ENIGMA CURRY

Quod Libet

I've been spending some time today playing around with Quod Libet, a free music player and organizer built for Linux. The nice thing for me is that it's written entirely in Python, which makes it really easy and fun to modify.

Today I wrote one plugin for it as well as one bug fix.

This is too much fun!

My Dad, the piano man.

My father always had a piano in the house while I was growing up. I have many fond memories of him playing it. At some point, after we moved to Utah when I was 10 years old, the frequency of his playing slowed. I think this was due in part to his eagerness to provide for his family and thus his time diminished, but also because his Chickering upright piano did not fare well in Utah's lower humidity.

Last year, my parents moved closer to where my Dad works and they also got a new house-warming self-given gift: a 1911 Steiff grand piano. My Dad has been very enthusiastic about it ever since and his playing has improved by leaps and bounds. I am very proud of him.

Today, he sent me his latest studio recording. I assume this is not played on his new Piano as he doesn't have his own studio. This is amazing: If you could see me now.

Click the play button below

Fiscal irresponsibility completely out of control.

I've written a few times on how badly we're spending money these days, but this article from Rolling Stone should bring the point home:

According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined.

How have we let things get this far out of control? It's unbelievable: more money borrowed in five years than in all the two-hundred and eleven years previous… and Bush still has until January 20, 2009 to bring that number even higher.

This is money that you and I will be held accountable for one way or another

Imagine a boot smashing on a human face — forever

I am sick to my stomach after reading this latest news. We have heard over the last several months a lot about justification of torture and debate on when, where and under what circumstances it should be allowed to occur. This, though, is personal - An uncensored glimpse into our own local reality: domestic torture of unconvicted Citizens of our own country.

Eugene Siler of Jacksboro, TN was brutally beaten by Police officers in July of 2004. His wife Jenny secretly hid a recorder in the room and caught the whole candid event on tape. The transcript has been available for a while. The audio has now been realeased as well.

Luckily, the officers involved have all been charged and sentenced to prison, if but for a small token amount of time.

Please read or listen to the above. If you have any lingering beliefs that law enforcement is here for our benefit or in any way respects the rights of their fellow human beings, this should put things in their proper perspective.

You might be thinking that this all turned out OK because the officers were all convicted. Yes, that is the good part of this story, but it was only due to the secretly hidden recording device. How many more untold stories like this are hidden forever?

Thanks to the Hammer of Truth for the story.

Waking Life

I'm trying to determine if things are just getting really bad or if I'm just starting to wake up.

I try to read the news everyday. I browse the topics at mainstream media sources but I try to get as much of my daily info from a variety of independent and blog-type news sources. Unfortunately, a lot of really important things are filtered out by the mainstream media these days. Also, I don't have enough time in my day to read all the potentially really newsworthy topics in the blogosphere. I've missed a lot in just the past few weeks alone:

• Boy convicted for putting pictures of guns on MySpace
  This 16-year-old was arrested in February because he posted pictures of his father's guns on his blog. The pictures were taken privately in his own home, and he had his father's permission to handle the guns, even when he was alone at home. He has been convicted of 'possession of a handgun by a juvenile'; however, the law also gives permission for parents to allow their children to handle their guns in their own homes. Therefore, no law has been broken, but it looks as if he will be going to prison regardless.
• Federal agents attempt to seize gold tooth caps from suspected drug dealers
  To their credit, the agents said that they didn't know that the tooth caps were impossible to remove without destroying the teeth. However, these agents only admitted this after the defendants' lawyer got an injunction to stop them. By that time, the defendents were already loaded up in the car and ready to go to the dentist. The best quote from the lawyer:

  It sounds like Nazi Germany when they were removing the gold teeth from the bodies, but at least then they waited until they were dead.

  No kidding! Not only were these people not dead, they weren't even convicted yet!

• The White House wants to examine your shit… Literally!
  In the ongoing war against drug users, the latest tactic is examination of your excrement for traces of cocaine.
• Disease-Mongering!
  Now we have drug companies inventing (!!) new diseases in order to gain more market spectrum and profits. Richard Ley, of the Association of the British Pharmecutical Industry, has this to say:

  We provide information that there are treatments out there that might help certain conditions, but at the end of the day it is down to health professionals to decide if they are appropriate.

  My translation: "We just throw random chemicals together and call it science, and then we pay off the doctors to sell our stuff. Oh, but we're not actually saying that our drugs are for any particular purpose. Again, they're just random chemicals, You do what you want with them."

Kind of makes one rethink the avian flu thing now doesn't it?

Oh, but you might say, "Ryan, that's not very libertarian of you to say that. Let the company sell what it wants to sell, it's your fault if you do something stupid with it. Let the market take care of it".

I might believe in the free market, but I don't have to stay quiet when a company does something I don't like, especially when it is in collusion with the government. This is far, far, removed from a free market. Currently, only the companies that are a part of the FDA elite are allowed to hock their wares.

• The FDA comes out with 'New' evidence that marijuana has no medical value
  This 'news' comes to us despite how testing marijuana is actually illegal in this country so they couldn't have done any real tests, despite how all the party's involved are a bunch of government-funded bureaucracies that certainly have their own agendas, despite hundreds of tests that show the contrary, despite the fact that, if the same standards were applied 30 years ago, even aspirin wouldn't have been approved by the FDA, despite the fact that people, since the beginning of time, have been able to responsibly use marijuana and no deaths directly attributable to it have been recorded. Yea, let's all congratulate the FDA on their new 'scientific evidence'.

And scariest of all:

• Bush Advisor, John Yoo, admits that Bush has the right to crush a child's testicals
  That recording was from a debate in December. Regardless of whether one has the right to torture a suspected terrorist or not, where does one get off saying that you can torture the suspect's family members, especially their children? These people are facists and should be taken out of power immediately!

The scariest thing about all of this is not that any of this has happened, but that there doesn't seem to be much outcry about it. When it was proven that Bush lied to us to get us into a war, I thought the People would revolt. We didn't. We don't seem to care about torture. We don't seem to care about domestic spying. We don't seem to care about anything that our government does anymore. We all seem to know that at least something they have done is unconstitutional. But where are the protests? We got Clinton impeached for far less. I think it's gotten so bad that maybe it's just too overwhelming and is just washing over us like the tide. I don't want to be lazy, I want to do my part, but it shouldn't be such a chore to dig this stuff up every day. We need to be proactive and refuse to put up with this sort of crap anymore. I'm still holding out for us, hoping that more people will gain the courage that Michael Badnarik has, that people will make the current regime accountable, that people's voices will be heard; I know that most of us still have one.

Digital Photograph Fingerprinting

Our printers have been spying on us for years, but soon we may be revealing our identity when we publicly post pictures we take with our digital cameras.

According to Jessica Fridrich, the holder of two new patents related to digital image fingerprinting, she has been able to statistically show whether or not a particular camera took a picture in question. She asserts that each camera has a unique signature in the way it captures the image and that this signature will be visible in every image that the camera takes. If true, this brings up many privacy concerns; it is most certainly beneficial to individuals, and society in general, to be able to post pictures anonymously.

Computer images are just a long string of RGB values, which are easily modifiable. What if we were to randomize those values within a small delta (using appropriate software)? If the delta were small enough, the change would be unnoticeable to the human eye, but would render any statistical analysis for identification purposes impossible.

Here's some python code to test my theory.

Here's an example test I ran. This is a scaled down copy of the original image (click the image for the original one):

Here's the same image run through at delta = 2:

Here's the same image run through at delta = 20:

Here's the same image run through at delta = 100… Now it's really grainy (click the image to see it better):

Obviously, you want to pick the right delta level. I personally can't see much of a difference between the original and delta=2. The question is: at what point does the image lose its "statistical identity"? I would tend to think that it would lose the identity at even delta=2. At delta = 100 the picture becomes really grainy (although at low resoultion it's easy to miss) … When it comes time for the revolution though, I think we'll have more important things to worry about than grainy pictures.

Ron Paul on the IRS

I'm pretty critical when it comes to the IRS, and I'm sure many people would think my beliefs on the IRS (short answer: abolishment) are too extreme. However, Congressman Ron Paul has recently spoken on this issue and has a very compelling argument that few would be able to refute:

Even today, individual income taxes account for only approximately one-third of federal revenue. Eliminating one-third of the proposed 2007 budget would still leave federal spending at roughly $1.8 trillion – a sum greater than the budget just 6 years ago in 2000! Does anyone seriously believe we could not find ways to cut spending back to 2000 levels?

He is talking about what would happen if we were to completely abolish the IRS today. What would happen? The US would have 1/3 less cash than it would otherwise, but the remaining 2/3 would still be more than the entire 2000 budget. This points out two things to me:

1. The IRS would be really easy to reform, if not outright abolish. The Government would still have a plethora of avenues to aquire revenue, including constitutional methods: tarrifs and excise taxes. Even if we just abolished the IRS and did nothing else, the government would still have as much incoming revenue as it did in 2000!
2. If the government would have the same revenue as it did in 2000 by cutting out an entire 1/3 of the budget, what does that say about the government's spending habits?? That means a massive increase in the budget in just the past six years.

