Ad Terras Per Aspera

Craig Baracco over at Craigorian Chant has an article up about the NPR story covering the guilty plea of serial bomber Eric Rudolph in front of the federal court. He brings up an important point,

What struck me about this when listening to an NPR story about Rudolph this weekend is the fact that the coverage of this story does not include the word “terrorist”.

My question for the readers of The Chant, is when should a criminal be described a terrorist? Obviously the term is appropriately applied to members of Al-qaeda, but what about the insurgent forces within Iraq? What about the insurgent forces within Ireland? Do radical Christians deserve the same label as radical Muslims? What about eco-terrorists and drug dealers?

I personally think they all should be considered terrorists. Anyone who kills to instills fear in people who oppose him/her or his/her views is a terrorist. Rudolph clearly did this, and he is correctly labeled as a terrorist. Back during the Atlanta Olympics bombing incident, I clearly remember the media labeling him as a terrorist, and the only reason they aren’t now is because the US government doesn’t want our current image of terrorists (IE, the stereotypical Al-qaeda camel-riding rag-head) diluted.

The White House has spent the last 5 years trying to convince America (and whoever else will listen) that there is only one kind of terrorist, and they all look like the rejects in the Team America movie; they don’t want us to remember that sometimes terrorists are also our fellow Americans, and come in many forms such as the Rudolphs of the world, and CEOs of major corporations, or are elected President.

To quote Apple’s OS X website (specifically, the yellow “New in Tiger” box on the right): “Remappable Modifier Keys: Remap modifiers such as control and caps lock to be super elite.” And one of the screenshots has a transparent terminal.

I’m waiting for the eventual announcement: “New for 10.5: We’ve ported Enlightenment, and are using this as our window manager! Ooh shiney!” Crackrock ahoy!

The New York Times is running an article about the public discussion between Lawrence Lessig (the Stanford University professor who is so against criminalized file sharing it hurts) and Jeff Tweedy (the leader of the band Wilco).

They both agree that people have a right to culture, and I agree with them. I’m always on the look out for something new. Something that is actually new, and isn’t the same rap or pop rehash you find on MTV or VH1, something that isn’t complete shit. The only way to do this is to download it: I’m not buying a CD if I don’t know what it sounds like first. If I did that, I would be potentionally rewarding them for producing shit.

I also think that by attempting to shut out people who want to distribute your music over the Internet (who ultimately are your fans) is an unbelievably stupid thing. Free bandwidth to distribute things is hard to come by, so is free publicity. If you want to make an honest living, then let your fans do the right thing. By charging $25 a CD for shitty music, and try to sue your fans for doing the right thing only means you’re stealing money from your fans.

Well, it was bound to happen: someone goes to jail for trying to spend legal tender. I’ve been trying to think of something witty to say about this for the last twelve hours, but this is so unbelievably retarded that my mind has just been flooded with Stupid Rays^TM to prevent any witty remarks from surfacing.

In this post-9/11 world, the terrorists have already won: terrorist, thy name is high school drop out working at Best Buy! That’s another thing I don’t get. How can you blame the actions of a (hopefully soon to be fired) high school dropout working the cash register on the actions of a group of terrorists? Blowing up the World Trade Center, sure. Blowing up the Pentagon, sure. Blowing up soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, sure. Having someone arrested for trying to spend legal tender, only if Satan is forecasting flurries and a chance of ice-coated brimstone.

If anything, high school dropouts are what’s wrong with this country, not a few empty tents and camels in the middle of a desert. We should wage a war on stupidity, and not wage a war on terrorism. We should drop the hammer on the Department of Education, not drop the hammer on a couple of third world countries. We should make school books, not war.

Teachers and parents alike should be trying to further the education of children, not give them a gun and ship them off to a foreign country to fight. The United States used to be one of the most well educated and well respected countries in the world, and now our educational standards have dropped to what some third world countries have.

And because of that, we’ve put a poor innocent person in jail because he tried to pay using legal tender. I wonder if its too late to move to Canada…

I found this pretty cool science fiction story, Cradle’s Children. Its pretty decent, though a little dry. It needs polishing up, so go leave comments on what you liked and what you didn’t.