MemeMachineGo!

Sherlock Holmes and the strange case of the Semiotics of Hats.

The monster under the bed, updated.

I’m scared. I suspect my Roomba vacuum robot is trying to rebuild itself to be bigger and more dangerous. Last week I lost my phone’s charger, and today I found it inside the robot. I thought I’d take a picture of it for this web log, but now I can’t find my camera’s batteries, either.

I, for one, think our new robotic overlords suck.

=v= Apologies to my millions of loyal readers, but for years, the length of things I’ve been writing has been shrinking. I blame email/Usenet/etc., though to be fair, email/Usenet/etc. has inspired me to write more overall. Still, the trend has been worrisome and you haven’t seen much of me around here lately.

While I haven’t hit TXT MSG levels of terseness (Kids these days! Go figure!), I knew something was up when I had a popular coinage with “Folds Up!” — a folding bike ride organized by the groups TIME’S UP! Technically, I only wrote 50% of that. My next hit was “Trees Not Cars,” which might seem to be something I wrote 75% of, though the whole concept of “pros Not cons” is pretty derivative.

My biggest hit to date has been”Still We Ride,” and indeed it catapulted me to a fancy midtown Manhattan party where I met the guy who came up with Zed’s favorite saying, “One Less Car.” Alas, though, I must confess that I was only riffing off of “Still We Rise,” which was itself inspired by the poem “Still I Rise,” by Maya Angelou (who is, thankfully, too classy to come kick my white ass). So I only wrote 10% of that. One letter! Could I sink any lower?

Perhaps. There’s a cautionary Mr. Boffo strip that I’ve virtually clipped and put up on my virtual fridge: a panhandler with a blank sign, and the caption, “Writer’s Block: Worst Case Scenario.”

Well, I’ve been exploring a new prose form: photo captions on my Flickr account. Terse, yes, but people seem to like them, even to the point of sending me kudos! Consequentially, my captions have gotten longer. Who knows? I might start writing blog-length stuff again.

I just finished The Best of Poul Anderson, a 1976 collection. Several award-winning stories are conspicuous by their absence in a purported “best of”; I imagine avoiding overlap with 1973’s The Queen of Air and Darkness and Other Stories and 1975’s The Book of Poul Anderson played a role in the selection.

In the introduction to “Sam Hall,” Anderson writes:

Returning [from a trip to Europe], I found the heyday of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Now this wasn’t quite the horror that academic folklore maintains. While no doubt a few innocent people did get harmed, the fact is that others had been the dangerous agents of an implacable enemy; and in any event, as a shrewd observer remarked, the period consisted mainly of intellectuals screaming from the rooftops that they were afraid to speak above a whisper. Actual suppression, when it occurred, was almost always the result of private unofficial hysteria. Still, it didn’t take great imagination to see the trend continuing until we really got a dictatorship. […]

Nota Bene: We, in the real-world United States of the 1970s, are still very, very far from the situation here depicted [in “Sam Hall”.] Indeed, that was supposed to have arisen because of defeat in a major war. Despite every crime and encroachment, our government has not yet lost its legitimacy. Revolution now would only deliver us to totalitarianism, whether that be of foreigners or of Berkeley’s bearded fascisti. The duty of those who love freedom is to ward off tyrants both outside and inside their countries. Then perhaps revolution will never be necessary.

I also recently watched Berkeley in the ‘60’s. It documents the rise of the Free Speech Movement, the Black Panthers, and the Anti-war Movement in and around Berkeley, beginning with the police turning hoses on students protesting HUAC hearings in San Francisco, and concluding with the police corralling protestors so they could be tear gassed by helicopter.

There was cheap irony to be had in the coverage of Clark Kerr’s Dec. 7, 1964 speech at the Greek Theater. Kerr said:

The University of California does share, in its instructional functions, along with other educational institutions, with churches, with families, a deep responsibility to help equip our students with the training, the knowledge, and the understanding to care wisely and effectively about the future of our free society. In meeting this responsibility, the University supports the powers of persuasion against the use of force, the application of decent means to decent ends, the constructive act as against the destructive blow, respect for the rights of others, opposition to passion and hate, the reasoned argument as against the simplistic slogan, enlightenment in place of blind prejudice and ignorance.

followed by Mario Savio walking to the podium, where he was promptly dragged away by police in a great triumph for the powers of persuasion against the use of force. (The documentary didn’t relate that Savio was ultimately allowed to announce a rally, as had been his intent.)

