Politics

High school students nationwide may be surprised to know that the Pentagon knows their name, address and phone number.

A provision of a new federal education law requires high schools to hand over the information for recruiting purposes, or risk losing federal funds.

— via Boing Boing

Just freaky. I suppose I can kind of understand that school rosters would be a prime source for recruiting people (though I’d prefer that the government at least waited until people were 18, and just stuck to colleges), but threatening to withold funding if they don’t get the rosters? That’s just ridiculous.

So, over the past few weeks, it’s been announced that Henry Kissinger is heading up the 9/11 inquiry, and John Poindexter is the new head of the Total Information Awareness office. And we’re supposed to accept these announcements as good decisions?

When in office, Henry Kissinger organized massive deceptions of Congress and public opinion. The most notorious case concerned the “secret bombing” of Cambodia and Laos and the unleashing of unconstitutional methods by Nixon and Kissinger to repress dissent from this illegal and atrocious policy. But Sen. Frank Church’s commission of inquiry into the abuses of U.S. intelligence, which focused on illegal assassinations and the subversion of democratic governments overseas, was given incomplete and misleading information by Kissinger, especially on the matter of Chile. Rep. Otis Pike’s parallel inquiry in the House (which brought to light Kissinger’s personal role in the not-insignificant matter of the betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds, among other offenses) was thwarted by Kissinger at every turn, and its eventual findings were classified. In other words, the new “commission” will be chaired by a man with a long, proven record of concealing evidence and of lying to Congress, the press, and the public.

— Slate, “The Latest Kissinger Outrage — Why is a proven liar and wanted man in charge of the 9/11 investigation? (via Antipixel)

Some people are suspicious that the degenerate Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness system will be used to harass and track the activities of people who some significant fraction of society disagree with. They fear a replacement of today’s general tolerance (and official blindness to one’s Bill-of-Rights-protected activities such as speech and association), with specific harassment of those whose names pop up in the database. Such harassment of people who are not reasonably suspected of criminal activity would destroy much of value in our society, such as the presumption of innocence and the “live and let live” philosophy that encourages diversity. Offering dissidents “a death of a thousand cuts” by constantly harassing them and denying them the privileges of ordinary life would be far worse than charging them with a (bogus) crime, which they could clear up merely by demonstrating their innocence in court.

It would be good to have an early public demonstration of just how bad life could become for such targeted citizens. While ratfink’s system is probably not working yet, and a large part of it is classified, much of it can be manually simulated for demonstration purposes. Public records can be manually searched and then posted to the net by people who happen to be looking there for something else. Many Internet public records search sites also exist; try searching for “People finder”. (Matt Smith at matt.smith@sfweekly.com has offered to “publish anything that readers can convincingly claim to have obtained legally”.) Photographs and videos of the target, their house, car, family, and associates, can be made and circulated to demonstrate facial recognition techniques.

— Eyeballing Total Information Awareness (via Aaron Swartz)

I think if I could cringe any more violently, I’d implode.

Click on the image to download posters in .pdf format.

(Via BackupBrain)

Just tossing these in really quickly — I may come back and revisit them later on tonight.

Sitting around at work, doing something mindless, so my mind is wandering.

Theory 1: Bush must be pissed — the sniper is stealing all his press.

Theory 2: What if that’s the point?

Theory 2a: The sniper is a government operative (and probably future fall guy, once he’s caught), unleashed to distract the American public from the buildup to invading Iraq, making it easier for Bush to work out all the schemes and deals he needs to in order to set the invasion in motion.

This really should be required reading, in my estimation. John Perry Barlow, of the EFF, has posted a very compelling rant looking at where we’re going as a nation — and why he believes that our current attitude is, “THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC IS DEAD. HAIL THE AMERICAN EMPIRE. OR ELSE.”

I believe that the American Republic died in the U.S. Senate last Thursday morning and was buried yesterday morning in the East Room of the White House.

Despite a deluge of calls, letters, and e-mails, which Capital Hill staffers admitted ran overwhelmingly against the ludicrously-named “Resolution Authorizing the President to Use Force, if Necessary, to End the Threat to World Peace from Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Congress extended to George II the authority to make unlimited and preemptive war against another nation that has neither attacked us nor shown the ability or inclination to do so.

