Friday, January 27, 2006

Fool Me Once

You know how the saying goes…

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Well, shame on Americans. It seems all the Bush administration has to do is invoke the “T” word to get a majority of U.S. citizens to accede to their latest unconstitutional scheme to institute a Big Brother government.

We must invade Iraq. There are indisputable links to terrorism. It’s an integral part of the War on Terrorism. Blah, blah, blah…
It appears most Americans have figured out those justifications for starting a war were a bunch of BS, and that the terrorists in Iraq are there because we invaded the country, and only showed up after the invasion.

Then, in December the news hits that the administration has been spying on U.S. citizens since shortly after 9/11, the president having authorized the NSA to do so, without the mandated court approval (we are a nation built on the rule of law, my ass). There’s a bit of muffled outrage in the U.S. national media (don’t make too big of a deal about it; you might piss off your viewers and end up losing revenue) and even (gasp!) a bit of talk about impeachment and criminal charges.

Not to worry! The Bushies know what to do— This program is only spying on terrorists! We’re only stepping beyond the bounds of the law to protect you from terrorists! In fact, we’re not really breaking the law, because we’re at war, and the president can do whatever he wants if we’re at war.

Will Americans see through this? I mean, he hasn’t exactly been straight with us about this whole terrorism thing now has he? Of course they won’t! According to the latest NY Times poll, as long as they say the “T” word, the majority of U.S. citizens will let them do what they want. From the Wired news web site this morning:

“The poll, published in Friday’s New York Times, found Americans were more accepting of the surveillance program if they believed it was intended to protect them.

Fifty-three percent of those surveyed said they approved of President George W. Bush’s decision to authorize eavesdropping without prior court approval “in order to reduce the threat of terrorism,” The Times reported.”

Yeah, it’s barely a majority, but I still think it’s pretty depressing. The Benjamin Franklin quote about those giving up liberty to achieve temporary safety deserving neither was almost used to death after 9/11 and the ensuing hysteria that prompted easy passage of the “Patriot” Act and other travesties against the citizens of the formerly free country, the United States. But, unfortunately the quote is still way too appropriate.

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Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Hard Drive Crash

The startup drive on my main machine at home crashed about a month ago. Had a fairly recent backup and after a bit of jumping thru hoops, I got it back up and running with a minimum of lost files. Then...

It crashed again, about two and a half weeks later. Been down for about a week now and as I was trying to fix it, I noticed in OS X's Disk Utility, it had S.M.A.R.T. info about the drive. Unfortunately, the status for that was failing in red letters!

So, I need to get a new hard drive for the machine. It still has the original SCSI drive that came with the machine and that's what it's running on now, but that drive is only 8GB and has very little free space, so until I can get the failing drive replaced, I'm limited to what I can do with that machine. On the positive side, the iBook we bought back in November is sure coming in handy right now!

Friday, January 20, 2006

Twisp Gone

Mr. Campbell said his Twisp blog was going away on January 31st. Well, he pulled the plug a bit early. If you've been looking, nothing's wrong with your web browser. Howard Campbell's Twisp blog, as well as Ben Mack Scribe, his biographer/nemesis' blog are both gone and have been since about the 10th of this month.

I'm not sure where Howard's writing these days, but you can keep up w/Ben on his GNN blog.

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Current Mood: Dark

I took last Friday off from work so I had a 4-day weekend over the New Year holiday. Went GoodWill store shopping with the wife on Friday and scored a small handful of books for 49 cents each, including an almost pristine copy of William Gibson's Neuromancer.

Then Saturday, I felt my mood slipping. By Sunday, my outlook on life was fouled. I had the better part of the day to myself but couldn't bring myself to do anything all day. This actually made my mood even worse, because when I get that much time alone, I like to do some work on my website, or write or draw a bit (and I have a couple of writing/drawing projects I could have worked on), but I couldn't bring myself to do anything but sit around and stew.

I fall into these moods periodically but they usually only last a day or so. This one has held on a bit longer, but I'm coming out of it.