songs from the sitemeter: in russia...

I commented on this before, but wow, interesting, and hello to my Russian readers!

Here's the gist: there are nearly as many Russian readers of this blog as Americans. I'm still trying to process this to understand why. If any of you can enlighten me, I'd be very pleased. Either way, it's pleasing in itself.

What can I say except that I feel the US and Russia are so similar, what with both nations being oligarchies and police states? Shhhhh, I know, don't tell the little people here in A'murka that, especially the ones who still have purchasing power...

DuHS

Get a life. Get a real job. We never needed a Department of Homeland Security, and we never will. Fuck you. Quit spying on and harassing me online. Stop sending web bots and AI profiles at me wasting my very valuable time. Fuck you. I want my money back, assholes. Why do you love Christopher D. Baker and Shirlington Limo so goddamned much, huh? America could survive one hundred 9/11s, I'm no pussy. Fuck you assholes. Go away nepotists, criminals. Building a corporate castle system isn't going to save that old money. DHS, you're the best argument for smaller government (and birth control) that there is.

Lulz Security and Arizona's new race laws

I love these kids, and I am certain they're sincere. Unlike most of my own generally worthless generation, enough of them give a shit not to cancel them out like us generation x-ers have done to ourselves, in our pathetic, jaded narcissism.

But enough about people I used to hang out with in college (not you, Chris!)...

Polls show that most Americans are taking the reactionary route with online activism--groups like LulzSec and Wikileaks. They don't get that--like it or not--there aren't going to be too many secrets in the future among the powerful. Scoundrels of every stripe are running scared right now and doing the predictable overreacting, going so far as to pass laws that enact police state policies. These are the dumbest reactions imaginable since it's not going to work, technology is Pandora's Box, you can't close it.

That's what bullies do. The problem they face is that people are beginning to tire of their bullshit, their lies, and their secrecy (really an excuse to hide criminal activity a good portion of the time) at everyone's expense.

Now, people are beginning to push back, and that scares the crap out of the people with the power, the people who have been abusing it since day one. This is coming to a real watershed moment where people are going to get hurt, but that's how human history works, it never ends, and eventually there will be no sidelines to park one's ass on, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no rationalizations that are going to float anymore.

LulzSec have now hacked the main computers of the Arizona State Police in order to derail that state's obviously racist and unconstitutional anti-immigrant laws that will allow racial profiling. Arizona already has a bad reputation with race going back to its earliest settlement after the Mexican-American War and the law is political pandering and strategy by the Republican Party since most Hispanics (and blacks) don't vote for them historically.

Add to that a moronic segment of the population of the state that has played into their hands and pushed their agenda.

Businesses that employ "illegales" also stand to keep benefiting from a continuation of the status quo (with some ramping-up for show) where they can continue to blackmail illegal immigrants into working for even lower wages for what can only be described as the conditions of peonage. But really, the racist cops also get to take out their bad childhoods on Mexicans, they get a blank-check to profile and target them for legal harassment, no probable cause necessary.

So, today, and I really mean it, a little "fuck you" to Arizona law enforcement who have the same fixation they do in Maricopa County with brown people:

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6490796/Chinga_La_Migra

Thank you Sen. Jim Webb for introducing the "The National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009"

WWW--Virginia Senator (and former Governor) Jim Webb has introduced a bill to create an 18-month commission to evaluate our criminal justice system "from top to bottom," noting that it's "a national disgrace," which is being euphemistic. The bill was introduced yesterday without much fanfare and is reputed to be "quietly supported" by the White House. This bodes very well for the prospects of the legislation and the timing of its introduction is purposeful and serious.

Republican Senators Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) support the bill, and many others in the Senate are likely to follow.

But I believe he cares (amazing, isn't it?), and that he's doing something to reverse the damage of the Reagan era, an era where millions have been incarcerated under the failure known as the "war on drugs," really a racialist war on people. It should be remembered that our drug laws began as "race laws" and have continued this pattern of abuse that's reflected in American criminal justice statistics. Worse still, when Reagan closed our state-run mental health facilities, it threw the mentally ill onto the streets of American cities, then swept many of them into prisons to be housed with violent offenders. No society calling itself civilized would let this specific act of social negligence continue any longer.

Senator Webb notes on his Senate web site:

Why We Urgently Need this Legislation:

• With 5% of the world's population, our country now houses 25% of the world's reported prisoners.

• Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980.

