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Let’s Party! Tea, anyone?

The TEA Party: Enough is Enough

I appreciate a good movement as much as the next guy. I love a grassroots swell and a freshly formed band wagon with enough room for even the most armchair of supports and fair weather of fans to hop aboard before the central transfer to the next “big thing.” Give me a bunch of halfcocked concepts and a catchy jingle and I’ll kick back and watch that rickety bucket run itself all the way in to oblivion, joining it’s trendy forefathers in the meme stream graveyard. Couple this with my overt and unabashed distaste for political circus performing and the attention grabbing, politically incorrect if not unapologetic sound bite machines in the Republican parties screaming “fire” in a meat locker, and you’ve got the makings for one of the greatest shows on Earth outside of a back alley snuff film peep show at 50 cents a minute. Unfortunately, the TEA Party, an epitome that gets me literally (No, I did not mean literally) harder than Georgia Pine, is still rolling on down the road despite itself, and again finds itself parked out on street corners and in front of government buildings screaming for…something, anything, if not everything and still nothing.

The Tea Party started in late 2009, but really burst on to the scene in 2010 with Tax Day protests outside anything resembling a government building, including one unfortunate misunderstanding that led 150 people to protest the unfair taxation in this country in front of a Denny’s in Topeka, KS. After some real movement in the pubic eye, and the appearance of the pseudo-homely, folksy tundra wisdom of one near vice president turned reality star, Sarah Palin, the party began to gain political ground. Whatever ground they have been able to grab in the political arenas has been helped as much as it’s been hampered by the very party itself and it’s elected officials and unfortunate choice in public mouthpieces.

It’s all in the campaigning they do as a “party.” If you go to the Tea Party Patriots website, one faction of the now fractured party, you find some of their ideals and what they stand for. Their slogan, or mantra, or whatever you might call it, is as follows:

“A community committed to standing together, shoulder to shoulder, to protect our country and the Constitution upon which we were founded!”

The exclamation point is theirs, not mine. So they are united, they are committed to the Constitution, and they are excited. Ok, maybe they aren’t Tebow excited, but they are pumped enough to outline their mission statement with an implied pounding of fists on desks invented for the purpose of this punchline.

What I have also gathered from my direct contact with these people, is that they are basically Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh fanboys and girls that would give Glenn Beck a blowjob behind the aforementioned Denny’s if given half a chance. They are fairly fundamentalist, Christian, founding father/log cabin Republican racists, homophobes, and fairly hateful of liberals. Compromise is not an option. If politics was war, these people would happily exercise their God-given right to refuse quarter to liberal soldiers in a second. They think the US is their home, and liberals can fuck off and die. So…I guess they are open to compromise and fresh ideas then? Shoulder to shoulder, I gather, is with like-minded, old white people who are afraid of everything that doesn’t attend their local Evangelical church potluck with casserole in hand every third Sunday after sermon.

Now, before you go thinking that this is just some unsubstantiated claim form some liberal in every derogatory sense of the word, I implore you to shut up and read. This is a library, and you need not be muttering to yourself like an idiot in the stacks. If you’re reading this in a Starbucks, though, then go ahead and laugh you pretentious Berkley trust fund baby because you’re not my demographic either. Grab your summer scarf and your Birkenstocks and walk around the Hashbury with an unearned sense of belonging.

This is some Kung Fu grip G.I. Joe action figure stuff. Facts are included. Fifty-nine percent of all Tea Partiers are male. Only twenty-three percent are under 45, while nearly thirty percent are over 65. Eighty-nine percent are white. Ninety-five percent are either Republican or Independent, while seventy-three percent describe themselves as conservative. Eighty-three percent are either Protestant or Catholic, but oddly (and not surprisingly enough) only thirty-eight percent attend weekly church services. Oh, and fifty-eight percent of them are armed. It’s a passing point, but I felt that with all that other white Christian BS, I needed to complete the cliché trifecta with a reference to being well armed…for protection. Riiiiiiggghhht, “protection.”

I often get a laugh from how non-Tea Party Republicans talk about this fractured faction of exceptionally right leaning Suzie and Stan Homemakers. It’s like they are talking about an alcoholic brother or a cousin that hasn’t been right after getting kicked by that mule two summers back. They’ve got some great ideas. They have a lot of passion, something we need more of in the Republican party today. They are fired up. They are just decent, hard-working Americans that think this country is on the wrong path. (side note: Why is it that I always feel like I’m being inherently insulted when this is said? These Republicans are decent and hard-working? What about me? Do I maybe think we need to be on a different path as a country? Well, I guess I don’t get any love because I’m liberal and am not inclined to put a Hitler mustache on a picture of Obama and fill in the white spaced with poorly spelled, vague statements about taxes and cap and trade. OK, got that out. Let’s continue.)

I always like to think of the Tea Party as a person. Whenever I can, I like to personify nouns and ideas. I’m able to better get a handle on a problem if it’s got a face. When I think of the Tea Party, I see a sweet old Grandmother. You know, the kind of woman who is beloved on the neighborhood block. She is at every social gathering, and is never in short supply of fresh lemonade and cookies. The kind of woman who every kid in the neighborhood calls Grandma. Her husband passed long ago, her kids all moved away. She has a cute, meandering story for every occasion from when she was a child. Nothing gets her down, and a smile is always just hook and loop away as she knits on her porch in the summer evenings. Then you talk to her after a couple of Manhattans and she lets slip the N-word with a venomous spit and a scowl when you bring up the Johnsons one street over and you realize she’s a racist old bat who reminds you suddenly more of the wench from Hansel and Gretel even though the unassuming smile is back and she’s knitting away as if nothing was amiss.

