"Free speech for me but not for thee": Anti-war activist arrested for expressing views

This is either a country where we allow freedom of speech and the press whether or not we agree with what's being said, or we aren't. If we aren't, then this isn't a country worth fighting and dying for anymore. The way America really, really is, what it's become... screw it. Let it die. Don't ask me to love what this country has become. That's like asking a son to totally accept his father even though dear old Dad is an alcoholic and heroin addict. You can love what your father used to be before the addiction the same way you can love what the American republic used to be... and that's patriotism at its finest. But you can't love someone or something and agree to watch their self-destruction like that.

A student at George Mason University is harassed by campus police, then arrested for "anti-recruiting". The behavior of the people who didn't agree with his stance is nothing short of fascist, including the supposed "Marine".

I'm wondering if anyone will write me an e-mail or comment on this, and defend what happened to this guy.

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Microsoft vs. Google: Count Zero coming true

In 1987 William Gibson released Count Zero, the sequel to his award-winning novel Neuromancer (hard to believe it's now over 20 years since that book first came out). One of the three stories in Count Zero - which eventually tightened together into the story's central plot - focused on Turner: a mercenary-type who specializes in helping scientists and executives defect from one company to another. See, in the near-future depicted in Gibson's "Sprawl trilogy" (which concluded in Mona Lisa Overdrive), cutting-edge technology is such a cutthroat business that corporate talent needs a small army to get extracted from the highly-fortified compound of a multinational conglomerate in order to make a career change. Needless to say, the company that the defector is fleeing from is not happy about losing a chunk of its braintrust to a competitor.

Count Zero comes to mind now that Microsoft has lost at least two executives - including one of their top computer scientists - to Google. An enraged Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer reportedly threw a chair after one of the execs told him about an imminent departure for Google. The big fear at Microsoft now is that Google is going to be hiring even more staff from the "House that Gates Built". Part of that is the worry that Google will be offering word processor and spreadsheet applications over the web, instead of having to pay Microsoft several hundreds of dollars for MS Word and Excel.

It's almost enough to chalk up one more mark for things that William Gibson foretold in his books. First it was the Internet (Gibson is the man who first came up with the term "cyberspace"), now it's (nearly) all-out war between rival corporations. Maybe someday soon we'll have "simstim" also.

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Thirty years ago, people really did BUY these

Darth Larry made a frightening (and funny) find a few days ago. It's hard not to laugh but remember: twenty years from now our children will be snickering at OUR CDs of Eminem and Brittany Spears.

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Smurfpocalypse Now

I saw this picture and was hysterical with laughter for about fifteen minutes...UNICEF created this 20-second promo that's airing in Belgium right now, showing the Smurfs' village getting hit with an incendiary airstrike. The idea behind it is to bring awareness to the plight of children caught in war zones, hence Baby Smurf crying with Smurfette's crumpled corpse on the ground nearby. Here's the only actual video of this that I've found online, in Windows Media format.

This has got to be one of the most surreal things I've seen in quite a long time.

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Back

Time to return.

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I am going away for awhile

I am stepping away from blogging for some time. Don't know for how long. Things could do for a little respite, and some realigning, and you never know how they'll settle out in the end... but I rather believe that it will be for the better. Don't be surprised if this blog is entirely different when I return. Don't be surprised if I'm entirely different. Who knows, I might be a whole 'nother person that you've never seen before when this is finished. But we'll see how and what happens in the meantime about that. Until then, keep smiling.

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When Bush says "I want more power", start worrying

So, President Bush is asking Congress to give him more powers in the event of major catastrophes. The article suggests that he may ask to be given the authority to:

- Order mandatory civilian evacuations

- Dispatch U.S.-based armed forces for emergency search-and-rescue operations

- Grant wider leeway for active-duty U.S. military personnel to carry out law enforcement operations.

The last one is the really troubling possibility: that Posse Comitatus could be suspended.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest what to some is the unspeakable, if not outright unthinkable: that given the right situation, this president will seek to remain in office indefinitely. That if a major enough terrorist act were to happen between now and the 2008 election, Bush would see fit to suspend the vote "for the duration of the emergency". He would appeal to the American people and enough of them would nod their heads and agree that it "wouldn't be right" to be changing presidents amid wartime. If granted a wider leeway of presidential powers, Bush could probably do so with very little recourse left to any opposition other than outright rebellion.

