Written by J.D. Tuccille

Keep arguing folks. The people in power live to keep us at each others’ throats.

(Photo by David Shankbone, Gnu Free Documentation License)

In the comments to yesterday’s jury nullification piece (yes, I read your comments) Smitty was especially on-point when he said, “The real problem might be toleration, or more accurately, the lack of it. We wish our preferred freedoms to be respected, while applauding governmental crackdowns upon those freedoms we dislike or are indifferent to.” Frankly that’s been an ongoing hurdle in the effort to preserve and extend liberty. Until pot-smokers and gun owners and low-taxers and sexual minorities recognize that liberty is indivisible and that we’re all in this together, we’re going to be picked off piecemeal by government officials all too happy to exploit our mutual antagonisms.

After World War II, Pastor Martin Niemöller voiced several variants of the following sentiments in his public speeches:

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I was not a Jew.

When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

Along the same lines, Benjamin Franklin once commented, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

It comes down to the same thing: When liberty is under attack, everybody is at risk. But that’s not what the politicians and inspectors and tax collectors and police officers say, of course. No, they’re all too happy to tell you that the queers next door are a threat to your way of life, or that the gun nuts are a public danger, or that the tax dodgers are greedy and not doing their fair share, or the store keepers are running amuck without entangling red tape, or that the pot heads are lazy parasites who will corrupt your kids.

But once the politicians and inspectors and tax collectors and police officers are done with the queers, they’ll happily shift their sights to the gun nuts, then to the tax dodgers, the store keepers, and then the pot heads, and …

Where were you planning to hide? Forget about it. Because you’re some kind of menace, too, and you’ll be fresh out of allies if you don’t realize that the freedom of people you don’t care very much about is just as important as your own.

The sort of people who make up the political class — the control freaks of the world — are experts at divide and conquer. They have all sorts of reasons why you should be glad that somebody else is being hemmed in by laws and threatened with prison. Those people are bad — until it’s you who’s so bad. What the control freaks will never tell you is that they’d be entirely unable to impose those draconian laws and threats if you’d ally yourselves with those different folks and their peculiar interests to protect their liberty and your own at the same time.

You don’t care about your neighbor’s gun collection and he doesn’t give a damn about your pot farm? So what? If you help each other out, everybody wins. If you don’t, you’ll both end up losing something you want, or else hiding it in the shadows and hoping for the best.

Keep that in mind the next time a politician promises to protect you from bogeymen who look an awful lot like the pleasant couple who live down the street. Maybe it’s time to knock on their door and talk about an alliance of convenience.

Because you’re not going to stay free if the only liberty you care about is your own.

Written by G. Martin

For those of a certain age, the phrase “the year 2000″ still sounds futuristic even though it was nine whole years ago (as usual, Conan O’Brien knows what he’s talking about). But now that we’ve lived through almost an entire decade of the “Oughts,” one can’t help but wonder, “Where the fuck is the future?!” Certain technological developments should have occurred by this point in history and we are still waiting. Cars are still miserably earthbound. Fashion has not been whittled down to the one-piece jumpsuit. And rednecks and drifters still seem to be the only ones who are able to make extraterrestrial contact. Even though we live in an era of unprecedented gadget geekery, from iPods and iPhones to Xboxes and Fleshlights, today’s so-called cutting edge devices don’t come close to the promised innovations of science fiction’s recent past. The “not too distant future” is now and these are the 7 inventions we should have had already.

7) Exo-Suits, due 2005 from Transformers: The Movie

Putting aside for a second the fact that we were supposed to be acquainted with an entire civilization of sentient robots by now, the one thing that would really come in handy at this point is that transforming exo-suit. A thought-controlled mechanical outfit that not only converts into an armed mini car, it also allows you to breathe in space while enhancing your strength and agility. For scores of 80′s kids, the very sight of this contraption instantly made the idea of riding around in Bumblebee a lot less exciting. Merely hanging out with a Transformer isn’t nearly as good as actually being a Transformer.

6) Time Travel, due 2004 from Timecop

Before he was getting all weepy and sensitive in JCVD, the Muscles from Brussels was doing all kinds of Van damage throughout the space-time continuum, all while resident villain Ron Silver taught us that touching “yourself” is never a good idea, no matter what year it is. From The Time Machine to the Back to the Future series, movies about time travel usually tread the thin line between fascination and exasperation, with plot lines (and timelines) that would make your head implode if you thought about them too hard. But the underlying allure of these stories is always the same: the ever-tempting ability to go back and change things for the better. Although set in the groundbreaking year that gave birth to such miraculous events as The Passion of the Christ, the Red Sox championship and Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, Timecop‘s technology could not be replicated in the real 2004. Someday, somebody should go back and change that.

5) 360 Degree Running Tracks, due 2001 from 2001

One of the main reasons why most people don’t workout (aside from the fact that it’s strenuous, painful and often inconvenient) is because it’s boring. Example 1A: running on a treadmill. Has there ever been a more brutally monotonous activity known to man? Now imagine if you could soup up this outdated torture device with the verve of an upside-down rollercoaster and the action of a giant gyroscope. Way more interesting, right? Although it probably still wouldn’t get your lazy ass off the couch, one has to admit that a spinning 360 degree track would be a lot more enticing than the ground model ever could be. Then again, it still wouldn’t be as much fun as getting the little exercise you do get from playing the Wii.

