Going Gaga for Google

The word of the day: commandeer.

Some sentences using the word of the day: The dictator commandeers the airwaves. The pirate commandeers the gold shipment. During the national emergency, the authorities commandeered private buses to aid in evacuation. Admiral James T. Kirk commandeers a self-cloaking Klingon Warship and flies it to the Seventies. The Bush administration’s Department of Justice commandeers Google.

The word of the day tells you everything you need to know about what’s wrong with Department of Justice’s subpoena of Google records pertaining to pornographic searches. It isn’t about privacy; it’s about piracy. Where’s the emergency that justifies the commandeering of a company’s one service? Where’s the legislation that permits it? Since when did the United States become a dictatorship whose administration can commandeer any business at will?

Where does government commandeering come from? Exactly where I have told you it comes from, in this very column, before. It comes from fear and cowardice. I said as much in a column for October 17, 2002, at which time I said I thought I was onto a grand unifying principle of the workings of the universe, possibly involving vinyl. I didn’t say so at the time, but I had in mind vinyl automobile seating, rather than recording media. But I will not rule out recording media as a factor in the grand unifying principle.

Let me recall the principle. The principle is that reacting from fear, rather than reason, just gets you more stuff to be afraid of. So, generally, whenever the public is afraid of some so-called threat, even a threat that is non-emergent, that’s been around since the beginning of time, and didn’t just land on our doorsteps today, the public can be induced to look the other way when the government orders everybody but its own employees to do something about it, resulting in illegality.

I illustrated the problem with a practice I learned about in my cab-driving days. When the police in Seattle want to break up a domestic violence situation, they often commandeer cabs and order the drivers to kidnap one of the parties. They don’t call it kidnapping, they call it telling the driver to take them where they (the police) say to take them, but you know it’s kidnapping when the party in question says, “I don’t want to go where the police say I should go, I want to go to the Seven-Eleven, and if you don’t take me there I’m jumping out of this cab while it’s moving and getting a lawyer and suing you from here to Jankistan.”

So far as I know this practice is still going on. No legislature ever authorized it. No cab driver has ever been deputized to do the police’s business and take people places against their will. The police never offer to even pay for the commandeering of the cab drivers’ services, the kidnap-ees are supposed to pay to be kidnapped! The practice isn’t enforced with court orders; it’s enforced with physical intimidation. Or, as in my case, with actual police violence, following a “failure of communication.”

Which is what we have in this instance, with Google. The government demands they turn over their records of searches. Now, farmers farm dirt. Bus companies bus people and luggage. Mercenaries deal in hurt and death, anything but mercy. Search engines store and move information. And here it comes to pass that the Department of Justice demands that they turn such information over, at their own cost and at their own liability, without one stitch of legislation authorizing the commandeering of any company for such purposes. Communism!

Presented with demands from a government that has all the biggest guns and the world’s biggest army in history, it wouldn’t be surprising if Google caved and preferred to risk litigation from the ACLU rather than from the United States. Why not? Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL all wimped out.

But Google didn’t. Way to go, Google!

Ahmadinejad's Two Seconds of Clarity

Here we are on the verge of another foreign policy “oops, our bad, but that’s all right” moment. The Iraq War: “Oops, no WMDs, our bad. But that’s all right, Saddam had to go anyway, right?” The CIA's attack on a village in Pakistan: “Oops, our bad. Al-Zawahri wasn’t there. But that’s all right; the people killed included several non-Pakistanis so they must have been terrorists, right? Besides we already established in Iraq we could attack and kill anyone in any country anywhere, including thousands of innocents, whenever we thought we might eliminate one enemy, so, what the hell?”

Really, what the hell? All sorts of folks are condemning Harry Belafonte for calling Bush the world’s greatest terrorist. But all Belafonte was doing was giving credit where credit is due. Bush surely authorized the CIA attack. If any attack of that nature were conducted by a foreign power in this country, it would be called a terrorist attack, at the least. But Bush has convinced the majority of Americans that he is not a terrorist. It’s precisely that which makes him so great!

The newest “oops” moment in the making concerns Iran. Thanks to a CNN translator’s error, most Americans today probably believe that last Saturday Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that his nation has the right to build nuclear weapons, when actually what he said was that no civilized nation needs nuclear weapons.

