Save the Internet!

It's American Censorship Day.  In honor of this holiday, I intended to [DELETED] a [DELETED] with a [FNORD] on my [DELETED].


PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.


Today, the government decides on whether or not there will even be an internet in the future. I strongly encourage all Americans to take a few moments today to email or call their Senators and Representatives and complain about SOPA and the Protect IP Act, two pieces of legislation that, if passed, will cripple the internet. Say goodbye to your social networks, your fan forums, and blogs even remotely like this one. If these laws pass, the RIAA will shut this site down because someone once posted the lyrics to "Freebird" in our comments. There won't even be space left on the net for hyperbole, over-reactions, or blatant misrepresentations of fact like my last sentence, because the technology industry will be too busy closing portals as it retreats from the lawsuits brought against them by the so-called entertainment industry. Seriously, Hollywood and big music are trying to take your internet away. The laws they are trying to pass will chill and censor online creativity and expression, while mostly failing to actually stop piracy.  They are pushing for restrictive internet laws in the US that would mirror those that exist in regimes like China and Iran. Today is the day. Please take a few minutes to call or write your law-makers while it's still morning. Thank you.

Here's a section of a disturbing little article I just read...

US Police Increasingly Peeping at E-mail, Instant Messages

Soghoian found through his research that law enforcement agencies requested more than 30,000 wiretaps between 1987 and 2009. But the scale of requests for stored communications appears to be much greater. Citing a New York Times story from 2006, Soghoian wrote that AOL was receiving 1,000 requests per month.
In 2009, Facebook told the news magazine Newsweek that it received 10 to 20 requests from police per day. Sprint received so many requests from law enforcement for mobile-phone location information that it overwhelmed its 110-person electronic surveillance team. It then set up a Web interface to give police direct access to users' location data, which was used more than 8 million times in one year [emphasis mine], Soghoian wrote, citing a U.S. Court of Appeals judge.
Those sample figures indicate the real total number of requests is likely much, much higher, since U.S. law does not require reporting and companies are reluctant to voluntarily release the data.
"The reason for this widespread secrecy appears to be a fear that such information may scare users and give them reason to fear that their private information is not safe," Soghoian wrote.

Newsflash for you: Your private information is not safe. It's not really even private anymore.

Heckuvaweirdassparallelworldweek

This week has been bizarre.

Peaceful little ol' me has narrowly avoided two fist fights this week, with total strangers (one of who was definitely crazy, the other seemed sane but got the bizarre impression that I was trying to attack his 70-year-old mother).

The night of the first such near-fist-fight (with a guy at a coffeeshop who just spontaneously turned to me and shouted "you can suck my dick!"), I also got called a "fucking bitch" by some drunk lady in a parking lot, and then 20 minutes later thought I'd stumbled into the midst of some sort of gang-violence but it turned out the people running straight at me in the dark waving weapons were just having a squirtgun fight at 11pm. That day was the worst of it, but things haven't returned to normal yet.

A couple days later a friend spontaneously moved to Montana in the middle of the night.

My wife's sciatica, which is usually pretty tame and has never had a flare-up longer than 36 hours is now on her 4th consecutive day of incapacitating pain.

At this exact moment there's some guy in my neighborhood shouting "Spider Wars! Dude, that sucks!" again and again at the top of his lungs. Like it's the most important thing in the world.

If anyone knows the metaphysical nature or dimensional coordinates of the parallel universe I've shifted in to, please share them with me. I'd like to chart a course back to my original reality.

Aborted License Plates

You know those specialized license plates - I'm not talking about ones with custom numbers, like "FAA-QUE" or "STRTRKFN" - I mean the ones with alternative background images and cute little messages indicating you're a ham radio operator, or a dog lover, or a wildlife conservation supporter? They're like bumper stickers that are overpriced by $100 or more.

Well, long story short, there's various anti-abortion groups that have been trying to get a "choose life" plate made in every state. When the states have refused, they took them to court. The recent North Carolina case is now expected to get to the Supreme Court.

As an advocate of free speech, I'm looking forward to them getting there way. Having to look at the words "Choose Life" when stuck at an intersection won't bother me nearly as much as it'll bother them when Atheists or Pro-Pot groups get on the bandwagon. I'm looking forward to the day when some car in front of me sports a state-minted license plate promoting a hastily erected non-profit that rims a loophole to pimp the porn industry. Every time I'm ogling the free speech boobies on the license plate in front of me, I'll think how happy I am that I chose life.

