A word about prisms...

For anyone who’s been following the Ed Snowden whistleblowing story, I can;t help being suspicious of anyone intelligent who claims a Powerpoint presentation is proof of anything. 

A bit of digging brought this up. An interview from 2008 for a ('factual') book, The Shadow Factory. 

Turns out, the whistle was blown way back then.

“And that’s what happened. NSA began making these agreements with AT&T and other companies, and that in order to get access to the actual cables, they had to build these secret rooms in these buildings.

So what would happen would be the communications on the cables would come into the building, and then the cable would go to this thing called a splitter box, which was a box that had something that was similar to a prism, a glass prism. And the prism was shaped like a prism, and the light signals would come in, and they’d be split by the prism. And one copy of the light signal would go off to where it was supposed to be going in the telecom system, and the other half, this new cloned copy of the cables, would actually go one floor below to NSA’s secret room. So you had one copy of everything coming in and going to NSA’s secret room. And in the secret room was equipment by a private company called Narus, the very small company hardly anybody has ever heard of that created the hardware and the software to analyze these cables and then pick out the targets NSA is looking for and then forward the targeted communications onto NSA headquarters.”

From http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/14/james_bamford_the_shadow_factory_the

Why the media would want to pick up on this now is beyond me. 

Something to do with the Bilderberg Group Meeting going on at the same time? 

Something to do with the new push to tighten laws against digital piracy and internet porn?

Who knows. But Powerpoint slideshows, for all their prettiness, do not make evidence of anything except people can be so gullible.

Running up more hills...

I love music. And, therefore, I hate music.

Some writers thrive on background tunes to stir their muse.

Not me.

Nuh-uh. No way.

I know better. Listening to music freezes every ounce of creativity and I go into Analytical Mode. I pick out guitars licks, key changes, and voice harmonies. I zone when I write (where ‘zone’ is a verb. I zone, you zone, he zones.) And I zone when I listen to music.

Thing is, they’re different zones. Moving from one to the other is sooo difficult. And I know that.

But tonight, a friend posted a link to Kate Bush’s cover of Taupin/John’sRocket Man.

 Bollocks. I can’t resist Kate Bush.

I remember that song so well. And man, she looks so much sexier on the video than I remember—and she looked pretty damned hot back then.

Caught up, I drifted to other tracks, remembering the Hounds of Love album I must have listened to a million times. A favourite if ever there was one. And Kate Bush led me to Dave Gilmour, led me to Neil Young, to James Taylor, and back through the years to Annie Lennox.

Jesus.

It’s easy to think Nostalgia messes me up emotionally, but it doesn’t. I’m not a nostalgic sort of person. They weren’t the ‘good old days’ at all. They were internet deficient, pre-computer days. Hell no, I’m happier today and I just hope I’m around to see what happens to computing over the next half century. It’s gonna be something else, you know?

"Ophelia" ~ John Millais

No, what messes me up is an appreciation of music. Some people get all mushy about artwork. They can faint at the joy some paintings bring them. Seriously. Visuals don’t do that to me. (Okay, apart Millais’ Ophelia, but that’s different, because in the early 70’s I fell in love with the model, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife, Elizabeth, and I can’t see that painting without remembering what a sad and tragic life she had, and I get sort of mushy about her demise.)

Mushy. Yeah. Good music makes me cry. Deal with it.

I have two projects on the go, right now. First—and the most important because there’s a tight deadline (like, the end of this month)—of getting the autobiography of a friend’s father edited, and sourcing a decently priced printer (POD probably); and secondly, and a couple of weird and freaked out shorts—one of which kept me awake half of last night because I couldn’t sleep through the idea and just had to see how it looked in pixels.

I had all intentions of getting back to writing, tonight...

But, Momma, the songs are still playin’ in ma head.

Getting back to anything without hearing Lennox’s LittleBird or Young’s Heart of Gold, or Bush’s Running up that Hill is going to be a hill of its own to run up.

But, hell, look at this. Even with Kate’s vocals in my head, I’ve just done a blogpost. And it’s not even midnight, yet.

We survived another asteroid fly-by yesterday. Things are looking up, and I might not need to snip the wire to my laptop’s internal speakers after all.

Enjoy the links. I won’t be listening with you. Imma gonna take my shoes off and throw them in the lake.

Coincidences and bare truths

Odd, isn't it--Thatcher's going out to controversy over Ding Dong the Witch is Dead (from the Wizard of Oz (with possible royalties to Lording-it-up Andrew Lloyd Webber)) and the one person who stands up in Parliament to decry Mrs T is Oscar winning actress Glenda Jackson.

Some might have spotted the close coincidence: in the Wizard of Oz, the Good Witch of the North appears when the wicked witch has a house dropped on her. The Good Witch's name: Glinda.

Glinda...Glenda?

Coincidence, right?

And the bare truth...Thatcher is still being touted as the daughter of a greengrocer, as if that puts her roots as coming firmly from the working class.

Oh, puhlease.

Okay, I concede: her old man, Alf Roberts (not to be mixed up with the more lovable Alf Roberts of Coronation Street fame), actually was a greengrocer. It's true.

But he was also a Justice of the Peace, president of the Chamber of Trade, President of Rotary, a director of the Grantham Building Society, a director of the Trustee Savings Bank, chairman of the local National Savings Movement, a governor of the local boys and girls grammar schools and chairman of the Workers' Educational Association. During the Second World War (note 1 below) he was Chief Welfare Officer, directing civil defence, and soon became Chairman of the Finance and Rating Committee. In 1943 he was elected by the council as an Alderman and then served as the Mayor of Grantham for a year.(amusingly, calling for 'a large programme of expenditure to rebuild the roads, public transport, health and social services for children and to "build houses by the thousand. (Wiki bio)

But fuck it, let's just call him a greengrocer, shall we? And while we're on, let's belittle him a little more, by pointing out that there's strong evidence to suggest he was also at the very least, a sex pest who groped employees bums and looked up their skirts, and maybe even a groping sex offender, depending on how you want to grade the offences

When you consider the accusations that Thatcher knowingly employed paedophiles, and had Jimmy Savile around for seven (or was it eleven?) New Years in a row, things start to look a little like what went around was still going round. Some have nodded a wink to Denis Thatcher being one of the club, as it were. Who knows? We might never find out...or maybe we will.



[Note 1: The first World War was actually the Seven Years War (1754-1763) (which you might have noticed was actually nine years not seven.) You also have to watch what historians tell you.]