I wrote a guest script for Webcomic Pete. It’s an interesting comic with art that’s reminiscent of some of the single-panel comics from National Lampoon in the 70’s and 80’s. You should go give it a look.
If you’re just coming here from there, welcome! Updates are erratic at the moment, but I’m trying to arrange things so I have a more stable schedule.
Due to the insane amounts of spam I’ve had to delete, comments are now limited to registered users. Registration is free and I really don’t look at your info (nor will I sell it or give it away).
Of course everyone with a working concept of the enormity of the data involved in Project PRISM and the cell phone record grab is surprised that anyone would even want to do it. It would be more productive to buy a million monkeys and throw them in a room with a million typewriters to see if one can come up with a working script for Hamlet II: the Revenge than it would be to hire and maintain the staff necessary to trawl through the reams and reams of minutiae generated by the Modern American Desperate Need for Contact (cheaper, too).
Yes, I know that much of the grunt work is done by crawlers similar to webspiders that look for key words and country codes before passing them on to a human (or a more advanced program), but even with flag catchers, the resultant mountain of data has to be tremendous. Those crawlers don’t have discretion, so they can’t tell the difference between a Hezbollah operative contacting his handler in Tehran and a Persian immigrant calling his mother (assuming she’s allowed contact with an American phone number) any more than your IT department’s traffic managing software can tell the difference between your websearch for “kilts” because you promised a friend you’d dress up for the local Renn Fest and Frank from Accounting’s search for Catholic School Girl porn.
The thing is, the point of data mining is not to acquire working evidence of any kind. The point is to justify other questionable methods of obtaining “evidence” after the fact. The Director of the CIA cited (actually, he only cited four, but he referenced) fifty separate potential incidents forestalled by the sweeping invasion-of-privacy programs. The Director of the NSA (notably, an Army General who was not asked to resign his commission before accepting a high-ranking seat in the civilian government) was less optimistic, say “at least ten” and “dozens” alternately during interviews and public appearances.
But here’s the thing, of the four incidents he cited, he only gave details on two and even those details were sketchy and didn’t show evidence that supported his claim. The most noted one, a “planned attack on Wall Street that could have been as bad as 9/11” resulted in a few arrests and one guilty plea, all for money laundering. The principal in this case, a naturalized citizen living in Kansas, had been funneling money to a Yemeni organization that General Alexander claimed was connected to Al ‘Qaeda. He didn’t name the organization, nor did he show any evidence that they had made any notable moves toward their alleged plan of bombing Wall Street. He simply said that the fact the accused parties were convicted by a jury shows that they must have been serious. Except the accused parties were all convicted of monetary crimes under RiCO, not any sort of Terrorist activity.
In any case, you catch the movement of money by tracking international bank transfers (this is a legal activity done every day by the Federal Reserve, since the full faith and trust of the US Treasury is put to the test every time US currency leaves the country in any way), not by tracking phone conversations. It’s far more likely that they used the data mining to compile ex post facto evidence for a jury to consider so they wouldn’t have to admit that they had been hacking into privacy-assured banking systems in other countries.
The only other way to make efficient use of data mining is to use it to get a back-dated warrant for something you’ve already done. A wire-tap, say, or a tracking worm. Of course, the FISA courts were set up in the ’80’s to check all that stuff an make sure it’s all on the up and up, right. I mean, if you can’t trust a secret court with no appeal or public regulation, who can you trust? Father Gustavo can’t use squassation as a means of getting your confession and a list of fellow heretics unless the Grand Inquisitor says it’s okay, right?
But then, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you don’t have anything to fear, do you? It’s not like making a donation to a foreign aid charity can be turned to look like anything bad. You know, unless that charity is located in Somalia, or, well anywhere with a foreign-sounding name. But it’ll probably be all right. Nobody really cares about the web research you’ve been doing for your planned vacation to Uruguay.
You do realize that Uruguay has no extradition treaty with the United States don’t you? Why would you plan a “vacation” in a country with no extradition treaty?
So if you’ve spent the last month sleeping under a rock, you should know that a number of “scandals” have hit the press, centered around the Obama Administration, and its repetitive intrusions into American privacy. It started with the Justice Department acquiring the records of a Fox reporter and the entire Associated Press Editorial Staff, but has since been expanded because a former National Security Administration contractor released classified documents that outlined the NSA’s ongoing effort to acquire every bit of information available on every person in the US, on the off-chance that Frank from accounting is making terroristic plans on the Catholic Schoolgirl website he alt-tabs out of every time someone comes into his office.
The horrible traitor, Edward Snowden by name, informed the country that not only was the NSA spying on American lives and conversations, but that they were outsourcing access and analysis of sensitive and classified material. Never mind that Big Brother is poking his nose in our business, it also turns out, he’s a moron. You don’t give a contractor access to classified material for the same reason you don’t let your plumber thumb through the boudoir pics your wife had made for your ninth anniversary: It’s none of his business and you can’t trust him to keep it to himself.
So, anyway, I can call Mr. Snowden a traitor because Speaker of the House Jon Boehner called him a traitor, and who am I to contradict the Speaker of the House. I mean, sure, Snowden committed exactly zero of the two definitions of treason found in the Constitution, but, if we’re going to limit our definition of treason to the only one that legally exists, then how are we going to get rid of all the bad men who wake us up and spill water on our beds every night?
Sure, I know what you think. Why don’t we do what we’ve always done: wait for people to commit an actual crime before treating them like criminals. Pfft! What do you think this is 1978? The Post-9/11 world is all about prevention! “Never Again” is the motto and the watchword, and justifies every act from moronically expelling kids for having a finger-gun battle in the schoolyard to murdering an American citizen with a robot because a couple of his known enemies said he was probably a terrorist.
