Open Letter to my Senators

CISPA passed the U.S. House of Representatives.  This makes me mad, but I’m unsurprised that it would get through eventually.  So I wrote to my U.S. Senators today, Richard Blumenthal and Christopher Murphy of Connecticut.  I’m posting the letter here, for three reasons: 1) for feedback on how to make it better the next time I send it (and I will have to send it again); 2) as a model for other people to use, and to examine follow-up comments to make their own alterations to their future letters; and 3) to provide a public record that such an e-mail was sent to them, and that this could become a political issue for them in the future.

Dear Senators Murphy and Blumenthal,

As you may know, today the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR624, otherwise known as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or more popularly as CISPA.

I am writing to you to ask that you vote against any Senate version of the bill which may somehow make it to the floor of the U.S. Senate, and that you use your powers as a Senator to place a hold on any Senate version of this bill — or filibuster it as necessary — to prevent any version of this bill from passing the Senate.

I also ask that you work to include in any Senate version of this bill, a formal restatement of the principles of the fourth and fifth amendments of the United States Constitution, which explicitly defines the digital data of individual persons (not just citizens) as “Effects”, and thus protected from unreasonable search and seizures without a warrant — and to require companies which hold such data to insist upon warrants from law enforcement personnel before releasing information to local, state, or federal authorities.

We live in a time of greatly-expanded law enforcement powers. Today, the New England city of Boston is effectively “shut down” while a massive manhunt ensued for the alleged Marathon bombers. Yet a study of history has shown, time and again, that where citizens can be spied on at will, and their letters and materials can be studied at length and with impunity for any reason, that there is a corresponding reduction in political and economic freedom. Such powers, unregulated, lead to the criminalization of thought as well as deed.

I urge you, at this moment, to take a stand for individual liberty and the rights of the people as enshrined in the fourth amendment to the constitution, and block ANY Cyber Security Act which does not treat people’s data as private and protected from search and seizure.

It’s not perfect.  I’d be happier if there was a version of a Cyber Security bill I could support, instead of having to keep objecting to the same bad ones.   I also note with some pleasure that my own Congresswoman, Rosa DeLauro, and all of my nearby congressional representatives, voted against the House version of the bill.  Thank goodness that I don’t have to start writing angry letters to them about their votes on those bills, and I can instead write to them to say thank you.

Poem: For the Sun’s Exaltation

Thanks to Christopher Warnock, I know that Friday the Sun will be in its astrological exaltation, at Aries 18-19 degrees. There’s a whole bunch of ceremonial instructions appropriate to the day, and for the image of the talisman — something about a dancing woman with staff and various symbols around her… You can look it up on his site. For myself, I’m working on one of the most complicated sketches I’ve done to date. I have to admit, I’m not sure it will be worthwhile when it’s done. The learning is important, sure, but sometimes the product is important too. Both, in this case.

In the meantime, though, I have to write poetry for the day, too. And I have a particular poem in mind for this, an invocational ode for the Sun’s exaltation. But they’re harder to write. So I began early, and I’ll finish it during the local time window on Friday, which for me is local solar noon. Thanks to Freeman Preson, I know this is 12:38-12:55 pm for me, but it may be different for you.

[update: I've been reminded that April 8 is the day that the Sun is actually in its Exaltation... But that there is not a suitable hour of the Sun on Monday, April 8. So you can use this on Monday or Friday just before 1pm local time, wherever you may be.]

Hail to you, great Sun, in Exaltation!
Prince of planets, agile and clad in grace!
You stand in beauty, lord of Creation,
And every world around you keeps its place:
You are Lord and we but followers are —
Intemperate when you are in a rage,
Yet calm when you stoop to ripening grapes;
firey when you set forth in Dawn’s car,
weary as you approach old Twilight’s cage:
Thus has it been since our fathers were apes,

And spirit had not deigned to touch mortal!
Great Eye of Nature and the Seasons’ King —
Dancing lady supreme in your power —
As your chariot passes this portal,
And all your supplicants your praises sing:
Cause all our works to sprout and then flower.
Drive us on like your own coursers of flame,
To work with majesty, power and skill —
To mirror below, your own Ageless Name,
With deeds of illumined unwearied will.

