Re: Just my opinions...
I fear I've become too big a distraction, and too much of a lightning rod on this stuff. I don't mind, but I don't want to cause bad feelings among our little group.It's precisely because you've more than established your street cred as a reasonable person that you are being engaged rather than dismissed out of hand. You're not causing any bad feelings. Oh, sure, CRC was a little brusque, but you need to gauge that against pre-fatherhood CRC and I think you'll conclude that this was right up there with blowing you a kiss.
I'm not afraid of the NSA spying on me. Not because of the "well, if you're not guilty then you have nothing to worry about" reasons commonly trotted out. But because the NSA has no institutional interest in me.But you're not an investigative reporter. Aren't you the least bit worried about these powers being brought to bear against the public's putative right to know what its supposed public servants are up to?
I wish I could give you details, but I've frightened myself by now: About five or six years ago I sat in on a meeting with some Stasi types in my capacity as graphic designer. They wanted me to prepare some oversize graphics in a pending court case regarding a foreign infant who had died while it and its parents were detained by an arm of DHS. If you had been there, it would have put paid to any illusions you might have had about the essential decency of our secret police. If there was a fucking particle of compassion for the infant or for its parents in evidence, I must have missed it. And these are probably decent people in their private lives, but in their official capacity they are as impersonally heartless as any Third Reich railroad clerk who cleared the trains back to Poland. You dare not trust them to abide by "the law," particularly when "the law" has become so infinitely elastic.
You need not reply. But I hope you'll reflect.
cordially,