That's Sarah with an "h," ya hear?

You can package it any way you want, but hate is hate. It can be screaming on a city street holding a sign splashed with heinous references to the most evil men that our President apparently is just one missing razor away from resembling, or it can be hidden under a hand-made afghan in a rocking chair in a small, midwest town and it’s all the same. The Tea Party may have itself a Michelle Bachmann, a Sarah Palin, and some national recognition as a perfect opportunity in April to rail against the “obamination” this country has become, but it will never be anything but b-roll during televised debates on MSNBC and FOX. Same video, different adjectives.

I do have to give credit where credit is due, though. They are still around. They have people, followers, an out dated website (a political party “must have” in 2012), and a PR team that can spin anything in to a crisis and an all-out attack on the nation’s values and Constitution. I just don’t think that people of this angry and closed-minded position will ever understand that this is a diverse nation.

I know that from the inside of a local Tea Party community organization meeting it may look like a very united if not pasty, homogenized country, but unfortunately this is a place so damned diverse you need a genealogist with a Geiger counter to figure out what most of us are made of. I’ve met these people, tried to make sense of their signs, and I’ve looked in to their faces, and there is little there that I can understand.

I get it, some of the angst and frustration, I feel it for them and Republicans after all–Oh hell, for shitty Democrats, too–but the further division of this country and the resistance to possibility and development of new ideas since the good old days of the late 1700’s is a little obtuse and fearful for my liking. Thanks, but I’ll let necessity be my mother, and with change comes the necessity to adapt or die. That’s not me talking, that’s science. Then again, nearly ninety percent of you are religious…so that’s probably falling on ears deaf to anything that’s not from scripture. So, protest on my nostalgic homophobes and middle class anarchists. The Republican party might be a bit embarrassed of you in public since that mule kicked you and you aren’t acting right in front of people, but in private they love you, because your crazy Christian fear-votes count just as much as anyone’s that hasn’t lost a couple of marbles.

Romerica 2.0

Jan 20

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Author’s Note: This was originally published on Poppycock in February of 2011 as an excerpt of an ongoing work. This is still not finished, but this is the entirety of that original article. This is a piece I will continue to work on. I may change this in to a bit more a narrative, but as it stands it is a look in to the events that could crush this country’s infrastructure. I have always felt that American civility and society is very tenuous and that it would not take much to turn upright citizens in to outright criminals adopting them “us or them” mentality of a dystopian survivalist. We will continue to refine and edit this article, but I felt it might be nice to share a little gem from the past that’s never been seen before. Give it a read and if you like, let me know how off base I am. Cheers.

Or: The only thing we didn’t steal from Rome was…ummmmm, wait I’ll come up with something…

No empire rises in a vacuum and no civilization progresses without the foundation set forth by it’s predecessors. America may be a country, I won’t argue with ya there, but we’re most definitely an empire, too. We have grown as nations, and now tandem, we have both done our share of nation building, empire expansion, and overall oppression/exploitation of people and foreign soil on the way to the top. America as a nation has taken symbols, words, and it’s queues, from maybe one of the greatest empires to achieve the foothold we have now exceeded in the world landscape; the Roman empire.

America has bastardized and prostituted the very concepts that made Rome great, for our own profit and advancement. We took their democracy, seemingly entitled imperialism, protracted warfare on foreign soil, slavery, and prostitution. The parallel between the rise and the eventual fall of the American empire and that of the Romans is staggering. People don’t like to think about our magnanimous nation as an “empire.” The gentry and the benevolent like to think we are a “nation” or a “country” because it tastes better in our mouths than what we truly are. In one breath we embrace our world power status and then turn the other cheek and try to downplay the fact; like an actor who says it’s just an honor to be nominated.

There is a great argument in the historical community as to the actual fall of Rome. Logically one could argue that, since it still exists, it never really fell. The monuments are still there and the city as a whole is quite literally built on top of the remains of the former empire. The city is built on the bones of those that came before them; those that inhabited quite possibly the greatest empire on which the sun ever set. But the end did come, in a very real sense when the German Odoacer took charge of the Western portion of the Roman Empire. Long before that, the Eastern Empire had gone Byzantine with a capital at Constantinople, and once you go with the big B, you never go back.

Some argue that there might have been one single cause to the fall of the empire, but that is so like modern people to try to boil a cause to one single thing. Much like our own civil war, where people think slavery was the reason for the war, it’s roots are not set in the soil of just one red-handed culprit. Rome slowly tripped, stumbled, and then slumped over on the side of the road before it truly fell. The world around the Roman empire, and the lands it took over, complicated it’s governance and as times changed things became harder to corral and keep control over before she finally started to buckle under her very own weight.

  It began to show it’s age as Christianity became a commanding and controlling force in the world along with it’s predecessor, Judaism. Islam also rose as a world-wide force to be reckoned with. Though the Roman Empire let most cultures and traditions continue in absorbed regions, they slowly moved people over to more Roman daily living; the religions grew nonetheless with a pertinacious determination. Constantine himself transferred the empire over to Christianity under his rule and is responsible for many churches, not to mention one of the first canonized Bibles. Outside of this was an expansive empire with more people than the emperor could contend with controlling and keeping happy. Taxes became an issue as the swelling debt of the empire began to bloat with protracted battles for control and defense on more fronts than they could financially support. Outside of that was widespread diseases, lead poisoning in water supplies, and food difficulties, not to mention the world-changing and growing outside of the reach of it’s rulers.

