Big Brother Is Watching YOU

Book artist Richard Minsky tracked down the original printing of this famous quotation, usually attributed to Benjamin Franklin.

How did we get here again? Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering tells us how:

[T]he people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

It's time to dust off those old copies of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four; or, if you don't have one, Wikipedia has some links to electronic versions downloadable from sites in countries where the copyright has expired. Of course, Big Brother's media company friends might not like you using those links. And as we now know, more than ever before, through the technological marvel that is ECHELON and the directives of our current President and his henchmen. . .


What's next? Take a look at England's latest initiative:

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

And after that?

The new national surveillance network for tracking car journeys, which has taken more than 25 years to develop, is only the beginning of plans to monitor the movements of all British citizens. The Home Office Scientific Development Branch in Hertfordshire is already working on ways of automatically recognising human faces by computer, which many people would see as truly introducing the prospect of Orwellian street surveillance, where our every move is recorded and stored by machines.

Wait, there's more!

[British Prime Minister] Tony Blair is preparing to scrap a 40-year ban on tapping MPs' [Members of Parliament's] telephones, despite fierce Cabinet opposition. . . .

Some people are not comfortable with our President ordering pervasive snooping without a warrant, on our own citizens inside this country, and his assertion of vast power as Commander-in-Chief during a "war on terror" that has no end. A Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of The New York Times, Howell Raines, has used his institutional memory and knowledge of history to give us a backgrounder on the role of the Bush family in American politics. The Times itself just editorialized on Vice President Cheney's motivations and huge role in this administration's interventionism and expansion of Presidential power. Former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle used his institutional memory in a Washington Post column, saying that the Congress explicitly rejected legislative wording in the "use of force" resolution pushed by the White House that would have authorized those same expansive Presidential powers to be exercised inside the United States. Even arch-conservative columnist George Will has wondered, "Why didn't he ask Congress?" for expanded domestic surveillance powers.

The President has asked us to trust him not to abuse his newly alleged powers; but in a similar context regarding the Alien and Sedition Acts, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

[I]t would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism — free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power: that our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go. . . .

In questions of powers, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

UPDATE: Al Gore, Jr., weighed in on this matter with the best speech of his life and one of the best in American history. Read it here, listen to it here, and see excerpts of it here. Jefferson would be proud. Read an earlier Gore speech here.

UPDATE: Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites.
Comrades, we need not worry with these weighty matters. Just remember that Big Brother is watching out for you; and remember the Party's truths:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Lesbian Litigation

Our litigious society has entered a new era. In a federal case out of California, a district judge has ruled that a girl can sue her high school because the principal told her mother that her daughter openly kissed and hugged her girlfriend on campus. I wasn't surprised that the ACLU attorney who filed the case maintained that "a student has a right not to have her sexual orientation disclosed to her parents, even if she is out of the closet at school;" but what the mother said did surprise me until I thought about the money:

“The person to decide when and how to talk with our family about this should have been my daughter, not her principal,” her mother, Crystal Chhun, said in a statement.

What next? Oh, yeah, America's first same-sex civil union is on the rocks. Carolyn Conrad, 35, filed for dissolution after alleging that Kathleen Peterson, 46, "punched a hole in the wall during an argument in late August, and threatened to harm a female friend of Peterson's in early December." Conrad obtained an emergency relief-from-abuse order against Peterson on December 7, pending a hearing January 4. The Vermont article included an interesting statistic: "A little more than two-thirds of the same-sex couples who filed for civil unions were women." A conservative website tied in more recent social science data in its report:

A Swedish study published last year found that lesbian couples were 2.67 times as likely to divorce as opposite-sex married couples, while same-sex male couples were 1.5 times as likely to divorce as married opposite-sex couples, over a similar period of time.

As a final tidbit, to greedy men and bi-curious women wanting threesomes, I have long said: "I don't want a woman with a taste I can't satisfy." I'm talking about a long-term partner here, not a short-term playmate. As evidence for the wisdom of my position, I offer up this recent news item: "I'm still Jolie's lesbian lover." Let's see how Brad Pitt deals with that.

UPDATE: See what the kids are up to in "The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School."

UPDATE: "The lesbian couple whose lawsuit led to the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts have separated."

UPDATE: Ruling in state vs. state battle over former lesbian couple's baby.

Slavery

In a recent article in The New York Times, "A Convenient Amnesia About Slavery," Brent Staples tells of a new exhibition put on by the New York Historical Society in Manhattan, titled "Slavery in New York." Some of the nuggets in the article prompted me to share some thoughts on slavery and on the superiority or inferiority complexes associated with it:

Slavery was no less brutal in New York than in the South - and just as pervasive. At one point, about four in 10 New York households owned human beings.
. . . .
By conveniently "forgetting" slavery, Northerners have historically absolved themselves of complicity while heaping blame onto the shoulders of the plantation South.

The Times article followed a comment battle eight days earlier at Hit & Run on the all-important topic of whether Lynyrd Skynyrd's song "Sweet Home Alabama" is racist in its response to Neil Young's "Southern Man."

Superiority complexes based on stereotypes seem to be most common and inappropriate in people who need to feel they are better than other people but who base their feelings on group membership rather than their own personal standing. The need to feel superior to some group of people may indeed spring from repressed feelings of personal inferiority to other people in one's frame of reference.

Inferiority complexes based on slavery need to be abandoned too, because it is fair to say that everyone's people -- black, white, yellow, brown, or red -- have been enslaved at one time or another in human history. See the Wikipedia entry for evidence of this. In other words, it's nothing personal. In terms of our ancestors, we've all had to get over it. Building friendships is the best antidote to brooding about it.

UPDATE: Pandering to blacks -- Walter E. Williams

UPDATE: The Untold Story of White Slavery -- Book review by Thomas Jackson