Let’s put that in perspective. First of all, it means it must be really hard to find good translators of Farsi. That one wasn’t even close. On the other hand, since CNN was banned from Iran because of this screwup, what Farsi-English translators there are, good or not, will become more available. Snap one up now, prices will never be lower!

But what I think really needs to be appreciated is that the biggest nutcase in the Middle East, and in fact the biggest nutcase with major political influence anywhere east of Darfur and west of North Korea, said something saner than George Bush has ever said or is likely to ever say, and he won’t be believed.

And why won’t Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be believed, you ask? Well, even though he has always been totally straight-up with his stupid “death to America” rhetoric and his extreme nutcase ideas that Israel should be moved to Auschwitz and/or downtown Berlin under permanent Polish or German management, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won’t be believed because he is a president of a country, and George Bush knows that presidents of countries can’t be believed. Why heck, that just goes without saying! Presidents are all liars!

Meanwhile, just as in 2003 the UN wanted nothing to do with an invasion of Iraq without proof of WMDs, so now, the UN will never authorize sanctions without proof of a nuclear weapons program, so...

So we are all set up for: “Oops we bombed nuclear energy-making facilities, instead of bombing bomb-making plants. Our bad. But it’s all right, because we’ve decided for them they don’t need nuclear energy anyway, and besides, they’re Islamic extremists who attack people in other countries without justification. Besides, nobody else would do it but us, so we had to act for the good of Iranians and all Mankind. Sorry ‘bout the mess and the thousands of innocent lives lost, but we did what was right.”

Questions for Further Discussion:

1. Senator McCain says the only thing worse than attacking Iran would be an Iran armed with nuclear weapons. Which would be worse: a) the United States having nuclear weapons, or b) the United States being attacked?

2. Iran is hosting a “Holocaust Conference” to study the evidence that the Holocaust never happened. Are they asking for an Israeli missile strike, or what? If the answer is “what,” try being more specific, for a minute or so. Then, give up, have a cold one, or take a couple of aspirin, or whatever you’re used to doing to re-enter reality.

It’s the minorities, Isn’t It?

Here’s your Intermittent Science and Technology News You Can Use Catch-Up Roundup.

Our first item is news that the “Radar Scope” you ordered when you were a pubescent middle school boy will soon be available at the low low price of $1000 per unit. To be initially distributed in the spring only to our troops in Iraq, it will detect signs of unwanted enemy breathing on the other side of thick concrete walls. The hand-held devices should be ready for peeking into girls’ locker rooms as early as 2008. In the meantime expect it to be on your local police department’s Home Security 2006 Christmas Wish List. That’s News You Can Use!

Our remaining items belong to the “Social Science Marches On” category. A study of the Canadian Medical Association has concluded that giving homeless alcoholics up to 16 glasses of wine a day on an hourly basis can improve their health and behavior. In related news, alcoholics everywhere are saying, “we told you so,” and “what part of ‘self-medication’ hadn’t you understood?” Here’s a general rule to live by: when desperate people living desperate lives say they need something, they may know more about it than the comfortably ignorant.

Of course the free wine helps in part by relieving the need to waste valuable energy scrounging for wine in other ways. It also helps create a bond between the wine providers and the wine receivers, which makes the wine receivers more accepting of other services.

Not all social bonds are good, however. A sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has determined that the cell phone has brought too much social connection to modern life and is now increasingly a factor in domestic strife. Family life is being interrupted by work life; work life is being interrupted by family life. So the social bonding that helps an alcoholic accept help to get off the streets can also break up families, when there’s too much of it, and put moms and dads on the streets. We are complicated animals, aren’t we?

How complicated are we? Scientists are looking into it! Socio-evolutionary-anthropological scientists have been theorizing about the very evolution of the mechanism of social bonding that we all take for granted. How have we humans successfully evolved the means to bond outside of families, to create the friendships and comraderies that tie us one-to-another and keep us from killing each other all the time, instead of only just some of the time?

The answer is truly complicated. Nature, these researchers say, has endowed some of us with “imagination” that we use to modify our own behavior for the purpose of creating bonds. Examples of this can especially be seen at Star Trek Conventions, and among Goths, Raging Grannies, Filkers, and Canasta players. The imaginative people bond by sharing the products of their imaginations and through their enhanced facilities of suggestibility and geeking.

