrorist attack. Any questions?" At least that one carries a little more . . . verisimilitude than the original. To quote the great Bill Hicks: "I've seen UFOs split the sky like a sheet, but I've never thought my brain looked like an egg." But that's what we're faced with, every day. The government and big business push endless waves of propaganda, through every medium they possibly can. The majority of us know its bullshit, but it's so omnipresent that we don't even bother decrying it, unless we're still young and full of quixotic vigor.

Remember the debate over whether giving corporations the same legal protections as people was a violation of state rights, an intentional misinterpretation of the 14th amendment, and likely to bear bad fruit? How about whether creating a peace-time spy agency, accountable to almost no one, to do America's dirty deeds would ultimately tarnish our national image, and make our government as sinister and untrustworthy as the Soviet one? Of course not; the first was over before all of us were born, the second before many of us were. We're invested in them now, we can't look back. Same goes for advertising and propaganda; they've morphed from "questionable" to "established fact".

This generation, we've invested in the Office of Homeland Security, a name so evocative of das Vaterland that I sometimes wonder if old Nazis in Florida had a hand in it's creation. After enough public outcry, Congress dismantled TIA, but just swept it's programs under other confidential blankets. Our children will think this panopticon normal, unless we tell them otherwise; their children will likely not understand that there was ever a question.

---

The ease with which tyranny entered the Soviet Union is in part due to its history. Russia's history prior to the Bolshevik revolution had been bloody and dire, a string of national misfortune stretching back to the Mongols. Czarist rule had prepared the national consciousness for oppression; when the Party demanded loyalty in exchange for political power, nobody questioned the idea. By contrast, being an ocean away from the root of authority, and with access to as much natural resource as could be exploited, America's national consciousness started with an almost teenage libertarian streak. It took five years to finally ratify the Articles of Confederation, and six years later we were debating them again to form the Constitution. So while totalitarianism could quickly march into Soviet government, here it has had to sneak in on little cat feet.

Quiet or loud, the signs are the same. In private conversation, I know many who agree on how drastically fucked up American society and law have become. There is a bit of a selection bias going on, but the agreement comes from some surprisingly diverse sources. Police officers and bail-bondsmen, for instance, have both agreed that our drug laws are broken. I don't know anybody who (now) thinks the Iraq war was a particularly good idea, though the suggested solutions for that particular quagmire are still wonderfully diverse. Those who understand the extent of government and corporate propaganda and surveillance are usually as disquieted as I am, though some balance that with concessions to situational necessity.

But in public, the only folks willing to say anything controversial are crotchety old men and known clowns. Everybody else is on guard against attracting that wrong kind of attention. The idea that we can and should change the system when it fails has been largely supplanted by a broad fatalism and escapism: there's nothing we can do but ignore it, keep our heads down, and try to enjoy the ride.

Which means that I probably shouldn't waste much time reading the long explanation:

It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is not like ordinary property at all, but constitutes a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necesary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty.
Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine