Good morning 99%'ers!

This Saturday is Halloween when all the little ghosts and goblins come around to your door begging for candy.

Here in this small town, Halloween is celebrated with a downtown festival complete with a 5K run, pumpkin carving contest, and a parade for the kids. It is one of four major festivals each year when the entire downtown is closed to traffic and a local celebration is held. I think nearly every child in this town comes dressed in some sort of costume for the Halloween festival.

In my own childhood, many eons ago, before dirt was even invented, Halloween was a fun holiday for us kids. Our elementary school had a Halloween carnival which was a big fund raiser for the PTA. In the evening, we kids would dress up in our costumes, often cobbled together from old clothing or sheets that our parents no longer wanted. We would head out at dusk to trick or treat in our immediate neighborhood. No kid over the age of twelve would dare go out trick or treating because back then it was not cool. Now I am hearing stories of how even college kids go trick or treating. My how times have changed.

When we would come home with our bags of candy, Mom would immediately confiscate them and portion out the candy over the next couple of weeks. No eating until you got sick was allowed in our house. Sometimes I would catch my Dad sneaking some of our candy for himself. He had quite the sweet tooth, so it was expected. But he knew which candy I really liked so he never took those.

That was before the religious fundamentalists declared that Halloween was the work of the devil and proceeded to shelter their little Bible thumping tot bots from one of the most fun days of the year for any kid. And thus the war on Halloween was declared. I am always amazed at these very same religious nuts bemoaning the so called war on Christmas because store clerks now greet customers with Happy Holidays while commercializing this supposed sacred holiday and yet, they themselves have declared a war on Halloween, a fun day for kids. What they fail to acknowledge is that the origins of the dates of both holidays are similar and are rooted in paganism.

For the more mature of us, how about some ghostly or ghastly songs to set the mood, starting with some creatures from other worlds.

I do not know why, but Warren Zevon's Werewolves of London popped into my mind first.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDpYBT0XyvA]

How about a little Frankenstein, courtesy of Edgar Winter?
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSLP1FCREBA]

We definitely need a heavy metal song for Halloween and Godzilla by Blue Oyster Cult is definitely a good one.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T65rW_SIzg0]

What Halloween always needs is some witches, first with Santana's Black Magic Woman.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDLLXUaqZxg]

And of course, the Eagles gave us Witchy Woman.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVXqocPAz1k]

And finally, Donovan's Season of the Witch.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAzTnsSgs2s]

But wait! Where are the ghosts?

Here's the classic Ghostriders in the Sky by Johnny Cash.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMll6TNnTs4]

Here is the incredible Ghost Song, recorded by the Doors after Jim Morrison's death.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3Ja7wDuY9o]

And speaking of horrifying, here is a sampling of news and views about the Senate's passage of the CISA bill yesterday. Coming under the header of what in the world are they thinking?

The U.S. Senate on Tuesday passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) without any of the proposed amendments that would have strengthened user protections. The bill passed 74-21 (see the roll call here).

Rights groups immediately called for President Barack Obama to veto the bill and vowed to keep pressure up.

"Every senator supporting #CISA today voted against a world with freedom, democracy, and basic human rights," tweeted digital rights organization Fight for the Future.

More from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on CISA.

The passage of CISA reflects the misunderstanding many lawmakers have about technology and security. Computer security engineers were against it. Academics were against it. Technology companies, including some of Silicon Valley’s biggest like Twitter and Salesforce, were against it. Civil society organizations were against it. And constituents sent over 1 million faxes opposing CISA to Senators.

Trevor Timm of the Guardian weighs in on CISA.

Under the vague guise of “cybersecurity”, the Senate voted Tuesday to pass the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa), a spying bill that essentially carves a giant hole in all our privacy laws and allows tech and telecom companies to hand over all sorts of private information to intelligence agencies without any court process whatsoever. Make no mistake: Congress has passed a surveillance bill in disguise, with no evidence it’ll help our security.

It seems as though everyone, even Yahoo, hates CISA except for Congress and the NSA.

What really sets off CISA foes, however, is the bill’s requirement that threat reports be “shared in an automated manner with all of the appropriate Federal entities.”

That list of seven entities includes the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — which, in turn, means the National Security Agency. Yes, Snowden’s favorite three-letter agency, the one his disclosures revealed had been conducting widespread domestic surveillance.

This article from Wired is particularly good in its analysis of CISA.

CISA has faced opposition from the security community, which has largely objected to claims that information-sharing effectively stops cyberattacks. Tech firms also oppose the bills, arguing it will diminish their users’ trust in sharing private information with companies. Apple, Reddit, Twitter, the Business Software Alliance, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, and other tech firms have all publicly opposed the bill. And a coalition of 55 civil liberties groups and security experts all signed onto an open letter opposing the bill in April. Even the Department of Homeland Security itself has warned in a July letter that the bill could flood the agency with information of “dubious value” at the same time as it “sweep[s] away privacy protections.”

None of that was enough to sway the Senate against CISA. “You had computer security researchers against this bill, much of Silicon Valley against this bill, privacy advocates and civil society groups against this bill,” says the EFF’s Jaycox. “Our biggest takeaway is disappointment.”

As I was writing this up, I got a phone call inviting us to a Halloween party Friday night. Now I will need to conjure up the inner child in me and try to find one in my husband so we can figure out what we are going to wear.