Strange
Day

I know I have commented enthusiastically about the RIAA before, and their ignorant, self-destructive, monopolistic efforts to control music. But you gotta give it to them. If yur gonna be an ass, you might as well be the biggest ass.
They’re joining everyone and their grandmother in trying to tack on riders to the anti-terrorism bills going through congres right now. These bills are scarey enough on their own, without the help of the big-three media companies.
They weren’t so much trying to add anything, as to grant themselves special exceptions. In this case, to make themselves immune to prosecution.
What are they afraid of being prosecuted for, that could possibly relate to terrorism? (Besides forcing people to listen to another Hanson album). The exemption they want involves a portion of the bill that classifys any hack on a computer that results in 5 grand or more of damages as an act of terrorism.
Why do they need to be exempt from this?
The only answer that has come up so far is that they literally want the ability to hack into individual’s computers in an effort to locate and destroy illegally distributed music. Or as this article puts it, “RIAA’s License to Virus”. And if they accidently destroy the contents of your hard drive while they’re at it? Well they wouldn’t have been legally liable.
RIAA: Judge, Jury, and Executioner
Bite my friggin ass.

< weiny whineing >
Are you pondering what I’m pondering?
Signs.
I’ve been working on a couple projects that involve very old pictures of various towns. It’s caused my to take closer looks around me now, especially when I’m out taking pictures. And in the last hundred years city landscapes have become incredibly cluttered.
street signs
lights
roadmarkings
I doubt there’s an intersection in this city with less than 8 signs surrounding it. Most have 3 or 4 times that many. Two blocks from my place, there are two signs on the same corner, going the same direction, that both forbid right turns at a certian time. The problem is, the times conflict with each other.
Even where there aren’t conflicting signs, there are usually redundant ones. Or totally ointless ones. The most current trend in DC is to put up signs reminding people that causing gridlock in intersections is illegal.
Who
fucking
cares.
If you have enough mental capacity to drive, you ought to know that pulling into a crowded intersection is a stupid idea. And if you couldnt figure that out, the 6 ton city bus that is going to come barreling at you will likely clarify the point.
If you don’t think we’re becoming inured to it all, then why are the newest signs all done in flourescent yellow and green?
With an average of 15 signs at any given city intersection, and people haveing 1-3 seconds to look at signs, do you think anyone is getting all this information?
There needs to be a review of city signage, with brevity and clarity in mind. And a strong consideration for aestetics and usability. Put some standards in place, man.
I said this would be a ridiculous post. But I look at these old pictures of the city and you see people, and architecture, and skylines. I look today, and you see streetlights, and powerlines, and signposts every 10 feet.

Even with all my bitching about people overreacting, I notice I’ve gotten a bit jumpy. It used to be when I hear loud noises out in the city I just assumed some numbnuts smashed their car up. But I’ve caught myself straining to listen to every crash and boom in the last month.
Comments about undoubted attempts at further terrorism ain’t helpin.And quite frankly, the talking heads, and the president (the Talking Ken Doll), really need to stop mentioning them. It does no good. If you don’t think there are always efforts to attack the US, originating from inside or out, well then you’re still the same dumbass I told you that you were a few weeks ago.
*right turn*
About a year or two ago, I was talking to Sara about one of my inspirations. They hit me about once a month. Sometimes they become something great, but ussually, like in this case thus far, they fall miserably by the wayside. Anyways… in this case I was thinking about creating a newsletter/magazine. It would be distributed online in PDF format. I would (hopefully) get articles and stories contributed by people who were writing online. Cause, ya see, back then, it was still a new thing. I know maybe 5 or 6 people who were seriously writing online. (There’s still not a whole lot of serious writers online). I figured it would give the writers a chance to distribute their work, and me a chance to utilize my design skills with no client screwing it up.
My, how times have changed.I think it would be a lot harder now. Writing on the ‘Net isn’t as unique anymore. And someone stole the damn (a gram is better than a damn) name I wanted to use.
*left turn*
So I was listening to the Fastbacks on the subway today. They’re one of those bands you go back and listen to so you don’t forget how good they are. Not to mention how much better they are than listening to tourists who are scared of the automatic doors on the train cars.
Speaking of which, did you know Franconia and Springfield are pretty damn far away?

