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Showing posts from October 19, 2008

In transit.

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Half a league, half a league, half a league on. Man, this sucker is going slower than I would have expected. You call that an ion drive? I call it junk. Do you hear me? JUNK! Oh, hi. Didn't know anybody was within shouting distance. Don't pay too much attention to what I just said - again, I like to keep the crew on their toes, if you know what I mean. Mitch Macaphee does much better mad science when you light a fire under him (I mean this literally - he responds to fire with greater productivity). So if you have any questions about our progress, I have answers... depending upon specifically which questions you are asking. Since you're not saying anything, I will guess that they are as follows: Q: Are you making progress towards your goal, Aldebaran? A: First of all, don't call me Aldebaran... at least not while there are other people in the room. The answer, quite simply, is yes. However, I'd prefer if you not ask me how much progress we have made in the time elaps...

Finding enemies.

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All right - I was listening to journalist James Bamford on Democracy Now! talk about his new book on the NSA, The Shadow Factory , and it has really made me angry. Part of what is so irritating about this is that it isn't even considered significant news - that people have become so inured to the notion of a government tapping their phones, reading their email, transcribing their private conversations, and archiving them for whatever future use they may want to put them to. For chrissake, these fuckers in the Bush White House directed the NSA to work with companies like AT&T and Verizon - companies that profit from our business - to sift through our correspondence without any limits, to the point where staffers at the NSA were actually passing around recordings of intimate phone calls between members of our military deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and their spouses and partners back home. Hey, Charlie - get a load of this one! What the fuck. But it's far worse than just ...