• Four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals.

• Approximately 1 million gang members reside in the U.S., many of them foreign-based; and Mexican cartels operate in 230+ communities across the country.

• Post-incarceration re-entry programs are haphazard and often nonexistent, undermining public safety and making it extremely difficult for ex-offenders to become full, contributing members of society.

• 
  

Webb's social statistics are both shocking and solid, they check out, but we can assume that those who have enriched themselves through unconstitutional forfeiture, private prison building and ownership, investors in privatized prison labor that targets drug offender populations specifically for exploitation, sundry drug police equippers, and the rest of the drug war scum are going to fight this very hard. Bring it on.

I think these exploiters of social misery (who lamely call themselves "heroes") will lose their fight and that the tide has already turned against them and their allies inside and outside of Congress and the courts. Check Senator Webb's page and read the legislation, it's almost revolutionary in the best sense of the word, it's in the best spirit of America.

The Republicans are going to fight this and lose. They and police lobbyists who shouldn't have a right to lobby Congress for anything are going to keep saying what they always have: "If only we had more funding, we could win this!" With the funding we've given them, they should have been able to win WWII several times over. Yet--oddly--the victory never comes for the war that never ends. It's been said over and over that we could stamp-out the usage of illicit-drugs in America, but that it would take the creation of a police state to do it. That's what the advocates of continuing the war on drugs are suggesting in so many words. Their time is ending, now.

That's all the change I need to believe that real change is coming to America. Future generations might say that the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009 was when America's "domestic" Cold War began to thaw. Let freedom ring, and let it ring true for us all. Legalization is coming, public statements to the contrary.

Senator Jim Webb's "National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009" page (with a link to its text and supplements): http://webb.senate.gov/email/criminaljusticereform.html

S.185: RESTORE HABEAS CORPUS ACT

www.democrats.com--The folks at democrats.com are running a petition urging all members of Congress to pass this bill, restoring habeas corpus not just for those detained by the United States, but for every American citizen. The bill's sponsor is Arlen Specter, and he deserves his due on this one. At least he's willing to fix what he originally neglected.

He wisely sponsored it with Sen. Patrick Leahy and 18 other Democratic Senators on December 5th, 2006 as S.4081 during the ill-fated 109th Congress, and it has continued with its resubmission as S.185 by Specter on January 4th of this year. Former-Sen. John Edwards wasn't one of them for the original bill and Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders is missing from the vote in the current version. The question is: why?

Beyond Specter, there are no current GOP cosponsors. Nearly every Democratic candidate for president currently in the Senate are sponsoring it, but a good number of Democratic Senators are AWOL. What's so controversial about an 800-year-old tradition? It's curious, but they might have felt that the bill's language wasn't assertive enough.

Otherwise, this is bipartisanship with substance. This blog urges everyone to consider signing the petition, Congress has been dawdling in their pledge to restore this fundamental right in Anglo-American law. It has been the basis of the liberties we've enjoyed for nearly 800 years. It should never have been suspended, but was done in an atmosphere of haste and political panic by opportunists in the GOP and the Bush administration.

This is all to eliminate "the Military Commissions Act," hastily passed by the dying 109th Congress on September 28th (in the House) and 29th (in the Senate) of 2006, in gross-defiance of the will of the American public--it surely figures-into the end of the Republican majority less-than two months later, just another nail. Voters should recognize that current GOP incumbents are still holding their un-American viewpoint on habeas corpus, and vote accordingly in 2008. John McCain and Joe Lieberman voted to suspend habeas corpus, and a surprising number of Democrats...and one Sen. Arlen Specter.

The petition:
http://www.democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/113

The Senate bill (S.185, of the 110th Congress): http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s110-185

Amnesty International on the Military Commissions Act: http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGAMR511542006

The Military Commissions Act of 2006: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=109_cong_bills&docid=f:s3930enr.txt.pdf

How they voted on the Military Commissions Act of 2006 in the Senate: http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=2&vote=00259

A Scanner Darkly review

1Corinthians 13:11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

1Cr 13:12 For now we see through a glass [the original-Greek connotes "mirror," not a window], darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

1Cr 13:13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these (is) charity.


Substance-D is a powerful hallucinogen, a drug that when used over a prolonged period causes a bicameral-split in the user's personality. They become psychotics with multiple-personalities. Users call the drug "death," an appropriate moniker that reflects the eventual disintegration of the user's personality--or, at least in Philip K. Dick's science-fiction novel , "A Scanner Darkly" (1977).

