Last night’s movies:

’1984,’ the one that came out in 1984. I encountered the term ‘two minute hate,’ and couldn’t remember exactly how the two minute hate worked, so I googled it and ended up at this site: the Newspeak Dictionary. Poking around there, I eventually read most of Emmanuel Goldstein’s ‘The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,’ which is the book-within-a-book in ’1984.’ So it was on my mind when I went to the video store.

Goldstein is, in the book, the most hated man in all of existence, because he is a subversive rebel. In fact, he might or might not exist, and his book might have been created by the Party to ferret out rebels.

Now, ‘Oligarchical Collectivism’ is basically the crib notes explaining the context for everything else that’s happening in the book. Once you read Goldstein’s book, it all falls into place. When you’re watching the movie, on the other hand, the filmmakers leave very little space to understand that there’s no tyrrany, other than raw social force perpetuated by the Party itself, upon itself. Instead, the movie concentrates on the love story between Winston and Julia. In these storytelling confines, Winston ends up as the poor pathetic brainwashed victim, and O’Brien is the heavy, the bad guy.

So I think it’s true that ’1984′ should really only be a book. You should have to read it in order to know it, in the same way that you have to read ‘Oligarchical Collectivism’ to know Oceania.

So it’s handy that it’s available as a download.

What the fook is this??

Constitution Restoration Act of 2004 (Introduced in House)

HR 3799 IH

108th CONGRESS

[..]

A BILL

To limit the jurisdiction of Federal courts in certain cases and promote federalism.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

[..]

(1) AMENDMENT TO TITLE 28- Chapter 81 of title 28, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:

`Sec. 1260. Matters not reviewable

`Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, the Supreme Court shall not have jurisdiction to review, by appeal, writ of certiorari, or otherwise, any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an element of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official personal capacity), by reason of that element’s or officer’s acknowledgement of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.’.

This amuses the hell out of me:

It comes from another amusing thing, a book on how to program in the ruby language. ‘Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby.’

You know what makes me happy?

This makes me happy.

I’m thinking of J. and A. Too bad A. didn’t make it this far forward into time.

I remember one time A. told me those outrageous people in the gay pride parade in NYC just made it harder for others like him. The kind I can only refer to by their first initial, even as I’m linking to a picture of two older men finally able to get married at City Hall.

Speaking of whether or not I’m a hacker….

Should I be worried that I don’t have to look anything up in order to understand anything on either this diagram or this one?

Via sean‘s site, I found a site about the topic of hackerdom, which includes this article: How To Be A Hacker.

I agree with most of it, but the main problem I have with it is that it treads on hallowed ground. It says that if you follow some simple steps, you’ll be hacker. The first step is to learn a computer programming language… I’d offer that there were no programming languages around when Issac Newton was hacking physics, or when Gregor Mendel was hacking genes. Which is to say, I don’t think you can teach someone to be a hacker.

I’m not a very good hacker. I can program computers, I’ve read a lot of science fiction, I’ve even been to science fiction conventions. Yes, plural. I know people who were making the internet run before it was called ‘the internet.’ They are hackers. I’m just a guy who could learn Tkl if he wanted to.

Anyway, that website has come up with an emblem for hackers to use, which is appropriately nerdish in origin. My initial guess was that it was something like a binary representation of the number 42 or maybe some kind of binary mathematical magic square, but the actual meaning is good, too.

Back when I lived in Houston, I used to ‘hang out’ with appropriately alienated hacker-ish types (to one degree or another). Meaning, I’d go to BBS meetings sometimes. At one of these get-togethers, I was talking to Brian O. Blivion (not his real name, obviously; I can’t remember it), who made a sort of reputation for himself as being the hacker’s lawyer. Remember Operation Sun Devil? That was the vibe of the time, and it was nice to have a lawyer around who knew the story. He was in his mid 40s (it seemed any way), the token normal-looking adult person in a room full of GenX social delinquents. I confided: “I’m not really a hacker. I have no desire to make free phone calls to China, just to prove I can do it.” He said, “You’re a good writer.” Then he looked at me, as if he were the Official Bestower Of Validation For All Hacker Hangers-On and said, “You write software for people’s brains.” And I totally ate it up.

So I’m a hacker. I hack YOU.

There’s an acronym: RSN. It means ‘Really Soon Now.’ It’s closely related to the term ‘vaporware,’ which is what you get when you announce a product with no intention of producing it, in order to shape the market.

Like, Microsoft might announce a product just to send competitors scurrying to develop a similar product, as a tactical move. That new faux product would be ‘vaporware,’ and it will be released RSN.

But I’m not here to slam MSFT (much). I’m here to talk to you, my bloggies (and I guess I just decided that’s what I call you folks… be flattered. It’s a little like ‘droogies’ from ‘Clockwork Orange’), and tell you that I really, that is, really want to travel to somewhere outside the US. And I want to do it RSN.

What I want is to see that there is sanity out there. I want to see what’s right and wrong with our culture in the US, by comparison. I want to extrapolate where history is headed based on visiting places.

I also want to learn more about my family roots and find out where they cross the national boundaries. My mom’s side goes to Switzerland, dad’s to England. That’s a pleasant trip to Europe right there.

But the point here is that if you’ve got suggestions, please leave them as comments. Or perhaps a better way to do this is: If you could go any place outside the US, where would it be and why?

Added a site counter. Woot.

UPDATE:

I am removing the site counter, because it makes pop-ups happen. I didn’t realize it would do this, because I had Safari set to block pop-ups.

My apologies to anyone who was accosted by my web counter.

For the record, so that others may benefit from my mistake, it was from coolcounters.com. It made it to 66 in a day.

This kind of takes the cake for post-modern irony overload:

Ok, so Bush as an Agent in The Matrix, but it’s a button advertising *for* Bush’s election campaign. It makes no sense. It’s the perfect emblem.

Here’s another one:

For comparison purposes: The Republican Matrix.