Self Expression is Electric

Speaking Via the Brain

This story of a 24 year old man with "locked in" syndrome reminded me that each one of us has this golden opportunity to share what happens in our minds by communicating it. If we are stripped of our mouths communication becomes a one way street. In the end it doesn't matter if a thought is spoken, written, broadcast, podcast, announced over a PA or carved in stone. Ideas are electronic storms in the mind that can either be heard now or later. as long as a mind is intact it remains capable of ideas and ideas change the world. I have thought a lot about the implications of instant messaging and texting for the future of cooperation. This story makes it seem like a real possibility that at some point in the not-so-distant future all minds will be connected in a large web of information not bound by the keyboard interface but as a constant milieu of physiological imagination and digital representations. This is either very scary or extremely exciting depending on you perspective.

Core Enlightenment Beliefs:

Naomi Wolf recently publish a book entited...

The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

Upon listening to her explain (on both the O'Reily factor and Democracy Now) how the actions of the Bush administration over the past six years have followed in the footsteps of the actions taken by fascists like Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Pinochet, my friend Teri and I became fearful of the destiny of the United States. But rather than inciting the flight mechanism, native sons and daughters of the United States should stand tall and fight. With our collective minds in an unprecedented cooperation we should fight to overcome our own diminished attention spans and prove we are NOT the United States of Amnesia. We need now more than ever to remember who we are as a nation and where we come from in order to prevent the full erosion of our liberties.

These core enlightenment beliefs changed much of the world during the last 241 years. Let us never forget them or their meaning.



GOVERNMENT CAN ONLY BE EMPOWERED BY ITS CITIZENS

SUCH CITIZENS ARE BORN WITH CERTAIN NATURAL RIGHTS

NONE ARE BORN SUPERIOR TO ANY OTHER

ALL WILL BE TREATED EQUALLY BEFORE THE LAW

THE STATE HAS A DUTY TO HELP THE NEEDIEST OF ITS PEOPLE



These are the basis for Thomas Paine's "Rights of man"

In these few words we witness the power of ideas to change the world.
never forget them.

Encounters with the Great Firewall of China

Encounters with the Great Firewall of China

During my second year of graduate school I learned a great deal from my lab mentor who was born, raised, and attended University in Beijing. He loved to talk about Chinese culture and I enjoyed listening. During our discussions we inevitably reached the subject of Tibet. On this topic we vehemently disagreed about the reasons and effects of Chinese occupation. He consistently claimed that the people of Tibet were wholly better off because of the occupation and that Chinese rule had made the more barbaric practices of “lamaism” (as he called Tibetan Buddhism) illegal. He went so far as to claim that the lamas (the high priests that surround the Dali Lama) had practiced human sacrifice up until the 1950’s.

The argument between he and I remained civil but lasted for 3 months. After he had sent me an e-mail with the claims of human sacrifice backed by scholarly references I inter-library loaned these references. Some came from obscure private libraries at Harvard. The only evidence I could find in all my research was reference to ancient Tibetan texts describing human sacrifice in the 1300s. I found no modern evidence for human sacrifice in Tibetan Buddhism anytime close to 1950. My mentor stuck to his ideas though and we agreed to disagree, but I did learn that Tibet was not the Shangri-La that it is normally portrayed as in western media.

This encounter was a clash of ideals and resulted in a discussion that left both parties more informed about the facts. My second encounter was far more real and ultimately one-sided.

My friend Philip Razem is currently a Peace Corps volunteer in Chongqing, China where he teaches English and American culture to college students. I received an interesting reply e-mail from him the other day.

I recently began to write a blog and wanted to share it with my friends and family. I had sent the link to Phil and he replied saying he would enjoy reading this, but had to do so through proxy servers from his host home in Chongqing, because the “Great Firewall of China” had successfully blocked access to my blog from servers in mainland China.

These first hand encounters with governmentally approved censorship renewed my appreciation for my U.S. citizenship. These cases mark a key contrast between democracy and socialism. It also points out that free press and free speech transcend the quibbling of Republicans vs. Democrats into the realm of universal human rights. So, why does the Ministry of Public security of the People’s Republic of China care what I have to say?