And thank god we do, too, because that attitude has prevented any number of terrorist threats that none of us ever knew about because they were handled quietly and remanded to a secret court (the same one that decides whether or not it’s okay to spy on and/or murder American citizens, I assume). I’d tell you what they are, but then I’d have to schedule a drone strike for your next crowded commute. Suffice to say, that if we weren’t being constantly watched, recorded and analyzed, then events like the Boston Marathon Bombing and Newtown shooting would just be Tuesday. I mean, the Marathon Bombers were just normal citizens who flew well below the Justice Department’s radar, right? (No, they weren’t.)
There is a petition out, I guess it’s on President Obama’s lame-duck relevance site, “Change .Org”, to destroy the Confederate Monument at Stone Mountain, Georgia. Like everything else that reminds people that the Civil War was a thing, the Stone Mountain Memorial pisses people off because it reminds people that the Civil War and slavery were things in American History, and, specifically, in Georgian History. Not that Georgia needed any reminders; only the tech boom and Atlanta’s lax enforcement of zoning codes allowed the state to crawl out from the rubble left behind by Sherman’s March to the Sea 120 years earlier.
So, yeah, the Stone Mountain Memorial, which was paid for with private money and built on private land (which was subsequently donated to the Stat of Georgia) is a horrible affront to everyone who thinks…I’m not sure…slavery something, and we could probably work in a “worse than Hitler.” Of course, if we’re going to blast that off the Mountain, we should probably give the hairy eye to a few other large monuments around the country. The San Jacinto Monument, the Goliad Memorial, and the Alamo, all mark events in the Texas Revolution—an event that was (according to some modern historians) an obvious land grab by the US in order to expand slavery (never mind that Texas won that war on its own and wasn’t even permitted to join the Union until 5 years later with the promise that the newly admitted state would handle its own debts), knock ’em down…put up a Gap or something. Mount Rushmore sits on land formerly sacred to certain Souix (okay, Souix is a generalized term that means “enemy,” but there is no other word that encompasses the many Algonquin tribes that ruled the northern plains in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), and the nearby Crazy Horse Memorial is insulting (Native American cultures consider it an insult to point with their fingers, and more so that he’s using his left arm). I could go on, but I won’t. Basically, if you have a petition and enough dynamite, there’s apparently a lot of work to be done.
I have safe money that a large number of the organizers and signatories of this petition were among the voices telling people to “get over it” when the hubbub surrounding the Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero occurred. That is, of course, neither here nor there. Hypocrisy is a problem in America, and in human culture in general, but it is not the focus of today’s article. Today, we’re going to talk about offense.
Now, I’m not one of those people who subscribes to the erroneous notion that offense can only ever be taken. Some words and actions are so foul that they can be nothing but offensive. Most states have a “fighting words” defense, so the law sort of bears me out, since “fighting words,” means that there are some things that can be said for which there is no reasonable response except to beat the speaker like an old drum.
To be fair, “fighting words” are pretty clearly defined, and, in most cases, come within spitting distance of actual assault (a credible verbal threat of bodily harm). So it’s not like “Yo’ Momma” jokes can be considered fighting words.
But are they, by their nature offensive? On the off-chance that your mother is actually so fat that when she sits around the house, she sits around the house, I’m going to say, that some people may take offense, but that, while insulting, the statement itself is not offensive. At least no more offensive than Lucky the Leprechaun, that obsessive little sugar addict who’s been the primary representative of Irish-American Culture for the last fifty years. Let us, then, look at the SMM and determine what about it makes it offensive.
The Stone Mountain carving depicts three men on horseback, pictured from about the waist up (Lee, in the forefront, is shown from the knee up), facing east. All three men are sad, and even a little regretful, when one studies their features. From left to right, they are, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. J.E.B. Stuart is not depicted shaking his fist in defiance and rallying his newly-formed Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, nor is there any depiction of the horrifying destruction wrought on the State of Georgia by Sherman’s strategically-necessary scorched-earth policy. For a United Daughters of the Confederacy project, the Monument is remarkably subdued: just three regretful men, looking east.
So, it is not, in and of itself, offensive. Its presence on the mountain and the sad looks presented on the faces of its subjects can be interpreted in ways that might be considered offensive by some, but it is not even in the same league, in terms of intrinsic inappropriateness, with Aunt Jemima or the Cleveland Indians mascot. Heck, it’s not even as intrinsically offensive as the use of the Swastika, and that was a good luck symbol for a thousand years before the Nazis painted it with hatred and murder.
The thing is, if we want to remain a free society, we have to stop thinking with our guts, our hearts and our genitals, and re-learn how to think with our heads. It’s stupid to get our panties in a wad every time we see or hear something that we personally find offensive, but it’s easy. Freedom isn’t easy; it requires work and thought. To be a responsible member of a free society, you have to take the two seconds necessary to look at things from someone else’s perspective. You have to ask yourself, “Is this meant to be offensive, or did I just get my back up, because it struck the wrong chord in me?”
The US population is a mix of every culture present on the planet, and we must keep ourselves aware that things we may view as offensive may be seen as harmless to others. When someone wishes you “Happy Holidays,” they are not trying to eradicate your god or undermine your faith. It’s not racist to say that you think the President is set on a dangerous course, no matter who that President is. The Islamic Cultural Center in New York was not planned as a Tea Bag for the Ground Zero victims, and the UDC did not commission the SMM as a big “Fuck You!” to anyone.
Get over it. Very few people do or say anything specifically to piss you off. Most of the time they aren’t thinking about you at all, but have their own concerns instead. Save the uproar for something worth the effort.