But the genius of social evolution is that every one of its successes creates more opportunity. As imagination evolved to bring some people together, those who lacked that advantage evolved mechanisms to compensate. Hence, the unimaginative have learned to bond together in what researchers refer to as “clumps” defined by shared boredom and the shared paraphernalia of stupidity, such as alcohol, reality TV, and designer jeans.

Further Questions and Activities.

1. List ten ways a device to see through walls could improve lives. Next, list ten ways the invention of walls has already improved lives. Combine your lists. See them negate each other.

2. Get a kitchen timer. Set it for one hour. Before it goes off make up six conclusions for future scientific sociological studies to have.

3. Here’s an experiment to try with the whole class. Use your imagination to try to bond with the student on your right. When the student on your left tries to bond with you, report him. When it’s over, who’s in detention? It’s the minorities, isn’t it?

Today’s Lesson: Cell Spy-ology

According to our Justice Department, our government can spy on us, but we can’t spy on it.

Yesterday George W. said, “If somebody from Al Qaeda is calling you, we'd like to know why.” I expect tomorrow he’ll add, “If we don’t know someone from Al Qaeda is calling you, it’s because we didn’t spy on you enough.” Then he’ll come up with, “You may not have had a call from Al Qaeda yet, but there’s always a first time, and we’re gonna need to be there, listening in. America’s freedom is at stake.”

With excuses like that, and a little torture here and a little indefinite imprisonment without charges there, pretty soon you’ve got a real totalitarian state. Happy New Year!

Evidently, those of us who care about preserving this country’s actual freedom, and not just talking about it while destroying it, need to find creative new ways to counter the administration’s rhetoric. I say, if you can’t beat them, join them.

Let’s let them know that we understand the need for spying. We need all the information we can get about our enemies, with whom we are at war. But we also need to fight this war with good old American initiative. Just like we beat the bad fascists in WWII, so that we could be ruled by good fascists now, we need to hit the terrorists with the full might of the U.S.A. We citizens need to lock arms together and fight this war united.

That’s why all the information that the administration gets from wiretapping us needs to be made available to all Americans, so that we all will know where to go to kick Al Qaeda butt. The more of us that are in on Al Qaeda butt-kicking, the more butt-kickings are going to happen. This is America, and that’s what we do.

Bush has said, "We're at war, and as commander in chief, I've got to use the resources at my disposal, within the law, to protect the American people.” But, hey, in WWII, did we only send that old guy Roosevelt to Normandy? No! We sent everybody we had!

I’m not talking about sending people to France. That was then. This is a war of information. Bush himself has said that, too. He said, "There's an enemy out there. They read newspapers, they listen to what you write, they listen to what you put on the air, and they react."

They read newspapers! They react! We’ve got to read newspapers and react, too! You’ve got to fight fire with fire. They know where we are, and they can send suicide bombers after us. We’ve got to know where they are. So we can suicide bomb right back at them. It just stands to reason.

They’ve got no freedom. We need to have no freedom. They’ve got to hide in cells and fight independently from each other, never sure what the other cells are going to do. We have to split up into cells too. But that’s going to require information.

It’s not just something that some few patriots among us should be doing. It’s something we all have to do because it’s our duty. We all have to know who’s talking to Al Qaeda and when and why.

Let me illustrate with a potential scenario. Suppose Al Qaeda calls a pizza shop in our nation’s capital and says, “heh, heh, Pizza Hovel? Yeah, this is Al Qaeda, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. Yeah that’s right, we’re THE Al Qaeda, Death to America, yadda, yadda, heh, heh, so we need 70 large pizzas, all with olives, mushrooms, green peppers, and anchovies. No pepperoni, no sausage. Ask for George, he’s paying.”

Our government needs to get a transcript of a call like that on the internet at once, so our loyal American cells in the D.C. area can take immediate appropriate action. And lay waste to that Al Qaeda party.

For Auld Lang Syne

Here it is, the end of the year, bringing me end-of-the-year memories. Unfortunately, being as old as I am, and as scattered, I can’t focus my memories on one year, so don’t expect an end-of-the-year roundup like you’ll get from a convergent person.

Instead, my thoughts race back and forth across the last 56 and a half years, and I recall who did what to me, and I calculate how much they need to pay. New Year’s Resolution: Round up bastards, chastise, repeat.