There were several reasons for me to start writing a blog this past October, but my involvement in the public opinion hearing held by the BSC was the last straw in pushing me into the blogosphere. On September 27^th I was contacted by Kristen Sullivan the news coordinator at Google News. My name had shown up in enough news articles that day to elicit a response from “Big Brother.” She had asked me to write a comment on the news stories I was quoted in. At first I was hesitant to respond but then realized that Google was providing a public forum for debate and the faster I responded the more likely people reading the news would read what I had to say. So I used this opportunity to challenge the biased coverage of the BSC hearing among the Denver News affiliates and express my opposition to the war in Iraq and provide detailed reasons for opposition. I specifically stressed that the barbaric profanity of pre-emptive war is supremely more offensive than a four letter word.

Google News kept my comments attached to stories relating to F-bush editorial for 30 days after publication. From this experience I do believe that corporate media can and must play a crucial role in a healthy democracy. From these comments evolved my blog.

An unfettered press was the inspiration for the American Revolution and will be the key to fair cultural globalization. People in general are compassionate and when exposed to the truth behind genocide and general injustice will come to the aide of afflicted peoples.

The right to a free press is at the core of American Democracy. Ideas cost nothing to export and have the ability to change minds, markets and eventually governments themselves. The global information age has brought with it unprecedented cross cultural communication and with this raised global consciousness. I do not think it too much to ask that these ideals be upheld in the nation of their birth.

As Ben Franklin said…

“Any society that would give up liberty to gain security will deserve neither and lose both.”

-Kristopher Hite

Fort Collins For Iraq Withdrawal

The following links you to the non-binding resolution for Iraq withdrawal which has been presented to the Fort Collins City Council for the past several months.

http://www.fciw.org/index.htm

Please show your support for this resolution by showing up to Fort Collins City Council meetings which are held at city hall at 300 Laporte Ave. on the first and third Tuesday of each month. at 6:00 PM there is 1/2 hour dedicated to public comment there is no requirement to stay for the entire meeting.

Poem worth a five minute read

Poetry by Jeff Poniewaz

Why Young Men Wore Their
Hair Long in the Sixties

Because they could feel the deforestation of the Amazon

breathing down their necks even then,

Because half of the world's trees have been cut down

since 1950,

Because even as kids in the '50s they could feel

the wilds dwindling, and were given crewcuts

soon as school let out for the summer,

Because they didn't care if some bigot

thought they looked like girls--

they were unmistakable male to themselves

and weren't afraid to accept the female

half of their soul and love the Mother Earth,

rejecting the macho Earth-rape of civilization,

Because they had to become long-haired Indians

to expiate the genocide of the Indians

by their European-invasion

boatpeople greatgrandparents,

Because even their European Paleolithic granddaddies

all had long hair before they cut down

the forests to make room for cities

with barbershops right next to butchershops,

Because they had to make up for all the baldheaded skeletons

the Nazis kept as deathcamp slaves,

Because though they dug Buddha's bald head

they liked getting high

in other ways besides meditation,

Because Jesus was crucified for having long hair

by crewcut fundamentalists who went back

in a time machine to make sure he'd be

the Only hippie on their holycards

Because Einstein's hair burst from his skull in protest

of radiation sickness making people's hair fall out,

Because Eisenhower's bald head was succeeded

by Kennedy's boyish shock of hair,

which got blown off his head the year

before the Beatles came to America,

Because Elvis's duck's-ass outraged the '50s

as much as the Beatle-cut outraged the '60s,

Because Stokowski let his mane fly illuminated

on album covers decades before Billy Idol,

And long-hair music has been letting its own long hair down

much longer than "Roll Over Beethoven,"

Because even short-haired hepcats like Charlie Parker

let down the long hair of their souls in their jazz,

Because James Dean's pre-Elvis noncrewcut rebel

is a nobler symbol of the '50s than Happy Days,

Because haircut conformity's a sellout to getting a job,

Because Whitman shook his white locks at the runaway sun

while loafing on a hill of summer grass,

"And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves,"

he wrote observing the flowing grass,

Because Industrial Revolution lobotomizes our mammal brain,

Because military-industrialism barbers the heart

with bayonets,

Because "patriots" yearned to razor the throats

of bearded longhairs during the Vietnam War,

and yearned to shave off their balls as well

to make perfect eunuch robots of war

albeit Bob Hope pimping Ann-Margret

to the about-to-die: "Remember, boys,

this is what you're fighting for,"