Of course, I thought the same thing of Bill Clinton some years ago: that he would go to this kind of length to cover up his wrongdoings. I was wrong on that one (thankfully). The thing is, as more time goes by I think Clinton was actually the more noble between he and Bush (and I never thought I'd put "Clinton" and "noble" together like that). I really can't put it past Bush to go for something like this if there were a chemical or low-yield nuke attack somewhere in America. With all the mechanisms he's put in place - and now that he's seeking to put in place further - I'm more than a little inclined to believe that he's looking for some way to use it all to his own advantage.

Yeah, maybe I'm speaking a lot of crapola. But you tell me: do you trust any politician who's asking for more power?

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For a few dollars more: "The Man with No Name" coming to Xbox/PS2

IGN.com is reporting that a videogame based on Sergio Leone's "The Man with No Name" trilogy is coming to Xbox, PC and Playstation systems sometime in 2006. It's possible that Clint Eastwood might be brought onboard to provide vocal talent for the game.

This might be what finally gets Dad to pick up an Xbox controller :-)

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Episode III goof: Ring around the collar

This has been bugging me ever since I caught it the very first time I saw Revenge of the Sith. The scene where Anakin is on the slab, getting rebuilt into classic Darth Vader. Here's three cuts in succession. Notice anything wrong here?Give up?

Okay, in the top image there's Anakin in most of the Darth Vader armor (for the first time I'm noticing that he's not wearing the gloves) and the droid is lowering the facemask down onto Anakin's head. The next panel shows us Anakin's POV as the mask turns on, giving us the only glimpse in any Star Wars movie of how Vader sees the world behind the mask. The bottom image is just before the mask clamps down with the helmet completely sealing the head.

The "collar" that the mask hooks onto is missing in the first image, even though the mask is already on its way down onto Anakin's face. It mysteriously materializes around his neck just in time for the whole thing to come together around his head. The collar should be there during this entire cutaway to Palpatine's medical facility, but it ain't.

Maybe this'll be something they digitally fix for the forthcoming DVD release. Or for the "Ultimate Edition" six-episode multi set that you just know George Lucas will someday release with EVERYTHING corrected and amended per his grand master vision :-)

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New toy to play with

Lisa found me a 256 MB flash drive. Previously I was using a 128 MB one. I know they make them much bigger (like a gig or so) but I still think it's a pretty neat gimmick to mess around with. I find it amusing that this is 80 megabytes bigger than the hard drive in my very first computer. First things I put on it was the medium-sized Quicktime of Forcery and a Quicktime installer, so I can carry around a much larger version of my own movie with me. Lisa's gonna be using the 128 version for school stuff from now on. Anyhoo, just thought this would be a neat thing to mention getting, if nothing else than for my own sake :-)

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Four years ago today al Qaeda defeated the United States

Osama bin Laden got pretty much everything he wanted. The country that existed prior to 9/11 is gone now. In its place is a land where no-warrant searches take place, where you can be locked up indefinitely without being charged or put on trial, where our women and children are fondled obscenely at the airport, where guns are now seized from average citizens, where Big Brother monitors all of our communications (if you don't think the government isn't interested in what you are writing or reading, you're dead wrong), where it's all to easy to lie and deceive people into a horribly executed abortion of a war, where our military forces are stretched to the breaking point, where we are practically surrendering our southern regions to illegal immigration (California to Texas will be northern Mexico at this rate), where citizens do not matter so much as corporate interests...

Dammit, this isn't the America I grew up reading about. I really do wonder if that America can even come back, or if it was ever really here at all.

Do you think that America is a much greater country today than it was four years ago, before the planes hit?

We reacted the wrong way totally. We should have been like the British, treating this like an enormous act of criminal minds and proceeded to punish the guilty as necessary. Instead we got a country that punishes everybody. Well, everyone except those with power and affluence, 'course. When they got bombed this summer the people of Britain were stalwart. We have been nothing other than coward.

We let them win, because we allowed them to make us destroy who we are as Americans. We gave al Quaeda the biggest victory of its existence, and we dare pat ourselves on the back for being "good American patriots" even as we give away one freedom after another for sake of "security" from the government.

H.L. Mencken was right: "Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses". I know exactly who the jackals are. The problem is there's too many jackasses in this country ruining it for those of us that still care about these things.