The empire grew fast over centuries and then slowly decayed as new dangers, evils, and simple day-to-day difficulties, made it increasingly difficult to control. The mere idea of the empire being divided in to East and West shows that the empire had grown too difficult to control from one location. Remember, as you conquer a land and a people, absorbing them in to the Roman proletariat, there are ideological, geographical, and linguistic barriers to deal with. This was an empire made up of many tongues, and we all know how that went at Babel.

Hmmm, all of this seems to sound familiar. This whole rise and fall of one of the greatest empires in history seems to ring true with me somehow; it’s like I can almost relate to it. Oh that’s right, because it is happening to us! We are right on track to see a fall more violent and abrupt than the Romans could ever have envisioned. Don’t think it’s possible? Look at our wars, our debt, our country divided. Take a gander at the corruption, taxes, protests, and ideological melting pot we live in; shit, it’s a boiling cauldron at this point. Look at the Middle East, a portion of the world we’ve been raping and trying to nation build, i.e. colonize, for some forty years. Take at look at our schools, commerce, racism, decadence, and our complete ineptitude to do anything about it. Do you actually think we are on the crumbling edge looking in to the maw relegating us to the history pages of some English finishing school? The columns are cracking, friend.

America took it’s Manifest Destiny and expanded beyond our rights, doing it by force and dirty tricks calling it all our land, our crop, our animal, and anyone who disagreed could face our front lines at their own risk. This nation was a cesspool of whores, drunks, and psychopaths…then we got civilized. We became a world power, exerting our will through force and threat of poverty or death on anyone that opposed us to win wars, get our hands in so many pies, and begin to control the world without even having to be in any part of the world. We operated as a shadow government with secret wars, hired guns, and coming up with any bullshit excuse to pick a fight for some good ol’ fashioned profiteering and being able to call ourselves patriots.

The American Empire followed every step of the Roman cookbook, and still does. We have the dead and God on money. We invoke the name of our Lord to justify war to the bible belt and Jesus freaks; if it’s good enough for the Alpha and the Omega, then it is good enough for me. We operate in a level of debt that staggers the mind. Literally, a human being can’t count to the number 14 trillion in multiple lifetimes. We are not too big to fail, we are just getting big enough to fail. This nation is fighting multiple wars on many fronts with assets and liabilities in multiple nations with no end in sight; we have been in Afghanistan for a damn decade at this point.

We have all this debt, this spending, and these taxes, yet the infrastructure is failing so epically. We have shit schools, for-profit colleges raping students with tuition-cocks, and we have no universal healthcare while government offices fail every day. The Post Office, Social Security, Welfare, Unemployment, prisons, and on and on; nothing is working well. This whole country is held together by a single concept. Yes, there is the patriotism glasses we wear as we peer through the cracks in the fingers covering our eyes. Yes, there is the happiness that we aren’t “somewhere else,” and America is number one, but that’s not it. The duct tape keeping this country from full-blown revolution coupled with a complete breakdown of every semblance of a civilized nation is a simple one: it’s not that bad. That’s it, just that it’s not that bad.

But you say it could never happen here. Are you that naive? You don’t think that the same fate the felled Rome can’t happen here? Well let’s take a trip in to the possibility machine. What would it take to break down Americans to roving bands of rebel forces and militia groups like something out of Mad Max? I think it wouldn’t take very much. Think about it…all it would take is three bad days…

Day one brings the catalyst; the stock market opens to a massive crash. Within 70 minutes of the first bell, the dollar has become devalued to thirteen cents. This causes a world-wide panic that nearly topples the international markets by days end. Evening paper headlines read: “The Dollar Crashes,” “America in Full Blown Bankruptcy,” The Final Bell Tolls on Wall Street.” CNN is reporting at six PM that an estimated 385 of the Fortune 500 will be closing their doors the next day. Analysts at FOX News begin hypothesizing that the unemployment rate in America will erupt to anywhere from 68-80 percent within the week as companies simply close down. With the dollar in this conditions there is no one to go to for capital to stay afloat. The nation is stunned as tomorrow will most likely be the first day of the last days; Uncle Sam has been brought to his knees inside ten hours. So the chaos begins to ensue.

Obama appeals to the people at 7 pm EST in a national broadcast marking that this was a terrible day in American history, but he urges people to stay calm, and as Americans we can win the future with perseverance and the spirit that made this country great in adversity in the past. Reports indicate that some nearly one and a half million pink slips will be issued the following day in both the private and public sector. Obama further urges people to stay in their homes as he knows that there are reports of violence in the streets. Obama further informs the nation that he will be calling for all schools to be closed the next day as the government agencies have received a larger than normal amount of what they call “marginally credible threats” against the safety of Americans. Obama says it is simply a precaution and that he is working through the might with his cabinet and advisors to address the problem and see to it that all Americans are taken care of in the interim so that power, water, and all public services stay in full working order in the coming days…this only makes people more nervous.