“It would be easy to poisen your corn flakes, but astronomically difficult to poisen all the cornflakes in the entire country.”
Moron.
You would cause much more terror and problems by not infecting the entire batch. Terrorism would involve contaminating only a few selected sites at random locations across the country. It would leave everyone paniced about their cxhances of being the next victim, as opposed to simply not buying corn flakes.
*end rant*

George Bush is a twinkie.
I can’t think of a better word. I tried watching his speech this time (don’t call it a press conference). But I can only stand so much rhetoric and campaigning. (Managed to get in everything from Palestinian statehood to the Ballistic Missile Ban. And I just know someone is going to slam him tommorrow for his comment about “my country”. (Coulda sworn we all lived here, Dubbya).
Damnit. My building is on fire again. It wouldn’t be a new month if the fire trucks didn’t park outside. It might be less disturbing if they actually rang the fire alarm.
Judging from the news, I’d think we were it. Attacks on America. Terrorist networks and anti-terrorist partnerships. Occasionally an attack in Isreal/Palestine. But it seems others are just as good at acting like animals.

This boy wants to kill you.
Or so I’m told, by the talking heads.
He really didn’t look too imposing shivering on the sidewalk, way too early in the morning to be radical.
I’m not sure how many people that showed up have even finished puberty yet. They carried drums and banners and wore rags and scarfs covering their faces.
Going to a rally, and concealing your identity?
By quarter to ten, there were maybe 300 people at most. It was your general granola bar mix of nuts and flakes. If you can name a cause from the sixties, they were there. Environmental, Organization of Anarchists, big government haters. I felt like I was back at a Saturday afternoon in college.
This was a rite of passage, not protest or rally. These are the same people that show up any time a cause is in danger. The important thing is the protest itself.
People concerned about the cause would probably put more effort into the message than the props, and would show up here more than one day a year.
So what the fuck was MetroPDs problem. Fuck me if they were there to observe and ensure.
I was once assaulted by 5 guys 100 feet from my apartment. It was over an hour before I saw a single police officer, and then I had to prove to them I wasn’t the one doing the assault. But a bunch of high school radicals with cloth banners brought out one third of the metroPD.
Those cops that weren’t lineing every street and intersection for six blocks around the park, or sitting on one of at least a hundred motorcycles were sitting on Metro buses across the street from the park. Just sitting there.
Until 5 minutes before the rally started. At which point over 100 riot troops in full gear marched out and surrounded the entire area, three officers deep at some spots. And proceeded to constrict themselves into a smaller area every few minutes. Thirty seconds into the march, the cops started gathering up all the people sitting on the grass. shit or get off the pot, I guess. There was no option… if you were in the park, you were forced to march by big, ugly men in riot gear.
This is when I turned on my sorry ass and went the other direction. When cops start forcing people to join a protest, it will not be a good day for the protesters.
No doubt. I kept an eye on several other protests in the city that day. I wasn’t able to find that one again, after circling around a couple blocks.
That night of course, there were stories of how protesters marred a peaceful rally with violence.
Bull fucking shit. These people couldn’t do anything more violent than blow their nose. They didn’t even have ammonia soaked rags this year. I suppose they beat the shit out of an innocent bystander with the blue peace-symbol or the swan signs.
And this kid shivering on the sidewalk looks like a threat to a 6’5, 250 lb. cop in full riot gear.

Feeling good about being an American? Freedom and all that?
A little something for your paranoia: “Government seeks to extend reach of secretive court used on spies, terror”.

The former IMF-World Bank, now anti-war/pro-justice protests are scheduled to start in an hour.
And the only thought in my head is how the police are going to do their damndest to screw it up. It may or may not be enough to show up on the news. But the MetroPD long ago dropped the idea of impartial observer. What the hell gives them the right to try and upset protests, much less legally sanctioned ones, is beyond me.
We will see.

Shut up.
You try and be coherent when you’re this tired.

