on the same subject as below.  I thought I was done, but then I saw this clip from The Daily Show on Ashcroft’s Victory Act Tour.

Okay, now I’m done.

This is a long one, so I’ll break it up a little.

Patriot 1 – Nightline

Last week Nightline has a very good segment on the Patriot Act.  Lisa Rein’s Radar has the complete video on this page.  Here are the “closing thoughts” from the program:

The men who drafted our constitution, who framed our civil rights and protected our various freedoms under the law would, I suspect, retch at some of the bone headed, self-serving, misinterpretations of their intentions that they so often use these days to undermine the very freedoms they pretend to safeguard. The miracle of American Law is not that it protects popular speech, or the privacy of the powerful, or the homes of the priviledged, but rather, that the least among us, those with the fewest defenses those suspected of the worst crimes — the most despised in our midst, are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

That remains as revolutionary a concept now as it was in the 1780s. It makes protecting the country against terrorism excruciatingly difficult, but we cannot arbitrarily suspend the rights of one category of suspects without endangering all the others.

Patriot 1 – Action

There is a bill (“Protecting the Rights of Individuals Act”, S1552) to help correct some of the provisions of the Patriot Act.  Most of what it does is clarify the language to make it apply to terrorism and require reporting on the usage of certain surveillance activities.  The ACLU has a page where you can easily fax support for the bill to your Senator.

There is also a page to fax support for the “Domestic Surveillance Oversight Act of 2003”, (S436), although that appears to be stuck in committee.  It requires the public accounting of basic information such as the number of Americans subjected to surveillance under FISA and the number of times that FISA information has been used for law enforcement purposes.

Road Trip!

It’s old news now, but Ashcroft is on a twelve city nationwide tour in support of the Patriot Act.  See Ashcroft Patriot Road Show or CNSNEWS coverage.

This inspired candidate Howard Dean to put up a Stop Ashcroft Petition on his DeanForAmerica site.

And none to soon.  This spring, the PROTECT Act was signed into law.  While it is famous for containing the federal version of the “Amber alert,” it also included another important provision relating to federal criminal sentencing.  That provision directs the U.S. Sentencing Commission to amend the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines “to ensure that the incidence of downward departures are substantially reduced.”

On July 28, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a memorandum to all federal prosecutors outlining the Department of Justice’s policies with respect to downward departures.  When a judge imposes a departure over the prosecutor’s objections, the memo requires the prosecutor, within 14 days, to report the departure to DOJ.  The result, Sen. Edward Kennedy has argued, will be to establish a “black list” of federal judges who downwardly depart. 

The Protect Act basically forces judges to use harsh sentences, and to be reported to the Justice department if they don’t.

But why bother with a tour?  What does it have to do with the PROTECT Act?  To get support for…

Patriot 2, The Victory Act, Domestic Security Enhancement Act

Critics speculate that as a result of public criticism of the PATRIOT Act, some provisions of PATRIOT II have been introduced separately as the “Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations” or VICTORY Act.  (Ironically, or appropriately, the ‘Y’ is missing.)  The VICTORY Act continues the assault on the federal judiciary that the PROTECT Act and the Ashcroft memo embody.

The “Domestic Security Enhancement Act,” which opponents have dubbed “PATRIOT II,” is designed to further expand federal law enforcement’s powers to limit alleged terrorist suspects’ access to the protections afforded to criminal defendants.  It would allow the Justice Department to declare a person suspected of somehow being involved with international terrorism as a “foreign power,” making the individual subject to the reduced judicial oversight and lower thresholds of proof required under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).  It would also give federal law enforcers greater wire-tapping authority and would allow state and local authorities greater access to information obtained through FISA surveillance for criminal prosecutions.  The proposal would give the attorney general greater power to issue “administrative subpoenas” without approval from a judge and to revoke the U.S. citizenship of individuals who “provide material support to” or “serve in” terrorist organizations as defined by the Department of Justice. 