4) Full-Blown Virtual Reality, due 1999 from Strange Days

Although the technological events of Y2K seem as quaint and archaic as the Salem witch trials in hindsight, the realm of virtual reality hasn’t changed all that much since then. To this day, it is still pretty much defined by videogame role-playing and that Star Wars attraction at Disneyland. Psychedelic drugs have not evolved much either. LSD and ecstasy are the same as they ever were, just strong enough to give you a ride, but too weak to leave any sort of lasting, otherworldly impressions. Honest to goodness head trips haven’t made any real progress since The Monkees were getting Head. If Ralph Fiennes’ Lenny Nero, the “Santa Claus of the subconscious,” had his way, the symbiosis of biology and technology would have been a reality ten years ago. Using tricked-out hairnets called SQUIDs (Super Conducting Quantum Interference Devices) which allow “wireheads” to jack into and experience full sensory moments of other peoples’ lives, Fiennes slings prerecorded mini-DVDs packing pure vicarious entertainment taken straight from the cerebral cortex. Until somebody actually comes up with this bit of biotech, kicks will just keep getting harder to find.

3) Walled-Off Cities as Prisons, due 1997 from Escape from New York

New York Maximum Security Penitentiary has it all: total isolation from society, a fully equipped surveillance station, paramilitary guards armed to the teeth and a badass warden who doesn’t take crap from anyone, be it Kurt Russell or Clint Eastwood. If they had this kind of lockdown security in Oz or on Prison Break, none of that horseshit would have gone down. With more than one in 100 American adults behind bars and the average cost of keeping someone incarcerated surpassing the amount of most college tuitions, it might be high time to take a page out of John Carpenter’s playbook and give this idea a whirl. Build a wall around North Dakota, ship every last criminal over there and let God sort ‘em out. It just might be crazy enough to work.

2) Self-Aware Machinery, due 1997 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Let’s forget all this post-Cameron nonsense for a moment and get back to basics, shall we? Skynet, the program in charge of the country’s military computers, was supposed to remove all human decisions from strategic defense and become self-aware on August 29, 1997. That was almost 12 years ago. What’s the fucking hold up? With cell phones that malfunction at the slightest hint of rain, laptops possessing fruit fly life spans and misbehaving Blackberries that make emails disappear faster than mob informants, we could all use some of that super advanced Cyberdyne technology right about now. Damn the consequences, we’ll cross the whole “end of the human race” bridge when we get to it. In the meantime, just make our artificially unintelligent computers work.

1) Telescreens, due 1984 from 1984

This year was meant to be more than just the title of Van Halen’s greatest album. This was supposed to be the year of complete governmental control, the year of the thoughtcrime, the year of the telescreen. It is often said that necessity is the mother of invention, yet in spite of our nation’s recent flirtation with Big Brother-style tactics, the need for round-the-clock surveillance televisions that simultaneously receive and transmit information from within every home has not arisen. Although Kiana’s Flex Appeal would definitely be more titillating if it was totally interactive, it’s probably better for society at large that the Orwellian telescreen hasn’t come to fruition. Let’s hope that it never does.

Written by Adam Bluestein and Lauren Gniazdowski

Get smarter about grocery shopping. These tips could change your family eating habits.

1. If you hate crowds and lines, shop at dinnertime (5 to 9 p.m.) or even later. Only 4 percent of shoppers hit the aisles between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m. Least-crowded day of the week? Wednesday.

2. Go ahead and reach way back for the fresh milk. Everybody does.

3. Coupons with a bar code are easy to scan. The other ones take an eternity. But if you’re willing to wait … 4. That star fruit has been here a lot longer than the broccoli. Familiar produce turns over more quickly than exotic things.

5. “The more products you see, the more you are likely to buy,” says Marion Nestle, author of What to Eat. “That’s why the aisles are so long and the milk is usually in the far corner.”

6. Like employees with a good attitude? Shop at chains that are employee-owned, suggest customer-satisfaction surveys. When employees have a stake in the profits, it shows in their attitude.

7. The “grazers” order food at the deli, eat it as they’re shopping, and get rid of the wrappers before they check out. We also call that stealing.
8. I’m not just selling groceries, I’m selling real estate. Look high and low-literally-for good values from smaller manufacturers who can’t afford to stock their products in the eye-level sweet spot.

9. We’re marketing to your kids too. That’s why we put the rainbow-colored cereals and other kiddie catnip at their eye level.

10. Be wary of “specials.” When people see signs with numbers-”8 for $10!” “Limit: 5 per customer”-they buy 30 to 100 percent more than they otherwise might have.

11. The baby formula is locked up because thieves resell it on the black market. Ditto for the cough and cold medications, smoking-cessation products, razor blades, and batteries.

12. Driving your Ferrari to the Piggly Wiggly and want to avoid shopping-cart dents? Park far, far away.

13. You’ll end up tossing 12 percent of what you buy.

Sources: Maurice Nizzardo, former supermarket executive in Connecticut; David J. Livingston, an industry consultant; Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating; and others. Interviews by Adam Bluestein and Lauren J. Gniazdowski.