Or how about not.

Our genius Commander-in-Chief has, in all his infinite wisdom, decided to support the extension of several provisions of the USA PATRIOT ACT, including illegal wiretapping and the infamous “national security letters” that compel businesses to hand over records to the feds, and then impose a blanket gag order on the very mention of said letters.

The PATRIOT ACT has been a giant shit stain on the Constitution from day one.  It has always been unconstitutional, bad law at best, and insidious police state machinery at worst.  It was enacted by manipulative politicians who capitalized on the politics of fear in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, in order to extend federal power into whole new areas of our lives.

What I find most striking is how the Great Leader’s repeated campaign promises to break with old school politics and bring “change” to Washington were dropped and forgotten as soon as he finished reciting the oath of office.  The Bush administration did plenty of damage to our nation’s civil liberties and international image, and much change is needed.  Instead of implementing that change and moving forward in a positive direction, President Obama has slipped comfortably into the culture of slimy deal-making and political fear-mongering that dominate the post-9/11 debate on national security.  This is not only a wasted opportunity, but an epic failure of a politician who once embodied the promise of a new direction.

Dear Mr. Kim:

Thanks for releasing Laura Ling and Euna Lee.  It appears they did in fact commit a crime and cross into your country illegally, but I understand your pardon in exchange for a visit from fellow international playboy Bill Clinton.  I’m sure you two had lots to discuss on the topics of sleeping with staff members, lying to your people and drinking excessively.  You’re two peas in a pod!

Mr. Kim, I’ve visited your Stalinist dystopia utopia once already, and I’m thinking about visiting again.  I guess I just can’t get enough of Karaoke Tuesdays in Pyongyang.  I’m writing to ask if you could kidnap me as well?  Maybe hold me in a villa for a few months, let me receive mail and make phone calls, then release me to whichever international supermodel they send to pick me up in a Gulfstream V.

You see, in our capitalist system Laura and Euna are going to be paid a shitload of money to tell the story of their experience in your country.  And frankly I’ve done far more interesting things than either of them and I think it’s bullshit that these idiots broke the law and are going to get a huge payday out of it.

So yeah- an extended vacation in Pyongyang is exactly what I need.  I’ll be there soon; just have your guards grab me at the airport and take me to my bungalow cell.  After I’m rescued and get my seven-figure book deal I’ll send you a bottle of your favorite XO Hennessy to say thanks.

Warm regards,

The malcontentist.

(Burn Notice voiceover): “If you’re trying to evade police, the last thing you want to do is draw attention to yourself.  Driving recklessly and crashing into things will only attract the cops’ attention.”

So who does Michael Westen call when he needs help?  My recommendation: a good DUI lawyer.  Let’s hope Burn Notice isn’t afflicted by the DUI death curse that rages on the set of LOST.

Courtesy of our friends over at What Would Tyler Durden Do:

Burn Notice star Jeffrey Donovan was arrested for a DUI on July 11 after he crashed into a Miami Beach Police Cruiser on July 11 around 11:50 pm. He refused a breath test.  “I really think I’m only borderline and not too drunk – the only mistake I made tonight was to drink Benadryl with three glasses of wine,” Donovan said on the way to the police station.  Donovan told the arresting officer, “Sorry I didn’t see the red light or your car.”

I’m disappointed Michael.  I’d expect this from Sam, but you should know better.

Another day, another bank castigation here in the world of malcontent.

Like many of you, I get paid every other Friday.  In a year and a half at this job there has never been a problem with payroll.  I recently mailed a rent check on a Thursday knowing that the cash deposited the next day for payroll would be more than enough to cover it, along with the balance already in my account.

But - of course - there was a problem with that payroll and I didn’t receive it until the following Tuesday.

Naturally I didn’t find this out until the end of the weekend, so I’d been spending money on my debit card all weekend thinking I had plenty of cash in my account.  And for those small purchases I had ample money; it was the rent check that would tip me over.  The rent check and all the weekend transactions posted on Monday, the day before my late payroll deposited.  Here’s what it looked like:

Balance = $1,280.48

Debits: $6.50 to Subway, $37.50 to Whiskey Bar, $5.58 to Subway, $34.47 to Exxon Mobil, $219.20 to American Express, $8.10 to Baja Fresh, et al.