Dick's adult life was spent primarily in-and-around Berkeley during the heyday of the antiwar movement and the American counterculture (though it really has continued into now). Many of the characters in his story like Ernie Luckman, Charles Freck, Donna Hawthorne, James Barris, and even Bob Arctor, were based-on real people that Dick had allowed to hang-out at his home while he wrote. Most of them were junkies and losers (and a few robbed him), but Dick felt a real pity and empathy for them. I share this with him, as despicable as addicts can be.

If you have ever truly been a part of the counterculture, this is going to be familiar-territory, and it will be both a funny reminder and a tragic one. I can say with authority that the film and the novel are pretty authentic in depicting the paranoia and the toll that the "lifestyle" takes on people. But, in classic Burroughsian-fashion (Philip K. Dick was an avid reader of William S. Burroughs, like many countercultural writers of that time), he shows that there are facets of the lifestyle that are worse, far-worse than "straight" society. Addicts are victims in more ways than you might suspect.

Think of addiction as a pyramid--as Burroughs enjoined us to do--and you'll understand that the so-called "drug problem" is about social control of rebellious populations and an excuse towards about gradually foisting a totalitarian system onto a democratic one. Dick homes in on this theme with incredible perceptiveness, simplifying it for the average reader. Yet the majority of Philip K. Dick novels are about the elusiveness of the underlying reality that constantly escapes us, the search for meaning within this reality, and the need for empathy in our lives. Like numerous other social observers, Dick saw us all becoming dehumanized by modern consumer culture, even becoming commodities through "reification." Richard Linklater has done this particular theme and story more justice than any other director has or possibly will anytime soon.

Linklater is a product of the American counterculture, which should be obvious glimpsing "Slackers," "Dazed and Confused," "Waking Life," and virtually all of his most personal films. He has also done what few writer/directors have ever attempted which is a story that is basically anti-drug (hard-drugs, not pot) without being preachy and boring.

I have read "A Scanner Darkly," at least six times and I can say that Richard Linklater has nailed the story, its meaning, and the hard lessons learned by Philip K. Dick and people like myself in the counterculture. Unlike many anti-drug films, we are told by the character Bob Arctor why he began his addiction: he hated his conformist daily-grind life with the kids, the wife, and its consumer nightmare of meaninglessness. This is why most people become addicted-to-drugs. They can no longer stand life in the developed world and how controlled and repressed it is. They yearn for empathy, closeness, and community.

When life's options have become constricted by ever-greater concentrations of power (a situation fostered by politicians and lobbyists, and the inaction of most people), you get a society like ours, and the one in A Scanner Darkly. The lives of ordinary people become warped by the distortions in power-relationships, and it poisons society and people's minds and spirits. Before long, nobody trusts one another, it all becomes apparently "normal," and society begins to feed on itself.

After that, collapse comes, inevitably. The body politic crashes and a bloodbath emerges as the system crashes. It wasn't hard to see where things were going in the 1970s, especially after Watergate and earlier--and more important--revelations like the 1971 break-in of an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania that revealed the extent of spying on American citizens at that time. Now, it's become "normal," but at that time the public was alarmed and outraged. Now, the war on terror justifies everything, and up is down.

The NSA's current spying is nothing new. Philip K. Dick's own home was burglarized during the early-1970s and his tax-records were stolen. The likely motive was that he had been a war tax resister during the Vietnam War, which raged into the middle-1970s. It should be noted here that Dick Cheney was a Nixon and Ford administration staffer. We shouldn't wonder why we're back to square one. Because things have only gotten worse, Linklater's version of the Philip K. Dick story is nothing less than a call-to-action and a very radical film in a very good sense. If we continue not to act against these encroachments on our rights, we will end-up with a society that closely resembles the one in A Scanner Darkly. Since 1977, things have gone in this direction. But then, there's the (second) war on drugs again...

There is ample-proof that our government has had involvement in the drug trade with corporate complicity in some areas (think NAFTA). Like any great science-fiction tale, this is a cautionary one, and we ignore the message at our own peril. What Richard Linklater has crafted is a great film based on a great American novel, and it was fun watching Alex Jones be dragged-away by the police (again). If only that part of the movie had been real, but Jones has a tendency to screw-up, so we'll see if he gets popped again. Timeless.

Significantly Revised, 09.13.2008