Someone slap a piece of duct tape on George’s mouth, please.
Since the day he was elected (okay, maybe 50 days after he was barely elected), he has been a doomsayer with an awkward way of making his predictions come true.

“The economy will slow down”
“There will be a recesion.”
“We need more defenses in case we’re attacked”

now..
“We must go to war.”
(Maybe I could get him to predict a more active sex life for me?)
It’s awfully hard to take as coincidence the fact that the economy boomed about the time the previous president was elected. And when he left, so did people’s confidence. Regardless of what you thought of the man, he inspired strong feelings. People act on strong feelings.
George was put in office by an election that showed just how apathetic people were about the candidates. Until he decided to declare a non-existant war, you couldn’t get him to take a stance on anything more vital tha boxers-or-briefs.
George, stop feeding us lines of patriotic bullshit about this slaughter (I refuse to use the word tragedy), and start actually doing something progressive for this country. When the public school system is in need of over 20 billion dollars, you give the airlines 15 billion?
Fucking hell.
Planes won’t stop flying. There is still a huge demand for it. Someone will fill it. At worst, it will force the airlines to start treating passengers like people again to get their business.
Someone want to explain to this man that the Presiden’t of the United States is the embodyment of the entire country?

I can’t read the national news any more.
Yikes! I used the ‘r’ word… I’m sorry. *slap* bad monkey, bad
All it does is annoy the hell out of me.

Someone send me a pair of wire cutters.
Please.
And I’ll stand on the District border, and stop each car that approaches. First I’ll snip the wires leading to each and every car horn.
And for anyone who complains, I’ll use the clippers to whittle off their limb of choice.
You know, you could almost get the impression I hate people who honk their horns unreasonably?

you gotta wonder about any society where companies can spend millions of dollars on advertising paper towels.

me? a bit vitriolic?
could be.

I may be getting old. I can feel the weather in my broken ankle. Like some blue-haired, chain-smoking, old woman predicting a hurricane.
At least I’m not as stupid as you idiots though.
You ignorant, childish, vapid, weak-willed idiots.
Did you ever think it was any different than this? And if so, how long ago was it that you pulled your head out of your ass.
There has been mass transit by air for probably over 65 years now. Big ol’ flying hunks of steel and copper carrying big ol hunks of flesh and drool at hundreds of an hour at thousands of feet in the air.
And there are people who hate us — Americans. When you park a battleship off someone’s coastline and start lobbing 30-inch shells into their country, they may get miffed. Or maybe we bought them a new President. Or we told them if they make our Nikes for 60 cents a piece, we won’t nuke them until they become puddles of irradiated genetic stew.
And you’re suprised these people dropped a couple jetliners on our cities?

“I’m saddened to admit that this job is even necessary, but it is necessary. Our nation faces an unusual threat that it’s never faced before.”

— Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge

This man was just appointed head of “homeland security”. And he is already feeding you a line of bullshit so long it dwarfs our welfare lines.
People hate us. Lotsa reasons. Some not even so reasonable. But they do. And they have been trying to kill us. In large numbers. One by one. Any way that works. Do you think all those nuclear weapons pointed at our collective asses are there for show?
They get stopped. 99.999 percent of the time.
How many people died on American soil at the hands of foriegn terrorism in the last 20 years? a little over 5,000? I’m willing to bet that gang killings in this country dwarf that number considerably. And suicides. And negligent homicide.
We are much better at destroying ourselves than they are.
This is not new. They’ve been doing it forever. This is not different. I can’t think of a decade in the last 50 years when a couple of planes and/or buildings haven’t been blown up in the name of a cause.
The people in government are not stupid. They know all this.
With one hand they are wiping away your tears while the other hand is pushing through legislation that is going to do to you what is probably being done to Ted Kazinsky right now.
Legislation to require any cryptography created to have a backdoor that the US government can exploit. So you are allowed to have secrets from anyone except a government employee? Forgetting that, this would effectively be the end of cryptography, period. Once it is known every crypto system has a exploitable weakness, it will be exploited, in very short order, by anyone with half a clue about computer programming.
Of course, you might also want to ask why this is being passed to protect us when it would have done nothing to prevent the very incident that spurred it’s presentation.
Legislation that would allow the INS and Attorney General to lock up and deport ‘foriegners’ with no evidence of wrongdoing, and basically no chance to appeal the decision.They’re not just talking about people who step off a flight from Iraq with a load of C-4 in their suitcase. They mean every international citizen in this country. All the friends I had in college who were there on educational Visas. Probably all the cab drivers in New York City. The computer programs who flocked here a few years ago.
And just in case you think the government is run by reasonable people who wouldn’t let this get out of hand, consider the words of Lousiana Representative John Cooksey, who is running for Senate next year:

