Fears of New Government Crackdown on Dissent

Yet another anti-terrorism bill has been placed on the congressional table. The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act was passed in an overwhelming 400 to six House vote last month which will call for the creation of an academic panel which will review and examine the social and personal points at which a peaceful person will turn into a violent one. "The bill would establish two government-appointed bodies to study, monitor, and propose ways of curbing what it calls homegrown terrorism and extremism in the United States. The first body, a national commission, would convene for 18 months. The university-based “Center for Excellence” would follow, bringing together academic specialists to recommend laws and other measures. Critics say the definition of extremism and terrorism is too vague and its mandate even more broad. Under a false veil of expertise and independence, they say, the government-appointed commissions could be used as ideological cover to push through harsher laws." With recommendations from the board and demanded access to school records and information of students, the government will then be able to make the appropriate interventions on behalf of the public to keep peace activists peaceful.

Why is this so dangerous? This bill allows further expansion of congressional powers for one thing, but also this bill may allow the scanning and blocking of media from countries that are considered part of the "Evil doers." Al-Jazeera could be considered too radical for the American people and therefore their site would be shut off to American servers. This would be a congressional criminal act that would only continue the consolidation of the media broadcastings powers. Not only that but the study of these extreme people could easily be broad enough to include such groups and environmentalists, peace activists, Iraq War Veterans, anarchists, and any other profiled group of people that the government could consider to a be a threat (and a threat to whom).

This law was passes by the house in a move by congress which allows for bills with an overwhelming majority to be rushed though congresses in order for the implantations to begin as soon as possible. What this shows is that there is bipartisan support for one thing, more power for the government. Yes Democrats and Republicans alike can agree on one thing in particular, more control over what the American public is thinking. I find it interesting that politicians would begin to care so much at the possibility of people turning violent in America. What would cause more people to become violent? Watch out America. They might want to find out exactly how far they can push you.

homegrown_terrorism_prevention_act_raises_fears

Star Wars- The American Hope: Impeach Vader

As I watch the media show news flashes of the upcoming American elections, I cant help but read into the use of media as a Force. Yes i mean THE Force. George Lucas' Star Wars was a complete breakdown of the current American Capitalist system in the form of a single world government. In Star Wars the empire in this facists capitalist government craves enslavement and homogenization. Just like the when the evil empires parliament elects a supreme ruler , the American governments republic metamorphism's into fascist universal empire elected not by the people, but by oligarchy.

The Empire in Star wars is a Galactic empire who threatens the destruction of any world that is not aiding them. They even blow up a planet in order to torture Princess Leia into telling them the secret location of the Rebel hide out. A direct quote from non-elected president George W. conceptualizes, "You are either with us, or you are with the terrorist." Who ever these terrorist are they better stop calling themselves Al Qaeda because the news keeps telling me that these Al Qaeda terrorists are all over. They seam to be in every corner of the US and Briton and every ruling Muslim country. Especially Iran. Lets not forget when the force of the media told us that Iraq was harboring Al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction. We sent our cruisers and tie fighters into battle to destroy the insurgents (rebels).

The Empire in Star Wars was also known for its clones. Our Government does everything it can to keep people acting and thinking like sheep. And as the government cuts money for Education it promotes more Dolly's in the population. Thus causing homogenization and easy to dominate and control. Also by not funding Education they are then given the carrot on a stick, they go do poorly educated areas and convincing the educationally starved to GOARMY and join the men and women in uniform to protect our way of life.

Our way of life is endanger and its not because of terrorists. The nature of capitalism causes our own end to the American dream. The problem arises from economic capitalism which supports its self on the back of other economies thus creating this financial drive to keep exploiting more and more economies. We are then faced with the fact that there are only so many economies on our planet. We have already exploited most of them. Now the American Government wants to create a new demand for American Good's and needs oil to ship goods to that area. Enter the 6,000 year culture of Persia. Here is a totally unexploited group of people who want nothing to do with capitalism, why, because their Democratic beliefs and religious views keep the capitalist machine out of the country.

By threatening them with our Death Star and threatening them because they cant own one cause we do, we will then attack them and secure the first need for further exploitation which is fuel (oil), and then we will create a new need by using the force of media and advertising to sway those with week opinions that they need to buy more material possessions.

Do not be dismayed, a New Hope is here. As a matter of fact it is in front of you. Whether not you have realized it before this instrument lets you access the positive side of the media's force. Yes young Jedi you too can have sway over you destiny. Write about it in your blogs, post on news sites, let the media owners know that you are a waking, thinking citizen. Don't be angry, the the Dark side will use it against you in response. Lets stop the Neocon Empire in its tracks. Sign this petition and send a message to our leaders that the American people no longer belief this man can run our country, and ruin the world.

http://www.impeachbush.org/site/PageServer/

The force is strong in you.

