Where have I been? I’m glad you asked! I… have been working so much that the thought of looking at my computer after-hours fills me with fear and loathing.

And if that weren’t bad enough, I just downloaded Nethack . If you have never played Nethack, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It hearkens back to the days of Rogue, Telengard, Bard’s Tale, the early MUDs; it is The Original Adventure Game, and it has been constantly updated and upgraded for the past twenty or so years.

And it is free.

I expect I will be using it a lot as a distraction in the coming days as we gear up for war. Personally, I think Saddam needs to be ousted. His methods are on par with Stalin and his continued rule will be worse for the Iraqi people than any U.S. led war that doesn’t go nuclear.

Having said that, I will now say that I think the Administration should just come out and admit that the one and only reason we are even acknowledging Saddam’s existence is The Oil. Seriously. If the Middle East wasn’t chock-full of oil we wouldn’t pay any more attention to it than we do to the AIDS-decimated countries in southern Africa.

Think about this: If it was Catholic terrorists flew the planes into the towers, would we have declared war on Rome? Nope. After the Oklahoma City bombing did we declare war on Michigan rednecks? Nope. You know why? Not profitable.

Every president since World War II has been a sociopath to some degree or another. The kind of ego that would want to be president believes nothing other than itself truly exists. I don’t think Bush gives a damn about, or even notices the existence of, other human lives. They simply don’t factor into his reality. Those hundreds of millions of social security numbers are nothing more than assets in his giant game of Sim Presidency. I absolutely believe this about him.

And if he has this level of respect for the people of his own country, imagine how expendable he considers the rest of the world to be…

To usher in the new year in the appropriate way I have picked up two new books: Flash Math Creativity and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain . This year I expect es.o will have more visuals than it did in 2002.

On to other news.

Apparently there is (was?) a movement (the “Two Towers Protest”) to have The Two Towers renamed to “show increased sensitivity toward the destruction of the World Trade Center”. The organizers have even gone so far as to call the un-altered title of the movie “hate speech”. Hate speech. Peter Jackson, et.al, kept the original title of the book for the movie, and it is being called “hate speech”.

This is what I have to say about that:

1. Dear Two Towers Protest: Fuck you.

2. The Two Towers is a movie, and the World Trade Center was a tragic event. Never the two shall meet.

3. If “the people” can’t make a distinction between a fantasy movie and a terrorist attack, then “the people” deserve the angst, anger and ulcers which that will cause.

The Two Towers Protest is as much a capitalization on the 9/11 events as is the Bush Administration’s arbitrary naming of an “axis of evil”, and as are the kiosks at the outskirts of Ground Zero selling bags of dust and rubble from the buildings.

Come to think of it, the name of this moronic movement is hate speech, too. The “Two Towers Protest” shows insensitivity toward the terrible events of September 11, 2001. What applies to one must apply to all. They must REALLY hate America. The ghost of Joseph McCarthy is buggering the ghost of Thomas Jefferson in glee.

And I don’t even want to get into how, with their flawed logic, they are actually encouraging people to forget what happened last September.

There is a particular freedom to being offline for a while. Writing becomes more personal as there is an implied distance from the audience, strengthened by the fact that I won’t be able to post this for at least eight more hours.

I have noticed little talk lately of the ironically named “citizen’s brigade”. There are two possibilities: either it exists, or it doesn’t exist. If it doesn’t exist, then has there been any pronouncement that it was, after all, a miserable and stupid idea? If it does exist, then has there been any official pronouncement that it has been created?

When I first heard this idea I discounted it as the slightly justified but paranoid reaction to the terrorist attacks of 2001. But still, a stupid idea. Anyone who agreed to this idea would be a traitor to the constitution, and anyone who disagreed, a traitor to the country.

So in a time when the government… no. Not the government. The administration. When the administration was trying to unite all Americans behind a common cause it introduced an idea which, if enacted, could very well have started a civil war: “Hey! You three million over there! Why don’t you keep an eye on everyone else and, if they do something a little more, you know, red, than white or blue, why don’t you tell us?”

Hitler committed suicide in a bunker. McCarthy died alone and insane. Ashcroft is trying to send us to war with Iraq.

The continued searching for demons on other soil is distracting us from problems on our own. The members of the Administration have enough reptilian-brain survival instinct to not openly advocate the revocation of the constitutional amendments but close attention will reveal that they are whittling at them, slowly paring them away until the letter and the spirit of the law are at odds with one another.

As with any other prison, the Big Bull has it’s bitches: The entertainment industry (RIAA!), in order to maintain it’s profitability, is happy to take white-out to the amendment that created it. To prevent us from copying music, they want us to not have access to it in the first place. Somehow, that makes sense.

The real danger of terrorism is not that another country will destroy us, but that we will destroy ourselves in order to deny our enemies that pleasure.

And the Administration would call this a victory.