derek's video of the event.

here is a good article about the monday oct. 26 julian heicklen incident that goes into way more detail than i was able to provide here. good read, you should also check out his website!

if you live in nj this should be your vote for governor. lets get the government out of our lives and learn how to be responsible for ourselves. learned helplessness, people.

edit: at first i embedded it but it broke the layout and the audio is horrible and goddamn who does an interview in an office out of 1992? oh well, this is why the libertarian party struggles, they shoot themselves in the foot so often. you're not getting flashy wall art and twittering here folks, this is about properly run government, not gimmicks.

this sunspot seriously tickles my loins. it is about to rotate over the western limb, but i have a sneaking suspicion it may return in 33 days. it is absolutely enormous and a trifle unusual in terms of shape as far as sunspots go. they say cosmic rays are at an all time high, and sunspots are at an all time low. believe it or not these two sets of data may be linked. the last time we had this few sunspots in a solar maximum it was called the maunder minimum and during this time was something called the little ice age. could be interesting. i know people like toe yell about their carbon footprint and all this shit, but climate change may be happening in the whole solar system. its a fact jack.

check out some of these pictures. meditate on them a bit. see what you think.

one of my fellow political activists has been demonstrating recently because "[he] know[s] for a fact that it is the policy of [us district court of manhattan] to instruct the jurors that they must uphold the law as the judge gives it to them."

he has been passing out FIJA literature at the US District Court of Manhattan. he recently did this again on monday the 26th. here is how it went.

FIJA DEMONSTRATION OF 10/26/09

I arrived at he U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, 500 Pearl Street in Manhattan at 11:45 am on Monday, October 26, 2009. The weather was perfect: about 60*F and sunny. I stood in the middle of the plaza in front of the courthouse.

I started to pass out the FIJA pamphlet entitled “A Primer for Prospective Jurors” along with my handout (see below). Immediately the three Department of Homeland Security Officers of last week approached me and told me that I could not pass out that material. I informed them that I could. They said that I could not and that I had quoted the wrong law in my e-mail distribution of last week. They had checked the FBI records to find my identity and accessed my web page. They said that if I distributed the FIJA pamphlets, I would be put under arrest.

I asked for the statute that they use. They said 41 CFR Sec 102–74.415(c). I asked them to identify themselves and they did. The officer in charge was C. Barnes #245. The other two were Wong #213 and Roomnd #234. They work for the Federal Protection Service of he Department of Homeland Security.

I started to distribute a pamphlet, but they seized it and my sign which read JURY INFO and placed me under arrest. I fell to the ground and remained motionless for several minutes. Nothing happened, so I got up and started to distribute literature again. They had called the ambulance. They and the ambulance personnel approached me and I read to them the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution. I asked them what part of “Congress shall make no law” they did not understand. They said that I should take it up with the judge. They were arresting me under the rule that they had stated.

I started to pass out literature again, but they seized all of my pamphlets and placed me under arrest again. I fell to the ground. Officer C. Barnes #245 gave me two citations, one for Unlawful Distribution of Fliers on Federal Property 410 CFR, sub C Section 102–74.415(c) and one for Impeding/Opposing Federal Officer, 18 U.S.C. §111(A). Officer C. Barnes also gave me a property receipt for my two signs and the pamphlets that they had seized.

I was placed on a gurney and put in the ambulance. I was taken to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital. I did not talk to any of the personnel, including the psychiatrist. They left me alone for awhile. The police left. After awhile the psychiatrist returned and read a copy of my flyer. His comment was that this was a free speech case and he agreed with me. He ordered that I be discharged.

I was fed lunch and after some paper work was released at 3:10 pm.

Below are the citations that were given. 18 U.S.C §111(a) deals with forcible resistance. It does not apply to me. I used no force whatever. Title 41 C.F.R. §102 is not a law. It is a regulation that applies only to employees of the GSA, not to the public. Failure to comply with those provisions is a violation of these regulations. Big deal. It is not a violation of law. The GSA cannot make laws. Only Congress can do that.

he will be doing the same thing on monday Nov. 2 if anyone is interested in going. derek demarco was at the one on monday and had this to say.

I showed up a little late, at 12:10, and Julian was already limp on the ground and I started to shoot video. I was approached and questioned by several officials and was told I cannot shooot video on ferderal property. I was questioned further and asked what information I knew about the "unnamed" man laying on the ground. I procceeded to answer their questions with vauge answers and avoided naming Julian. I told them i heard about a jury nullification protest and voluniteer to video and be a witness to this protest. I was asked to show my ID, which i did, and they vertified I was no threat and was asked to leave, my battery died after about 7 minutes anfter i arrived and I left. What should I do with the video? I created a youtube account to post this video, but iI don't want to post it until I hear from Julian.

