As my CD drive appears to be on the fritz on my laptop, it’s likely I’ll be looking into an Air sometime soon—since the drive is always the first to go, why not get a laptop that doesn’t have one in the first place.

It’s 9:28 PM
Commuter train of the damned
Slaving away for machines
Which do our thinking for us
Which is what this is all about…
Evolution…

It’s 9:32 PM
Commuter train of the damned
Soon to be boarding
A motly crew of the damaged
Is crowding me in the waiting room
What if I stay perfectly still,
Can they see me?

It’s 9:34 PM
Commuter train of the damned
The mechanized nightmare
We’re all wired in now
Did I say that out loud, or just think it?
Sloppy cadence.

It’s 9:37 PM
Commuter train of the damned
Soon to be headed out
To places boring as fuck
Thou art damaged and still with me
Thy Rod and thy staff…

It’s 9:39 PM
Commuter train of the damned
It won’t be long now, man
Atomic batteries to power
Turbines to speed, ready to go
Doors are closing

It’s 9:45 PM
Commuter train of the damned
Fascists ain’t runnin’ shit.
A small god for small miracles
I knew they’d be invading damn
Iran on nine-twelve.

On his first day, he never arrived. I called and called, and three days later he informed me that he was in India on an emergency, and had asked a friend of his to return my calls if/when I called him. His “friend” never did, so it fell through. About a month after that, the first-choice candidate called me up out of the blue and asked if we were still looking for developers.

I said sure, and he came onboard for the same salary as choice #2 (the main sticking point for him the first time around). He was supposed to start on or about the first of November, though the owner and him had those conversations and it was never quite clear what exactly was said as far as a definite start date (if anything was). So last Monday, I called him up, and he was in Austin. We worked out that he would start yesterday at 8am.

He too, never showed up.

Five more messages and 30 hours have passed since he was supposed to start working here. Reading Glen Greenwald today, I come across this little tidbit, which he quoted from an Associated Press story from Monday (emphasis is Greenwald’s):

In court documents filed with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., the Justice Department said a new anti-terrorism law being used to hold detainees in Guantanamo Bay also applies to foreigners captured and held in the United States.

Immigrants arrested in the United States may be held indefinitely on suspicion of terrorism and may not challenge their imprisonment in civilian courts, the Bush administration said Monday, opening a new legal front in the fight over the rights of detainees.

The story also goes on to note that the “test case” of this is a Quatari programmer living in Peoria, IL (yes, that Peoria)—about an hour and a half south of my house. Nice that some geek is now simply a test-case of Presidential TortureAlternative Interrogation Procedures, not a human being with a wife and four kids. If I were an immigrant, I’d get the fuck out of the country and not look back as well.

Of course, it’s also possible that dude is just an asshole, and the whole “we can disappear you” thing is just a coincidence. Not that it really makes the “we can disappear you” thing much better, simply less immediate.

BTW, where are the Democrats on this? Or was the plan to just get elected and let Bush’s phony “bipartisanship” nonsense prevent them from actually doing anything lest the media paint them as “Terra-loving San-Franciscamites”?

[Kinda sorry something this snarky is the first post to PGO in months, but this particular paranoia-kicker is a little close.]

Update: Turns out dude had a “personal life crisis” that meant he had to stay in Austin, and would’ve called except for his dead cellphone battery. I guess Texas is worse than I suspected, since they apparently don’t have pay-phones or e-mail there either… *fume*

When you look at the use of color in that photo, the first thing you should notice is everyone in that photograph is white. It’s shocking to watch so many people internalize and regurgitate the “White = Normal” lie without even thinking, and that attitude is obvious in the responses to the start of rendition and the Military Commissions Act.

Start with the fact that the U.S. government denies even the possibility of habeas corpus, every day, all over the world. Immediately after 9/11, 1,400 people were rounded up and imprisoned by the INS without charge or the ability to see counsel. Thousands more are languishing in jail after being sold to American troops in Afghanistan by the our heroin-producing “allies” (one would be hard pressed to call anyone who helps junkies stay that way an “ally” in any but the most corrupt, Machiavellian sense). No writ for Iraqis or Afghans suspected of supporting whoever the bad guys are this week in those two countries, either.