Let those who empower our work this day,
And meet you, Sun, with our own best deeds—
Cause kings and princes to kneel at our doors!
Propitious bless our works with gracious ray,
Make fortunate our quests for wants and needs,
And guide us through rough seas to golden shores!
Mighty are your works, Source of Ageless Light,
Giver of justice and the good one’s guide:
The life of all living grows in your sight,
and none can match your celestial ride.

I may make some changes between now and Friday, but I think that’s the core of it. Altering poetry with both rhyme and metrical schemes is always hard, but it’s sometimes worth future editing.

4/30

A Prince’s Land Fleet

The prince of Monaco is auctioning off some of his fleet of cars (PDF of the sale catalog is the link).

I don’t have anything else to report.  I’m so glad I never got excited about cars the way that some folks did.  I totally understand the obsession, but I’m glad I don’t share it.

More shooting… lone gun nut or anti-liberal bias?

(CNN) — One person was shot Wednesday at the Little Rock headquarters of the Arkansas Democratic Party, police said.

The suspect was shot by police after a chase and later died, police said.

Police would not identify the victim, who is in critical condition at a hospital.

However, a witness told CNN affiliate KTHV that Arkansas Democratic Party Chairman Bill Gwatney had been shot, and the Democratic National Committee issued a statement indicating that Gwatney was the victim.

Police chased the unidentified white male for about 20 miles.

Police said man got out of his vehicle and began shooting at officers, who returned fire.

The suspect had walked into the downtown headquarters, near the state Capitol building, about 11:50 a.m. and started firing, Little Rock police Lt. Terry Hastings said, injuring “one of the people working in the office.”

Asked about a possible motive, Hastings said, “right now, we don’t know.” The investigation is ongoing, he said.

A woman in a nearby business told KTHV that Gwatney’s assistant came in and asked her to call police.

“I thought maybe someone had gotten hit by a car,” said Sarah Lee, who works at a florist’s shop. “She was just shaking really bad.” But then the woman said that Gwatney had been shot and that three shots had been fired, Lee said.

“She said she was waiting on the gentleman. He wanted to see the chairman. She tried to give him Democratic party stuff,” Lee said. “He took a sticker” but still wanted to speak to Gwatney, she said. “Evidently, he walked on around her and went in the office and started shooting.”

A vehicle description was provided to police, Hastings said, and officers found it it. After a chase into Grant County, about 20 miles south of Little Rock, the suspect was shot and taken into custody, he said.

The chase involved Little Rock police, Arkansas State Police and the county sheriff’s office, he said.

Former President Clinton and Sen. Hillary Clinton said in a statement that they are are “stunned and shaken by today’s shooting at the Arkansas Democratic Party where our good friend and fellow Democrat Bill Gwatney was critically wounded. Bill is not only a strong chairman of Arkansas’ Democratic Party, but he is also a cherished friend and confidante. Our thoughts and prayers are with Bill and his family today and we wish him a quick recovery.”

In Sheridan, Arkansas, where the chase ended, a crowd gathered near the suspect’s blue pickup as police cordoned off the area with yellow crime-scene tape. What appeared to be bullet holes could be seen in the truck’s windshield.

People at the nearby Arkansas Baptist State Convention said that just after the shooting, a man with a gun walked into their building.

The man was “white as a sheet,” convention official Dan Jordan said.

“I’ve heard he said something do to about losing a job. … He didn’t threaten anyone.” The man left through the front door shortly afterward, he said.

Police have not said whether the two incidents are linked, according to CNN affiliate KARK.

Samizdat and Collapse?