What is so important that we're doing now that we weren't doing back in 2000? The war? Not many today will argue that anymore. We can end the war, we can get rid of all the pork spending in Washington if our Congressman are allowed to at least read the bills before they're passed and by so doing we can easily restore this nation to using constitutional methods of taxation. It just takes a bit of (re-)education:

[Education] is favourable to liberty. Freedom can exist only in the society of knowledge. Without learning, men are incapable of knowing their rights, and where learning is confined to a few people, liberty can be neither equal nor universal. –Dr. Benjamin Rush (1786)

Update: As soon as I posted this, someone mentioned to me after reading the above mentioned article by Mr. Paul that he never specifically mentions abolishing the IRS. True, it wasn't explicit; It was implicit. Mr. Paul speaks out about this a lot, so it's not very difficult to find where he stands on the issue:

By the way, when I say cut taxes, I don't mean fiddle with the code. I mean abolish the income tax and the IRS, and replace them with nothing. Ron Paul (2002)

Nuclear weapons may soon be in Iran… Our own!

If you don't believe the writing on the wall put forth by Ron Paul earlier this week, then how about this: Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker Magazine that President Bush is in secret talks of how to attack Iran, one such plan even includes using Nuclear Bunker-Buster type weapons:

"One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites."

You can also read a shorter Yahoo! news synposis.

The Raw Story writes that it is assumed that the New York Times will release an article tomorrow that asserts that four anonymous Pentagon officials or other beaurocrats are refuting the story… well it's easy for someone to say it's untrue if your anonymous.

In the New Yorker story it even mentions that Bush is in the habit of calling Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "a potential Adolf Hitler." — The progoganda has already started.

Go to prison for thinking of illegal acts

In light of all the news of Department of Homeland Security Deputy Press Secretary Brian Doyle's arrest for "using a computer to seduce a child", Becky Ackers over at LewRockwell.com brings up an interesting point.. one that is easily obscured when deep emotions are involved:

Actually, regardless of the crimes Brian has committed against our freedom and the Constitution, he is innocent of the felonies for which he was arrested. He did nothing but email pornography to another, very willing adult, one who eagerly responded and who played on his emotions by pretending to have survived cancer. True, Brian "believed" the cop to be a 14-year-old girl, but only fascists prosecute a man for his thoughts.

Whether or not you approve of soliciting minors in sexual situations, technically, that is not what Mr. Doyle did. It may be difficult to see the corruption here because of how you may feel about the supposed issue, but take another look and you will see that the issue that most people are seeing is not really there.

This sounds like something out of a Phillip K. Dick novel… being apprehended for one's thoughts. Think about that for a while.

America needs a non-interventionist policy once again

I've been far too long away from this blog. Things are rapidly changing and I need to stay on top of it.

At lunch today, I had a nice heated discussion about individual sovereignty, what constitutes a "right", and why the income tax is evil. The key point I tried to make was as Thomas Jefferson said:

To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.

Today, I read Ron Paul's speech before congress on Wednesday. This speech is powerful. It makes me angry. It makes me so fucking tired of all of the ignorance of this country (mine included!) and it's desire to forget and feel secure and cozy when it is so very close to falling down to it's deepest inhuman low. The United States has too quickly forgotten the false pretenses that we used to enter into a conflict with Iraq, for we are doing it again with Iran. Not only does Congress seem all too willing to add to the more than 100,000 deaths in the conflict with Iraq, it stands ready to subvert our Constitution and all reason, by allowing the executive branch to control the fate of our lives, possessions, and liberty.

I have so many times before "drawn the line", but I do it again: The Line is Drawn HERE.

No longer will I stand idly by, I will take action. I promise myself to do the following:

• Pledge the maximum contribution I can make by law to the Congressional campaign of Michael Badnarik before his election in November. Michael is the best hope we have to restore liberty (or at least keep it's destruction in check). It doesn't matter if you live in Texas district 10 or not, a contribution to Michael is the most important money I have ever spent. With the current political climate in Texas right now, he has an incredible chance of victory… a chance that may not come easily in the future if current trends continue.
• I admit that I am a fairly introverted individual. I have strong convictions, but I tend not to make, nor keep, friends easily. I will gently, but consitently, introduce people to my beliefs and concerns for this country. This includes introducing people to websites like: Lew Rockwell, Hammer of Truth and of course that of Michael Badnarik.
• And most importantly, I will blog here more often. Something that I have come to realize more and more is that Blogging, and the Internet in general, is probably the most important and powerful force in defence of our liberty. My Employer, and good friend, introduced me to an article today in a local newspaper that shows how powerful blogging has become, if from a different perspective: the local media has found blogs to be debasing it's authority and 'eminant' domain (I'm not 100% sure this is the one he was refering to, but the point is made).

I cannot compare myself to those that have fought or even died to aquire or protect our liberty, but I have a sincere desire to add my name, my pledge of "life, fortune, and sacred honor" to it's cause.