Welcome to the home of the very worst of the meretricious poetasters!
number 20 for 8-7-05:
We Didn’t Really Know Him. We Just Had Him Arrested.
We live in a world that wants nothing more than to squelch your voice, to hide your ego, to take away your given right to express yourself.
My position is that anyone who seeks to stop you from expressing yourself in the name of making money or keeping others “safe” from your eyes, for ANY reason, is contemptible.
I do not question that it is LEGAL for a company to take down something they don’t like to make more money. I question if it is RIGHT.
Here are the stories I have found in the last week that disgust me in this regard.
Take, for example, the story of a man named Robert Norton.
He spent his entire life being arrested, again and again, because he wanted to be nude and saw nothing wrong with it. He went outside to water his lawn nude, and he would be arrested. Four decades, he fought for his freedom of expression.
I am at a loss to come up with a reason why being nude is damaging to anyone in any way, but he was labeled a habitual criminal, and committed, in my opinion, a righteous campaign of civil disobedience.
His reward from this society? Though he requested to be buried nude, his family stepped in and disregarded his wishes, burying him clothed, and the newspaper closes with a quote from his neighbor gloating over how she had him repeatedly arrested:
"We didn't really know him. We just had him arrested," Loete said. "Normally, if we had him arrested in the spring he'd be gone for the summer and we wouldn't have to worry about him until the next spring.”
Good to know you kept the world safe from a harmless old man you never even spoke to, you dumb bitch.
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Software creators are fighting back against censors who are trying to prevent file sharing (for vested corporate interests in the music and movie biz, read: fucking bojillionaires who want another bojillion dollars instead of a shared and vibrant media.) by creating software that makes the file sharer completely anonymous. Good. They will be held responsible under the bullshit new ruling for what they do, but good. I hope they take the entire record industry down and we have a world of indies. FUCK corporate interests. More humanitarian interests, I say.
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Europe is trying to ban low-cut tops as a health risk in barmaids. They say the women will get skin cancer if they expose their boobs to the sun.
Well then, I guess it makes more sense to stifle expression than to provide a warning and let the worker make the choice, huh?
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To combat the gross inequities of civil liberty that the PATRIOT Act brought into being, congress pushed through a five member board to review the civil-liberties breaches of the PATRIOT Act. To no one’s surprise, Bush appointed its members six months late with only one democratic member, and they have yet to meet.
Not front page news, nah. It barely even made the news. But hey, five guys are up in space, I guess that takes precedence.
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Google, widely considered the best search engine, has recently become very rich and powerful. As such, they have started acting like the rich and powerful do, squelching the voice of anyone whose voice they have the power to squelch they don’t like. One bad article about one of the founders, and suddenly CNET cannot question Google.
But all the better that they start down this path of failure, because when you search Google, a search for “Egg ass” and “deep ass” leads you to nealbailey.com faster than “Neal Bailey”.
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Speaking of CNET, they just bumped up a notch in my eye, publishing the below story pointing out the cons of the proposed TWENTY-FIVE percent tax on porn in this country, and why it is unconstitutional and will likely fail.
The point is well made. We can’t tax expression any more than we can limit it, because then they’d tax 99 percent of the earnings of Ayn Rand, Howard Stern, the KKK and anyone else the public doesn’t like, including people like me.
Blanche Lincoln, a democrat, indicates that porn is shoving itself in the face of children and not regulating itself, therefore it should be taxed.
Uh, yeah. I know that porn sites regularly leap up to bite me in the ass when I don’t want to see them. NNNNT!
In fact, unless you click on or type in a URL, it’s pretty damned hard to get to one. That means that the kid makes the choice to visit the site, and the parents aren’t watching them close enough to stop them, and why should they stop them? Porn is a natural thing. We all wanna fuck, we all wanna watch fucking, it’s just paranoid Christians who want to make fucking worse than a stab wound that start this shit up.
Even assuming porn reached out and bit kids without them looking for it, so could seditious literature. So could fucking Sesame Street. Oscar could suddenly snap and beat the fuck out of Elmo. I know I would. Nothing could stop that. That’s why adults are supposed to watch out for their kids, not the creators.
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This goes another step when you learn that P2P networks are also being threatened with MORE legislation if they don’t somehow make it possible for kids to not get porn. Imagine a library where there is a section you can’t go into unless you’re over 18, with half the books in it (because they have sex). That’s a lot like what this is.
Kids are not fucking idiots. Parents are. Parents should watch their kids, and I know it’s hard to accept, but even a fucking ten-year-old can comprehend sex and sexuality in context. Hiding it from him makes it forbidden or strange and stunts his development. It needs to be shown and explained in context, and that requires parenting, not legislation, which we all know is a taboo thing to say in this country.
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Still, America is best, as I learned that the entire COUNTRY of Russia banned ABC because they interviewed a rebel leader. That’d be like banning CBS because Dan Rather got an interview with Osama Bin Laden. Hell, they DID get an interview with Castro.
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The law applies to everyone. Except women.
I want it to be legal for anyone to be naked anywhere (Sexual? That’s another thing.). So do I have any problem with breast-feeding mothers? No. I think it’s cool. I get to see a tit, and kid gets food.
But then, when a girl shows her breast and she’s not breast-feeding, she’s hauled off. Double standard. We need to go one way or the other. If we’re a society where tits are prurient, no breast-feeding in public. If we’re a society where nudity is acceptable and beautiful (I fucking wish), breast-feeding in public. Tits in public. One or the other. A tit is a tit, feeding a kid or giving me a hard-on. Double fucking standard.
So this woman, a “victim” of this law, not only gets her fine revoked, but demands an apology. And the news, dumbasses, give her publicity.
This is why this is allowed to happen. We glorify idiots like this.
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Al Qaeda had websites up, until the other day, when Britain wiped them out. I guess expression is okay unless it involves something the British don’t like. You know what? Web sites don’t blow up buildings. Get your feet to the street and pick up some fucking terrorists. I would think an Al Qeada website would be a great thing to LEAVE UP. That way, you’d have an idea what they were thinking and feeling to better combat them. But then, if we paid attention to what the enemy was thinking and feeling and attempted to reason with it, we might be close to an end of the war. And nobody wants that, right?
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This one really surprised me, but then, it didn’t.
The Secret Service can track any printed page from a color laser printer to the printer that made it. How? Little, microscopic dots that appear on every page printed and can be seen under a microscope. Sounds nutty? It is.
But it’s also true.
So hey, next time you’re printing out something the Secret Service doesn’t like or might not link, consider a press instead of an Epson.
I’m disgusted.
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People follow their leaders. When people look like idiots doing it, that says something about our leaders. Like when old people sue GTA for content it DIDN’T put in its game, a game which is clearly marketed for adults, and demand recompense.
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ANCILLARY
In this article, look at what we did sixty years ago yesterday.
And remember, over half of us are still PROUD of this.
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