I’m aware that a lot of folks that I respect and like as poets, artists and writers are feeling crunched these days on an emotional/performative/creative front; articulated his sense of it in himself pretty well in today’s entry. (Others are doing fine: ‘s poem about Sunday’s shooting at the UU church in Tennessee rocked my socks off).

One of the tags I’ve been using on my LJ account these days is “annihilation anxiety”, which is my own sense of how difficult and hard this all can be. Gas prices have fallen slightly in the last few days and weeks, but there’s no sense that they’re going to fall enough to really affect many people’s budgets. The economy is tanking, and many families are having to tighten their belts on things like food as well as gas; eventually the trifecta here in the Northeast will be food, heating fuel and travel fuel. Global warming seems to be a continuing issue for everyone, but no one feels empowered to do much about it yet.

These choices are personal, but they start to become community-wide. I debate monthly on whether or not to stop using a cleaning lady, but I’m aware that Chris and her family will start to fall through the cracks if she doesn’t have enough work. Her husband has chronic illness, and the medicine bills and hospital fees continue to pile up. Traveling to see him in his specialty hospital continues to eat away at their lives and their wealth and their health.

A few months ago, when I began to read Club Orlov and other writings by folks interested in problems like Peak Oil and Climate Change as political-economic phenomena, I was struck by something that Dimitriy Orlov said about art. He said that in the days of Andropov and the early days of Gorbachev, there was an underground literature called samizdat. There were newspapers, blogs, zines, poetry journals, and other publications, usually produced on mimeograph machines or handwritten, and circulated hand-to-hand among interested parties. They were sharply critical of government — and in the Soviet system, that meant you were also criticizing the economic levers as well as the political ones. Satire and sarcasm were the principal weapons of these publications, first gently and then fiercely mocking the systems of authority.

Authority, of course, cracked down on them, hard. And got nowhere. The mimeograph machines were portable. There was a black market, and usable ones disappeared from official use to reappear in the unofficial economy. Alternately, the machines stayed right where they were, and the underground — who were all really part of the overground, too — simply used them while they were at work. And the writings were funny. They were pointed, bitter, hilarious, bleak, dark, humorous, and all the rest.

But the well of samizdat dried up, Orlov said. People stopped producing these writings, these cartoons, and this material, because they were working so hard on keeping themselves and their family afloat. The money system went first — no one put much trust in the rouble, because it didn’t matter how many roubles you had. You needed favors and contacts and friends to get inside the shop before all the toilet paper got sold. You needed to spend your time waiting in line to get the food. You needed creative energy for other things than ‘working’ at an official job in order to use an official mimeograph to wring out a dozen copies of your latest well-thought-out and funny anti-Communist screed.

My family genuinely believes in annihilation anxiety. Ask , but we laugh about it at dinners even as we think about how the latest bad news spells the end of the world. So you should take this next bit with a grain of salt, perhaps even a whole box of it. But my father — and I — both see the makings of another Great Depression here. And the commentators cloak it by saying, “oh, it’s not as bad as it was in ’35 or ’36, really.”

Well, maybe it’s not. But the rest of the world is losing its trust in the dollar, and shifting to other sources of value. Many of the best and most easily reached pockets of oil in the world are empty or nearly so, and the remaining ones are smaller, more difficult to get to, and involve releasing even more toxic waste than usual.

So I wonder. Are we having artistic difficulties because that’s just where we are in our careers? Or are we having artistic difficulties because our creative energies are being turned increasingly to ‘getting by’ instead of to getting out and getting noticed? And how bad is this likely to get?

Maybe it’s just annihilation anxiety. But I don’t see things getting great any time soon.

Shooting at UU Church in Tennessee

ganked from :

Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity on accused shooter’s reading list

Police found right-wing political books, brass knuckles, empty shotgun shell boxes and a handgun in the Powell home of a man who said he attacked a church in order to kill liberals “who are ruining the country,” court records show. Knoxville police Sunday evening searched the Levy Drive home of Jim David Adkisson after he allegedly entered the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and killed two people and wounded six others during the presentation of a children’s musical. Knoxville Police Department Officer Steve Still requested the search warrant after interviewing Adkisson. who was subdued by several church members after firing three rounds from a 12-gauge shotgun into the congregation.