I don't feel any bit "patriotic" on this fourth anniversary of 9/11, because there's precious little left to this country to feel proud about. And I refuse to be a hypocrite about it. We've been destroying ourselves ever since. There won't even be an America like this in another five years, the way things are going. You tell me how that's something to honor with empty words and useless gestures.

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This church's pastor is an idiot

From KLTV.com come this heartwarming story of Christian "love":

Local Church's Sign Offends Evacuees

A confrontation this morning between an East Texas church and an evacuee from New Orleans. It centers around a sign out front of Woodland Hills Baptist Church on Old Jacksonville Road in Tyler, about a mile inside the loop. Some say the message is offensive.

"I drove by that sign and was just horrified when I saw that," says Kelly Jackman who now lives in Tyler but used to live in New Orleans.

That sign at Woodland Hills Baptist Church reads ,"The big easy is the modern day Sodom and Gomorrah."

Kelly along with her sister Robin Lafont, an evacuee from New Orleans, showed up this morning at the church to talk to the man who put it up, Pastor Wiley Bennett.

During a heated discussion, Robin asked, "What's the point of the sign out there?" Pastor Bennett replied, "The point of the sign is New Orleans, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and New York City are some of the most wicked cities in America."

Robin, who still has family members unaccounted for in New Orleans, is offended by the sign. "I'm telling you. This hurts. Why would you want to put more hurt, more salt in my wounds and why would you want to do this to me?"

Kelly adds, "And to go by and see this church saying that God did this to destroy these people and basically they're celebrating that by putting that sign up there saying look at what God has done. He has destroyed the city of New Orleans because it is evil."

Pastor Bennett says, "Anybody that's ever visited New Orleans, the very name its self - Big Easy - denotes that it's easy to find sin there..."

WRONG!! You wanna know where the nickname "the Big Easy" came from? Black musicians from the east and further up the Mississippi used to consider New Orleans to be maybe the one place that they could always find work. It was almost too easy to be a paid musician there, and so it is that they came to consider New Orleans the "Big Easy". There was nothing vulgar about the term, and if it weren't for it being so attractive to black musical artists there never would have come the unique sound of jazz (although I've heard some preachers rail against jazz itself as being "evil" but that's a rant for another time...)

Anyway, the pastor of this church... is acting like an idiot, to be nice about it. See, this is what happens a lot when some Christians take it upon themselves to be more an authority on God than anyone else. This guy relishes hurting people, though he won't admit it. Take a looksee at his church's website: obviously a "King James only" outfit. Which explains the horridness of it: King James only churches usually have some of the worst websites I've ever seen. Whenever a church is King James only, that pops a big red flag in my mind: they see that as a license to inflict all the pain they want to, in the name of the Lord. Believe you me I know.

Anyway, I don't believe that Katrina was a punishment from God on New Orleans alone: the most "sinful" part of town escaped practically unscathed. And the "Southern Decadence" gay pride parade went ahead as scheduled, by the way... not that I think anything highly of that (I don't) but that fact alone smacks this notion that Katrina was "divine retribution" upside the head.

Okay, enough ranting here. Time to get ready for church, and who knows if I won't rant about this there either...

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Interdictor blog has been the site I've most visited the past two weeks

There's going to be a movie made about these guys someday, bank on it.

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It was four years ago tonight...

...that I started writing the script for Forcery. Feels so curious now, to finally have that behind me.

Two days from now will more or less be the official start of pre-production of our next project. Which will be something of an experimental way to make a movie. I'm really excited about what this is going to be, all the things that are going into making it.

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KWerky Productions website is still down

No, we ain't out of business (yet :-), we're just working through the intricacies of a physical relocation of our server. Should be back up soon (along with news on our next project or two). It'll be at the usual address when it comes back online.

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"It can't happen here"

Avearge American citizens are being removed from their homes by force, are having their weapons seized at gunpoint, and are being removed to government-run shelters "for their own protection", in a major American city. A federal court just ruled that the government can detain anyone it calls a "threat" for however long it wants to.

All of this is happening under a Republican President, by the way. You know... the party that this kind of thing isn't supposed to happen from.

For anyone who's been paying attention to these sorts of things, Claire Wolfe is more or less admitting that "it's time" now. "I'll never argue with anyone who says the time is already here," she writes: "The only question now is how to be effective. But it's now absolutely imperative to find the way."

I hope and pray she's right.

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