“If I see someone come in and he’s got a diaper on his head and a fan belt around that diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over and checked,”

This Congressman sits on the Committee on International Relations.
Apparently you dont have civil rights unless you were born in East Bumpafuck, NJ.
Just a taste of what we’re in for.
Rule of thumb: Everytime someone tells you they are doing something to protect you, cover your ass (in every sense of the phrase).

God Gave U.S. ‘What We Deserve,’ Falwell Says
Satan called, Jerry. He says Timothy McViegh has already claimed you and Pat as ‘his bitches’.
Emotional Fucking Rape. That’s what it is, Jerry. And you’re spewing it like a prisoner watching the Playboy channel.
You have a capitive audience of 250 million people locally, who are scared and overwhelmed by the bloodiest single act ever commited on this continent. And you choose this moment to take advantage of 5000 mutilated bodies,… for political means?
These people are looking for anything to cling to. And when you saw them falling over themselves to embrace the Patriotic frenzy that is sweeping this country again, your response is, “I want some of that”.
So you gave them an even easier out. They don’t have to risk dying in some war that should never be fought. They only have to look at the neighbor and hate them. And not just one target, but a whole bunch of scapegoats; enough so that there’s someone for everyone to hate.
Homosexuals, femanists, pro-choicers (no… the term is not abortionists, Jerry)… they don’t want special treatment from this country. They want to be treated equally, as stated in our very constitution and supported in faith by every major religion. A Constitution over 200 years old that we still can’t seem to live up to.
The founders of this country were not heathen fools, either. They did not ban anyone from embracing religion. They simply declared that the dealings of faith would not be the dealings of goverment. Whenever religion and government attempt to come together, they have always sought to dominate the other, resulting in the violent oppresion of all things different.
We don’t need to be told to hate anyone right now, not by the government or by you, Jerry. There are tens of thousands of people who have lost friends and lovers this week. And the idea of replacing their lost love with your version of hate just makes me sick.

I’m beginning to think I live in a war zone. At least, that’s the impression the local militia would have you … have.
Cordoned off entire blocks surrounding the White House. Can only enter at one corner at one end of the street at one side. Cause basically that’s the only place they’re really staffed. which makes me wonder what the fuck is the point of th barricades anyway. If there is no one to back them up or even watch over them, they won’t keep out my dead grandmother much less a determined terrorist.
However the choppers overhead are a nice touch. the constant patrolling and all. who know’s what they’re patrolling for. They are’nt going to stop any plane attacks (though the F16s might). And I dont believe for a minute you can tell a damn thing from that far up that will let you know that the guy picking his nose on the corner is going to stick a pipe bomb in the rain gutters at the white house.
A few more minutes and I can get out of here. Show my ID to Rufus the Redneck Trooper. An ID that is 3 years old and from issue. But I don’t think he really cares. After all, police never look you in the eye unless they are doing the talking, and hope to intimidate you. I suppose it should make them look like they’re watching everything going on, to be sure they don’t get bushwacked.
here’s a thought mr. Rufus. Worry about the guy in front of you that could pull out a shiv and eviscerate you, more than the car stopping at the corner McDonalds for a Big Xtra Meal.
Is that a threat from me? no. Motivationless, power-hungry security guards are not what worry or antagonize me.
Smart people like these terrorists are much more scarey. No one wnats to admit that there is next to nothing that was or could be done to stop them. sharp knives can come from anywhere and any substance. A hurtling plane wouldnt even be stoped by a missle once it was on course. there are no barricades that could hold them back. These men knew once they were under way that they had already won.
It was all incredibly simple. Ingeniusly simple.

