jude folly

I’m on the edge of my seat reading about the Congressional deliberations over the FISA bill. Very briefly, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act attempts to balance privacy rights vs. national security by requiring a court-approved warrant for a wire tap of any U.S. citizen, allowing a spy agency up to 72 hours to file for such approval after the fact (as amended in 2002; see p. 14).

Sounds reasonable, no? That’s of course if you have a pre-9/11 mentality that inspires your opposition to any of the Bush administration’s power-grabbing maneuvers.

I digress. As I read of Sen. Chris Dodd’s preparation to filibuster the House-approved ‘compromise‘ (granting immunity to telecom corporations that enabled NSA’s violation of FISA), I came across this nifty web site, MAPLight.org, that tracks political contributions to elected officials on what appears to be an issue-by-issue basis.  There were a number of Democrats who initially opposed granting immunity to telecoms now recently flipped to support it.

Put the coin in the slot, pull lever.

Special thanks goes to Charles Bukowski for inspiring this gem of wisdom. He once presented a signed a book of poems to Larry Mullen Jr (U2’s percussionist), wherein the poet inscribed the followng maxim: “Humanity at its greatest is a failure.”

The Huffington Post–along with throngs of nay-saying science whizes –on Wed. 18 June, debunked the topic written about in the last posting. I apologize for my euphoric rush to pass on a truth-deprived story; what seemed to me at that moment, Necessity’s nursing of a much needed energy alternative to petroleum.

What’s kind of fun to read are the responses of those who read The Huffington Post debunking–ardently splitting the atom, as it were, about what defines a fuel and what defines a catalyst, etc., et. al.,  ad nauseum.

I’ll wager that for its importance this is the most under-reported story of the day. A Japanese manufacturer of electricity generation technologies, Genepax, has unveiled an automobile fueled by hydrogen processed from water.

More than anything else, this story should serve as a reminder that the global economy should not carry on captive to only one source of energy (ahem, petrolium). Yes, the water-mobile alone will not rehabilitate us from our dependence on oil. It will be a diversity of alternative energy sources the moves the economy past a petrolium-dominated system. I look forward to watching that transition unfold.

It surprises me no one has offered this scenario (at least publicly) about the Sept. 2007 disappearance of Steve Fossett: wouldn’t the ultimate adventure be that of vanishing from publicized human contact, if not all human contact?

While living in San Francisco in the late ’90s I first browsed Lloyd Dangle’s Troubletown in one of the free Bay Area weeklies. His cartoons strike the viewer’s eye with their amateur-quality (even for political cartoon standards) illustrations, sinister facial expressions and squalor-tinged settings. 

Depicting whichever political scandal or celebrity idiocy of the day, Troubletown simply followed a public figure’s rhetoric to its most demented and self-serving conclusion. There’s something appealing about the crudely drawn figures that lends a deviant quality to the makers of media mayhem. You’ll often find them sketched with a diabolical brow and knowing sneer; dark rings under the eyes of those tirelessly at work on sordid schemes.

Take a look at his response to the enormous financial debt the United States owes to China. It’s a stark yet clever reminder of the lender-saturated advertising one most likely will endure while watching television or listening to the radio.