And of course the rent check for $1,395.

Now the fair and ethical thing to do would be to pay all the smaller charges and then incur one overdraft for the $1,395.  Instead these asshats start with the $1,395, turning everything else that day (for which there was otherwise ample cash) into an overdraft.  End result: eight overdrafts at $33 each.

This is shady business conduct; banks do this on purpose to maximize their fee revenue.  It doesn’t matter than I’ve been a customer for more than a decade and almost never overdraw my account.  These greedy bastards were only able to survive their bad decisions thanks to the largesse of the American taxpayer.  And when it came to bad decisions during the boom (read: subprime loans) WaMu was one of the worst offenders.  You’re welcome for TARP.

I’m pissed.  That really shouldn’t be a surprise to any of you, as I am the malcontentist and this blog is entirely about my rantings.  But this is a special kind of pissed off, the type that I get when I encounter stupidity so blatant, and so irrational, that it stuns me into silence.

Momentarily, that is.

I recently decided to renew my years-old interest in firearms and exercise my Second Amendment right to own some.  I knew that California had some weird and irritating gun control laws, but not even I could have predicted the idiocy I’ve encountered in my research as a law-abiding citizen trying to stay in legal compliance.  A couple gems for you:

* No firearm may have a magazine holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition.  What’s the purpose here?  Whether 10 or 15 rounds people will be equally dead if a gun is misused.

* California maintains a roster of handguns certified for sale in the state.  If a gun is not on the roster you can’t buy it here, even if it’s just a variant (different color, say) of a gun already on the roster.  But an out-of-state parent can buy you a non-approved gun as a gift and transfer it you - that’s perfectly legal.  Thanks mom.

* God forbid you have anything remotely military-looking, because it’s probably banned.  There are all manner of rifles for sale that function the same way the banned models do, but don’t look nearly as sexy as an AR-15 or Galil.  Yes, it’s the appearance of the gun that makes it dangerous.

And yet somehow the shotgun I just purchased can - in one shot - deliver the equivalent of getting hit with a nine round burst from a sub-machine gun.  Perfectly legal!

I’m not a fanatic; I support rational gun control.  California’s approach, however, is fear-based instead of reason-based.  By all means let’s keep guns out of the hands of children and felons.  I suppose we don’t need fully automatic weapons, either.  But the restrictions currently in place are not only non-sensical, they infringe on my Constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

Get a clue, Sacramento: these laws impact only law-abiding citizens like myself.  People with criminal intent don’t buy guns in gun shops via the background check process; most have priors and would be ineligible anyway.  So while you limit me to ten rounds in a specially modified “California legal” rifle, the asshole robbing the bank is going to be using a fully automatic he bought on the black market.

The political reality is that gun control is a winning topic for the commisars in Sac-town to look “tough on crime”, when really the laws are highly arbitrary and don’t do a damn thing to hinder a felon buying illegally at a Nevada gun show and importing to California.

As for that Second Amendment, what part of “shall not be infringed” did you asshats not understand?

Worse than useless, actually.  Dangerous.  I’ll get to that in a minute.

Many of you dear readers know that I’m a travel guru and it’s my day job to help wealthy people spend their money on fancy vacations.  In the course of doing that I recently booked all available first class seats on a Virgin America flight from LA to the east coast.  I received a call this morning from Virgin America HQ informing me that for “federal reasons” two of the passengers in our party would be downgraded to economy.  (Airlines are legally obligated not to disclose the fact that air marshals are behind this passenger displacement, but I’ve been in this business long enough to know exactly what’s going on).

This isn’t Virgin’s fault; it happens on all airlines and Virgin did more to re-accommodate us than many others would have.  The blame here lies squarely with the federal government and the worse-than-useless Department of Homeland Security.  Its workfare program to pay people to fly around the globe armed with handguns is a colossal waste of money and is a bigger danger to passengers than any would-be terrorist.  Don’t believe me?  Ask the man they gunned down in Miami.  Or the marshal who left his gun in the lavatory for a surprised passenger to find.  Or the one who threatened to shoot a passenger in an airport lot over a parking space.