Because Moloch lusts to blow their balls off in battle,

Because Jim Morrison flashing his phallus

in the face of the Vietnam War

got busted for obscenity,

Because Rock'n'Roll pit its ecstasy

against the nightmare madness of war

(tho rock promoters scalp rock fans

as much as ticket scalpers do),

Because hair longs to be long,

Because even when we die our hair wants

to keep on growing forever,

Because every wild horse loves its flowing mane,

Because long hair means a wilderness

and short hair means a lawn,

Because John Muir said the first thing they do

is cut down the trees and the second thing

they do is graze sheep amid the stubble,

Because the first thing they do in

a prison an insane asylum or the Marines

is shear off all your hair exactly like sheep...

Free Press at Colorado State University

Prologue: I know this is a long post with a lot of possibly unnecessary details, but I am sick of the media spin that happens in mainstream media and has been happening right in front of my eyes. So, here are all the facts, take from them what you will.

This story begins on Friday September 21, 2007. The Day began at 12:00 AM when the 7 member editorial board of the Rocky Mountain Collegian (The student newspaper at Colorado State University) approved and printed a four word editorial that received instant national media attention. It read - Taser this... F___ BUSH. Except the f word was spelled out. This was not on the front page, but on page four, the Op/Ed page, in large font ( I just measured it.. the font used has letters 4 cm tall and 2.5 cm wide). The editorial stated underneath the large lettering that "this column represents the views of the collegian's editorial board." The front page of that issue of the Collegian had the headline FREE SPEECH LIMITS. I took this to mean that the issue would be a discussion of exactly that. The use of the profane word sparked immediate national media attention. Michael Moore put a censored photo of the editorial on his website, and camera crews headed for Fort Collins, Colorado.

When I go into the lab in the morning I usually pick up a copy of the Collegian as I did on that Friday. After showing my colleagues, they thought "well, that's immature" and didn't really give it another thought. I watched the media coverage of all of this with curiosity at first, and then I decided to get involved. On Saturday the 22nd CNN aired a video clip online and on television which had the title CSU students split over controversial editorial, or something to that effect. This piece included four interviews with CSU students. Two interviews where the interviewee thought the editor in chief should resign and two in which the interviewees stated they supported the editorial boards right to speak their minds.



I thought that this was a fair interview but I continued to watch the media coverage. This next bit is what motivated me to get involved.

The college republicans, a chartered student organization on campus, announced on Sunday the 23rd that they would have a booth on the student plaza from 10:00 AM until 3 PM where they would collect signatures on a petition calling for J. David McSwane's resignation. The college Republicans announced this to the local news media and were interviewed on Sunday announcing their intentions to hold this public petition. I did not hear about this public petition until I was at home Monday eating lunch and reading the Collegian's website. As soon as I heard about this I rode my bike to the student center to engage the republicans in a conversation. This conversation lasted for about 45 minutes from about 1:15 until 2:00 Monday. While discussing with them their rationale for calling for his resignation I was photographed by The Rocky Mountain News and subsequently interviewed. My pictured appeared the next day, Tuesday, on page 8 of the Rocky Mountain News accompanying an article titled "300 at CSU urge firing of editor." I am pictured here having a "heated debate" with the college republicans. During my conversation with the 9+ people manning the booth on Monday I asked them how I could set up my own booth to collect signatures supporting J. David McSwane and the entire editorial board and their right to free speech and free press as guaranteed under amendment 1 of the U.S. Constitution. They said it was easy and all I needed to do was contact the EPO (events planning organization) at CSU and get a chartered student group or department to call in a reservation for me. So even though I'm not affiliated with the republican or the democratic party I started calling.

I thought that the logical place to start calling was the "Young Democrats." I got a contact number from the CSU website but the problem was that this was an out-dated number and I ended up calling the president of the young democrats from last year. her name is Nicole and she did want to help me so she gave me the contact information for the current president and vice president. After calling, and sending e-mails to both I received no reply. I also wrote e-mails to the "allied students for peace" and a group with the word zen in their title to see if someone would step up and sponsor a booth for me. I did all this with no luck. I don't know if they just didn't get my messages or they did not want to involve their group with the controversy. So I started calling individual professors to see if I could get a department to reserve space on the plaza for me. I contacted a few who were willing but could not get their department to agree in that short a time frame. The one professor that was most willing to help me was Pamela Jackson of the journalism department. After many failed attempts to get a booth set up I called the EPO back once again and asked them if it was OK that I, as an individual, go to the plaza and and ask people to sign a petition. They said "oh yes that is perfectly fine" as long as you don't have any "equipment" - meaning a table, tent, chairs or any amplification. So with this information I wrote out a petition which I will quote here verbatim.

