10/19/2006

President Bush, in defending the Military Commissions Act he signed into law this week, said something profound– something that basically sums up the entire position he has been using to justify all of the horrid things the government has pursued for the past five years:

Over the past few months the debate over this bill has been heated, and the questions raised can seem complex. Yet, with the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat? Every member of Congress who voted for this bill has helped our nation rise to the task that history has given us.

This is a ridiculous argument. It is government excesses, and overreaction to a situation, that cause more problems than they solve. We can never truly be completely safe, and even if we give up all of our rights, we will find there are still ways we can be hurt. The ever-present threat of the Terrorists is one that will never disappear.

Dr. Joseph Elias, a professor of history, wrote in the New York Times:

What does history tell us about our earlier responses to traumatic events? My list of precedents for the Patriot Act and government wiretapping of American citizens would include:

  • The Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which allowed the federal government to close newspapers and deport foreigners during the “quasi-war” with France
  • The denial of habeas corpus during the Civil War, which permitted the pre-emptive arrest of suspected Southern sympathizers
  • The Red Scare of 1919, which emboldened the attorney general to round up leftist critics in the wake of the Russian Revolution
  • The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, which was justified on the grounds that their ancestry made them potential threats to national security
  • The McCarthy scare of the early 1950’s, which used cold war anxieties to pursue a witch hunt against putative Communists in government, universities and the film industry.

In retrospect, none of these domestic responses to perceived national security threats looks justifiable. Every history textbook I know describes them as lamentable, excessive, even embarrassing.

But it defies reason and experience to make September 11 the defining influence on our foreign and domestic policy. History suggests that we have faced greater challenges and triumphed, and that overreaction is a greater danger than complacency.

Yet the Terrorists are still “out there”, and I’m sure the current administration– with help from Congress, no matter who wins the impending elections– will do everything they can to pursue their inattainable and truly ridiculous goal.

10/19/2006

Mmm… I have my new widescreen LCD monitors now. It’s amazing what a few extra inches can do for a guy. (Hah!)

It reminds me of the classic song “It’s All about the Pentiums” by Weird Al Yankovic:

“I’ve got a flatscreen monitor forty inches wide; I believe yours says ‘Etch a Sketch’ on the side.”

10/17/2006

Hoo boy, here we go.

Secretary Chertoff of the Department of Homeland Insecurity said this today:

We now have a capability of someone to radicalize themselves over the internet. They can train themselves over the internet. They never have to necessarily go to the training camp or speak with anybody else and that diffusion of a combination of hatred and technical skills in things like bomb-making is a dangerous combination. Those are the kind of terrorists that we may not be able to detect with spies and satellites.

While I don’t think “radicalize” is a word, this ominous statement definitely spells the beginning of the end of the internet. If people can really go online and learn about how to make a bomb (seriously? you can do that?) we absolutely must shut down the single greatest communications device in history. We can’t risk it.

Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI, chimed in today with his own frightening rhetoric:

Terrorists coordinate their plans cloaked in the anonymity of the Internet, as do violent sexual predators prowling chat rooms.

Whoa. So the internet is basically a place where terrorists and pedophiles hang out? I’m so dumb. I thought it was used for all kinds of good stuff. But gee, if it’s possible to use it for something bad, like Terrorism, it’s got to be eliminated. That’s the only solution.

With the elections coming up in a few weeks, I envision desperate Republicans jumping on the Internet Terrorist Bandwagon and screaming about how unacceptable this is, and how the new laws just enacted are simply insufficient to combat such a serious menace. They’ll have the internet shut down by Christmas.

I guess I’ll have to quit my job then, and become a shepherd.

10/17/2006

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.”

— George Bernard Shaw

10/17/2006

On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft turned and snapped a picture of the Earth from four billion miles away. Circled in blue here, you can see the tiny pale blue dot suspended in a beam of sunlight.

Of the photo, Carl Sagan said:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there– on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

It’s both humbling and awe-inspiring to recognize how tiny we are in the cosmos.

10/16/2006

Ahh, ’tis the season. The Congressional elections are in a few weeks, and that means every few days I get another phone call where some recorded voice tells me how horrible such-and-such candidate is.

A few days ago it was actually a live person– some guy who wanted to know whether I’d vote for Representative Musgrave (the incumbent) or her opponent. I told him that I wasn’t going to vote for either of them, since I’m generally a Libertarian and vote for the candidate who I feel best represents me, rather than blindly following a party line.

Whee, politics!