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Apparently, fear of partisan political reprisal trumps constitutional rights, decency, and a host of other important things in the lastest failure of the United States’ legislative branch to keep insanity out of our lawbooks.

Both political parties seem to have failed us horribly. Republicans sided with a corrupt and out-of-control administration in an effort to bolster itself against possible defeat in midterm elections, while Democrats, afraid of being considered “light on terror”, only put up a limp-wristed struggle, with the bill in question passing easily.

The “evil” in question is the Military Appropriations Act of 2006, which allows anyone, even a citizen of the United States, to be declared a “lawful enemy combatant”, and therefore be stripped of all civil rights and due process. Many have said that this sets us back “900 years … by denying habeas corpus (sic)” to pre Magna Carta status. A nice, simple review of what this bill does is here.

I probably shouldn’t be speaking out against this, since doing so might inadvertantly classify me as one of these supposed “enemy combatants”. It’s a shame when an awful legal loophole can be expanded like this to allow uncontrolled expansion of Executive power. I, for one, advocate the use of encryption technologies like OTR for IM communication, TOR for web browsing, and anything else you can get your hands on to keep yourself away from the overextended reach of the overzealous executive branch.

Maybe, upon midterm elections in this country, we can try to reclaim what is rightfully ours — the liberties guaranteed to us by the Bill of Rights. I urge anyone living in the United States to vote against any incumbent official who voted for or advocated this bill in whole or in part. I used to think that the root of the problem was the neoconservative administration in power, but I’m starting to realize that there are very few who cannot help shoulder the blame for the enormous trench we’re digging ourselves into. How can people envy your liberties and freedoms when you’re more than willing to trade them cheaply for a little inferred temporary security?

I hate writing posts about political matters. Maybe at some point the insanity will die down, and I can go back to writing about things that *don’t* make me mad for a change.

For those who use Apache 2.x, this is a nice trick to keep people from hotlinking your images. I’ve seen a few variants of it, but this one I picked up most recently from a slashdot comment, of all places.

Make sure you have enabled mod_rewrite, then add this in your .htaccess file for any directory with images in it:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* /files/goatse.jpg [NC,L]

to redirect to an awful image, or use my own personal variant:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?sitename.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|png)$ - [F]

which doesn’t return *anything* if someone else hotlinks your images. If they like your images enough, they can like them enough to save a copy on their own webserver.

I’ve been watching a great deal more television, reading a great deal more papers and “blogs”, and listening to a lot more interviews these days. And though it’s extremely hard to do this without politicizing what I see, I try to look at it as objectively as I can, from as many sources as I can.

I’m getting downright sick of this “War on Terror”. Not that global terrorism (as opposed to local terrorism?) isn’t an awful, awful thing, but that it has been a problem for years. I don’t think any American president for at least the last thirty or forty years has been exempt from having to deal with some sort of terrorism, whether pertaining directly to our citizens or to citizens of nations with which we have chosen to ally ourselves. I just have trouble lending credibility to the idea that we’re declaring war on “terror”. For some reason, it was shortened from “terrorism” to “terror” … I think I even vaguely remember when we declared a “war on terrorism”. The problem with this is the basic concept ; not only can you not declare war on a noun, but we’re not really fighting terror.

My good friend Webster defines terror as “to frighten”. I don’t think I have ever seen the people of my country as frightened as they are now. We were afraid to open our mail due to Anthrax (which turned out to most likely be an American, not an “international terrorist”, but that’s completely irrelevant), afraid to fly because of the prospect of people smashing planes into buildings, afraid to keep our civil liberties, and afraid to voice our opinions due to the prospect of being tainted as a coward, deserter, or someone who doesn’t love our country. You can’t fight terror by terrorizing the people you’re supposed to be protecting ; simple logic.

I love my country. I really do. I also believe that one of the highest forms of patriotism is being able to question your country and its leaders, to hold them accountable for their actions, whether or not you agree with them by political party lines. It would be nice if that weren’t vilified as unpatriotic, though.

While we’re talking about wars on nouns, how about the war on the English language? Referring back to Webster, torture is defined as ” … inflicting agony … to punish or coerce (sic)”, yet I keep hearing pundits on a lot of mainstream media channels and “blogs” continue to try to make a distinction between torture and coersion, as if the intention behind an act alters the definition of the act itself. I’m more than a little upset that atrocities are carried out under the banner of protecting the liberties and freedoms of the people living in this country. Whether I support the *actual* wars that are being fought right now (the ones which don’t have an intangible object as the intended target) or not is irrelevant. I believe that we should be attempting to comport ourselves in a manner which appropriately reflects the greatness and respect of our country if we want others to respect it in the same way, in much the way that tourists represent the country from which they hail.

Please, stop trying to split hairs and redefine words. Don’t hide behind these words, but instead use your actions to convey something far greater: that you are a member of the greatest nation on earth, and that you respect everyone else’s right to have the same liberties that you brag about. What good is bringing freedom to the world if you can’t maintain your basic constitutional rights here?

I was sitting by myself a few days ago, and started to wonder about the value of a single person. Not in relation to society, or anything else that tangible, but in relation to the totality of existence.

At first, I thought that the lack of a single person’s existence would irreperably alter the universe. Everything we do impacts others in thousands upon millions of imperceptible ways every day we’re alive, so wouldn’t one missing person somehow change the fabric of existence? Even stranger than that, wouldn’t that mean that everyone, no matter how insignificant they may seem at first glance, is special because they hold together what we consider to be reality?

Then I thought a bit further, and realized that a lot of the things we do cancel each other out, and thought that it didn’t seem possible that everyone could possibly hold the ability to alter reality and existence. It smacks of Chaos Theory (no matter how contested it is) to think that all of our contrary, opposing actions keep everything in balance and in check, so that the loss of a single person wouldn’t really make much difference in the grand scheme of the cosmos.

In reality, I think the answer is somewhere between the two. We can’t really aggrandize our lives and think that the universe would fall apart if we weren’t here, but I think that reality would change, and that pulling a single thread from a tapestry would eventually cause it to unravel or rearrange into something distinctly different. Maybe it’s not a reason for thinking that you have value or worth in the infinity of the universe, but it’s not as though you have to think that you have no effect on the universe either. As in everything else in life, this is best represented in shades of grey.