This petition is in support of Rocky Mountain Collegian Editor in chief J. David McSwane, and the freedom of the press, guaranteed to all U.S. citizens in the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America.Neither J. David McSwane, nor any other member of their editorial board should be penalized by any governing body for their editorial published Friday September 21st 2007.

Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

I printed out about 30 pages and went to the plaza at my lunch hour on Tuesday. I did not have any signs at this point It was just me a pen and a clipboard. I was hesitant to approach people at first and I only collected about 20 signatures on Tuesday from 12 PM until 1:30. those twenty signatures meant a lot to me though because for each one I had a few minutes of conversation about the issue with the signer. I started feeling more confident that I could get a lot of signatures by 7 PM Wednesday (when the board of student communications, aka the BSC, would have their public opinion hearing). While collecting signatures on Tuesday I noticed I was not alone in my idea to start a petition as an individual affiliated with no group. Ben Whiner is a freshman computer science major I met on the plaza on Tuesday. Our petitions were almost identical, so we decided to team up to double our potential total petition tally. I told him to meet me at this cottonwood stump that sits almost at the center of the plaza the next morning at about 10:30 AM.

I want to take a second here to tell you about the national media coverage at this point. I talked about CNN having an even-handed video piece that aired Saturday the 22nd. Well, since the college republicans had collected over 300 signatures on Monday calling for J. David mcSwane to resign, CNN decided to run another story on Tuesday the 25th which had the title which read something like "CSU students call for editors resignation." This completely shocked me and made me sick that a puny 300 signatures gathered on a campus of well over 20,000 students had come to mean that the entire student body was calling for him to resign. This really lit a fire under me. So Tuesday night I went to the local radio station on my bike (KRFC) and asked them how I could set up an interview tomorrow to inform the community of what exactly was going on on campus. The woman at the office told me to call the station between 7-7:30 AM the next morning and ask for David Peterson the news director. I did this and we set up an interview where he brought a tape recorder to the student plaza meeting me there at 11:00 AM Saturday. After meeting Ben and getting some signatures between 10:30 and 11 I conducted my interview with David Peterson. I did not get to hear whether it aired or not because I spent the rest of the day gaining signatures on the petition I wrote out above. Between 11-1 on Wednesday Ben and I had attracted an entourage of people who not only wanted to sign the petition but wanted to help spread the word about free speech and free press. When I went home to grab a quick lunch my roommate and I both counted the signatures independently. we agreed that at that point the tally was 435. When I returned to the plaza the group had grown and we totaled the signatures gained at 3:30 at this point the count was at 734. this is the number that appeared in the rocky mountain news article released online last night (Wednesday night) entitled Group of CSU students rallies around embattled editor. as classes ended that day we did not continue to get the volume of signatures we had been getting all day but they were still being added. Throughout the day our group had been telling people to go to C101 Plant sciences for the BSC hearing at 7:00 PM that night. I showed up to the hearing at about 6:15. Ben had saved me a seat close to the front. With our petition in hand we prepared for the hearing. I had printed off a copy of the BSC by-laws before heading to hearing.

A large portion of the hearing was captured on tape by independent media outlet InTheoryTV. The cameraman ran out of battery as I was speaking.



