I got an e-mail from Christine Kristen (a.k.a. LadyBee) that contained a press release announcing the conclusion to the case against Steven Kurtz that I blogged about in January and actually got news that Kurtz was cleared a while back through a post at Glob-a-log titled “The Steve Kurtz case finally dismissed (Another political trial, another pathetic witch hunt: Just business as usual in Bushland)”. (If you’re curious, it’s at the end of this post after the fold).

I gather that the press release was to promote the art show Seized at The Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo) which documents the materials involved in the case (it’s on display from June 7, 2008 through July 18, 2008). But way way down at the bottom of the press release was the key part: the [clearly ironically named] Department of Justice had no business even bothering to bring up charges of mail and wire fraud because (as I said before) it’s a civil dispute so it requires one person to accuse another of fraud — not a criminal one where the state can bring charges against someone. They clearly overstepped their bounds as part of the Judicial Branch of the U.S. government, as they were acting on behalf of the Executive Branch to execute the laws, then they even did that wrong by misapplying the law.

The thing that bothers me so much is that when I consider why the Department of Justice did this, I can’t come up with a reason, other than those with evil purposes.

What crime — of the United States or against anyone or against humanity — did Kurtz commit by his artistic protests? I say there was no crime committed, and I’m left to believe that the Department of Justice was trying to put an innocent man in jail. Why would they do that? Perhaps to justify the “War on Terror” by staging arrests of fake terrorists? I don’t know, but it all smells evil. [And let me also reiterate what's not been said enough: "terror" is a concept, not a group of people so it's at best a Quixotic move to try and wage war against it.]

Perhaps they’re working to block dissent to the war and to questionable corporate efforts — both topics that Kurtz and his group rallied against. But in a free country … nay, the free country? When dissenters are rounded up and put in prison in a dictatorship, I can at least understand it, but when it happens in a country that prides itself on inalienable freedoms? So maybe the Department of Justice’s goals were to steer the United States toward a more totalitarian government. Again, evil.

When I try to apply Occam’s Razor, most relevant evidence points to a big conspiracy: that government is trying to bias the delivery of news for purposes of manipulating the will of the people through false information.

It’s a thought that I can’t bear to stare straight into. I welcome comments that disprove my theory.

(more…)

This past weekend I held a Garage Sale and it went pretty well. I got rid of a lot of things, and then on Monday and Tuesday I took most of the rest of it to the thrift stores and such. I ended up spending all the money I made on a second Argon/Carbon Dioxide tank for the MIG welder. At least I didn’t fall behind. Plus, now I can weld all day on Sunday even if one tank runs out — and it always does.

But in regards to my relapse into consumerism, I was thoroughly excited to win an auction on eBay for one Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M (at $100 under Amazon’s price). It scans double-sided in color and outputs to PDF files — with additional options to convert to text (with “optical character recognition” or OCR) or to place text-under-graphics so it’s human readable like the paper copy, but mostly searchable as well (except for OCR errors). It whips through 18 pages a minute (although my lowly G3 PowerBook can’t keep up, especially with its 1/10th-speed USB 1.1 interface). In all: it’s awesome so far. My qualms with it are that it doesn’t scan very accurately, allowing compression errors to originate in the scanner, and there’s no way to set specific scanning resolutions: only interpretative ones like “Best” or “Fast”. I was also disappointed to find that Adobe Acrobat 8 won’t run on Mac OS X 10.3 — I’d need at least 10.4 for that.

So now my free time is going through old documents, shoving them into the scanner, and getting rid of the originals. I know: I have too much fun.

Ali and I went on the weekly Cruiser’s Ride this week. We’ve gone in the past but this is the first time I got to blog about it. Anyway, it’s a group of bicyclists that starts from Dogtown Hots (691 Monroe Ave.) — they used to start at Monty’s Krown (875 Monroe Ave.) but everyone kept getting dinner at Dogtown first. We got rolling around 8:30 or so and meandered through the city streets all over the place, covering some 9 miles or so all around (I measured as best as I could remember on a map). I finally got to see The Legal Wall — although I guess it’s now the “somewhat legal wall” … perhaps someone in the group wasn’t confident of the concept or that something changed. In case you don’t know, the principle is that the owners of buildings in this area permit and welcome artists to apply graffiti. Some of it is fantastic. Pardon me if I don’t specify exactly where it is because the cops have been on a rampage shutting good things down of this ilk.

The ride “officially” terminates at Lux Lounge (666 South Ave.) although this time, they wouldn’t permit us to bring our bikes to the back yard as they had in the past. Ali and I both had custom-built bikes [by me, in case you're wondering] and she didn’t want to leave them locked up in front so we went to Solera Wine Bar (647 South Ave.) with John and had a glass of wine so we could sit by them and keep an eye on them.