A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

I urge my fellow Americans to join with me on this action. You can find your state's senators here and find your district's representative here.

I dashed this off myself in a minute. You can copy it if you'd like, but I encourage you to come up with your own words, too.

Dear $TITLE $LASTNAME:

I urge you to oppose the proposed $700 billion bailout of foundering financial companies through a massive federal purchase of bad mortgages and other assets.

I am dismayed and disgusted at the idea of using, all told, $1.8 trillion dollars[1] of taxpayer money in order to rescue private-sector firms from their own greed-driven mistakes, and hope that you consider this issue worth fighting.

I look forward to learning of your position and actions regarding this matter.

Sincerely,

Jason McIntosh
Somerville, MA

[1] Source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/26808715

Conventional wisdom is that email, while it does have mass, still carries a fraction of the weight of snailmail or phone calls, so I plan on printing these out and mailing them to the same folks' offices.

Honest question: what is the experience of phoning your senator or representative like? I'm not sure that I want to have a two-way conversation with someone about this - I just want to make my stance and desires known, and then get out. The one time I phoned a senator's office, like four years ago (I don't even really recall what the issue was), I called off-hours and left a voicemail. That was OK. Rattling off a screed to a live human would be a tad more awkward, though.

I had two dreams this morning.

First was a good dream. I was simply a passenger on a big jet, and enjoyed a few flights. All were smooth and relaxing, despite my nervousness about such things. Towards the end of the dream the pilot got fancy and performed backwards and even sideways take-offs and in all cases the experience was like riding a vast, flawless glass ramp into the sky.

Then I dreamed that I was home and Dick Cheney (who, for some reason, had a syrupy Southern accent) called me on the phone to gloat about how I had failed to detect his scheme and he was now free to carry on. I had no idea what he was talking about, but felt terrible about it, sure that if he was taking the trouble to call me then I must have been tasked with the mission to stop Dick Cheney and simply missed the memo. I asked him what he would do now, and he chuckled and said that I didn't need to know.

Apparently what tipped him off was that he had, from afar, noticed me reading some false Wikipedia pages that he had planted to entrap and confuse his pursuers. These were two pages on webcomics that my dreaming self had, in fact looked up prior to the phone call. The pages were bizarre: one looked as if someone had simply moved the discussion page onto the content page, and the other featured only a bland publicity photograph of a senatorial-looking black woman and some text about her, as well as a simple map of U.S. with the larger states labeled in blue MS Comic Sans. Through traffic analysis Cheney saw me spend time wondering at those pages, and then move on to something else; from this, he concluded that I was on his trail, but then got thrown off, just as he had intended.