For Your Safety

Originally Posted Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Oh God.  It has come to this.  I desperately searched for some picture to post this morning that wasn't. . . you know.  All I had scanned was some film out of one of the Holga cameras, something I scanned a few months ago.  It is a useless picture.  It means nothing--except for the message on the sign.  It seems the government agencies, be they federal or local, are always looking out for you and your safety.  And who can argue with that?  Who wants to come out in public for a lack of safety? 

Anti-heros, of course. 

"Take that sign down.  Girls. . . safety is important, but it certainly shouldn't be first." 

That is a line misquoted to me (I am certain) by an old ex-friend from the movie "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." 

There seems to be a lot of faith involved in Big Data.  Diane Feinstein believes that NSA surveillance is saving lives.  She is one of secret surveillance's biggest supporters on Capital Hill.  Read today's stories on surveillance in the New York Times, and you'll see a lot about how government officials feel.  They feel, that the President either knew or did not know that the NSA was spying on the heads of European states.  Leaders of the E.U. are outraged that data has been collected on their communications.  Somehow, I guess, I'm supposed to feel the outrage, too.  I do, but not about them.  Why are they not outraged about surveillance on you and me and anyone else?  In the spy game, who are the bad guys?  Who are the good?  It is like football.  Your team is the good guys. 

Go Blue Shirts, Go!!!!

You may remember that I was never an Obama fan.  I've always said he was too conservative.  The thing that he had going for him was that he wasn't Bush, but it turns out he wasn't all that much "not Bush."  The list of things he has continued from that administration is long.  And some agendas he's furthered.  Like electronic surveillance. 

He's in trouble now.  Obama.  And he deserves to be.  I mean the whole Affordable Health Care website fiasco is crazy.  He has the NSA, for god's sake.  Whey didn't he have them put together the website?  It would have been a gold mine of information. . . and the site would have worked without a hitch.  As the N.Y. Times pointed out today, though, he's a better politician that he is a leader.  He has surrounded himself with youthful newbies who haven't the experience to get things done.  Frigging  kids!  That's what I say. 

So where's the Tea Party on all this?  Are they split on Big Government, hating health care but loving surveillance?  I haven't heard the outcry from them about the NSA that I would have expected.  I'm not even sure where the Koch Brothers stand on this.  Surely the NSA doesn't keep track of what they are up to. 

O.K.  That's a lot of bullshit trying to make today's picture work.  It doesn't help.  It is still a nothing picture.  I should have written about last night's trip to the beauty parlor.  Maybe tomorrow.  I need to write these things down.  I have another idea about "The World's Best Language."  Which one is really best?  I need to start with the rudiments, though, like alphabets.  Which one has the right amount of characters.  English has twenty-six.  Does it need more?  Are there better alphabets with fewer characters?  From there we can move on to punctuation and eventually to verb tenses.  Oooo, I hate verb tenses.  Perhaps there are languages, though, that have fewer, like Ebonics.  I DO believe that therein lies the efficacy of Ebonics (which shares that trait with Russian, I believe). 

But all of that is for another time.  Maybe.  If I remember or if other things do not come in between.  Now that I am getting over my long, slow motion flu, I might be able to make some of the new pictures I've talked about so.  Maybe.  Ad nauseum orinfinitum.  And so on and so forth, and things of that sort. . . .  Etc.