There was the campus security officer who forced hour-long conversations on me whenever he caught me sleeping in my car on campus. Such sleeping was legal at the time. But he wanted to let me know that he, personally, did not approve of the law having such a loophole, because it took advantage of working people like him. I told him I had a job. He said, oh, well then, get a better one. I said, how about yours, you’re not doing it…

On nights when that one wasn’t “working” there was another campus cop who didn’t, personally, mind me sleeping on campus. But he took great umbrage when he caught me using a public bathroom after hours.

I said, “It was left unlocked, it’s a public rest room. I’m a member of the public. What’s the problem?”

He said, “Don’t you know that people have to clean these bathrooms? They don’t just clean themselves.”

I said, “When I finish, I’ll clean up after myself, unlike any of the thousands of other people who use it during the day, who don’t get to meet you.”

He said, “But you’re homeless. How do you think those people would feel if they knew someone like you was using their bathroom?”

“Vicariously relieved?”

A certain deli downtown used to be open all night and welcomed the homeless if they at least paid for coffee. I was grateful and repaid them by patronizing them and steering other business their way. Then I moved out of downtown for a few years.

When I moved back downtown, I returned to the old haunt to find it very different. Not only was the store not open all night, it had been remodeled and rearranged. I saw people chased away just for appearing homeless. But what earns them a special place on my little list is what happened after I used one of their two unisex bathrooms while waiting for a sandwich to be made. I had accidentally used the wrong one, because I was used to the old arrangement. So they reported me to the police. I had been in a bathroom labeled “Women” on the door, by myself, for a whole minute. And oh, yes, I was obviously homeless again. So I was clearly a danger to society.

Here’s the one who goes at the top of my list. I had gotten on welfare at one time, but wanted to get a job and get off welfare as soon as possible. To help things along I got into a work shelter program through the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. Having a work shelter job meant being paid less than minimum wage. The state made up for that partially by providing bus passes.

Every day until I got my bus pass I’d take the same bus to the job. The driver would smile and nod. There’d be fewer than five passengers on the trip. No one ever complained.

The day I flashed my newly obtained state authorized bus pass, the same driver who had always smiled at me before said he was going to stop letting me use his bus if I didn’t start taking showers. When I told him I just had one, he answered that he was sick of people like me abusing the system.

As soon as I figure out what that system was he was talking about, it goes on my list, too.

Suspected Drug Use

George Bush has just admitted that he’s authorized eavesdropping of Americans without search warrants at least thirty times since September 11, 2001, each time for 45 days. Now Democrats want an investigation.

OK, let’s see if this makes a stitch of sense!

Let’s say once upon a time there was a country, we’ll call it Democratia, where it was against the law for people to eavesdrop on citizens but the country’s leaders wanted to know what the people were saying all the time anyway. So what they did was something very very clever. It was so clever that if Stalin were alive to see it, he would say, in Russian, “Damn, these guys are good!”

First, they arranged for the wiretapping of all their citizens’ phone calls, or at least all of their phones that in any way involved international transmissions. Those included not only phone calls meant to be received in other countries, but also phone calls that use satellites, because “space is international territory.” How did they arrange to do this, since routine wiretapping was illegal in Democratia? Easy! They asked their friends to do it for them, in return for them doing it for their friends. By “friends” I mean “other allied countries.” “We aren’t wiretapping our own citizens,” they said. “Our friends are!” “We’re just wiretapping our friends’ citizens. What’s wrong with that?”

To be even safer from criticism the leaders of Democratia made sure their friends didn’t actually listen in to their own citizens’ conversations – that would be wrong. Instead they had their friends use super computers to do the listening.

The super computers had voice recognition capabilities far in advance of anything you can get for a PC, and they could record all the millions of calls being made at any instant and transcribe them to computer text-files in real-time, 24/7. Then the computers could scan the texts for keywords that would indicate whether or not people were saying things that the Democratian leaders might want to know about, and all those calls could be flagged for later listening.

Computers would do the transcriptions and scanning, not people. So the Democratia leaders could honestly say that “no one,” “not anybody,” was eavesdropping on their citizens, not even their foreign friends.