“If PATRIOT II passes, a substantial number of political lobbies, including Gun Owners of America, could be declared terrorist organizations by an administration that simply dislikes their methods and goals,” Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America (GOA), warned.  His group has compiled an online analysis of the potential misuses of the proposed law.

The proposal also includes what it calls a “technical correction” to the PATRIOT Act, which would eliminate some of the sunset provisions in the original law, much of which will expire on Dec. 31, 2005.

That’s a technical correction?

The War On…Everything?

It looks like it the War On Drugs is being escalate to being called terrorism.  I guess they believed their own commercial equating the two.

A draft of the Victory Act (from http://www.libertythink.com/VICTORYAct.pdf) opens with this paragraph:

A BILL
To combat narco-terrorism, to dismantle narco-terrorist criminal enterprises, to disrupt narco-terrorist financing and money laundering schemes, to enact national drug sentencing reform, to prevent drug trafficking to children, to deter drug-related violence, to provide law enforcement with the tools needed to win the war against narco-terrorists and major drug traffickers, and for other purposes.

Another excerpt says:

U.S.C. 853(a)), is amended by adding at the end the following: ��In addition to any other money judgment that may be imposed under this section, a person who does not receive any proceeds from the sale, importation, or distribution of a controlled substance because the person is arrested, or the controlled substance is seized, before the sale, importation, or distribution is complete, shall pay a money judgment equal to the amount of money that would have been paid if such sale, importation, or distribution had been completed.��

This looks like carte blanche to just add an arbitrary fine.  It doesn’t say the drugs had to exist.  Just imagine:  “We’ve decided that you were going to sell an ounce of coke, but you couldn’t because we arrested your supplier.  So you’re going to be fined the street value of the coke.  Ha ha ha ha!!!”

Welcome to the police state.

From http://www.warblogging.com/archives/000679.php:  “[Ashcroft] seeks to pass laws like the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, a law that would allow the Justice Department to detain anyone indefinitely, without the right to contact an attorney or family members. The DSEA ’03 would make it a criminal act to reveal the identity � or even existence � of such a detainee. Why? Because revealing such information may result in some amount of oversight or criticism of the government’s actions.”

Your Internet browsing records are fair game for the Department of Justice under the VICTORY Act. Your phone too. Your bank records, your credit card records — under the VICTORY Act, they all belong to the Department of Justice too.

To learn more, there is a lot of information on Patriot 2 at the Bill of Rights Defense Committee.  The Victory Act is also covered on Warblogging.com.

To do more, send a “Stop the New Patriot Act” Fax from the ACLU.

Wow, that was way too long.

Yesterday’s New York Times reported that recording industry lobbyists are shocked, shocked to find porn on popular peer-to-peer networks.  Naturally, they think P2P should be heavily regulated as a result.  Somebody should send them a copy of Michael Kinsley’s classic Slate editorial on the most dangerous of all media: paper.

Stolen from Edward Felten’s Freedom to Tinker.

According to a BBC News article:  “People who experience a sense of spirituality in church may be reacting to the extreme bass sound produced by some organ pipes.”

A CNN article on the findings of the same experiment says:  “Mysteriously snuffed out candles, weird sensations and shivers down the spine may not be due to the presence of ghosts in haunted houses but to very low frequency sound that is inaudible to humans.”

I realize that nothing has been posted here for a while; I just keep saving links and thinking that I’ll get around to it.  So it’s time for a political yet fun one.  Here’s how Rhetorica describes it:

PCR2004 explains the persuasive tactics of the candidates for President of the United States by offering rhetorical analyses of campaign speeches, and speech situations, focusing on image creation, policy definitions, propaganda, and spin.

Pick your candidate, pick your speech, pick it apart.  To help make it understandable, they have the rhetorical terms (rhetorically speaking?) linked to their definitions.

Marijuana, of all illegal drugs, has inspired by far the greatest number of street terms, according to the database.  Perhaps that’s because the laughing weed is the most commonly used recreational drug.  Or maybe it’s because regular users have impaired short-term memories and have to keep making up new terms for their drug of choice.

What were we talking about?