(…)

[In 1848, William H.] Herndon had suggested that the United States would be prudent to attack Mexico before they attacked us, as they clearly appeared willing to do. [Abraham] Lincoln replied:

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose — and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’ but he will say to you ‘be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’

The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.

(…)

I don’t think that our new Emperor is an evil man. But he has the kind of unquestioning belief in his own virtue that is the richest loam for growing evil. He is simply too weak to possess this kind of power without misusing it. And now we have removed all the Constitutional impediments that might have checked his hubris. We have thrown ourselves on the mercy of a conscience too clear to be reliable.

(…)

As much as I loathe organizations, we need to organize.

And we’d better start doing it now before the Empire decides it’s necessary to declare a National Emergency and make it lethally illegal to oppose it. It could get that bad.

Or it might get oddly worse than that. The Empire has discovered something important. The best way to deal with us is to ignore us altogether, as they did last Thursday. Our calls and letters had no effect whatever.

But those were the acts of citizens. In an Empire, there are no citizens, only subjects.

Empires in the past found it expedient to jail, torture, and execute recalcitrant subjects. This one has learned that you can get a lot further with less trouble simply by pretending that the opposition doesn’t exist.

These arrogant bastards are so persuaded of their sublime duties to God and Exxon that they no longer need concern themselves with public outrage or even, I shudder to say, elections.

Let us prove them wrong. We must make ourselves painfully visible to them.

(…)

…vote. I know many of you gave up on this a long time ago, for which dereliction of citizen’s duty you are getting exactly the government you deserve. But there’s still time. Many states permit registration right down to the wire.

I particularly hope you will vote heavily against everyone who supported this treasonous resolution, no matter how enlightened they appeared before. Right now, a weakling with good intentions is worse than an outright Facist.

They didn’t listen to your phone calls or letters. Let them now hear your silent voice speaking from the voting booth.

I’ve always enjoyed Woody Harrelson‘s acting, but I never knew that he was much of a writer. He’s in London right now performing in a play, and wrote an excellent editorial piece for The Guardian.

I remember playing basketball with an Iraqi in the late 80s while Iran and Iraq were at war. I didn’t know at the time that the US and Britain were supplying weapons to both sides. I asked why they were always at war with each other and he said something that stayed with me: “If it were up to the people, there would be peace. It’s the governments that create war.” And now my government is creating its second war in less than a year. No; war requires two combatants, so I should say “its second bombing campaign”.

The history taught in our schools is scandalous. We grew up believing that Columbus actually discovered America. We still celebrate Columbus Day. Columbus was after one thing only — gold. As the natives were showering him with gifts and kindness, he wrote in his diary, “They do not bear arms…They have no iron…With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” Columbus is the perfect symbol of US foreign policy to this day.

…in wartime people lose their senses. There are flags and yellow ribbons and posters and every media outlet is beating the war drum and even sensible people can hear nothing else. In the US, God forbid you should suggest the war is unjust or that dropping cluster bombs from 30,000ft on a city is a cowardly act. When TV satirist Bill Maher made some dissenting remarks about the bombing of Afghanistan, Disney pulled the plug on him. In a country that lauds its freedom of speech, a word of dissent can cost you your job.

Via MeFi

I don’t have time to comment much right now, but I sure hope that Douglas Rushikoff is right.

It’s not ‘conspiracy theory,’ as some of my readers have accused me, to suggest that Bush may not actually want to spend the lives of Americans to invade Iraq. It is quite possible — no matter how evil or misguided you believe Bush to be — that he would rather not waste a few hundred or thousand American lives, or a few hundred thousand Iraqi lives, on pipelines and additional security against nuclear/chemical/germ threat. Bush would rather do it the easy way than the hard way. He’d stand a better chance of being re-elected if he could cow Iraq into true submission without a full-scale war.

In order to do this, though, he needs to convince Saddam Hussein that he’s coming in, and that he’s coming in no matter what Chirac, Putin, or any other more “reasonable” statesman advises. He needs to appear like a chicken without a head — a driver without a wheel — careeing inexorably towards invasion. He needs Saddam to believe that America doesn’t have the mechanisms to flinch.