Nor is this some new phenomena in American life. There was no habeas corpus for slaves prior to 1861. Or outspoken northern Democrats from 1861–1865. Native Americans weren’t allowed to file those writs until 1891. Japanese immigrants and their kids didn’t get it during WWII either.

Even prior to the Military Commissions Act„ whether this basic human right applies to non-citizens residing in the U.S. was a question considered up for debate by the same Congress: recall their earlier attempts to make local police ethnically cleanse Latinos from the U.S.—until the targets of that lily little genocide started marching by the millions and broaching the subject of neighborhood defense committees (rally ’round your family, pocket full of shells).

Naturally, like all laws, this will be primarily used against non-white people, but that does not mean it won’t be enforced against whites who don’t go along. In America, you can’t do that kind of thing to white people without passing laws and such (well, maybe commie-pinko whites, but they hardly count), which is why this law is a huge deal among the progressive groups when it merely institutionalizes what:

1. The Bush administration has been already doing for the last 5 years.
2. White-owned governments in general have been doing to everyone else for the last 400 years now.

It simply sucks that nobody here seems to care about anything unless they are personally threatened or attacked—well enough that the whole right-libertarian free-market/greed-is-good ideology deserves a look in a whole other light.

I’ll post still more on that photograph later.

or: Good times, good times (more on the photo later).

That night, I couldn’t help but think that this is no longer my country. I’m living on the same landmass, but “America” has packed up and left for greener pastures.

That is a fiction. The America I pine after has only ever existed in the fever dreams of its bohemian idealists. America as a whole has always been a brutal, mean-spirited hypocrite. It enslaved millions of Africans in the name of God. It slaughtered millions of indigenous Americans in the name of civilization. It conquered Cuba and the Phillipines in the name of colonial liberation. It setup banana republics in Central America in the name of democracy. It used nuclear weapons in the name of peace. It impoverishes a large chunk of the planet in the name of development. It conquered Iraq in the name of freedom, and continues to decimate it in the name of stability.

Now, it has decided to let itself disappear anyone it wishes and abuse them forever—in the name of security.

The climate chaos unleashed by finding large new reserves would make the mere collapse of industrial civilization look like a sideshow bagatelle¹

On the other hand, it’s somewhat disappointing to have my belief in Peak Oil skewered so expertly. The issue is not so much that I believed in it, but rather that there is so much petroleum in the world as to make both extreme climate change and further impoverishment of the U.S. poor and middle classes essentially inevitable.

I don’t, however, subscribe to his hand-waving dismissal of the petrodollar theories for the invasion of Iraq, if for no other reason than he does the standard “only on the Internet” shuck-n-jive in lieu of any actual counter argument. Yes, Bush wants to devalue the dollar against the Euro. That does not include throwing the global economy into chaos by letting over three billion dollars sit idle each day—or worse, come back to the Federal Reserve as countries dropped their dollar currency reserves, no longer requiring them to trade oil? Because that is what a switch from the dollar to the Euro would entail.

Americans really don’t care about freedom; they don’t really care about liberty; they don’t care about any of that.²

After that, the book reaches into the various voting scams which allowed Bush to steal the office, again. It covers quite a bit of information, from Ohio to New Mexico, from the more mundanely racist lists of voters to challenge to the more “sexy, Hollywoodish” (the book’s term) machine hacking. On page 243, I read the following, from an African American who was illegally denied the right to vote in 2000 in Tampa, and would have been again in 2004 had Palast’s filming crew not shown up to do a story on him:

I went into the place to vote and I was with my son and there were about 40 to 50 other people around and I got up there to vote and they told me I was a convicted felon. I told the young lady that I had never been arrested. I’ve never been arrested in my life. I I was in the military for four years and have been in the medical field ever since. You can’t even work for a hospital being a convicted felon… I was in the Persian Gulf War in ’91. It’s pretty screwed up how they did me, but what can I say?

I was upset, I was ashamed—with 40 people around—it made me feel real bad. And I’m just hoping I get a letter stating, hey, you can vote again, Willie.

I really feel it was bad for African-Americans—but hey, what can we do sometimes? What can we do?