Guns should not be allowed on airplanes, period.  Not by passengers, not by pilots, not by law enforcement - no one should have a firearm in that space.  The TSA’s job - ineffective and politicized as it is - is to prevent weapons from entering the “sterile” area.  Those of you who know as much about airport security as I do know that airport concourses are anything but “sterile”, with ID-badged workers constantly coming and going without being screened.  But to intentionally allow anyone to bring a gun on a plane is just plain stupid.  Stop this practice now before someone else gets killed in the hunt for unicorns terrorists.

And while we’re stuck with the marshals on our flights, for fuck’s sake make them fly coach.  The government doesn’t pay for the seats the marshals use, meaning that the feds are stealing revenue from the airlines.  In Virgin’s case these two occupied seats made up 25% of their first class cabin.  This is theft, and it hits Virgin disproportionately hard because their premium cabins only have eight seats.  The marshals can be proximate to the cockpit from the first row of economy.  Greedy bastards.

I was about to sit down last night to post here, condemning this evil corporation or that federal agency (the usual dissidence) when a chain of events occurred that were as unpredictable as they were illustrative of how fucked up my life is.

6:25  I sit down to crank out another blogging masterpiece when I realize I’m quite peckish.

6:26  Perusing the cupboards and refrigerator I reach the same conclusion I reach every night around this time: the only foods I have in the house are cereal, milk, past-expiration eggs and month-old frozen bread.

6:28  Deciding that cereal (46th night in a row) is better than nothing, I pour a bowl.  Since I have zero counter space I am forced to pour my cereal bowls on the stove.

6:29  For reasons unknown even to me, I pour the cereal into the bowl with a spoon already in there.  Don’t ask; it’s just how it’s always been done.  This turns out to be a dreadful mistake, as…

6:30  I spaz out as I turn to put the cereal box back in its home.  The force of my hand hitting the handle of the spoon is great enough to eject a substantial amount of cheerios from the bowl.  A mushroom cloud of honey nut cheerios is now expanding all over the kitchen.  The fallout scurries into every crevice it can find.  Fuck my life.

6:32  After a moment of shock and horror, I attempt to remedy the situation.  Every step I take is met by a hearty crunch.  And of course it still looks like someone poured the entire box on top of the range.

6:33  I give up on everything except my gourmet meal, pour the milk and retreat to the relative safety of the living room.

6:38  I realize that if I ever actually turn the stove on and cook something the stray cheerios will probably catch on fire and burn my apartment down.  Because that’s my life.

I knew you wouldn’t believe me.  So I brought proof.  (This was after the first round of cleaning up.)

Service and network speed issues aside (and I’ve had dropped calls and slow data connections a-plenty in the last two years) AT&T has chosen to really screw the iPhone public this time.  Why does Apple allow this?  AT&T’s stranglehold on the US domestic iPhone market should be broken immediately!  Here are two new iPhone features that we US-based users will not be enjoying anytime soon:

* MMS, or multi-media messaging service.  This is the ability to send picture text messages.  Most global iPhone network carriers will enable this from launch, but AT&T says we have to wait until “late summer”.  First of all, this feature should have been in the first iPhone release two years ago.  Second, MMS is not a new technology; AT&T should have this up and running on launch day.  They have had two years to plan for it; excuses are bullshit.

* Tethering: this is an awesome new feature that pretty much negates the need for wi-fi networks.  You can hook up your iPhone to your laptop and use the phone’s 3G internet connection to surf the web.  Airports, dentist’s office, windsurfing; as long as you can get a network signal (pretty much everywhere) your laptop will have net connectivity.  AT&T is not offering this on launch and makes no comment about when it might be offered.  Carriers don’t like this because they offer unlimited data plans and we’re actually starting to take advantage of that.  Well boo fucking hoo, AT&T.  Blow me.

As an aside, I’m sure (as with the 3G release) AT&T will charge a bullshit “upgrade” fee of ~$20 for the privilege of buying this new phone and paying more for a data plan, to say nothing of locking us in for two more years of indentured servitude contract.