It starts with small pockets of unrest and growing reports of looting in the night, knowing they don’t have a job to go to tomorrow. Why go to work if the money you were to earn is worth two cents on the dollar? Peaceful demonstrations and protests outside public buildings decays in to moderate violence brought on by the outrage. Looting leads the news after the crash; deaths have already been tallied in trying to quell rioters. LA, NY, Chicago, Detroit, San Diego, Seattle, Atlanta, and others break out in to chaos as people ransack every shop and market, every grocery store and car dealership. In just one day the poor to the upper class have taken it upon themselves to prepare for the worst.

On the dawn of day two the fires still roar, but the streets are practically empty in some places as others have fled the cities when the looting slowed before first light. In the night protests and marches were organized by those that had kept their head in the night. The sunrise is obscured by tire fires and massive blazes that still burn from the night before. The firefighters and police are trying to control the violence and madness, but the entire city is alive with fear and rage; there are never enough cops for something no one planned for. With the violence not ending, the country grinding to a halt in commerce and work attendance, the market opens to no gain and hope for bouncing back is lost; the world gave up on the dollar. As a result gas stations are looted, some explode in the commotion and violence around the limited gasoline left in the country. Homes are now being broken in to as stores have basically been picked clean in the highest traffic areas. Bodies are now lying around longer with no one to collect them; 911 is only a recorded message anymore, no getting through, and no one to help if you could.

By that evening grocery stores have been stripped bare and the nationwide damage is in the billions. Flights have been grounded, and Obama has urged police in major cities to declare a state of emergency using the support of the national guard and institute a curfew and martial law over major metropolitan areas. While all of this goes on people have decided to barricade themselves in their homes or to hit the street looking for answers through demonstrations and looking for someone to take their anger out on…DC turns on the White House. Under the pressures of a roaring crowd of people trying to get in to see the President, one nervous National Guardsman accidentally fires his weapon, getting his first and last kill as many armed in the crowd open fire back and before anyone could blink AMericans are killing Americans on the lawn at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave…and this is the end.

It is the night of Day two and martial law covers the entire nation, in cities that still have some semblance of order or power structure. In smaller towns the police and law enforcement have lost all control and gave up. It is anarchy. People violating the curfew are being detained, beaten, and gunfights are breaking out by the thousands all over the country and the firefighting force has broken down; square miles of cities are on fire as skyscrapers in Chicago, NY, and LA begin to crumble from fire damage. The President has been removed from the White House and citizens have ransacked it; it smolders in the glow of the flood lights, black stains and burns spot the previously white exterior.

The National Guardsmen aren’t enough, especially since most went AWOL, so the President has called in the military forces stateside and appealed allies like Canada for help, but they won’t help to control the American people, many of whom are already clogging the closed border to Canada; those not willing to risk death in America have become illegal immigrants in to Mexico in search of relative safety. A transformation in to the very thing they criticized from a Starbucks patio when the hog was so fat….on Monday.

By the morning of day three the military is trying to exert control stateside while soldiers overseas have gotten word of the trouble at home. It has become clear they will not get paid, their families aren’t getting paid whether they live or die, and now they see the very nation they fought for crumbling in on itself…they abandon their posts and go AWOL, doing anything they can to get back home. Pilots take troops home by the hundreds on commandeered planes. Aircraft carriers turn back, some under duress of mutiny, and make for the closest port they can call home on America’s shores. The war in the Middle East ended, but it lasted 48 hours longer than America…our legacy.

What little structure still exists at the federal and local level has turned to attempting to feed and clothe those who may have been looted in the madness. Bread lines and shelters, not too different from those in the depression have set up shop in churches and former Goodwill locations that are still inhabitable. FEMA, one of the few remaining forces had began distributing clean water, clothes, and food on day two, but by day three it is simply volunteers too scared and lost to do anything but help. Same goes for the non-profits, homeless shelter volunteers, and even the police and firefighters that can still stand after pulling 20 hour shifts. What is left in the good of Americans still swells in the hearts of those that went thankless when we had it all such a short time ago.

News hits the airwaves in America, for those still watching, America has been declared an emergency state and qualifies for UN aid and military support. Furthermore the Secretary-General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon has issued a statement supporting the nations need to protect itself, but also informing the world that the President of the United States will face a specially selected board to answer questions as to the cause of the collapse and his actions subduing the unrest in the nation; deadly force and martial law resulting in deaths will be the main focus as determining the possibility of war crime charges being filed against the US government. The Guardian’s morning headline will read, “Obama; War Criminal,” Le Monde will run a photo of Obama with his head in his hands before a speech in front of Parliament begging for help alongside a color coded map of the US showing the levels of unrest and damage with the headline, “America’s Last President.” La Presse, of Montreal, will run “America No More.”

It is over. Cities are littered with bodies and have crumbled. In most places there is no power, water, or safety of any kind. Foreign journalists file reports in the streets of New York and LA like they were in Baghdad. Seas of people protest and try to cry out for help from other nations as cameras are turned on them. It is every man for himself as curfews are getting harder to enforce with so few police and military personnel still holding to their codes and oaths; none of them signed up to kill Americans and they wanted to be with their own families, to defend them. The President no longer has any power to wield over the situation. He makes a statement from the relative safety of England, alongside the Prime Minister, speaking to wanting to fix the nation, a heart breaking few days, and the hope for the future he holds for his country and countrymen. “I will not be the President that let his nation kill itself.” But he already is. Over the now burnt out husk of the White House, the American flag flies upside down.

