Landau’s basic message to Congress was this: Be careful about expanding government surveillance powers, because doing so often creates more security problems than it solves. Landau pointed out that plans to force all telecommunications providers to provide standardized electronic trap doors through which government spies can conduct easy surveillance - a new Homeland Security regime the FBI is lobbying for under the code name Going Dark - can actually create an easy way for enemies of the United States to break into our nation’s communications systems and conduct massive spying against us. She warned,

“Building wiretapping into communications infrastructure creates serious risk that the communications system will be subverted either by trusted insiders or skilled outsiders, including foreign governments, hackers, identity thieves and perpetrators of economic espionage. This risk is not theoretical. For a period of ten months in 2004-2005, over one hundred senior officials of the Greek government, including the prime minister and the heads of the ministries of interior, justice, national defense, were eavesdropped upon as a result of a breach in wiretapping capability built into a switch.”

If this kind of vulnerability can be triggered through a simple adjustment of communications technologies, what could happen if the U.S. government established a massive surveillance dragnet in which practically all communications by Americans was made available? Imagine what an enemy mole could do with that kind of access.

That’s just the kind of massive surveillance system that’s been set up by the federal government, under a synergy of the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act. These laws, it seems, may actually be making America less secure, rather than more secure.

This Saturday, March 12, there will be a protest against the Patriot Act, held at noon on the National Mall just outside the U.S. capitol Building. Those Americans who care about security, as well as those Americans concerned about the integrity of their constitutional rights, should be there.

Then there’s the research done by senators Dick Durbin and Russ Feingold - indicating that the worst spy powers of the Patriot Act are almost never used to combat terrorism at all. Only one fraction of one percent of the time are those powers used to spy on people suspected of any connection to any alleged terrorist conspiracy. Over 99 percent of the time, the Patriot Act is used to conduct extraordinary searches and seizures against other people, often American citizens living in the USA.

You won’t find anything about the upcoming protest against the Patriot Act in these books either. The protest demanding repeal of the Patriot Act will be taking place on March 12, 2011 in Washington, D.C., right in front of the U.S. Capitol Building where Congress meets. It’s taking place in reaction to passage of a bill extending the most abusive Patriot Act powers, without any reform at all.

For a foundational understanding of what the Patriot Act is, and the kind of extraordinary, unconstitutional surveillance of the American people it allows, the following reading list of books on the Patriot Act is a good place to start.

- Refuge Of A Scoundrel, by Herbert N. Foerstel
- How Would A Patriot Act?, by Glenn Greenwald
- Misuse of Patriot Act Powers
- How Patriotic Is The Patriot Act?, by Amitai Etzioni

The main character of the story, Ali ben Yunes, has a nag of a wife. He wanders off into the woods, just like Rip Van Winkle. Instead of coming across the ghost of Henry Hudson, Ali ben Yunes happens upon a pair of people playing a game with “puppets” on a board, which looks a lot like chess, in a deep woodland clearing. Like Rip Van Winkle, Ali ben Yunes comes back to his town to find it radically changed, with years gone by.

The similarities seem too strong to dismiss, but which story came first? Did this book of Asian tales intentionally bring the story of Rip Van Winkle into an Indonesian context, or did Washington Irving update an Indonesian folktale to American revolutionary times?

This is one book that’s not likely to be made into a movie with a goofy expanded plotline and massive associated merchandising. It’s simple. It’s short. That’s especially needed in a time when so many books for kids have buttons and zooming accessory features.

The Earth is good - and we’re good when we’re with the Earth, instead of being trapped inside the little caves of our homes and offices.

The watercolor illustrations show a boy and a dog, and the landscape they live in, which often blends right through the characters, as if they are blending into the Earth around them.

No fast pacing. No long-winded sentences. Calming. Reassuring. Perfect for bedtime.

The Earth Is Good is good.