One of the eleven American soldiers who died in yesterday's helicopter crashes was a good friend during the five years that I spent in Boston. Thinking about anyone from that period of my life being dead is difficult. Hell, most times I feel like that portion of my life is still the current portion of my life.

I'd recently snapped a photo of the house that he lived in for four years, along with many of my other good friends, on a trip to Boston. When I posted it on Facebook it became a bit of an online reunion hub, with thinly veiled references posted by many about the debauchery that went on there. We half-heartedly talked about renting it out for the weekend and recreating a typical day there just for the hell of it. It probably never would have been the same had we actually done it, but now is there no question that it could never, ever be the same.

This article from TechCrunch says everything that I've been thinking about mobile platforms since leaving CES last year. An environment in which RIM, Apple, Android, Palm, Symbian, and WinMo all exist together is too dysfunctional and can't be sustained forever. Fast-forward 6-8 years and I think you'll find this being a two, maybe three cart race in the US, with Apple and Android leading the pack. Quick reasoning?

- Does anyone even care about WinMo 7.0 anymore? I can't think of anyone who does this mobile thing more back asswards.
- RIM's heyday is over; their hardware is uninspiring (and in the case of the Storm straight-up terrible) and the "we do corporate email" well thing will lose its luster eventually.
- Symbian... hrmm, do you know anyone that has a Nokia phone in the US? Didn't think so.
- Palm is cute, and might find a niche as the cuddly third place platform for awhile, but as much as I'd like to root for them and think the Pre is a great device, I just don't seem them being able to fight back. They might be able to hang on the longest, but as mobile application development continues to become a major industry, the need to consolidate will eventually win out, and with that WebOS will disappear.

Good/bad. PC/MAC. Republican/Democrat. The world has a tendency to narrow ideologies down to as few alternatives as possible. I see mobile platforms going the same way.
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Also, I want the 16-Bit Genesis one very badly.

Ga-damn it feels good to be strapped to the back of a beast.

The Get Up Kids and Braid, 3.1.98 vs. 10.21.09

Bob Nanna and Damon Atkinson of Braid and Hey Mercedes apparently have a new band called Certain People I Know that has posted four tunes up on their website. Only listened to the first one so far. It sounds very Hey Mercedesish to me, which is a-ok by me. Get listenin'.

I found newsmap the other day and think it's a pretty cool way to browse news. When I envisioned the newspaper of the future back when the intarnetz was young, it certainly looked more like newsmap than it did CNN.com, or even Google News, for that matter. While I like iGoogle for making some sense out of all of the stuff that I care about each day, I find that its limited to the amount of screen real-estate available, and that because I have to make choices about what information I want to see, I generally end up only seeing the stuff that I'd probably find trapsing around the web anyway. I like that newsmap displays news in a way that the world seems to be caring about. Combine it with the likes of Digg and Reddit, and you're able to dive into a lot of shit that's happening without having to, umm, trapse.

Yankees in 6.

Canon Digital Rebel XSi 12.2 MP Digital SLR ordered. Got it for $560 with employee discount. Psyched to take some ga-damn photos.

Baseball fan sites are generally pretty terrible. This one is no different, but it does contain the video of Mariano Rivera's alleged spitball. I watched the video twice, and I'm pretty sure there's nothing to it at all.

Owen's New Leaves showed up at my office today, which is exciting. Polyvinyl ships media mail. I'll forgive them for that. It's pretty much impossible to make any money off of vinyl since the price increase as it is. The good thing about waiting for something to ship is that I've usually forgotten ordering it by the time it arrives. I enjoy intentionally setting myself up for sorta-surprises. I also enjoy "Good Friends, Bad Habits", the best song from the album, as well as the accompanying video. Although that Wilde and Hemingway line is pretty cringe-inducing.

Machinarium looks beautiful. At first glance it looks like a playable version of the first half of Wall-E, although I'm sure it's not like that at all. I peeped the forums for the game and the creators sound like nice, humble guys. I'm not sure my PC is powerful enough to play any games other than Solitaire, but I'd like to give it a try at some point.

I wish I could have been able to easily click-thru to finish the rest of the article that Paul posted yesterday.

Yankee game starts at 4:17.. or 13, or some other weird time today. Safe to say that my mind will be checking out around then, and my body will be angled to the LCD screen that's about 25 feet to my right from there until packing up for the day.

Yo, Falcon. I'm really happy for you, and imma let you finish... but Anne Frank was the best kid hiding in an attic of all time!

Sonuvabitch. I basically picked PRX out of thin air based on its industry and its beta, and Barclays goes and upgrades the motherfucker a few days after I buy. Nice.