What? A little dramatic? Rome didn’t fall in a day any more than it was built-in one. Don’t fool yourself, if this country found out on a Wednesday that money was no obsolete, Goldman/Sachs’ offices would be rubble on Thursday morning. This country would fall apart inside a week. No jobs, no savings, an apple that costs $45? It would be animal survival inside the hour.It won’t come from a military coupe, It won’t be a people led revolution. We are to fucking fat and lazy sitting precariously high on the hog to fight for anything. We bitch about taxes, laws, rights, morals, issues, yada-fucking-yada, and yet we keep electing a democrat or republican despite the fact that these people are the damn problem. Oh, it might be a foreign invasion, like the Japanese teaming up with the Japanese to take Hawaii and Alaska before assaulting the Western coast full force. But that would look a lot like Normandy since we would see that coming…it would be epic though, with Canada and England backing us while Mexico flanked us during the fracas.
What I am simply saying is that we, as a nation, will collapse under our own weight. We have lived too far outside our own place and our own means for too long trying to absorb too much in to the collective. The chip is on our shoulders, but soon the shoe will be on the other foot. Our end will not come with a bang or a whimper, but with the sound of letting go of a balloon you didn’t tie off. This nation will deflate violently once the economy falls; the almighty dollar will be our end. No gay agendas, no Sharia law, or terrorist attacks. We will be our own undoing. Just as the Roman Empire, I think the only people who can beat us are ourselves. It would honestly take more than three days, but it would come like a breaking wave on the rocks. Our vanity and egos will topple this great nation as we move bolder and bolder towards the brink, thinking we can push the sky back just another inch. All empires go the way of Icarus, and even the Romans knew that story.

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SOPA. PIPA. Lets Call the Whole Thing Off.

Jan 20

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The blackout has come and gone for the digital protest of potential censorship and criminalizing the memer and the blogger. SOPA and PIPA represented another front for the unwashed, outspoken masses to rail against over-regulation and broad stroke legislation.

Little was accomplished with our silence and “off-line” statuses on Wednesday. Poppycock joined thousands of bloggers, websites like Reddit and Wikipedia, and many other sites in protest of hastily written bills before the House and Senate to #protectintellectualproperty and #combatpiracy.

I suppose one might have to admit that the widespread protest did at least as much as to raise awareness to  potentially dangerous bills before Congress. Bills designed to protect, but will, if enacted, do more harm than good; like the seat belt that saved your life on impact only to trap you in your burning car turned four-wheeled coffin.

Author of SOPA, Lamar Smith

As written, as far as my research and limited legal mind can infer, the bills are written in such vague and interpretable language as to allow for prosecution of parent search engines and sites facilitating user-generated content. In essence, Reddit could be on the hook for potentially illegal content found through their site that is posted by a third-party; it’s charging the gun manufacturer with first-degree murder where an unregistered weapon was used.

I applaud the idea that protection of personal property be it real, digital, literal, or intellectual, needs to be a priority for those who create it; but the simple writing of just something over doing nothing is no answer at all, yet it’s one used by legislators with growing regularity. Some clunky and slow swinging sledgehammer does little to help a situation that calls for more surgical precision that we designed scalpels for. Right tool, right job.

Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of the ravenously popular Reddit, said it best in an interview on G4 Tuesday. He said that the bills are too vague, and were clearly not written with technologists at the table. Had SOPA or PIPA existed when he and Steve Huffman were launching Reddit, it never would have gotten off the ground; it would have been largely illegal.

I am all for protecting the rights of entrepreneurs, writers, photographers, musicians, filmmakers, and the like. As a writer and photographer, I know that what I create has both a monetary and intrinsic, emotional value to me. Someone passing off my work as their own, plagiarism, should be punished. As a production studio, artist, or creator of any kind, I know there is a very clear and numerical monetary value placed on every illegal download and theft of copyrighted material. SOPA and PIPA are just not the answer.

The internet is a being, a living creature that we have created and have no idea how to control or regulate. It is amorphous and doesn’t fit in to the structure of any of the confines and very meticulous laws that we have set forth in our many years. It is not a “real” world. Police don’t exist there. It is, for the most part, the last Wild West frontier that certainly needs taming for the civilized folk to want to live there. Who would make the move west if all we are going to get is robbed, raped, and murdered? Certainly not me. Well, I do live there, but my business doesn’t really have anything worth stealing, so I don’t really worry about locking my doors at night.

For everyone else, trying desperately to lock things up tight and keep from getting robbed, I fully support some Pinkertons coming to town. Hey, I’ve got nothing to hide. Well, I did pull some photos off the web that MIGHT be subject to copyright, but that’s not a big deal, right? Okay, I’ll come quietly, but this is all a big misunderstanding…

Regulation is necessary, so what can be so bad with SOPA and PIPA? We’ll refine them as we go along, but for now, we need at least something. This is dangerous thinking that is probably what got those bills written. The problem with laws of such a nature as these bills, is that it almost encourages corruption and potential censorship equally harmful to that of the illegal practices of piracy. A classic tale of woe, replacing one evil with another.

I suggest regulation, but it should come from within. Much as the MPAA rates its own films, and much as the gaming industry rates and regulates the sale of its games, despite that M-rated material can legally be sold to a minor (thanks, Supreme Court!); these industries took it upon themselves to regulate out of a moral conscience for a greater good and a responsibility to society.