As I read it, How To Be A Bad Birdwatcher isn’t really about birdwatching particularly, but about the practice of watching in general, as considered through the specific case of people who enjoy watching birds. It’s a meditation on the philosophy of knowledge - not the end of having it so much as the process of gathering it.

Another reflection of the idea is that the word auspicious, which is now generally meant to refer to something suggesting positive or remarkable fortune, originally comes from the Latin term for divination through the observation of birds. That’s something that’s done worldwide - by the native people’s of Alaska, who watch Raven for signals of secret knowledge.

Not knowing is as great as mastery, in the open attitude exhibited by Barnes. Fanatical birdwatchers will try to prove their worth by their exhaustive knowledge of birds, but Barnes is as eager in excitement at seeing a bird previously unknown.

In the birds themselves, but even more in our posture of watching them, we come to understand ourselves. That makes How To Be A Bad Birdwatcher worth reading even for people who couldn’t care less about birds.

Another discussion of The True Believer:

Teenager discovers that he is going to become a shape-shifting monster like his father. How very psychological. I think it’s safe to say that this is one plot you have not read before - except for maybe The Graduate.

I was wrong. It took me a while to check for sure, but when I did today, I saw that the Progressive Book Club is fully online… and not just at the Progressive Book Club web site. They’re on YouTube as well, where they offer interviews with politically progressive authors such as the following one with Antonia Juhasz, author of The Tyranny of Oil:

“This book offers an exploration of religious intelligence in an era where public and personal belief has become inseparable. Since the events of 9/11 it has become increasingly evident that it is impossible to regard religion as a matter of personal belief alone and ban it from the public sphere. Current debates about veils and headscarfs in Germany, France and England, caricatures of the prophet Mohamed in Denmark, and the public reaction to Pope Benedict’s Regensburg lecture on 9/12/2006 clearly show the need for better concepts of dealing with religiously sensitive issues, and people.”

This paragraph in itself reveals a slippery grasp on the concept of intelligence.

How have public and personal belief become inseparable? Huge numbers of people separate them quite effectively, and many more people choose not to engage in religious belief at all, without any harm to themselves.

What evidence is there that it is impossible to regard religion as a matter of personal belief alone? Plenty of people regard religion as a merely personal matter. Does the author suggest that government mandates on religious practice are inevitable?

How do the religious controversies cited indicate that there is a need for improvement in dealing with “sensitive” religious issues? Couldn’t it be that the problem is the sensitivity itself, and not the lack of coddling for it? The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were religiously inspired, as were the other controversies cited. The common crisis in these controversies comes from individuals trying to impose their personal beliefs in the public sphere. So, Sedmak’s solution seems to be part of the genesis of the problem.

Sedmak seeks to convince people that there is an innate “religious intelligence” in the human brain that needs to be understood. In making this argument, however, Sedmak fails to understand the concept of intelligence itself, by mixing it up in belief. It’s ironic that Sedmak should choose to cite the Regensburg lecture by Pope Benedict, given that a significant purpose of that lecture was to blast the separation of church and state in secular societies, and attack academics for attempting to preserve the separation of intellectual thought from religious faith. Benedict announced that the Catholic Church seeks to “overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable”.

To mix reason with the empirically unverifiable is to make it unreasonable. Likewise, to propose that faith is a form of intelligence is to suggest that authority and tradition are comparable to skeptical inquiry. We might as well talk about scientific religion as to discuss religious intelligence.

Religious authorities have tried for generations now to co-opt the power of secular society for their own uses, inventing unintelligent chimaeras such as Creationism, Intelligent Design, and faith-based initiatives in an attempt to grab once more the worldly power that they lost long ago due to their incompetence and barbarity. The intelligent choice is to leave religious concepts in the realm of private, personal belief, and preserve the public square as a place where reasoned, truly intelligent arguments based on empirically verifiable reality are required to set common policies for the government of the whole.

- Exploring the Supernatural: the weird in Canadian Folklore

- Weird Tales from Northern Seas

- The Book of Weird

- Wyllard’s Weird

- Asian Horror Encyclopedia