Security

Creep factor on this photo's got to be a 7 on a scale of zero to the Detroit Stalker photo. This is the temporary badge that the security company at the Prudential Tower issued me so I could access their premises as a client of the outsourcing company provided to me by Fido. My question is: what kind of security company would allow a person that photographs like this to have intimate access to the second tallest building in Boston? Are these the same people that are keeping the peace over in Iraq? Furthermore, I'm starting to think that I really am this creepy. The camera may put on 10 pounds, but I don't think it's supposed to put on 10 degrees of creepiness. I got an email from a friend I hadn't seen since college yesterday who saw my website and told me I was creepy. When every photo of you makes you look creepy and your friends all tell you that you're creepy, you're a creep. You don't belong here.

While on the subject of security, allow me to say that Americans are cowards. I was going to write a long, well-researched post on the shameful failure of the American people and their elected leaders to be vocally and actively outraged at the illegal, police-state tactics of the Bush Administration in conducting their War on Tara. But the more I built it up to be an exhaustive listing and linking of examples (ala our friends over at annotated rant .com), the more I put it off and the more daunting it became - same mental process that makes it more and more difficult to send my dad his XMas present. Also, it's mostly obvious to anyone who would read VTK. But really, it's so fucking outrageous that it warrants at the very least brief discussion in this forum. And this week brought 2 more obnoxious examples of the Legislative branch's failure to check the out-of-control Executive Branch: First, the House voted to renew the Bill-of-Rights-savaging Patriot Act (initial passing of the Act in the days after 9/11 was almost forgiveable, but to renew it now is ridiculous (Russ Feingold, you are my hero)). Second, ... *stewing in my own anger* ... this from DemocracyNow.org's report yesterday:

Bush, GOP Sens. Reach Eavesdropping Agreement
On Capitol Hill, the Senate Intelligence Committee has voted down a proposal to investigate the Bush administration’s domestic spy program. The vote came after the White House and Republican Senators agreed to new guidelines for the practice of government eavesdropping without court-approved warrants. According to the New York Times, the deal asks the Bush administration to request court warrants only “whenever possible.” The Bush administration would be given a 45 day grace period to spy without court warrants if they felt requesting them would compromise national security. After the 45-day period, the warrantless eavesdropping could then be extended if the attorney general certifies the administration’s stance. In addition, a handful of extra members of Congress would also be briefed on the program’s activities.

Fuck you. Cowards. I've got a simple statement of fact for everyone who approves of this total abandonment of the ideals of American civil liberties in the name of security: you're going to die. That's not a threat. That's a fact. You and everyone else on this planet are going to die. Deal with it. To repeat the oft-repeated Ben Franklin quote, "those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither". Get out of my country you fucking cowards. And to the cowards who take solace in the fact that the American people, at the very least, had the pluck and spirit to shut down the TIA program a couple years ago in the interest of good old fashioned American liberty, get a load of this. They're doing it anyways, cowards.

I might have to move to New Hampshire so I can Live Free or Die. What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here.




[UPDATE: I listened to another edition of Democracy Now! shortly after posting this and thought this quote from Tony Blair in The Observer last week was relevant:

"I don't destroy civil liberties, I protect them ... The question is not one of individual liberty versus the state but of which approach best guarantees most liberty for the largest number of people. In theory, traditional court processes and attitudes to civil liberties could work. But the modern world is different from the world for which these court processes were designed ... If the nature of the threat changes, so should our policies. That is not destroying our liberties, but protecting them."

fuck you, you chicken-shit lapdog.]