This has nothing to do with web regulation, but it shows that an industry can regulate itself, so why not a marketplace? What’s the harm? Could it be worse than it is? Wall Street went highly unregulated and has screwed the US pooch more times than we can keep track of; the market pops more bubbles than a herd of 6-year olds at a birthday party. We saw the pop of the internet startups bubble in the nineties, but it never crippled the worldwide economy. If we’re not going to regulate the stock market and companies therein in any significant manner, then why must we throw the yolk of fear and culpability on the internet?

We could potentially appoint a committee to oversee internet activity and potentially illegal activity, but it is truly unrealistic. The net is not a brick and mortar city, it cannot be governed by a committee, a city council, or policed by a force of men that can catch pirates in a speed trap and hand out tickets on the internet super highway between Sidereel and Wikipedia. You can’t send SWAT in to a blog, kicking in the door and arresting everyone inside for FCC and copyright violations. There are billions of doors in hundreds of countries. It’s just unreasonable.

Let the onus of copyright and protecting their material be on that of the business or website that is posting for consumption. When you’ve got an apple cart on the sidewalk at a Saturday market, it’s up to the retailer of apples to keep an eye out for five-finger discounts. It’s not good for business to have a police officer leering over said produce enthusiasts.

A marketplace like the internet is too diverse and too ambiguous and anonymous to call for traditional laws. Each company, site, or business, has a responsibility to protect their property. If they find signs of theft, or catch a thief, then good for them, but laws governing everyone and everything on the web does no more good than a law governing every person in the world; your laws don’t apply here.

If there must be some overall governing laws specifically tailored to the web, then we need to work with the entrepreneurs that tamed this wild frontier. Who better to advise a layman on the pressing matter of lawfulness than an expert? Get everyone involved that thrives in this world, in spite of piracy and unlawful activity.

A perfect example of where there is a disconnect between the digital world and reality: “You must be 18 years of age to view these materials. If you are under the age of 18, click NO, if you are 18 years of age or older, click YES.” Have we figured out a way to verify the age of a user yet? Is there a sure-fire algorithm devised that can verify the age of the finger clicking the mouse? Not that I know of. I always clicked YES, and I started clicking it when I was 14 or 15. Never got my door kicked in by a SWAT team. Maybe this is step one, but I suppose that figuring out a PIN for all adults required to view sensitive material would be too much to ask. Something like 431-629. It’s not a huge leap, but most kids know how to click a mouse, and can do simple math to pick a birth date that will get them access to porn and or violent material. Just saying, but hey, lets worry about the bottom line and how much money people are losing instead of the welfare of our impressionable children. Ahhh, American priorities.

There is no easy answer of how to combat piracy and internet fraud and theft. It is a tricky devil. IP addresses aren’t quite as solid in court as fingerprints and DNA. “Someone must have hacked my computer” is a completely legitimate excuse for having stolen material on a hard drive. Instead of starting with a vague law, why not start with what and who you want to prosecute and then reverse engineer a law applying specifically to that activity. Still more layman thinking, I guess.

I am no techno savvy nerd. My skills run more in the vein of movie trivia, video games, and to a lesser extent the written word. So, no law makers will be calling me for advisement. There are experts out there with useful, insightful experience for a congressman who can’t even design their own campaign website or write their own tweets #howdoicheckmyemail.

Regulation will come in one form or another. It may be by the SOPA and PIPA jackboot of vagary under the sledgehammer of totalitarian anti-piracy. It might come from self-governance and businesses investing in better security, clever coding, and well written and prosecutable end-user agreements…not to mention a man-sized safe or two. It may, and least likely, come by way of incremental, levelheaded change from the bottom up; both structural and lawful changes that protect the end-users and the entrepreneurs from the “illegal” acts of a mere fraction of the customer base. Whatever the form, we must be both hesitant and ever thoughtful of the worst case scenario. Civil liberties are constantly jeopardized today, and a bastion of near apparent lawlessness like the internet could easily become over regulated as to push out invention and creativity and stunt the growth of the real world in the process. It is all about the big picture, and some restraint now can pay big dividends far greater than the example that can be made by a blacklisted site or some poor schlep in cuffs over aggregating political links and movie poster pics for some stupid blog on WordPress (he wrote with a darting glance and a lump in his throat).

Crime occurs in the real world in every facet even with the overbearing micromanagement of common moral fiber that we live under now. Why would the internet become any cleaner, safer, or more productive if we regulate it? A war on piracy? We have lost the war on terrorism and that good old war on drugs and will lose the war on cyberbullying and our frontal assault on Christmas; why would piracy end any differently? I already must pay a toll to get on the internet by companies, must my civil liberties and fear of prosecution for retweeting #wearethe99percent? A digital police state, indeed, and that is a far worse fate than the binary wild west we live in now.

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DNAmocracy (excerpt)

Feb 20

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or: Walk (the walk and talk the talk) like an Egyptian

…February 11 on Fox News George Birnbaum, former Chief of Staff for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, said, “We in this country are blessed with an innate, genetic subconscious that equates freedom and democracy…I’m not sure everyone in the world isready for democracy.” Well, well, well. The truth comes out. Now I get it. It’s not that we are a country that has developed tolerance and freedom through hard work, understanding, and a short history marked with mistakes like the acne scars of a teenager; it’s that we were just genetically better from the start. America isn’t just number one with a bullet, we’re number one with a “freedom gene.”