Worst bailout proposal yet

As bad as the idea of giving more money to corporate robber barons is, there's still the possibility for these bailouts to get even worse.

"As recently as last week, Democrats in Congress were discussing the wrinkles of a proposed bailout for struggling newspapers like the Times.
...

Business Week suggested wiping out newspapers' debt or subsidizing news digitization through a government-run purchasing program backed by Amazon's Kindle."

As if the major media weren't already a tool of the power elite, now we're talking about having the government pay off their debts. You think maybe they'd be unlikely to ever criticize said government again? Why not establish a new cabinet-level position called the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, while we're at it?

Never mind, I should quit my bitching. I'm 8 years late and several trillion dollars short. The major media is already beholden to the evil secret masters of the corporate state. More bribes from (or for) the power structure won't have an impact on their non-existent journalistic integrity. Instead, it's obvious that there's only one real problem with this plan, or at least only one real problem that John Q. Public will give a rat's ass about:

"But really, would you want to be forced into buying a Kindle just so a poorly managed daily paper on the other side of the country can continue to pay it's gossip columnist and Ann Coulter's syndication fee? I don't."

Perish the thought. That would be a real freakin' tragedy.

I'm not to worried about it, though. The Federal Government couldn't manage to get the majority of us to redeem coupons for free converter boxes on our all-important television sets by the time the first deadline for that came and went. How the hell does anyone think they can motivate us to all buy some kinda fancified readin' doohickey?


(quotes from Raw)

Suicide Soldiers (Updated)

US Combat Deaths in Iraq War since it's inception: just over 4,000
US Combat Deaths in Afghanistan since 2001: just over 600

Those numbers I already knew. A volunteer for the ACLU, working on a street corner I happened to walk past today, alerted me to a related set of facts I'd been unaware of.

# of attempted suicides amongst active duty US soldiers in 2002: 350
# of attempted suicides amongst active duty US soldiers in 2007: 2,100

The vast majority of those suicides have been amongst units that are NOT seeing combat, mostly on bases within the US. The suicide rate amongst servicemen is the highest it's been since the Vietnam War.
Worse yet, she said the same thing is happening amongst the National Guard units that were deployed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Worst of all, she said, despite all the combat, more US soldiers had killed themselves this year than had died in Afghanistan.

What the fuck is going on? These figures seemed so crazy, I couldn't just take her word for it. I told her as much, I was openly skeptical.

She said she was quite confident in those figures, as she herself had been out of the army for less than a year, having been discharged for medical reasons just a few months ago. She said this is the most important election in US History, and that her experiences in the military convinced her to take an active role in the ACLU to help ensure the integrity of the vote this year. She said, if you doubt my numbers, google it yourself when you get home.

So I did. OMG WTF I feel sick! She was right. Combat deaths right now are less than 10% of what they were in Vietnam, but the suicide rate for soldiers is about the same as it was then? Remember, in 'Nam, people were drafted - our current Army is all-volunteer, yet this year is expected to set a record-high for both attempts and successful suicides among servicemen. That is a terrifying sign that something really abnormal is transpiring on bases in the US.

I now have to repeat my earlier question: "What the fuck is going on?"

Addendum/Update:

• According to the articles, the vast majority of the suicides are folks who either have never seen combat duty, or have returned to from deployment more than a year ago. Nearly all the suicides are occuring on US bases.
• According to the lady I was talking to yesterday, there's one base in particular that's had more suicides in the past 7 years than soldiers died in Afgahnistan. I haven't been able to find an online source that confirms that later point, but I also can't remember the name of the base she'd indicated, which would probably make the search much easier. If this is true, that's a sure sign that something fucked up is happening on that base.
  

Open Season

In a comment, X (is back!) wrote:

I still find it amusing how we can mock people for their politics, their personal habits, the cars they drive, even the food they eat (lutefisk anyone?), but we can't someone's mock [sic] religion.

I understand that mocking a persons ethnicity, sex, age, orientation or any other innate characteristic about them which is beyond their own control is cruel, but when religious belief like politics, low-rise jeans and driving an obnoxious Hummer or a self-righteous Prius is a voluntary endeavor, I see no reason for it not to be fair game for ridicule.

I keep reflecting on this statement, and, as much as I hate to admit it, he's probably on to something.