Ann Coulter on Barbara Olson
Ignorant, sadomasochistic, bigoted faux-intellectual.
I’ve gotta get into Journalism if this woman is the Gold Standard for writers.
She is ready and willing to go out and start deporting, bombing, and killing people. And her vauge references don’t hide who she is talking about.
listen bitch:
we
do
NOT
know
who
did
it
.
Dozens of countries have agreed to strike down any country or individual who turns out to be responsible. These people will pay, one way or another. The Taliban has even agreed to turn over Osama Bin Lauden should we present proof he was responsible.
No one is going to get away with this.
But before we start shooting anyone who wouldn’t fit in at a Klan meeting, may I request that we actually find the true responsible party(ies)?
Cause when we start slaughtering Afghani men, women, and children, only to discover this was the result of some hick, redneck militia from East Bumpafuck, USA, we’ll prove ourselves to be the very monster we are currently decrying.
Maybe Ms. Coulter needs to take her hood off in church so she can hear better. Like the lines about “Judge not lest ye be judged” and “thou Shalt not Kill”. And if that doesn’t move her, she should keep in mind that this “murderous cult” she is referring to happens to be the fastest growing religion in the world, with millions upon millions of members. It doesn’t do to tease the lion when you’re in his cage. (And all this goes without mentioning the fact that Islam has far stricter moral and societal codes than Christianity or Judaism).
Go back to the Dark Ages, Ms. Coulter. We have no more Japanese internment camps. We aren’t out for playground justice. And we don’t need people like you playing off the basest, most vile aspects of human nature.

Okay. So I feel a little pathetic looking back and the two biggest rants Ive had lately were about MTV and Freedom of speech on the internet (AOL no less).
On the scale of importmant issues in the world, these rate somewhere near the level of what’s on TV tonight.
I live in a city where people are gunning each other down in the streets on a daily basis. Where the department of health is located in a building that can’t pass their own inspections. Where the people re-elected a Mayor who had been caught on video smoking pot with a hooker.
This city is the capital of a country where a black boy was recently dragged to death behind a pick-up truck. And another boy was tied to a fence and beat to death for being gay. Where when a young woman disappears from her apartment never to be seen again, the question isn’t “what happened to the girl”, but “who was she fucking”.
The most powerful country in a world where after tens of thousands of years of civilization, our usual solution to international conflict is to try to kill eachother. A world where our greatest advances only come from wars. Where more savagry has been done in the name of God than anyone else.
and I was complaining about MTV’s ideals?
excuse me while I order a labotomy.

It’s said you cannot slight someone for being what they are.
Bah. Fuck that.
MTV is the crap du jour. Or more precisely, MTV is the crap du jour tout la monde. (that’s “shit all the time” for all the Americans out there)
While they have never held themself to very many lofty standards, their current marketing campaign (not to be mistaken for cultural changes, kiddies) has turned the 900 pound gorilla of contemporary music marketing into a self-consuming cannibalistic shadow of it’s former self.
Did you ever think you’d see the day when VH1 had a better selection of music.
MTVs target demographic has become the same as their sister network, Nicolodeon. Those shows and concepts that haven’t been cancelled and/or outright banned, have been recycled and redone so many times they wouldn’t be fresh if they were sponsored by Right Guard. The stepford children they are passing off as pop musicians are the only fitting accompanyment to the ignorant grunting most of their favorite hip hop and rock groups being passing off as music.
I dunno. I think if I was still a kid, I’d be pretty insulted. The soundtrack to your disenfranchisement is being organized and brought to you, regardless of your race, creed, or color, by planning committee’s and focus groups paid for by a bunch of old white men who only make money if you do exactly what they tell you. (What do you want from a group of businessmen who make Richard Branson look young and wild?)
Turn off your TV. Shave your head. Go out to a club or bar (but I’ll lose all respect for you if they play dance music). If you don’t piss off old people, who will?