Birnbaum is not the only commentator to call in to question the Tunisian/Egyptian uprising; he’s just the one that pulled the Nazi-superior race card first. This just strikes me as ringing false, all these naysayers and closet racists. For decades America has always towed the line of trying to spread democracy through the world like Herpes at a co-ed kegger. We have always said we want to share our gift of representative, self-government with those that don’t have it. Our message eventually mutated in to an idea an attack on, or opposition to, liberty and freedom abroad is an attack on all freedom and liberty…now it seems that if we didn’t have a hand in engineering your rise against oppression than we call your stock and breeding in to question.

The organic, free-range egg is on our face in this instance, though. Some 30 years ago America was integral in placing Hosni Mubarak in to power; he was our guy. SO you can see why the government was hesitant to support a regime change in the region. We had to see how the cards fell; we couldn’t support the people if they failed and lose an ally, and we couldn’t support an America-sponsored regime and look like we hate other people having democracy. Is it any wonder the President did not come out clearly for either side? Why Hillary Clinton changed her tune in some four days from support for the Mubarak rule to one of wishy washy “wait and see” tactics. Mubarak was our ace in the hole in the region. His continual subservience to our empire was not unlike a Gangster blackmailing a snitch inside the department, “we made you, you owe us.”

As the grip of Mubarak began to slip, so did our support and even our willingness to comment on the subject. Once he was officially dethrone, so to speak, our TV and news personalities began shooting hole in the S.S. Democracy that set sail in the Middle East. All of a sudden we were stunned when we lost another guy we put in power; first to fall was Saddam Hussein oddly enough, and we saw how that turned out. A revolution we had not masterminded had occurred right before our eyes and we have no stake in the outcome. We had no favors to hold over those involved in the change; it is a revolution we cannot use for political gain and cannot hang our hats on in the face of the international community. We could not bully our way in to getting our hands in the Egyptian pie; we didn’t have a puppet all made up for the minstrel show. This was not our revolution for the Egyptians, and we don’t like the view from the outside looking in…

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When they said “vote or die” I don’t think this is what they had in mind

Jan 20

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or: well this is what you get when young people get involved in politics

It has been weeks since the events in Tucson. Giffords is showing ‘remarkable’ signs of recovery as every effort has been made to save her life. The events that day were more than the sum of adjectives used to describe it; words of any polysyllabic form fall short at a time like this. It was both shocking and tragic in the most heinous manner. The lives ended and the hundreds touched by this event including the senseless death of a nine-year old girl and a judge, among others. As we are searching for answers and guidance out of something like this we are watching ourselves spin out of control trying to find causality and something to point our fingers at. It is in our nature to try and find a source and snuff it out to prevent anything like this occurring again. But in our haste to try and gleam some kind of wisdom from this shooting I think we are suffering from a social PTSD distorting our ability to logically examine and process this event because we are all too close to it to think clearly.

I am not alone in the manner by which I process grief or prolific events like this. When I experience loss or hard times of any kind I find solace in laughter and finding the humor in any situation. I don’t dare make light of the event directly, but as I look out on the sea of comments and steps being taken I see great humor and hyperbole that is rife for satire. The knee jerk reaction of public figures, lawmakers, and vocal groups makes for great punchlines. I see the likes of the left blaming the violent rhetoric of the right as the right points the finger at the socialist left, and the middle pointing fingers at both sides, and all I can think is “Well, at least young people are getting involved in politics.” It sucks, and just like 9/11, and every other time we have felt wronged as a nation by the audacity of the singular or few, we want blood and we feel that if we do nothing then we are simply giving up on a civil society. Ya know, that is the same bullshit line of thinking people with reusable grocery bags use to help themselves sleep at night, “I’m doing something about this; at least more than the next person.” Go fly a kite with all that mishegoss.

Some are trying to push legislation to further limit gun rights and try to stave off the problem of these kinds of shootings. Some people are dealing with their grief by suggesting that if we took people’s guns away, kept them from carrying them, owning them, or buying them as they currently are allowed to, then this might never…happen…again. It’s all pie in the sky; shit happens. People will get guns, as long as they are being made and there is a demand for them. From Derringers to mini guns and RPGs the supply of weaponry will always find a way to meet the demand. We could take white-out to the second amendment and eliminate any right to bare arms; just eliminate a piece of the bill of rights. We could melt down every gun in existence, destroy every warhead and missile on the planet, and even go as far as eliminating swords, requiring a license to own a butter knife, and some whack-job will sharpen a stick and stab someone. Deaths by bow and arrow would sky rocket and archery class would be the new JROTC, so you can put that baby to bed.

Others point fingers at the language we are using to debate sensitive and complicated issues. People think our language is creating an angry and violent sector of humanity that is taking ‘death panel’ and ‘enemies of the state’ a little too far. This might be something we need to keep in mind, but is this the answer? We could wrap ourselves up in swaddling cloth of kind words and revert to Sesame Street etiquette and that won’t do it. As one who loves graphic verbal imagery and over the top metaphors I really have a hard-on for free speech and freely alluding to Republicans observing pagan-like rituals including goats blood and self-flagellation. For the sake of our rights let’s all admit that it is not the rhetoric but the issue itself that brings out these kinds of actions. When anti-abortion protestors shoot a doctor on his way in to the clinic they were not inspired by the words of ‘murder’ or ‘baby killer’, it was the actuality and the realness of what was happening that they worked up in their minds which drove them to the most ironic of actions. We would all categorize a doctor-killing pro-lifer a walking contradiction who was unbalanced to begin with; Jared Lee Loughner took his queues from Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto…rhetoric not found in today’s cable channel political debate. Hitler, not Hannity, was his inspiration, and I gotta say that if Hannity, Beck, or ANY other pundit was his guiding light to action then he needed better role models anyway. Loughner is one sandwich short of a picnic so let’s keep our hands off our words. We are not even allowed to say “fuck” on network television yet, so I think any kind of self-censorship is really unnecessary until we throw off the shackles of the puritanical speech we still senselessly observe in broadcast television; until we allow the f-bomb in primetime I say we haven’t gone far enough.

