it’s been a long day coding in the html trenches, getting the extremely first draft of the new website ready in time for tomorrow’s board meeting. now it’s time for bed.

but before I go, here’s two scary stories:

1. Autism pooling in Silicon Valley

an excerpt from a Wired back issue. There’s been a tripling in the frequency of autism in children born in Silicon Valley in the last decade. autism can potentially be a life-crippler. where’s that surge coming from? scenario one: environmental causes of some kind? radiation leak, cellular towers? maybe. probably not. scenario two: many (hell, maybe most) serious tech heads could be diagnosed with autism of the low-level, non-debilitating kind, if the attending pyschiatrist squinted their eyes. where in north american are you likely to end up, geographically speaking, if you are a serious tech-head? silicon valley of course. Autism is know to be genetically inherited. could the coders and wonks of silicon valley be mating up a storm of autism? looks likely. not to denigrate the seriousness of such a possibility, autism is a very serious thing. but still, that’s a little creepy in some strange, it’s after 1am way.

2. FBI spying on anti-war protestors

It’s to stop terrorists of course.

The memorandum, which the bureau sent to local law enforcement agencies last month in advance of antiwar demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco, detailed how protesters have sometimes used “training camps” to rehearse for demonstrations, the Internet to raise money and gas masks to defend against tear gas.

I’ve been to anti-war demonstration “training camps”. We called them workshops, or some other deceptive term intended to lower their profile in the eyes of the authorities. And we sneakily held some of them in YMCA camps and church rec rooms. So who knows. Maybe I’m fooling myself and I’m really a terrorist. Maybe we all are now. Maybe we can’t help it if we want to be real citizens instead of the democracy-wary sheep that are the only beasts capable of filtering through the new US regime’s suspicion generating mechanisms.

I don’t want to have an FBI record. Especially since I sometimes like to cross the US border, and the border agents are neither obliged to justify themselves should they choose to exclude you, or to explain to the public where they get their information from generally. Regardless of borders, nobody wants an FBI record. But you can get one now. If you protest against the war. So don’t do that.