From Chapter 1: Had Enough?

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ve had enough. How about you?

I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged. This is a fight I’m ready and willing to have.

My friends tell me to calm down. They say, “Lee, you’re eighty-two years old. Leave the rage to the young people.” I’d love to — as soon as I can pry them away from their iPods for five seconds and get them to pay attention. I’m going to speak up because it’s my patriotic duty. I think people will listen to me. They say I have a reputation as a straight shooter. So I’ll tell you how I see it, and it’s not pretty, but at least it’s real. I’m hoping to strike a nerve in those young folks who say they don’t vote because they don’t trust politicians to represent their interests. Hey, America, wake up. These guys work for us.

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I want to tell you
I feel hung up and I don’t know why.
I don’t mind,
I could wait forever, I’ve got time.

metazip is an Apache 2.0 module that allows you to serve dynamically-constructed, uncompressed zip files. Thus, your users can choose to download individual files or entire collections, but you don’t have to reserve disk space for both.

I originally wrote metazip to solve a problem at Archive.org. They have an amazing collection of freely-downloadable music, most of it being complete live shows of bands that allow free distribution. It’s really the logical, modern extension of the good ol’ days of Grateful Dead tape-trading. And, indeed, Archive.org has thousands of Dead shows free for the listening. Check it out!

Anyway, Archive.org allows you to download an entire show as a single .zip file. You can also select individual tracks. They employ a Perl script that dynamically creates these zip files on the fly. This seems logical, since otherwise they would consume double the disk space (and their archive is immense)!

Unfortunately, the script has a rather fatal flaw: it doesn’t support resumption of downloads, a topic of much consternation in their forums. (Also see my post on the subject, which includes a quirky workaround I concocted.) This can be mighty frustrating if your Internet connection craps out 95% of the way through a 1GB download! Most browsers and other HTTP clients support resumption, which would allow you to download that last 5% without starting over.

For more information about metazip, how it works, and how to set it up, see the metazip web site. It’s an open-source project, so feel free to contribute to its development at the SourceForge project page.

It’s all about taking the easy way out for you,
I suppose.

Elliott Smith, Easy Way Out, 2000

Crooks and Liars has audio (recommended), Windows video (choppy), and Quicktime video (also choppy.)

ALAN SHORE: When the “Weapons of Mass Destruction thing” turned out not to be true, I expected the American people to rise up! Huh! They didn’t.

Then, when the Abu Ghraib “torture thing” surfaced, and it was revealed that our government participated in “rendition,” a practice where we kidnap people and turn them over to regimes who specialize in torture, I was sure, then, the American people would be heard from. We stood mute.

Then came the news that we jailed thousands of so-called “terrorist suspects” — locked them up, without the right to a trial or even the right to confront their accusers. Certainly, we would never stand for that. We did.

And now, it’s been discovered, the executive branch has been conducting massive, illegal, domestic surveillance on its own citizens — you and me. And I at least consoled myself that finally, finally the American people will have had enough.

Evidently we haven’t. In fact, if the people of this country have spoken, the message is, “We’re okay with it all.” Torture, warrantless search-and-seizures, illegal wiretappings. Prison without a fair trial — or any trial. War on false pretenses. We as a citizenry are, apparently, not offended. There are no demonstrations on college campuses; in fact, there’s no clear indication that young people even seem to notice.

Well, Melissa Hughes noticed. Now, you might think instead of withholding her taxes, she could have protested the old-fashioned way: made a placard and demonstrated at a Presidential or Vice-Presidential appearance. But we’ve lost the right to that as well. The Secret Service can now declare “free speech zones” to contain, control, and, in effect, criminalize protest.

Stop for a second, and try to fathom that: At a Presidential rally, parade, or appearance, if you have on a supportive T-shirt, you can be there. If you’re wearing, or carrying something in protest, you can be removed. This, in the United States of America. This, in the United States of America! Is Melissa Hughes the only one embarrassed?

JUDGE: Mr. Shore, that’s a chair for witnesses only.

ALAN SHORE: These long speeches make me so tired sometimes.

JUDGE: Please get out of the chair.

ALAN SHORE: Actually, I’m sick and tired.

JUDGE: Get out of the chair!

ALAN SHORE: And what I’m most sick and tired of, is how every time somebody disagrees with how the government is running things, he or she is labeled “un-American.”

PROSECUTOR: Evidently it’s speech time.

ALAN SHORE: And speech in this country is free, you hack! Free for me, free for you, free for Melissa Hughes to stand up to her government and say, “Stick it!”

PROSECUTOR: Objection!

ALAN SHORE: I object to Government abusing its power to squash the constitutional freedoms of its citizenry. And, God forbid, anybody challenge it, they’re smeared as being a heretic. Melissa Hughes is an American! Melissa Hughes is an American. Melissa Hughes is an American!

JUDGE: Mr. Shore, unless you have anything new and fresh to say, please sit down. You’ve breached the decorum of my courtroom with all this hooting.

ALAN SHORE: Last night, I went to bed with a book. Not as much fun as a 29-year-old, but, the book contained a speech by Adlai Stevenson. The year was 1952. He said, “The tragedy of our day is the climate of fear in which we live, and fear breeds repression. Too often, sinister threats to the Bill of Rights, to freedom of the mind, are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anti-communism.”

Today, it’s the cloak of anti-terrorism.

My concern is that changing technologies are presenting new privacy issues that are being ignored. For example, while video cameras have been around for a while, digital technology continuously reduces the cost — virtually to zero. Storage and network capacity grows exponentially, and we now have the ability to link all video cameras into a large network. We also have the technology, using facial recognition, triangulation, and other new approaches, to recognize individuals on camera and link them into a centralized database.

Without any constraints, we could be headed towards a dystopic future depicted in Orwell’s 1984 or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. In these worlds, video surveillance is covert and pervasive, and those in power have the ability to use this information to their advantage. Is this an unrealistic scenario? I think not.

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Don’t want to read my ridiculous blathering? No problem! Just download the free, open source code that “fixes” find.

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While we’re on the subject of WordPress and blogging software, let me take this chance to say “Hello, world!” and “Thank You!” to the creators of this free, open source software.