We could set Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow as the title fight of UFC 126 to find out who is right about the hidden Socialist agenda of the Obama administration and it wouldn’t be far enough. To go one further if we decided who was right by settling debates with a two-party sponsored cockfight I still don’t think anyone but the most deranged would be frothing at the mouth to pull a gun on a public policy maker any more than they are now with this pussyfoot civility we have been clinging to. All the time we must practice restraint in our language. I just want to hear people get really angry; it’s the emotion bottling and the tongue biting that leads to outbursts. If it was cockfights and thunderdome then psychopaths might get their fill of blood and feel like something is getting done. It is the impotence and the “civility” behind a veil of politically correct speech in a minefield of “buzz words” that has driven me to scream at times. We have free speech but no one is allowed to speak freely because some constituents might not like it and “that kind of talk” is frowned upon; in the same breath teasers before the break are about the end of democracy and the government wanting to rape the family dog…it’s all talking out the side of our mouths.

I will be the first to admit that there has been an exponential increase in end of days speech. Every issue has become the one that will end us all. From week to week it is another moment of decision on a precipice of utter destruction. Exaggeration and apocalyptic rhetoric, the kind that makes every issue and event in to the second coming of Christ and the straw that will break the American democratic camel’s back, is evident by the coverage of this event. It was almost immediately coined as the “Tucson Massacre” by the media that in itself seems a little extreme. ‘Massacre?’ Really? I can understand ‘tragedy’ or ‘senseless murders’ but ‘massacre’ seems a bit grandiose for 6 death and 13 wounded. I am not belittling the event, but when we use this word it turns this into more than the sad event it is. Before you know it there will be a vague and hastily written bill before Congress called “Christina’s Law” that comes out of this event where nothing but decorum and national grief was called for.  If we are looking to watch our words and enter a time of civil debate and thoughtful speech then the first thing that needs to change outside rhetoric is the sensationalized manner in which we cover it.

My personal guide to labeling terrible acts:

A Senseless Act

shooting spree trumps senseless act

tragedy trumps shooting spree

blood bath trumps tragedy

massacre trumps blood bath

genocide trumps massacre

Holocaust trumps EVERYTHING

I hate to break it to you, but there is almost nothing to be found in this event but sadness and another in a long line of tragic losses of life.I know we have an insatiable need to categorize and label and find some kind of “why” in all of this, but even if we got one it wouldn’t make sense to us. Loughner could tell me that a polka dot elephant that lives in his hair told him to do it and I would give it as much credence as if he told me that he was guided by FOX NEWS; he is mental, so I don’t care what he says. This is not the first shooting of a government official; from Lincoln to JFK to Bobby and everything before, after, and between, figures in the public eye will become victims of the mad and extreme. Malcolm X and MLK weren’t even elected officials and they became targets for simply their ideas and zeal. Outside of this there are uncountable and often minimized massacres through history, in America’s past from school campuses to the daily streets. People kill and die and there is nothing that can be done. We can’t sit there and become scared to talk, limit rights, and do whatever it takes for us to feel like we are doing something to prevent this; there is nothing that can be done. We had one psychopath act out in a violent manner and took his misdirected anger out on an object he probably just saw as a representative of the larger problem.

This feeling of vengeance due to seeming helpless in the face of tragedy is as old as history. Our politicians can’t sit on their hands, they need to look like they are helping and making a difference, so they don’t have to explain doing nothing in their next campaign. This kind of possibly disingenuous, probably misguided, and most definitely impotent kind of action will do more to hurt than it will to help. We could try to get him the death penalty, but it accomplishes nothing for those lost and does nothing to deter other crazies from coming out of the wood works; right now there is a guy jerking off in his mom’s basement to the Loughner’s mugshot and he isn’t scared of anything. We could watch our words, but speaking more thoughtfully does not make abortion, gay rights, corruption, high taxes, unemployment, illegal immigration, education, the death penalty, free speech, gun control, two wars, oil drilling, global warming, environmentalism, government spending, and on and on, any less polarizing or inflammatory of subjects. We can whisper and hug and even blow each other while debating and the words and gestures mean nothing to a person who is unstable and is going to act out in what they think is a necessary and justified action as they have concocted it in their own mind. You can wave the flag, cry foul, and we can do everything we can to convince ourselves that we have done enough, but tomorrow another will have died and one day another figure head will die just as senselessly on the cement of a Safeway parking lot as the gang member in the back alley. Death is equal to all other death just as life is equal to all other life and it will be the same tragedy whether with an assault rifle or a sharp stick and words will always fall short no matter which one’s you use.

Addendum:

I am fully aware of the hypocrisy and contradiction found here in. I am not positioning myself above those mentioned here or that I walk some divined path of restrained rhetoric. More than anything I let the dogs loose on anything I feel and make no apologies for what is contained herein. I embrace and exercise my first amendment right and am thankfully not restricted by decency laws or guidelines; fuck it.

 

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