after finding this lovely addendum this morning:
CNET News.com - FBI wiretap worries slow satellite phones
(note the 'worry' is on the part of the FBI who worry that they won't be able to listen to your conversation w/ aunt martha to determine if that recipe for 'toll house cookies' (TM) she's giving you is really a coded message for a 'terrorist' or 'chinese spy')
and then noticing this AP 'filler' story ('star wars' is and has always been, one way or another, at least since the late 70's, very much alive) which i reproduce for your enjoyment:
"Missile hits missile 50 miles into space"
WASHINGTON-- An experimental Army rocket sped into the skies over NewMexico,
pinpointed an "enemy" missile and destroyed it yesterday more than 50 miles
above the Earth, the Pentagon said.
The successful test of the Theater High-Altitude
Area Defense, or Thaad, missile was cheered by Defense Department officials
as an important step toward developing an effective defense against medium-range
ballistic missiles of the kind U.S. officials say are possessed by about
2 dozen countries.
"Today was probably one of the watershed events
in the technological history of our country," Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald
T. Kadish told reporters at the Pentagon in describing the Thaad test conducted
shortly before dawn at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
[--- watershed event... in the history of our country? (2 quick questions: whose 'Theater' where? and which 'priests' are going to be trained to maintain, test, upgrade, 'validate' etc. the implied massive, pristine, bug-free (ada?) software/hardware 'supply chain' and 'genome' for this project over the next 50 to 100 years as our clever and insidious 'enemies' race to improve the 'shiftiness' of their own missiles?)... ]
[--- and in the same paper: 'china announces test of long-range missile capable of hitting U.S.'... the so-called DONG FENG-31... along w/ a submarine launched version... hmm... submarines seem to present something of a moving Theater... won't be long before DOD senses the necessity for a 'Thaad everywhere' campaign... sort of like 'windows everywhere' but w/ missiles... so maybe another question: 'why is it I don't feel SAFER now?' ]
anyway... i'm afraid if i put down all my thoughts
about the latest big brother
assaults on privacy and very related global milindustrial 'watershed
events' that the thought police would be visiting my place sooner rather
than later :)
but on a more serious note... thanks to you and tuyet! and eric
and
etc.. for keeping things going on this list... i think these
are
CRITICAL issues at a critical time... and 'hyper-critical' in
their
convergence, which is not only temporal but also 'thematic',
with the
thematics being 'squarely centered' on 'subjects' addressed on this
list
involving:
open-ness / individual autonomy/ privacy/ self-determination/
creative-expressive freedom and other 'prepositional' freedoms (freedom
to... freedom of... freedom for ... freedom from... etc..) on the one
hand vs. the 'closure' which is rapidly developing and consolidating
in
paternalistic 'systems ill-logics' of fear/ignorance/ greed/ militarism
and their
related mechanisms for 'blind' megacorpgov control/ surveillance/
and
repression of personal action, speech and thought... this as
a rapidly
evolving dystopian 'net pan-opticon' nightmare... or at least that's
one
way to describe it :)...
in any case, for any kind of effective resistance to these current
'trends', the entire family of outrages must be addressed together,
in
the sense of both 'taken together' and collectively, but also,
paradoxically, separately and in their specificity... a point that
eric
has made several times i think... w/ the best possible
framing and
gloss (and why not in the best light?) , and with some serious
development, i think this h20 'virtual site' could become an important
locus and 'network agency' for that vital effort... the relatively
low
'volume', the concerns that have been collected here by eon et al w/
a
not too narrow--not too broad focus, the sufficient sense of shared
(well-) intents and purposes, and relatively high 'signal to noise
ratio' combine to produce a promising environment... as opposed
to
something larger and more chaotic like say, 'slashdot'... which,
granted, occasionally presents some morsels of wheat in the chaff...
but for me the dreaded 'slashdot effect' is the headache i get
every
time someone here is 'nice' enough to link me over there for some
'discussion' ... where i feel like i'm being drafted for a flashback
to
an eternal graduate seminar at a minor state school, perhaps
in
philosophy, and where they've let a bunch of undergrads in too along
w/
some high school 'honors' students... and just when you think you'll
be
allowed to leave after 10 hours someone raises their hand and wants
to
discuss Rawl's 'theory of justice' by way of Kant's obscure later works...
and just when you think you'll survive THAT through some miracle w/
your
sanity and good spirits intact they administer the coup de gras w/
Parfit's 'reasons and persons'... or something like that... which
is
only to say that i think the 'meta-discussion' thread that came up
here
is also important in pointing toward the necessity for developing more
effective and powerful and painless ways to collaborate and 'get stuff
done'... as microsoft would say...
at any rate, as a part of my 'offering'/contribution to that effort
I
am attempting to develop (through my nano-company) an open, dynamic,
distributed object
network architecture and implementation for a 'semantic metasite' concept
(w0rk/site), along with a set of related 'network resistance' projects
using /prototyping this infrastructure. This under the name
and 'umbrella' of 'OhmWeb', and i hope to have a 'script' for that 'up',
in nascent, bootstrapping mode within a few days . The majority of
the
projects are framed as 'commercial' (from a 'fight fire w/ wildfire'
perspective) and I hope to be able to use the common infrastructure
developed for these, and the content of the projects themselves, as
a
better way to organize, publish and 'express' the majority of what
i
want to say and do about 'UCITA; cyber-squatting; star wars,
etc.' ,
using that hopefully more durable, persistent, dynamic and forceful
mechanism... as email and discussion lists tend to quickly lose semantic
coherence and force as the 'threads' age and get worn and unraveled...
hopefully that will seem less cryptic and incoherent in its hyper-linked
and referenced 'exposition' on the soon-to-be-pre-released site :)
but I'd also like to take the time in some followups to respond,
somewhat randomly, to the many interesting and rather important things
that have popped up on the list during my recent 'hiatus' from
participation... especially since i think these various 'threads' can
profitably and 'should', as above, be brought together for
consideration...
and i would again express general appreciation for
the efforts of the contributors who have been taking up the slack for
us... well... slackers, i believe, is the term...
thanks again...
--
mark 'marcello' weitzel, cco
zeitgeist y2k01 ltd.
830 28th st.
oakland, ca 94608
510.451.0352 510.451.0353 fax