Between now and August, Mars will brighten until it “blazes forth against the dark background of space with a splendor that outshines Sirius and rivals the giant Jupiter himself.” Astronomer Percival Lowell, who famously mapped the canals of Mars, wrote those words to describe the planet during a similar close encounter in the 19th century.

This Wednesday it will be the closest.  Me, I’m just going to go on Friday (yeah, I’ll miss the closest by a couple of days) to 7,000 feet at The Mountain and avoid the LA area light pollution.

Surely eternal damnation deserves more thought than this, but I was more interesting in seeing what they did with it than thinking about who to put in it.

Wait here

Check out the before and after images of this model.  When you’re done, check out the rest of Greg’s Digital Retouching Portfolio.

I’ll never believe a picture again.  We all knew they can be easily manipulated but this really shows the degree of changes that can be made where even in close-up you can’t tell that it was done.

I don’t remember where I copied this from, but it’s a new interesting twist on spam filters and worms:

The Internet epidemic du jour is the Blaster Worm. I’m not writing about it because it isn’t very interesting; it’s just more of the same thing we’ve been seeing for years. But there’s one new idea. One variant of the worm downloads a file whose name contains an anatomical term that many spam filters block. I wonder how many emails about the worm never reach their recipient because the filename is given? VERY clever.

This just in from Briefing.com:

10:21 am PT Floor Talk : In speaking with institutional traders, the lack of enthusiasm for being at work today seems to be the prevalent theme given the total lack of direction or volume. Given the confluence of the power outage issues and a typical slow summer Friday, some individuals have called it a week and gone home early. In addition, some of our contacts did not even make it to work today given the power issues still being ironed out in the city. However, traders point to the possibility of some action at end of day related to expiration. As a point of interest, one desk is passing the time making book on a cheeseburger eating contest. The undersized trader was able to ingest 9 burgers before being forced to make a trip to the closest garbage can. The first pay out was at 12 burgers, so the only upside was that the trader managed a free lunch. Lucky for him.

Yawn.

It’s not just a headline, folks — it’s a game show!

Part 2: Thank You Father

“I really did not want to live in Sacramento anyway.”

— Don Novello, aka Father Guido Sarducci on Saturday Night Live, after being disqualified in his bid to become governor of California for not submitting enough valid signatures.

Fox News Channel has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Al Franken (of SNL fame) over the title of his upcoming book, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.”  Fox News registered “Fair & Balanced” as a trademark in 1995, so the suit seeks to force Penguin to rename the book.

I’m shocked and awed.  Wait, that’s owned by Sony.  No, they backed down after the bad press.  So who does own it?  According to the US Patent and Trademark Office, 27 out of the 28 original requests for the trademark are still active.  (Just search for “Shock and Awe”.)

Over 5,000 speeches and sermons are indexed on American Rhetoric.  On the list of the top 100 American speeches, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” is followed by well-known classics from John F. Kennedy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  The Online Speech Bank offers a wealth of oration, from Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” to Cher’s eulogy for Sonny Bono.  The Movie Speeches section includes the “greed is good” pitch from Wall Street and Jack Nicholson’s famous utterance, “You can’t handle the truth!” in A Few Good Men.

PollingReport.com has polls organized by category from a wide variety of organizations.  It’s a one-stop-shop to see the latest thoughts, instead of trying to find out with organization did the most recent poll.

Howard Dean has really moved up in the Democratic Primary.  Here’s how the percentages turned up for the top 4 candidates to the question, “which of those candidates you would be most likely to support”.

Way back when I started this site in early 1996, it had a link to the Church of the SubGenius.  (Their slogans include “Pull The Wool Over Your Own Eyes and Relax In The Safety Of Your Own Delusions,” and “I Don�t Practice What I Preach, Because I�m Not The Kind Of Person I�m Preaching To.”)  The church didn’t even have it’s own site back then; it was hosted at http://sunsite.unc.edu/subgenius/.