Again, why is Apple allowing AT&T to shit all over its biggest market?  It makes no sense.  It’s obvious to this iPhone user that AT&T is not up to the game and could use a healthy dose of competition.

Apple: break that exclusivity agreement and introduce a Verizon or T-Mobile iPhone.

Warning: the story behind this really isn’t that interesting.  I just thought myself oh-so-clever in coming up with that headline and wanted to use it.

In the malcontent spirit of calling companies out on their bullshit, I name fcuk, nom de guerre for French Connection United Kingdom.  I occasionally buy their overpriced and (arguably) trendy clothes.  I’m not a huge customer, but really, in this economy how many people are queueing up to spend $125 on a pair of cargo shorts?

Soon after buying the shorts in question I decided that it was ridiculous to spend that amount of money on something a slave child migrant worker in Myanmar made for about three dollars in materials and labor.  I went to return the shorts of third-world destitution only to be told that I was one day over their 14 day return policy, so I could go suck it.

Seriously?  14 days?  I can scarely motivate myself to shave every 14 days, much less drag my ass an entire mile to downtown Santa Monica.

So f u, fcuk: may your legions of malnourished sweat shop peasants rise up against you!

Surely most of you have heard the old story about putting a frog in a pot of tepid water and slowly turning the heat up until he boils to death without noticing.  The point is that if you drop the frog into a pot of already boiling water, he’ll jump out to save himself.  But with the gradual increase in temperature he won’t notice and will get cooked alive before he realizes what’s happening to him.

This story is often used when discussing issues of liberty and personal freedom relative to changes in our society and laws.  I think it’s an appropriate and accurate analogy to make; we don’t easily notice gradual changes in our lives.  Look no further than the ageing process.  Show a 15-year old version of yourself a picture of what you look like today and he’d be shocked by the changes.  But seeing ourselves in the mirror every day hardly produces any reaction at all.

My friends, the total lack of real change from our new leaders in Washington means the temperature in our national pot continues to rise.  Today we have a story out of North Carolina about 16-year old Ashton Lundeby getting bitch-slapped by the most mis-named piece of legislation to date: the USA PATRIOT Act.  Some gems from the article, emphases are mine:

[A]ccording to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15.Around 10 p.m. on March 5, Lundeby said, armed FBI agents along with three local law enforcement officers stormed her home looking for her son. They handcuffed him and presented her with a search warrant.

Ashton now sits in a juvenile facility in South Bend, Ind. His mother has had little access to him since his arrest. She has gone to her state representatives as well as attorneys, seeking assistance, but, she said, there is nothing she can do.

Lundeby said the USA Patriot Act stripped her son of his due process rights.

“We have no rights under the Patriot Act to even defend them, because the Patriot Act basically supersedes the Constitution,” she said. “It wasn’t intended to drag your barely 16-year-old, 120-pound son out in the middle of the night on a charge that we can’t even defend.”

“Never in my worst nightmare did I ever think that it would be my own government that I would have to protect my children from,” Lundeby said. “This is the United States, and I feel like I live in a third world country now.”

___

Is this really where we are?  Sixteen year-olds getting hauled off to jail with minimal evidence of wrongdoing?  Have they declared this kid an enemy combatant yet?  He may get to go to Cuba before Obama lifts the travel ban.

As I’ve said before, various federal agencies have been indoctrinated to see terrorists on every street corner and do their utmost to stop them.  As these terrorists are largely imaginary outside of Af-Pak, the net effect is a federal law-enforcement culture that encourages its personnel to wield enormous (and unconstitutional) power over law-abiding US citizens in their own country.

It’s easy to look at a single incident like this and dismiss it as the work of a rogue agent or bad tip.  But this is far from the only time something like this has happened since late 2001.  From NSA spying on US citizens to data mining to border checkpoints up to 100 miles inland, we are allowing the machinery of a police state to be constructed right under our noses.  That may not have been the intention of those who authorized these laws and procedures, but it’s the reality of what continues to go on in this country day after day.  And one day, we’ll have a terror event so big, or a government so inclined toward authoritarianism, that this liberty-destroying machine will be turned on us with full force.  And we’ll be so acclimated we won’t even notice.