Dissolving Noesis

Tuesday, May 8

There seems to be a loss for the value of written word as we are developing into a world of dissolving text and ambiguous avatars; sending shouts in the face of as many screens as possible. The stock of our attention is what makes us the tech-onomic consumer. That’s what creates value to the click, the response, the immediate action to the cause of a distraction, and what we find is a growing population that no longer scrolls though pages of words but highlights to flashy captions and eye catching desires, which we probe the horizontal storyline with thoughts that can no longer be linear. For now there is still the text, still the division between what is thought, and what is understood. There is no direct projection to plug into our minds. We understand only through the eye, and are becoming reliant on a single sensory input in order to define our reality. This is the vision that cannot see reality as more than our limited corner of the eye and what dimensions exists outside the peripheral.

The cyclical rotation of the pages was thought post-modern, when Joyce wrote about Finnegan in a number of different languages that extended an index longer than novel. Now, our index is hidden in blue lines of underlined words that deny the strait through reading of the subject, and removes focus on our original knowledge. The loss of what we need to survive has been blinded on the course of projecting our minds with material. Now we are to the point where the image of the body is distorted to a manipulative vacuum that sucks from it the natural intent of the physical purpose. Repopulating empty mass with wants for the replaceable; a boat, a car, a plain white t-shirt from j-crew, which we pay to store in an off-home storage garage locked with our old tennis shoes and porno-mags that have no place in a digital culture. The only need soon becomes a sofa to sit allowing access to the media portal of our world. It is from this spot that we have a front row seat to the end of the world. Then, the TV newscast is commercially interrupted, and the radio announces Rutgers is as Nappy as our pop-up blocker when it fails to stop the assault of advertisements on our shriveling consciousness.

Our culture is dissolving sensitivity to the subject. It’s a human mission to find that divine connection to the person, and empathize the struggles of their life to understand the meaning of our own and not as a solution to economic means. The sites to gain advantage in our displaced commercialization can only be equalized by protecting the net as a place without author. Therefore, we are left to be the single judge of our information as an individual who must negate the false content and database the error report to patch the needed defects to update our content civilization.

Digital Vulnerability

The acceptance of the Internet as a medium into our society has been one of the fastest transitions of any form of communication, we blindly trust it as the solution to the demands of the modern man which in are meant to satisfy our immediately material gratification. What is often overlooked is that the information that we place on the Net might not be as stable as our salesmen selling Anti-virus would encourage you to believe. Our personal information can be hacked, scammed, or generally found in our everyday online interactions. We have set the path of our entire economic system to these interactions and have sold much of our material identity to the wired world that these is almost uncontrolled access granted from our technologically vulnerable society.

Caution should be exercised between letting a Internet give you the ability to communicate with more people at once, and how much information about you that is flowing in electron form. This may be the distinction between using the web as a tool, and letting it become an Achilles heel of our society.

Along the lines of identity theft we set our user names and passwords on our own computers in order for our memories not to work as hard at remembering sites with private information. In that case our own computers hold our identity cards for our private information. But exactly how secure is this information?

“A study commissioned by America Online and the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) found that 8 of 10 home personal computers lack the basic security protections needed for Web surfing, such as a firewall, anti virus software, or a spyware detector." The study also found that, "Nearly a quarter of online people in the United States have found themselves the target of the online con artists, and roughly one in five knows a friend or family member who has been duped." (1)
We feed the web with more information about our person.

And now with the opening of social networks to public search engines, there is even more access allowed for peoples to sponge private information. Facebook for example is now opening up its once secure social area for any Google search to find and use. SO if you think those wasted pictures of you in collage are safe, make sure. Your first line of defense is limiting that amount of public information floating around about you. And as we paste our photo's to the server space, the online image is becoming something to question. Through the fluidity of the web, we are seeing the manipulation of personalities.

For instance, what if some else liked your persona more than his/her own, plagiarizing your information, images, and contextualizing their space in a way that showed you, but was accessible to them? Identity theft is a huge financial problem when it comes to bank statements and social security numbers, but how do you manage a virtual life with someone attempting to steal your social identity? Going to youtube.com with a search of MY IDENTITY WAS STOLEN!! uploads all kinds of videos about people losing there identity to strangers. Since there is no World Web Police to track down profile-thiefs, the only thing left to do is to take the matter into your own hands and take action. Every action becomes harder to take against a person as they live farther away places.