The site (SubGenius, not this one) was put together very convincingly as the rantings of a lunatic (or a pack of them) with a sense of humor; even the web design showed it with its giant fonts, centered text and excessive exclamation points!  There’s too much odd stuff there to ever finish it, but it was worth an occasionally visit to try to figure out both it and the many related sites that it spawned.  I never did learn much about what was behind the site, probably because I was searching the wrong way.

A recent article explains a little about one of the church’s main contributors, Hal Robins.  Reading that of course led me to another article and another, and I soon realized how vast the conspiracy was. 

It turns out that Robins was the the fellow that did Weirdo comics in the ’80s.  The very long but interesting look at this guy in the SF Weekly article led me to the next SubGenii contributor: Paul Mavrides.  He is one of the three people that worked on The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, and semi-recently did the pencil-in-the-ear cover for the Butthole Surfers album Electriclarryland.  In an interview, he says Ivan Stang (aka Doug Smith) was the main “spiritual funnel” for SubGenius.

Probably the best descriptions of SubGenius are in one of Stang’s interviews here or here.  Along with Stang, the other founder is Dr. Philo Drummond — I’m guessing he’s not out of the closet yet because there isn’t any info available on him.

Here’s an interview excerpt showing some of who’s behind the curtain:

GA: Who are some of the more prestigious SubGenius Members?

IS: Our idea of prestige, or Theirs? … Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO is probably the most famous frequent SubGenius collaborator. One of my partners and practically a co-founder, Paul Mavrides, has lately been starting to get the recognition he deserves. He designs our books, does some of the best art, co-writes, and generally polices my tendency to get all sappy and sentimental. He�s best known for comics like The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Anarchy, but his paintings and “serious” art are getting more and more attention. Other artists and weirdos who are famous and happen to also be SubGenius ministers include the painters Robert Williams and Gary Panter; cartoonists R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, the late Rick Griffin, and many more; movie directors Jonathan Demme and Mike “Wizard of Speed and Time” Jittlov; counterculture heroes Ken Kesey, Pee Wee Herman and Timothy Leary; philosopher Robert Anton Wilson, and “cyberpunk” writers like Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, and Lewis Shiner; David Ossman of The Firesign Theater… A lot of the SubGenius “celebs” are secretly famous � that is, they�re worshipped in their odd field: Michael Peppe the performance artist, for instance, or Winston Smith the collage guy.

But not everyone likes SubGenius.  While trying to find info on one of the early artists, John Hagen-Brenner, I discovered a feud.  Did Hagen-Brenner really try to bomb Bob Black?  Or is this just more of the joke?  That rant did show me that a lot of the early creative stuff I saw on the Web was by people that knew each other.

Imagine the population of the United States stretched across a football field in order of income, from poorest to richest with the median income at the 50-yard line. Now put a stack of $100 bills representing each person’s income on the field, where a 1-inch stack of $100 bills is $25,000.

The stack gets gradually higher, from 0 to about 2 inches ($39,000) at the 50-yard line. It’s about 4-inches high, representing $132,000 at the 95-yard line, which means that 95% of population’s income is shown in less than 4 inches. Well past the 99-yard line that you hit the million mark: a stack of $100 bills 40-inches high. At the far, far end is a tiny sliver of width that is the richest people. Although this information is dated, Bill Gates in his largest income year would be represented by a stack of bills over 7890 miles high ( $50 billion). So lets bring things back to earth: According to Forbes, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, made more than $706 million in 2002 – that would be a stack of bills about 111.5 miles high.

The L-Curve has a graph that better illustrates this.

A nice, simple thought from Conceptual Guerilla:

“Cheap labor”.  That’s their whole philosophy in a nutshell � which gives you a short and pithy “catch phrase” that describes them perfectly.  You’ve heard of “big-government liberals”.  Well they’re “cheap-labor conservatives”.

The previous link (although you’re probably reading this one first because it’s above the earlier one) popped up because I was trying to find out who was responsible for a Flash animation called Army of One.  It’s a little too long, but well put together.  It’s sort of an anti-Bush message for the people that support him for his military policies.