The knee-jerk way in which Americans throw away the rights on which the country was founded never ceases to amaze me. California voters recently approved the “Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act.” Shhesh! Why not just call it the “God, Motherhood, and Apple Pie Support Act.” Anyway, California will soon be collecting DNA samples from anyone arrested for a felony and thus creating a massive DNA database.

You can practically hear the knees jerking. “What’s wrong with taking the DNA of criminals!” Nothing, but that’s not what they are doing. The database is built from people arrested, not just those convicted.

“Well if there is enough evidence to make someone a suspect, the police should be able to get their DNA!” They can do that now. If there is evidence, a judge will issue a warrant in a matter of minutes. The new law means the police can collect DNA from someone when there is no evidence of their guilt.

“Yeah?! Well why are you taking the side of those killers and rapists against our own police, you commie!” Go away.

Our innocence does not need to be protected. Our freedoms need to be defended.

In my last Tangled Webs I wrote about pending US legislation to rewrite copyright law and eliminate almost all consumer rights and protections. These bills have now been rolled into a single bill HR2391, and the Senate may be voting on it soon.

The bill contains all the outrageous provisions mentioned in my article and a brand new one. If it passes, it will be illegal for DVD Players or computers to permit you to skip or fast-forward through the commercials at the start of the DVDs.

If I were writing fiction, my editors would claim this is too far fetched and readers would not believe Congress would do such a thing. Soon we may no longer have the right to skip over a commercial.

I’m not sure what comes next.

I’ve just posted a new Tangled Webs here on the legality and social effects of P2P networks.

My absolute favoriate reader comment was

Actually, it is a heinous crime to give anyone a copy of the latest Britney Spears album for free or otherwise.

In the middle of an interminable marketing meeting the other day, I actually started thinking about the process of marketing. Everyone seems to accept the concept of “today’s sophisticated consumers”, but it’s patent nonsense. Consumers know almost nothing about the TVs, cars, computers or even food they buy. We are not sophisticated. We are resistant.

Fundamentally, marketing is a process of subtle manipulation. It works by preying on the mental shortcuts we all rely on to form opinions. Things like authority, consensus, popularity, urgency, and familiarity. Of course, as advertisers use these techniques in greater frequency and strength, we become desensitized to it. Therefore, marketers must come up with ever more crass ways to manipulate us. We are a lot like roaches becoming resistant to new pesticides.

The problem, however, is that to a large degree, society itself is based on these decision making shortcuts. I can’t help but think that by developing the mental habit of ignoring the false opinions we see every day in advertising we also train ourselves to ignore the very real opinions of other members of society.

Numerous studies have shown that people (not children, people) are influenced more by the social interaction they see on TV than they are by the social interaction that occurs in real life — although perhaps that’s just because we witness so much more interaction on television than we actually engage in — so it is not surprising that learning that everyone is trying to take advantage of you and manipulate you would have a negative impact on the way you view the rest of the world.

No solutionis today. Just ideas

What do you mean wrestling (pronounced “raslin” where I come from) is not a sport? It’s real! The matches aren’t rigged, and the athletes (pronounced “titanic, steroid-addled monsters” where I come from) are real sportsmen.

Well, if you believe that, let’s take it one step further. The Kaiju Big Battel events feature “wrestlers” who don’t just wear facemasks and body suits, but full-fledged lizard or bunny costumes and spray slime all over the first three rows of spectators. The arch villain is a guy with a white box on his head who goes by the name of Dr. Cube.

Now here’s where is gets a bit strange even for wrestling fans. The organizers of Kaiju present this all as very real and strangely important. The rivalries between these different costumed freaks and the characters themselves are being billed as fact. Looking around the Net, it seems that even the fans insist that none of this is make-believe.

Who wants to bet that in 20 years Dr. Cube will be the governor of some mid-western state?

Prolific spammer Jeremy Jaynes has just been convicted under Virginia’s new anti-spam laws and sentenced to nine years behind bars. His defense attorney and assorted pundits are decrying the sentence as “absolutely outrageous.” I feel it doesn’t go quite far enough. For years these scumbags have been downplaying the damage they do by pointing out “If you don’t want to read it, it only takes a few seconds to delete it.”

OK, lets go with that logic. This guy should have no problem spending two seconds in jail for each spam he sent out. Let’s see, he’s been sending out more than a million spams a day for the last three years, so that comes to around 2.2 billon seconds or about 70 years. Since that’s the time he stole from other people is only seems fair he pay it back.

It’s actually much more compassionate that my preferred punishment which is death by ten thousand paper cuts.

The great thing about democracy is that each nation gets the government it deserves.

– apologies to H.L. Mencken

Had dinner with some of my old artist friends the other day. I don’t do it is often as I should. It’s always like stepping into a time capsule and revisiting part of my life. Little of importance seems to change. It always leaves me with mixed emotions.

I’m convinced that some people perceive the world differently in a real rather than a metaphorical sense. Everyone’s brain is wired a bit differently and some people have wiring that puts them outside what is generally considered normal.

A person a couple of standard deviations from the norm is creative and interesting. Someone three or four is eccentric and strange. People further out are generally unable to function in society. But it’s all a matter of degrees.

Some of the most interesting artists will look at a tree and see a hand or will hear a descending augmented arpeggio and see yellow. I don’t mean that they are reminded of a hand or they imagine the color yellow, but rather that is quite literally what they perceive. It doesn’t freak them out because that’s what always happens.

Most real artists are very aware that normal people don’t perceive things the way they do. However, people who are just deviant enough to be considered creative might not even know they perceive things differently. After all, if you and I perceived b-flat differently, how would we even know?

Still though, I have to say I am glad to be out of the game. Artists, even the most financially successful ones, are not often happy people.

After four years of tightening of immigration regulations and increasing American isolationism, there is something fitting about this.

In true isolationist fashion, George Bush has decided that foreigners and Americans so un-patriotic as to live overseas should not be allowed to view his official web-site

http://www.georgewbush.com/

Overseas voters like myself get a curt Access Denied message.

Yeah, I know this is mostly a matter of reducing the load on the servers, but with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on this campaign, you think the reelection campaign could come up with the funds for an extra server or two to get the message out to the world.