The counter-argument is that many people don't choose their religion, it's generally foisted upon them. But the same is true about political parties - it's just that most people step out of their parent's shadow faster on politics than on religion. If you're the sort of sheep who does what you're told, you'll likely maintain your parent's politics and religion for life. If you're a self-thinker, you may step away from either or both. One's a little more likely than the other, but it's only a matter of degree, and a fairly trivial degree as well.

The particularly annoying thing for me is that if I acknowledge there's nothing wrong with mocking someone's religion, I pretty much have to admit there's nothing wrong with someone mocking me about being vegetarian.

I know that's a touchy spot for me - if I say it's okay, I'm pretty much consigning myself to never-ending arguments. Part of why I rarely watch TV (other than the fact that most network programming rots your brain) is the ceaseless parade of commercials for restaurants, grocery stores, and meat products. It pisses me off - having dead carcass waved in my face, people telling me that I'm abnormal for not eating what they do.

But I generally don't go off about it, because I generally hold myself to the standard that it's not polite or proper to assail someone about their dietary choices. A person's really got to get my goat in order for me to be provoked into responding about my vegetarianism and their carnivorosity. Lutefisk gets my goat - mostly 'cause I think the only critter that could survive on that lye-soaked fish-flavored jello is the same sort of critter that can survive on a diet of tin-cans and garbage. Dear friends insisting that broccoli screams, or that since I must kill microbes therefore I shouldn't feel guilt about killing anything, gets my goat. My mother-in-law insisting that lobster is a vegetable gets my goat. Frankly, I ain't got much goat left.

So, yeah, I'm on the verge of agreeing that there's nothing wrong with mocking anyone's religion. But religion is much further down the continuum then diet is, so if I move the line past religion, it has to hop past diet and several other issues as well.

Seth Godin recently drew parallels involving religion, technology and fashion. I think I'll take him out of context:

People will recommend something if adoption improves their lives.

Fax machines? Life is better for me if you have one.

Fashion? Life is better for me if I'm not the only one wearing this.

Religious sect? Life is better for me if I'm not the only one in the building.

Vegetarian? Life is better for me if my friends and I can eat the same meals, and blog from the same viewpoint. By that logic, I should be actively recruiting.

To be crystal clear - it's not that I'm afraid you're going to start mocking my vegetarianism. IMHO, that happens every time someone posts a picture of the bunny they killed as a child, or a video that uses hamburgers and bratwurst to explain WW2. You may not mean to insult, tease, or deride me, you may not mean to not-so-subtly imply there's something wrong with me because I don't eat meat, but it's sometimes hard for me to not interpret your actions as doing so. It gets my dander up.

I just know that if I acknowledge it's okay for you (and thus, me) to mock someone's religion, then that means it's also okay for you to mock me about vegetarianism, and thus okay for me to mock you about your meat eating. If it's okay for Dawkins' to call all Christians "Delusional" than it's okay for me to say equally insulting things about meat eaters.

I don't want to go there. I've been a vegetarian for a decade and a half. During that time, I've never told someone else they shouldn't eat meat. I've never tried to convert someone. I don't want to be a radical in-your-face vegetarian, many of the PETA crowd take it way too far.

But at the same time, most meat eaters haven't a clue that they are constantly being radical in-your-face meat eaters, unintentionally insulting and affronting myself and my wife on an almost daily basis. Many a time has someone that knew I was a vegetarian said "you sure you don't want some of this? It's really good!" On more than one occasion people have tried to trick me into eating meat "for my own good", by lying about ingredients. While I've gone off on the second group, I contemptuously tolerate the first.

I've been a smug and silent self-righteous ass, telling myself I'm better than you, because I tolerate your carnivorous boorishness. I've been wallowing in my imagined glory for being above the crass tactics of the rest of society. All that silent contempt has been "justified" by my defining the line of what sort of criticism is proper and fair far to one side, when in reality, it's quite possibly far to the opposite end of the continuum. That dickish self-righteousness has got to stop. On the theoretical level, at least, I'd generally rather be honest than polite. As mentioned a few dozen posts ago, Integrity has negative connotations I'd never understood.

If I go there, it's like I'm declaring "open season" on all the crap I've been grudgingly tolerating, and by extension declaring "open season" on all my idiosyncracies that I wish people would just quietly tolerate. If I go there, I'll be in danger of becoming a militant vegetarian, and that's not gonna be much fun. I'm bitter and cynical enough as is, last thing I need is Carte Blanche to be a vocal asshole about 2 or 3 more topics than I already am.