Of course, if the computers flagged a call as having suspicious content, like say, if it was made by a member of Greenpeace, or mentioned the president of Democratia, or if the words “drug” and “buy” were used in the same sentence, as in “I have to go out to the DRUGstore to BUY deodorant for my smelly Dad, so I’ll call you back later,” then the proper authorities could be notified. And then actual legal warrants could be obtained from on-call, easy, slutty, judges. Often this could be done within minutes, even before the calls in question had ended.

It’s like this. Suppose the police come to your door and say, “We’d like to search your house, but we don’t have a search warrant.” So you, fearing they’d find your stash of politically incorrect midget-on-stuffed-animal porn, say, “No.” So they say, “OK, then, step aside while this robot here rolls through your front door and through your entire house, and transmits images of everything in digitized form to a remote super computer which could spot the real Spock at a Star Trek convention. Then if the computer reports back that any white powder is visible anywhere in your house, like flour, or talcum, we can have a warrant faxed by satellite to our van waiting at the curb over here, and THEN we will search you.”

Would that seem like a fair way to sidestep your Constitutional rights? Well, that’s essentially what the ECHELON system, set up by Democratia (these United States, duh!) has done routinely with your phone calls at least since the Clinton administration, and the Democrats knew it at the time.

We should impeach everybody in both parties, simultaneously.

This Is Sheer Torture

“Homelessness is bad. War hurts people. Starvation is wrong. Poverty sucks. Pollution ruins the Earth.” These are just some of the messages that we here at Adventures in Irony detest bringing you week after week. It isn’t that we don’t agree with these messages, it’s just that we get tired of repeating ourselves.

Recently we have been forced to repeat, over and over again, “Torture is cruel and inhumane, and information obtained from torture is unreliable.” Please don’t make us say it again! We’ll tell you anything else you want to hear!

So we were ready to eat our own brains from the inside out when we read some news that offered an end to our agony. An AP-Ipsos poll determined that 61% of Americans along with a majority of people in Britain, France, and South Korea, think it’s OK to torture terrorist suspects under some circumstances. However the British, French, and South Koreans, are hypocrites: even though they’re for torture, they say they don’t want it in their own countries. Whereas the Americans, by a sizeable majority, don’t have a problem with it happening right here in the good old U. S. of A.

We have been protesting torture here unnecessarily. If the majority of Americans want to be able to be tortured just because someone suspects them of being a terrorist, who are we to stand in the way of democracy? And if the rest of the world is for torture but doesn’t want it in their own backyards, and Americans do, then excellent opportunities open up for American enterprise.

We hadn’t been thinking creatively about torture. We need to think outside of the box, about the box. It isn’t simply that, “if torture is outlawed, only outlaws will torture.” It’s that outlawing torture is bad for business, for the economy, and costs us a valuable tax base. If we legalize it, we can regulate it. We can tax it. It can help pay for our prisons, our jails, our schools, and our other centers of indoctrination and discipline.

We can stem the tide of out-sourcing of American jobs overseas. We can make this country a leader in torture throughout the world. Let the British, the French, the South Koreans beat a path to our door. We can’t provide technical assistance over the phone as well or as cheaply as Indians or Malaysians, but we can water-board better than anyone else, and we’re willing to do the dirty jobs that those others think they’re too good for.

Let’s let Americans do what Americans do best: innovate for the sake of progress and financial reward! Why should torturing be limited to the CIA, the military, and Iraqi intelligence officers? We need to license ordinary American businesses to do the business of torturing.

When we have permitted the franchising of torture to creative American corporations, the rest of the world will gladly send us their business. As an international leader in a newly invigorated industry, our businesses will be able to define and dominate the world market. Just as, centuries ago, the word “China” came to mean dishes, just as the word “India” came to mean ink, so the word “America” will come to mean torture.

Torture can reverse our trade deficit, and tax revenues from torturing the suspects of other countries can help us pay off the national debt. At a time when we owe 2 out of every 5 of our United States to Germans, Arabs, and Koreans, we can, ironically, regain full ownership of our own land by letting Germans, Arabs, and Koreans pay us to torture other Germans, Arabs, and Koreans.

Then, twenty or thirty years from now, when those of us who haven’t been tortured are all fat from torture money and our government coffers are over-flowing with torture revenues, then we can ban torture from public places, and 25 feet from their doors and windows.

While still keeping it legal, of course.