I'm neither the righteous, nor the shepherd. But I've had just about enough of the tyranny of evil men. And if you harboured any remaining doubts about the "evil" part, I give you this, from today's New York TImes:

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

Here's the permalink.

Posted by ElectricOrange at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Boy, I've been awfully quiet for a long time. If one is going to have a weblog, I suspect it only makes sense that one should write on it. At a minimum once a month would be fair. I had a grand plan to write a story about how I'd been abducted to a CIA black site, but I'm not finding the humour in that at the moment, and the times are sapping me of my creativity. So we're left with an author lacking inspiration and feeling underwhelmed.

Years are just numbers and dates, machinations to be sure. Convenient tools for all of us to mark the passage of time, and file the days away in leatherbound binders on our bookshelves.

In the binder marked 2005 will rest the contents of a shit year in a decade that has seen more than its share of shitty years. On a macro scale, there has been disaster after disaster, and a general sense that the trajectory of the world is at best a cause for apprehension (if not depression). On a micro scale, I can't think of a year that's been worse for personal relationships for myself and among my friends and acquaintances. Accidents, injuries, floods, hurricanes, divorces, cold shoulders, and sour memories for the lot of us.

It's a binder I'll be more than happy to file away.

I hope I find more inspiration in the new year, that the little signal that makes me want to share piques me more often. I hope I have good news to share, exciting ideas to comment on. I hope I can find the motivation that's been eluding me.

Posted by ElectricOrange at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)