At which point I collapsed out of my chair with a colossal fucking headache behind my left eyeball. After lying down for a few minutes to get my bearings back (an interesting experience in itself, BTW), I continued reading, eventually coming across another couple gems from New Mexico: Governor Bill Richardson (the only Latino governor in the U.S.) is the son of a Citibank executive and a woman who hails from Mexico City, and the only greater predictor of how worthless your vote is than race is income.

The resistance is just waiting to be organized³

When this is all finally sorted out, the middle class in general, and white people in particular will have a lot to answer for. It may be us, the younger-types in the workforce today asking for the accounting. It may be our kids. People will turn back to the last few generations and ask them: why did you let them get away with all this? Why did you keep your head down, trying to not fight them.

We’re all so busy scraping, just trying to hang onto our own toys, that they can get away with these kind of colossal crimes they’ve been getting away with. And while you’re busy trying not to get fired, they lynch the black guy next door. And that’s just the progressives/liberals/left.

The self-described “conservatives” will have more. One thing I don’t want to see, after the fight has been won, is some kind of phony “healing process” where all the bosses get to pretend they had nothing to do with it—to pretend they weren’t right there at the table, waited on by starving people. Where none of the police can quite remember who was in the K-9 units, and none of the military men can recall who was killing families and raping women in some desert hut, 12,000 miles away.

Ever notice how they never can find the racist cops in those civil rights documentaries—the cop who was siccing the dog on the kid, or the fireman manning the fire hose? That’s what I mean.

1. Robert Newman’s A History of Oil
2. Aaron McGruder, on C-SPAN
3. Ani DiFranco, Millennium Theater

Sometimes I think I’m the only one who has ever actually seen Head Office all the way through. Allow me some reminiscing… [insert wavy flashback lines here]

…sounds like it was cribbed from a uni-dimensional, dystopian sci-fi novel, which really sucks since it’s not fiction…

At any rate, it’s actually kind of humorous to watch to Democrats flounder and the Republicans go insane over the issue. Essentially, the Administration is treading extremely close to fucking with the money with their transaction-tracking program. I mean, how many rich people and organizations have their fingers in pies they would be embarrassed to have them in? Monthly dues to the Arse-tickler’s, Faggot Fan Club?¹ A copy of the receipt in the hands of the U.S. Treasury Dept. Wire-transfers to drug-running paramilitaries who are later implicated in a string of dead community and union activists? A copy of the receipt in the hands of the U.S. Treasury Dept. You get the picture.

Determining how that makes any sense is a task left to the reader…

So the Republicans have opened the door to allow the Democrats a chance to suck Capital’s dick, because Capital is now aware that the Republicans are wearing braces. Therefore, the goal of the smear campaign is to state, quite bluntly, that only a treasonous, objectively pro-terror communist would note the Republicans are wearing braces. Determining how that makes any sense is a task left to the reader.

Historically, however, the chances that any of this information will ever send someone wealthy, powerful, and white to pound-me-in-the-ass prison is nil, regardless of who is in charge. Clinton may have punished the tobacco industry for killing his universal health care plan over the cigarette tax hikes (which we got anyways) with the 90s lawsuits, but that’s a far cry from jail time. It appears the Democrats are either unable or unwilling to exploit this fissure publicly, they could have been caught off-guard by the venom directed at the Times, or they could be exploiting it privately. I think the party is refusing to disclose it’s motives publicly, because the DLC ultimately believes it can get it’s college tuition paid for if it does it privately. As the economic fortunes of the U.S. decline (as they must in a free-trade environment), the only recourse the state will have against the pissed-off newly-poor are repression and nationalism, so I think the Democrats are worried about giving up this power now, since they’ll likely need it back in a decade or so.

I fully expect the Democrats will half-ass it on the abuse-of-power scandals, and will probably end up doing what they say they want to do, if allowed: expanding the FISA Court again, to allow for “mass-target” warrants. If so, I’d expect them to pitch it as a “necessary logical extension of roving wiretaps,” even though the ability of the FISA court to issue non-FI-related warrants in the first place is already a pretty broad extension under the PATRIOT Act. Essentially, I think they’ll take another large step towards a completely secret Star Chamber, and call it a check against the Monarchy.