On the other hand, I'm constantly pissed off about "minor" things that are part of everyday life, and I don't have an outlet to vent that anger. I suspect that bottled frustration is part of what gets me into flame wars on gaming forums and has me stubbornly defending positions that I don't really support in the comment threads of LHC posts. I'm bugged about one thing, and transferring that negative energy to other topics. That's not very healthy or honest.

It's time to think outside the box. I've got an anger management issue, and it's got a few possible solutions:

1. I could just start mocking everyone for everything, and take life a lot less seriously. From time to time, I'll still get upset, but when that happens I can try to diffuse it via humor.
   
2. I could focus on insulting instead of mocking, and just be a petty and hurtful dick. Honestly, scathing cynicism comes more naturally to me than humor does, so this may be the way to go.
   
3. I could ditch the internet entirely. My anger doesn't manifest in my personal life. I could gamble that the net is causing it, instead of being how I vent it off. There's a danger that this could result in me becoming abusive in-person, though, as I used to have temper issues as an adolescent. I'm not yet willing to take that risk.
   
4. I could seek serious psychiatric help. I don't feel that I need it, but maybe I'm in denial.
5. I could self-medicate. Next round's on me.
   
6. I could give up my principles, start eating meat again, learn to drive, support a binary political party, and become a born-again something-something-mainstream, in hopes that this would result in me feeling somehow less persecuted or frustrated.
7. I could go the opposite direction. I could intentionally become an animal-rescuing, arms-stockpiling, orgy-coordinating, treason-fomenting, religion-subverting, vegetable-worshiping, faith-healing, self-imagined messianic half-alien nutjob and establish a commune on an abandoned oil derrick and start producing my own postage stamps for the Sovereign Nation of Rolfelandia.
   
8. I could just delete this post instead of hitting the "publish" button, and forget I ever brought the subject up. That's probably the safest route.
9. I could go ahead and publish, then later delete this post and deny it ever existed, gaslighting anyone who ever called me on it. Naw, that's crazy talk. I'd never do that.
   
10. I could save this post as a draft, not publish it, and know there's a chance that Jake or X will one day stumble across it anyway. If they ever do so, then I can delete it and gaslight just them. That seems much more reasonable.
    

I'm probably gonna try "solution" number 1, and see where that goes. Wish me luck and/or mock me. I may or may not pretend I don't care, and/or mock you back.

Congressmen vs Travel-Writers

I've done some follow-up research. My main source is this site about celebrity airplane crashes. I make no guarantees to the authenticity of said site, as until yesterday I didn't know it existed. They had no bias or agenda that I could spot, but I suspect they're based out of the US so regional celebrities from other parts of the world may be under-represented (I don't know).

Also, since their data is many pages, in paragraph form, and people don't fall in to comfy categories, there's a touch of subjectivity involved in this. I also didn't include 9/11, or any event that was clearly an admitted act of terrorism, since the point was to figure out whether or not the deaths of US Congressmen was an anomaly amongst non-intentional airplane crash statistics.

So, how many US Congressmen have died in plane crashes: 21. (Update: this is up to 22 as of Aug 2010.)

The total # of prominent US government officials to have died in plane crashes outside of war: 46
This breaks out as follows:

• # of US Representatives and Senators to have died in plane crashes: 21.
• # of Colonel-rank of higher military officials to have died in plane crashes outside of war: 11 (I think I included the famous spy plane pilot in this tally, despite not knowing his Rank, and obviously he was shot down intentionally, so a more accurate number may be 10 instead.)
  
• # of US Governors to have died in plane crashes: 4.
• # of former CIA Directors to have died in plane crashes: 1
• # of miscellaneous Government officials (cabinet members, state legislators, territorial legislators before Alaska became a state, etc) to have died in plane crashes: 9

Total # of foreign government officials to have died in plane crashes: 88
# of them from Israel, Pakistan or Afghanistan: 40
(note that these figures do not include the 34 aides to the President of Mozambique, as I was unable to determine what level of importance they held. By comparison, neither did I include any of the aides to US Senators in that section, above.)


# of Kennedy's to have died in plane crashes: 8.
(Plus, Teddy Kennedy narrowly survived a plane crash that killed 2 other passengers. Overall, members of the family have been in at least 6 different airplane crashes. You can learn more about The Kennedy Curse on wikipedia. In addition, one of the US Representatives who died in a plane crash had the last name Kennedy, but doesn't appear to be a close relative of the famous Kennedy clan.)