The hearing began promptly at 7 and the board began by asking questions of J. David McSwane himself. Then there was a period for public comment in which speakers that signed up could share their opinion on weather or not J. David McSwane should be fired or not. We all had to sign up ahead of time. If you apposed the editor you signed up on a sheet of gray paper, if you supported you signed up on a green sheet. I signed up on the green. everyone who signed up was given a chance to speak. 19 signed up to speak in support of McSwane while 12 signed up to oppose him. All the major news companies had large cameras rolling in the front left side of the room. each person got 3 minutes to speak. However, after a man from the community said the N word about Barack Obama. all the major news crews packed up their cameras. The man pictured in this article printed in the Rocky Mountain News today (titled Editor's fate in the hands of CSU panel) is the person who used the N word in reference to Barack Obama. (which I found extremely offensive as I feel that that goes into a related but wholly different issue of hate speech). Anyway after his talk about 3 more people talked and then it was my turn. I had been thinking about what I wanted to say all day. I decided to keep it short and to the point. There were three specific points I wanted to make. First: after all the toil of getting nearly 800 signatures to support the editorial board and their first amendment rights I thought that should be the first order of business. The first thing I said was "I have in my had a petition that supports J. David McSwane, and the entire editorial board, and their right to exercise their first amendment right." I said (to be conservative and not give an over-estimate) that there were over 700 signatures on the petition (if you count those signatures that were gained from the people outside the hearing which Isaac Burbank (a friend of Dave McSwane's) brought to me later we had actually over 800 names on our petition. I submitted this petition to the board because I thought they would enjoy reading the comments. After that was handed in I made my second point which was to read to the board excerpts from their own bylaws which demonstrate that J. David McSwane was within his rights as editor in chief to use the four letter word. I will quote these excerpts here.

29 PROFANE, VULGAR WORDS, EXPLICIT SEXUAL LANGUAGEAlthough the intended primary audience of the Collegian is adults, the newspaper is widely circulated on- and off-campus and is available to minors (as are Student Media television programs). Even though profane and vulgar words are part of everyday conversation, they are not to be used in news accounts or letters to the editor unless they are considered by the editor-in-chief to be essential to readers' understanding of the situation. Use of words viewed as vulgar and profane also should not overshadow other, more important facts of the story. Profane and vulgar words are not acceptable for opinion writing. Though they may be vulgar or profane, individual words are not obscene. Explicit language -- but not vulgar, street language -- describing sexual activities and human body parts and functions should be used for accurate reporting of health stories and, in a limited way, for sexual crime stories.

This comes from page 17 of the BSC's bylaws at CSU. I specifically addressed this point to the woman named Jaime (dressed in a reddish purple blouse, I don't recall her last name). I addressed her because I heard her say in her initial questions to David (I'm paraphrasing here) "you knew that profanity was prohibited under the BSC bylaws, so why did you choose to run the editorial and ignore that." It clearly states in the bylaws that the editor has the choice to use profane language if the editor-in-chief deems it essential to readers' understanding of the situation. The second point I made regarding the bylaws was that there are things flat out prohibited from appearing in the Collegian and those include things considered to be "obscene as to a minor." These prohibitions are listed on page 5-6 of the bylaws. For the third point I wanted to talk about all the adjectives that had been used during the hearing to describe the F-word. "Profane, vulgar, sophomoric, these are all words that describe the F-word and I would agree with that assessment. Let's not forget that in June 2004 Vice President Dick Cheney directed the F word at a senator on the senate floor." This next bit I was encouraged to dig up after I had read the day before a conservative blogger who thought the Cheney F word usage was justified because it was off the cuff and not intended to be in print. So I looked for an instance where the President himself had used the F work in print. It was not hard to find an example. During an interview in 1999 while still governor of Texas George W. Bush was quoted in print saying the F- word at least three times by Tucker Carlson (Mr. Bow Tie himself) for TALK magazine. this appeared in the September issue 1999, p. 106. So I finished my speech by saying that I do not believe that an editor of a college newspaper should be held to any higher standards than the President of the United States of America.

I was sick of hearing everyone talk about money last night. When is our country going to start churning out well informed, alert citizenry, that care about some basic core values that transcend country, race, or religion, rather than a bunch of "good business people."

The last thing I want to say here is I have been inspired to start talking openly about my opposition to the war in Iraq recently because my best friend, since we were 3 years old, is stationed at Camp Speicher in Northern Iraq right now. He will be there for the next 14 months. Anyone who tells me to be quiet and wait until the election of 2008, so I can voice my opinion at the ballot box, I say "no I will not be quiet." Everyday my best friend spends in that country is another day he risks his life to make the oil industry more wealthy. It is unacceptable to me that I should stand by and watch as the leaders of our country do what they please with our military might without listening to the calls of the citizenry. Please heed the words of a great President.

"We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together"

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

Peace
Kristopher Hite