Thursday, February 28, 2008

Did The Telecoms Just Cave In Toward Congress?

Like two spires of an iceberg which move move in unison, a little birdie here and a little birdie there suggest that the telecoms may have cut a deal with Congress.

One birdie, the leader of the Republican congressional minority, John Boehner, blew up the other day:
"Frustration bubbled over at a closed-door GOP session this week..." "House Republican Leader John Boehner told members of his party to get off their "dead asses" and start fundraising."
Donations from telecoms are way down. Offering immunity from prosecution to their leaders for their assistance in invading the people's privacy hasn't brought in as many dollars as hoped.

The other birdie sings a song that's a little more subtle. Mr. Bush just spent at least 2/3 of his press conference time today talking about the importance of getting the FISA bill past Congress. After passing the Senate, it has run aground in the House, where there are not enough supporters to get it to the floor. Mr. Bush talked on and on and on about this.

This FISA bill is to continue the executive branch's exemption from the need to get warrants for wiretaps. Mr. Bush wants it to also exempt from lawsuits the telecoms who have helped the government spy on people. Perhaps such a law could then be extended to provide a blanket to pull someday over himself and his friends as well.

But it's not going well. It's been very embarrassing. One Bush denial after another has been proven to be false as the public learns the truth about the wiretapping. The very generality of it - that machines listen to all calls, not just foreign calls - belies his words today that the surveillance is only of calls from outside the US. One blog reports,

"At the end of 2006, the FBI's Telecommunications Intercept and Collection Technology Unit compiled an end-of-the-year report touting its accomplishments to management, a report that was recently unearthed via an open government request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Strikingly, the report said that the FBI's software for recording telephone surveillance of suspected spies and terrorists intercepted 27,728,675 sessions.

Twenty-seven million is a staggering number given that the FBI only got 2,176 FISA court orders in 2006 from a secret spy court using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act."


Bush's mind insists that even though the enemies of America know that their phones are tapped, they will nonetheless reveal their plans. In this, he assumes their minds are like his own: trapped inescapably in ineffective behaviors.

The telecoms, thought, know about Moore's Law, and can see that abetting a madman has no future in tomorrow's world of glass houses.


One reads that in spite of it all the telecoms are continuing their data splitting. So one wonders whether they might have cut a deal with Congress. The immunity that they can get by telling Congress how the Bush organization forced them to break the law may be better than the immunity from civil suit that Bush is hoping to give them.

They broke the law, of course. A man's secrets are his own. If he is breaking the law, or is obviously intent on doing so, then there is reason to listen to his whispers and poke in his pockets. If he is just an ordinary citizen, however, the effect is dispiriting. Psychologically castrative. A man's thoughts are his own, to keep or share as he so decides. The public place is not in the home. So the telecoms trespassed, and they know it.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Missed A Spot

The U. S. Postal Service.

For heaven's sakes, don't anyone dare tell the terrorists about the U. S. mail. If they knew they could send money and instructions through the mail to other terrorists, our fishing for e-mail and phone calls from them would return zilch.

Fortunately, all terrorists use computers. And none of them read the news. So all we need to do now is to look at is their e-mails and their web explorations to see what they're up to.

However, if they ever should think of using the mail to conduct their nefarious communications, our goose is cooked. Gift cards with money. Postcards showing our most prized public works - tomorrow's targets. Revolver replacement parts.

Fortunately, no one ever reads this blog, so the secret is secure.

Don't tell anyone.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

A Simple Law For Peace

Suppose every administrator in Iraq received a tiny raise in his pay for every subordinate hired of a different religious persuasion than his own?

What would happen?

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Does Marijuana Treat Hysteria?

As a person who spent some years during the Seventies in the lovely town of San Francisco, this writer remembers well the smell in the wind those days. He added to the wind his own contribution, oh, he did. Thinking over those old times, it has occurred to me that perhaps marijuana vents hysteria. It cures hysteria temporarily by letting it rush out the door all at once.

The first smoke of the evening was the best. After that, the high progressively tapered and dwindled until, by the end of the party, tiredness made me punchier than weed.

There is a sense of a bubble bursting. Then a chatter-fest. Everyone is happy to try to understand everyone else. Everyone is happy to breathe in and out, and that simple act has acquired mystic pleasure. "Floating, free as a bird..." (Moody Blues) The buzz congeals a bit and everyone is in a happy time and place. Happy hippies were we.

Another water-pipe and we talked religion and the life of the soul.

Another pipe and we talked about politics and the organic engines of revolution.

Another pipe and we talked about people not present and sex.

Another pipe and we talked about the housing market. Excitedly.

We had vented our hysteria.

Curious it is that folks who appear to be unvented hysterics are the loudest condemners of marijuana. So hysteric they are that they dare not even allow research which might prove their point. It just might disprove it, too. A small chance, possibly, but why take any risk at all?

Hysterics need control.

So we put people in jail. On and on. Simply for owning marijuana. For our committing these assaults on logic that blow a person out of their life-niche and into worlds dismal beyond belief, we will surely someday need to seek God's forgiveness. Lest we forget where we have been. We know better. We all know better. We are better.

It doesn't seem to have hurt many people.

Why do we?

Monday, February 11, 2008

What Else Have We Done?

We have waterboarded. So says the White House, after years of denial. And we will do it again if we decide we need to. Goodbye, Geneva Accords.

What else have we done?

Name, rank and serial number. That's all you have to give, if captured. That's all we get to ask. But we were God and there was no way we were not going to win. So we could ask aggressively.

If we have committed the acme, the pinnacle, of torture - waterboarding - three times, what lesser acts of violence have we done?

What else have we done?