# of famous Actors and Directors (counting both screen and stage, domestic and foreign) to have died in plane crashes: 22.

# of famous Musicians (domestic and foreign, all genres) to have died in plane crashes: 57. (Like soccer teams, Musicians tend to crash in groups, though usually just 3 or 4 at time, not 20.)

# of corporate CEOs, Presidents, and CFOs (foreign and domestic both included, since most big companies are multinational) to have died in plane crashes: 18.

# of NASA employees to have died in plane or spacecraft crashes: 24.
# of famous non-NASA scientists or inventors to have died in plane or spacecraft crashes: 60 (46 of those 60 were from a single crash over the Ukraine, so, number of non-NASA scientists and inventors outside that one crash is only 14)

# of US Athletes and Coaches to have died in plane crashes: 135 (unfortunately, I was over half way done with my analysis before it occurred to me to seperate this into pro vs college. Obviously, there's a lot more college-level athletes than professional ones, and they tend to go down in groups. For example, one crash took out 43 Marshall University Football Players and Coaches. Anecdotally, it seemed like 80% or more of US Athlete deaths from aircrashes were at the college level, but I haven't run the numbers on that.)
# of foreign athletes to have died in plane crashes: 187 (more so than any other stat, this number is really subjective. Soccer teams go down in droves. There were cases of 14, 15, 17, 18, and 25 members of soccer teams dying at once, plus three unspecified "the entire team" entries that I counted as 20 people per team since I didn't have a more solid number)
# of professional race car drivers to have died in plane crashes: 10 (No other non-team sport had more than 3)

# of travel writers to have died in plane crashes: zero.
# of other authors to have died in plane crashes: 6. (I only counted people who are primarily known for being authors, not just anyone who wrote an autobiography.)

The autobiography / author point brings up some good issues of how hard it is to categorize people for the above purposes. For example:

Law professor Wesley J. Liebeler (71) and his flight instructor were killed when their plane crashed in Lake Winnipesaukee near Gilford, New Hampshire during a training flight. Liebeler served as counsel to the Warren Commission that investigated President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

Should I categorize Wes Liebeler as a 'famous Lawyer' (if so, 7 have died in plane crashes), as a Pilot (hundreds of those guys have died in plane crashes, including at least 29 'famous aviators'), or as someone within two degrees of separation from the JFK assassination (of which about 12 have died in plane crashes by my count)?

A similar conundrum exists for G. David Schine, who was an aid to Senator McCarthy, and a low ranking military man who died in a plane crash not related to war, and also executive producer of 1971's The French Connection. That's 3 categories he doesn't quite fit into.

And what about Michelle Clarke?

Clarke was the first black female anchorwoman on any network station in the U.S. As a child, her family was the first black family to move to Cicero, Illinois, sparking days of riots by whites, necessitating the call-up of the National Guard.

She died in the same plane crash that killed US Representative George Collins and Dorothy Hunt (wife of E. Howard Hunt, CIA operative and one of Nixon's "Plumbers"). This all seems somehow relevant to the discussion at hand, but doesn't fall neatly into any category from which I can extrapolate meaningful statistics (well, except Collins' death being 1 of 21 Congressmen).


# of members of Osama Bin Laden's personal family to have died in airplane crashes not related to 9/11: 2 (His father, Mohammed Bin Laden, died in a plane crash in the late 60s. Osama's older brother, Salem Bin Laden, died in a plane crash in 1988. What do you suppose was going through the man's head when he gave the orders to attack the US by crashing planes?)

I still intend to find out how the size of the various categories compare. For example, the number of Congressmen vs the number of major CEOs vs the number of Actors / Directors that died in plane crashes are very similar. But that similarity tells us nothing if we don't know how many people (who haven't died in plane crashes) fall into each of those groups.

(Eyeballing it: there's around 535 Congressmen at any given time. All the Fortune 500 companies have at least one person at the CEO/CFO/Chairman/President levels. My "Actor" category includes not just Hollywood actors and directors, but also broadway performers, foreign stars, etc. But that's all the energy I've got for this topic, at least for today.)

And (as was pointed out in the comments), we also need to know how often these people fly by small plane... solid data for which isn't readily available. So I don't think I'll ever end up with more certain numbers.