Sleep Well
Sunday. You don't see the candle lighted eyes very well in the photograph, although you get a better feeling for the thing in a room with low light in the photograph located behind the Sole Proprietor's Journal logo. A little creepy in that low light hides the smile and you think “demon” before you think “kitty cat”. And the lighting isn't right, something I think I'll work with these next few days. I have lighting equipment that's designed to make photographing small objects easier and I think it's time to give it a try. I say the next few days because I doubt I'll get it together to work on it in more than fifteen minute increments. Fifteen minutes isn't much and doesn't say anything positive about my funky feeling head, but maybe I can chain a few of them together. Who knows? It's a start.
Breakfast this morning at the usual cafe, a drive over to Berkeley to have the car washed (well worth having it done from the look of it), back to the apartment, a bus ride downtown to walk around Chinatown briefly to see what they have in the way of DVD movies on sale, an ice cream cone in the Cultural Center, back now on an overcast day punctuated by an occasional mist-like light rain. No complaints. Too much sun as it is in August (harrumph!) I think.
I was depressed to hear Congress didn't push back harder on the Bush revision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which still doesn't require a warrant to spy on American citizens with Congressional and Judicial oversight. The Bush administration is clearly covering up an operation that can't stand the dimmest of legal light, but that isn't what's so depressing, although that's depressing enough.
The Democrats seem scared to death a terrorist attack will occur here in the States and the Republicans will hang it on them because they successfully modified the Surveillance Act to conform to the Constitution, which means both Republicans and Democrats believe the American majority either doesn't understand the importance of the issues involved or holds them to be of such little value they're willing to trade them for whatever the Bush administration is currently selling as “safety”.
No reason given why warrants shouldn't be necessary, no reason given why they should be difficult to execute, no reason given why they shouldn't be audited now and then to see everything is on the up and up: no debate, no information, no dice. People this blind in the past have eventually found themselves under a totalitarian state just as frogs sitting in water slowly brought to a boil will allow themselves to fry.
Is this just my particular paranoia? Probably. I hope so. It's just I see the Bush people spinning, spinning, spinning and no matter how outrageous the proposition it invariably works. Sure, there's a blogosphere screaming the emperor has no clothes (where the “mainstream” press with few exceptions is mute or promoting the administration's adgenda), but to what effect? One of my Senators (Dianne Feinstein) voted for passage. She showed a similar disdain for civil liberties when she was the mayor of San Francisco. If another Democrat or (not likely, but who knows, maybe in California?) Republican runs against her on this specific and similar issues they'll get my vote. I suspect if she knew she wouldn't sleep well at night.
|