Freddie and Fannie may be broke

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which are GSEs or government-sponsored enterprises, may be technically insolvent. They have about $5.5 trillion in outstanding mortgages between them and only $80 billion in equity. Technically, the US government guarantees these loans but only implicitly. If Congress decides to guarantee them explicitly, the government will have debts equal to our GDP, give or take a few hundred million. If Congress decides NOT to back these mortgages, they may render 4-10 million families homeless as their homes are foreclosed.

Standard&Poor’s, Moody’s, and other rating agencies have been saying since Reagan was president that they would downgrade the creditworthiness of the US government if the US ever explicitly guaranteed Freddie and Fannie mortgages. Guess what, folks. That reckoning may be about to come due/true.

I would *strongly* advise anyone against major purchases at this time, or locking yourself into purchase plans or layaways of any sort for the next few months. Even frivolous stuff would be inadvisable- it is reasonable to ask “would I buy this if there were two more zeroes just in front of the decimal point?”

This condition is likely to persist until after the election at the earliest, and more likely to continue into the new President’s next term. Hang onto your hats, everyone. And your wallets.

NSFW: New pics from Abu Ghraib

These photos may not be safe for work…. or kids

Philip Zimbardo, who did the famous 1971 prison experiment at Stanford University, was asked to testify as an expert witness in the court-martial of some of the American soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal. He had access to the photographs, and published them in a video he showed at this years TED Conference. Then Wired Magazine made Zimbardo’s story available on their website, along with his presentation. The experiment in 1971 was about how prisoners and guards in a simulated prison behave. After only five days, Zimbardo was forced to stop the experiment, because the ‘guards’ in the scenario began torturing and abusing their prisoners, and forced them to strip naked and commit simulated sex acts.

The article explores ways that Abu Ghraib Prison parallels the Stanford University prison experiments of 1971. Interesting and freaky.

Mitt Romney abandons GOP Bid

Mitt Romney has dropped out of the race. With Mike Huckabee trailing a considerable number of delegates behind John McCain, it’s likely that John McCain is now, essentially, the Republican nominee for president.

So… we have a staunchly pro-war candidate in the Republican slot, in all likelihood. Now the Democratic contest becomes a little more interesting, because we know who that candidate is likely going to face.

Voting for Barack Obama

Tomorrow, on Super Tuesday, I am voting for Barack Obama in the Democratic Primary here in Connecticut. glassbooth.org says that we’re pretty similar in most areas; I have an 82% concurrence with him.

That’s not why I’m voting for him.

He’s opposed the war in Iraq for a good long while, and he’s stuck by that conviction.

That’s not why I’m voting for him.

I am voting for Barack Obama for the preservation of the republic. We have had twenty years with the presidency in the hands of two families — four years of Bush 41, eight years of Clinton 42, eight years of Bush 43. In thanks for this legacy we have a house divided: economically, socially, militarily, politically, legally. The former President Clinton is an impeached president (no matter that it was a Republican hatchet job, no matter that Bush and Cheney deserved not simply impeachment but conviction). It sets bad precedent for our Constitution and our republic to allow this family to occupy the White House a second time. They need to be thanked for their service to the nation, and sent packing.

So yes, I’ll vote for Barack Obama. Not just because he represents hope — although he does. Not just because he represents change — although he does. Not just because he plans to find a new way of doing things in Washington — although he does.

I am voting for Barack Obama because I believe that the Republic is under assault, and I believe the Constitution is at grave risk, and I believe the survival of our nation is at stake — not from outside enemies who wish us ill, although they do — but from our own ambitious former leaders who cannot bear to see others hold the reins of power.

But we are a nation of many strengths, and many are called to positions of authority and leadership. I believe the time is right for Barack Obama.