Savio was one of many who was illegally surveilled by the FBI for years to come. Robert Mueller, the current FBI Director (having been appointed by Bush in 2001,) commented on these investigations in 2003.

“As a citizen of this country, I abhor any investigative activity that targets or punishes individuals for the constitutional expression of their views,” Mueller said in replying to Feinstein’s inquiry about the June 9 report. “I will tolerate no such undertakings in today’s FBI.” […]

“Such investigations are wrong and anti-democratic, and past examples are a stain on the FBI’s greater tradition of observing and protecting the freedom of Americans to exercise their First Amendment rights.” […]

“The FBI does not currently maintain anything akin to the Security Index,” he said. “We do not compile lists of persons based on their political views or affiliations.”

However, he said, the FBI created a Terrorism Watch List after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as a “centralized repository of names of investigative interest related to terrorism investigations … that is accessible throughout the law enforcement and intelligence communities.”

People on the watch list have been detained in criminal or immigration cases, he said, and “not simply because of unfounded suspicion.”

Mueller did not answer related questions from Feinstein: “Has the FBI or the Justice Department considered detaining American citizens during times of crisis? If so, who? And under what circumstances?”

Mueller said the FBI will not return to such “inappropriate activities” because of the “comprehensive oversight apparatus and legal limitations that currently govern the conduct of domestic intelligence operations.”

He cited attorney general’s guidelines, congressional oversight, internal bureau review boards and the Freedom of Information Act.

“The best evidence of the vitality of this regime and the attendant culture of respect for civil liberties within the FBI is our response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks,” Mueller said. “While we have taken many bold and aggressive measures to investigate those attacks and to prevent others, the record shows that we have done so with full regard for civil liberties.”

In 2005:

Counterterrorism agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have conducted numerous surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations that involved, at least indirectly, groups active in causes as diverse as the environment, animal cruelty and poverty relief, newly disclosed agency records show.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, John Ashcroft, who was then attorney general, loosened restrictions on the F.B.I.’s investigative powers, giving the bureau greater ability to visit and monitor Web sites, mosques and other public entities in developing terrorism leads. The bureau has used that authority to investigate not only groups with suspected ties to foreign terrorists, but also protest groups suspected of having links to violent or disruptive activities.

But the documents, coming after the Bush administration’s confirmation that President Bush had authorized some spying without warrants in fighting terrorism, prompted charges from civil rights advocates that the government had improperly blurred the line between terrorism and acts of civil disobedience and lawful protest.

One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a “Vegan Community Project.” Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group’s “semi-communistic ideology.” A third indicates the bureau’s interest in determining the location of a protest over llama fur planned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Anderson died in July of 2001, so it’s a matter of speculation what he would think of the current situation. That unchecked power leads to tyranny, regardless of the society and system in which it arose, is represented in his stories again and again. But, as in the introduction cited above, he tended toward greater faith in the U.S. government than its protesters.

For this lover of freedom, regarding warding off tyrants within my country, I find my duty to lie far more in opposing the excesses of the current U.S. administration than those of any bearded fascisti to be found in Berkeley. And I wonder whether Anderson would have counted me as one of them. (I have a full beard now, as I grow every winter to keep my cheeks warm during my bike commute; I’ll shave it back down to a Van Dyck soon.)

An improv classmate asked me at the last minute to be in a show, so I am — I’ll be performing with Improv On Our Own for an hour starting at 8 PM.

THE BAIC PRESENTS: MIDDLE SCHOOL POETRY
Join us for our monthly show case of local improv talent. Middle School Poetry contains such educational experiences you’ll leave having learned something new. Possibly about yourself or even about one of the members that you never thought you needed to know but now do. Come join the information age.

Opening for them: Improv On Our Own. A brand new troupe that has been keeping each other laughing for the past year and they want to share that joy with all of us.

$10 to see
Lila Theatre, Suite 250 at 965 Mission in SF
First set at 8 pm and another at 9 pm

Berkeley has a kite festival. Punjab has a kite festival with a body count.

(Via MeFi)