Monday, 1 Oct 07



As an old cop, I have witnessed George Orwell's "1984" come of age. I recall an incident in 1970 when an agent had gotten some particularly juicy information on a target. A chill went up my back as he proudly and boldly proclaimed "big brother is here" as he strutted down a corridor laughing.

I thought, 'boy the people just don't know'. Truth was, little did any of us know. Most of us did not know when Martin Luther King, Jr was under surveillance for political reasons nor when Brit Hume of Fox News Channel was being shadowed for political gain.

Big Brother thinks of us in real simple terms as pigs. Let the Tennessee Mountain Man tell you how to catch wild hogs. First you find a trail where they travel or a place where they feed. Second you plant some food there everyday. At first the hogs will avoid the area because of the human scent and free food. After all they are bred to forge for themselves, and smart enough to fear people.

After a few days they can resist the easy food no longer despite the danger. Now you put up a short stretch of fence. The pigs are again standoffish for a few days but not long. Now you build a stretch of fence at a 90 degree angle appended to the first. Give the hogs a few days to become acclimated and build another stretch of the fence.

This is done until there is only a small opening for the pigs to get in and out and they will. Finally on a pre-selected date close the gate and you have a enough wild ham, shoulder, bacon, sausage, and pork chops to feed your family and all your friends for awhile.

Long before President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society there were other men with similar dreams stoking the feed lots, dangerous men like Mussolini, Marx, Hitler, and Stalin. There are equally dangerous men today like Bin Laden and Ahmadinejad operating under the guise of fundamentalist religion

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Someone has said we must learn from history or we are condemned to repeat it. So the question becomes have we learned.

Have we learned anything when we quietly endure our own government stripping away our personal rights and civil liberties in the name of national security while the highest court in the land stands idly by? Have we any privacy when Google can photograph us almost at will and claim it is their right to do so? When our cell phone company knows where we are within a square mile or so right now? When the black box in our car records where our vehicle has been and when and more?

Do you feel secure in your home when your ISP monitors your e-mail and your surfing, and Microsoft clandestinely enters your computer and does who knows what? When the satellite positioning device in your hand, in your car or in your boat can and will tell anyone where you are at given anytime? When traffic cameras and even highway toll centers record where you are, when , and what you are doing? Such data is being subpoenaed and used in civil court today.

How about when you go into a lounge, casino, mall, large office or residential building, store or church and realize you are being monitored by people watching your every move on hidden cameras. Those cameras are recording what they see...you and me. When you walk down the street or go for a walk in the park do you ever consider your every step is being recorded by cameras in police cars, cell phones, and private businesses and residences as well as the police department where staff monitors those cameras 24/7/365?

Do you really think that is bad? Consider the poor souls who became trapped in the pig pen and forgot how to care for themselves. All too often those forever uneducated folk trapped in poverty in the public housing projects skeezing and pleasing skeezers while chasing their next fix know only how to take what they want at the point of a gun. Especially when the nanny state cannot or will not provide.

Now that you are sufficiently paranoid about Big Brother maybe it is time to seriously reflect on what kind of world and country we want to live in tomorrow, and how we get there from a land adrift so far away.

tmm