Travels on the Bad F*cker Highway

[ Friday, December 27, 2002 ]

  DOW CHEMICAL v. FREE SPEECH. On December 3, hacktivists The Yes Men published a parody of Dow Chemical's website, in which Dow issued a press release asserting its "zero responsibility" position concerning clean-up of the Bhopal, India industrial disaster (Dow bought Union Carbide) nearly two decades ago.

The site recorded 250,000 hits, and hundreds of outraged e-mails, in three days, until the real Dow Chemical caught on and filed a Digital Millenium Copyright Act ("DMCA") complaint with NTT/Verio, host of www.thing.net. Verio, in a disgusting display of cowardly subservience to corporate power, immediately pulled the plug on thing.net, evicted them, and they now have less than 50 days to find a new home.

Thing.net is the service provider for numerous activist and arts organizations in the NYC area, and this eviction will be a real burden for these groups, not to mention the service interruption, and the chilling effect on free speech and criticism of corporate interests.

Meanwhile, dozens of mirror sites of the original dow chemical parody have popped up, and you can see the same at:

www.dowindia.com
www.dowethics.com
www.mad-dow-disease.com

For the full story on Dow's attack on dissent, check out this page at RTmark.

For more information on the Bhopal disaster, and Dow's irresponsible refusal to clean up the disaster site and compensate the victims, take a look at Greenpeace's Bhopal news item Dow fights for its image, but not the victims in Bhopal .

You can help thing.net create an autnomous network less vulnerable to corporate pressure and censorship by clicking here.


[12/27/2002]

[ Thursday, December 26, 2002 ]

  STATUS OF TEMPORARY RETIREMENT. I quit my job on Monday. It was harder to tell everyone than I anticipated, and more sad. Yet I feel deeply that it is the right decision for me. I've worked at this firm for 6 years, so breaking the routine will be . . . different. But breaking with routine is one of the things I need to do more of for my own development as a human being. I'm excited about the future, for the first time in a long time. I think of all the people posting on the Thorn Tree bulletin board The Long Haul on the Lonely Planet website, with their dreams of dumping their jobs and hitting the road. I used to sit in my office, periodically, reading those posts seeking encouragement to take the plunge. Needless to say, the advice on the subject of whether or not it is a good life decision to become a professional drifter is skewed in one direction on the lonely planet site. But nonetheless, I've found a lot of inspiration here.



Anyway, on to more important and sinister topics, like the Defense Department's proposed Total Information Awareness program. In essence, this project would allow the federal government and the military to basically catalogue on a meta-database any and all conceivable information about individuals, including what you are buying on-line, reading, photographs of you, and anything else that they deem to be "interesting" to national security. There does not appear to be any provision for search warrants, notice, or any other due process for htis heretofore illegal domestic surveillance. As there can be little question anymore that the United States of America is a gradually evolving Police State, everyone ought to be concerned and well-informed on the development of domestic spying by the military. Fortunately, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of the prominent groups facilitating citizen opposition to TIA. You can read more about the military's TIA proposal, and also learn how to send letters and faxes to Sen. Orin Hatch (likely next chair of Senate Judiciary Committee), and Sen. Ted Stevens (likely next chair of Senate Appropriations Committee) protesting TIA.

Carnivore/spider/bot/web crawler test: FUCK MILITARY SURVEILLANCE! and FUCK DOMESTIC SPYING! (We'll document this now, for a future FOIA request on my personal data, just to see how thorough the inquisition will be).

The EFF website has this, and other things, to say: "This may sound like science fiction, but Total Information Awareness (TIA) is a *real* threat to your civil liberties. TIA is a Defense Department project that is creating a range of technologies for a surveillance society. If TIA continues, the government will effectively have wiretaps, dossiers, and tracking devices for every American citizen." [12/26/2002]

[ Monday, December 23, 2002 ]

  REBUTTAL. Just a brief announcement and reply to all of you who have upgraded to homelanddrifter.com Premium Content in the past few days. I have received numerous complaints that, inter alia, the premium content subscription here is "a huge f*cking rip-off . . . I should have bought another porno sight [sic] password, instead," and "this is some kind of hoax, right? I want my 17 bucks back, you weirdo motherf*cker . . ." Another complainant wrote that when he paid, he was expecting lewd photos of sock puppets, and was really disappointed. In response to these complaints, I can only say that www.homelanddrifter.com doesn't need your business, as I've had at least 4 distinct page views this week!


Ergo, my next update, which is that since this site went up on November 26, 2002, it has recorded 6647 hits, and 2299 page views. If you deduct the 6643 hits which are accounted for by me going into the site to correct buggy html code or tag mistakes, one can conclude that 4 people other than myself have visited the site. So, to the rest of you who have complained - I don't need your support, anyway.


In fact, after my cross-linking agreement with "www.cum-crazed-euro-sluts.com" is finalized, I'll have more hits than I will ever need, thank you very much. FYI, please don't confuse this url with the similar family site "www.cum-crazed-euro-sluts.edu" or "www.cum-crazed-euro-sluts.gov."


Thanks for reading my travelogue, homelanders! [12/23/2002]

[ Sunday, December 22, 2002 ]

  RECENT CORRESPONDENCE.

Me no speak English okay.  So sorry. Me no terrorist.  Fill out form, make you happy.  No send back to foreign land with 6 percent alcohol beer, no president and metric system, eh.
 

-Original Message-
From: mikita [mailto:mikita@homelanddrifter.com]
Sent: Sunday, December 22, 2002 8:20 PM
To: xxxx@xxxxxxxxx.com
Subject: your mandatory registration document