Search Warrant? We Don't Need No Steenking Search Warrant
Water
Gets poured through a cloth
To become free of impurities.
The Beloved's Name
Is a mystical weave and pattern-
A hidden sieve of effulgence
We need to pass through thousands of
Times.
From my constant remembrance
Of the friend,
All I now say is safe to
Drink.
Something that I have learned
From the Kind Radiant One
Who drew me from the unfathomable
Sky's well
Makes me playful all day
Long.
(
My family left this morning on an airplane from Albany International Airport to go to Karla's mother's house. They were "randomly selected" to have their checked luggage searched. There was a black-cloth-walled place near the ticket counter where we went and watched the guy search the bags. He didn't mess them up. I also doubt he would have found a well-hidden bomb. It probably helps to be travelling with a pretty five-year-old girl. At gate security, they found a small pair of nail scissors. The security lady carried them out and gave them to me. Besides having our fourth amendment guaranteed rights violated with aplomb, it wasn't too painful, but only because there were no lines at either place.
AP via The Washington Times - Big Brother watching, warns New York guide - Bill Brown's Surveillance Camera Players give tours every Sunday afternoon of New York City surveillance cameras. They have also given many scripted performances for the cameras. [trt-ny]
On a recent Sunday, Mr. Brown did a little dance in front of one camera, holding up a copy of the Constitution -- which he says outlaws such surveillance. He then smacked an eye-level sticker on the pole that read: "You Are Being Watched, Surveillance Camera Notice."
He went through a similar routine in front of the city's red- light cameras at Ninth Avenue and 20th Street, and yet again outside an office of American District Telegraph, a 130-year- old international electronic-security provider.
Babak Dehghanpisheh, John Barry and Roy Gutman at Newsweek - The Death Convoy of Afghanistan - death by container in the Afghan desert. Disgusting. [ferran]
Norman D. Livergood at Hermes Press -
Brainwashing America - interesting. [trt-ny]
We are living under the beginning stages of a military dictatorship in precisely the same way that 1930s Germans suffered under the Nazi regime.
As in the case of Nazi Germany, state-sponsored propaganda (brainswashing) is a vital part of the Bush regime's strategy.
Gary Galles at The Ludwig von Mises Institute - H.L. Mencken on Liberty and Government - a collection of quotes about government. [Mrs. K]
"The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone--one which barely escapes being no government at all."
"Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently--one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings..."
The problem is that our government has rushed in a torrent beyond those proper bounds:
"Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us..."
...
"Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency."
"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker."
...
"The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic."
...
"Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, criminal, grasping, and unintelligent."
...
The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself... Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable."