Although its becomes hard for the everyday person to track and effectively trace another persons footsteps to tell them what they are doing, what they have done, and where they will be next, large corporations have been compiling data sets on everyone of us power users for years. Everything we buy goes into some company’s great database on our spending patterns. Our credit cards track us 24 hrs a day. The fluidity of plastic comes with Big Brother wanting to know if your traveling to Ottawa on an impulse drive, or if Johnny Slick Finger’s has stolen your card. Even if your the card holder, it is possible for a company to activate theft prevention on your card and cancel it in the midst of your road trip. Then, you arrive at the Canadian Inn to find out the credit card was canceled after the Beef Jerky purchase on the South Dakota boarder makes that spontaneous trip up North seems like a much colder excursion than you had planned. This just goes to show that all of us have become celebrities in the eye of the conglomeration, who track us like paparazzi after every transaction we make.

This databasing and individual celebrity status might not make all of our lives as safe as we think. The spreading fan of the Big Brother effect is connected to our ever-watchful government. Recently, their tactics of information gathering have proven to have gotten us into a war (with the wrong country), banned the dangerous peace activist, Cat Stevens, from entering the country, and have aided in the transition to safer airport security after “the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), a subsidiary agency of DHS, recently admitted to having mistakenly placed the names of 30,000 airline passengers on a watch list for potential terrorists.” (1) All that important information their storing does not mean our government is any better at understanding it.

In the process, our living becomes traceable and cataloged as information about the population is stored in that great data bank in the sky. This data-bank, called the Internet, is held on 12 main servers that support the traffic flow of the entire web. If one of these severs were to become overloaded- the entire Internet would crash. (3) This reliance on the Net, makes the western world a great target for hackers who try and gain fame by causing a the collapse of the internet, and if successful, our great Library of Alexandria II would once again come to a crashing to a fiery ball of melted hard drive.

Some governments have been accused of using this as a tactic by creating a collapse of information. Military strategists know if you can take away a countries ability to input information into their system, you eliminate their ability to fight an effective war. Therefore we are seeing political, as well as military staged attacks on sections of the net in order to make effective war strategies that much harder on governments who find themselves and the long end of a cyber-barrel.

So, to the public; protect yourself, your information and your internet access. Keep the web a free common space, and work to protect Web equality. Then we'll see who really has the power.

JJ Friedman


1. http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2005/id_theft_fears.html


2.
http://speakout.com/activism/opinions/5394-1.html

3.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00033FF0-A329-1C75-9B81809EC588EF21&pageNumber=3&catID=4

Medium of the Artist

To find my voice as an individual is not a simple goal in this age of mass messages. I want to be, and show what I am, to express my desires, to find like minds, to create art in a way to reflect myself, and my ideas on all subjects that have an immediate impact on to life.

As an artist, I create to explore what is hidden in my inner workings in a way that expresses my acceptance that we are part of a greater consciousness. My work reflects aspects of my true self, for the overall goal of writing is truth, and the pursuit of truth is the greatest goal a writer can strive for. Good art does not come from the constraints of life, but in the connection to common elements that exist in humanity

I believe that we are a small part of a larger force or energy that this world emits. This includes everything alive and dead, society and the individual, as well as material and organic objects including all art, recorded, or preformed. IT is conveyed in vibrations from speakers at a rock concert, or from a lonely trumpet out on Market St. IT can be captured in the painter’s brush-stroke, and in the laughter of an excited crowd, or the capturing of a piss stained, neon-lit brick wall of a downtown dive bar.

My writing and philosophies can be attributed to such writers as Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Aldus Huxley, Gene Youngblood, Noam Chomsky, and Daniel Pinchbeck, to drop a few names. In essence I look to discover those writers whom soliloquy a certain spiritual-ness in the survival nature of the human spirit, an alternative way to wander and wonder about life, and are able to hold captive a simple statement that can make us question everything that constructs our reality.

In our culture we share the need to communicate struggle, and what better way to reflect that struggle than by crafting the difficult symbols of words to translate meaning to the entire world, and to every generation who will read their own meaning in between the lines.

Recent Projects

Check out the my recent video creations on my Vlog page

http://uttillitarianjj.blogspot.com/

The Transgression of My Consioniosness

It seems that the world is becoming a more conscious-connected place, causing interesting synchronistic events that appear more frequently in my everyday. I feel this is a sign that I am still experiencing, and learning from the world while simply trying to take everyday lesson to heart and understand the way to transgress predetermined boundaries of the everyday reality.