World Affairs
Read it and weep, my Amerikan friends. And support the EFF. QUOTE December 10, 2004 A Taste of the System 02:07 AM | Current Affairs/ Drugs/ Politics Since the election, as you’ve doubtless noticed, I haven’t had much to say here. Having lost that crusade – and I do think we lost, election skullduggery notwithstanding [...]
If you have not read about this horriffic case yet, Lisa M. Montgomery of Melvern Kansas had a baby girl fourteen years ago and then had her tubes tied. Since that time, she frequently claimed that she was pregnant to her ex-husband, current husband, and fellow dog-show attendees. Even more recently, she claimed on a [...]
Many of you know that one of my favourite columnists is Mark Morford, who writes for the San Francisco Gate news. This is this weeks rant on Canada’s policies versus those of his own government. It’s a fantastic read and nice to see that at least one American is aware of what is going on [...]
The author of this article in The Register says it better than I could: QUOTE The plan underlying Fallujah’s ID scheme and phased return may be an effort to stop it reverting to a hostile no-go area for security forces, but it’s doubtful that this could entirely work. It won’t be possible to stop arms [...]
Once this system is in place that requires foreigners entering the U.S. from Canada to have their fingerprints scanned, it will only be a matter of a year or two or another trade dispute and suddenly the system will be extended to Canadian citizens. I would be quite happy to not visit the USA until [...]
America was doing so well until the ideological war-mongering Christian crusader came to power and now that they have managed to stamp out sex education, increase teen pregnancies, and push Creationism back into the classroom, it only seems fitting that one of the largest American TV networks would ban an ad from the United Church, [...]
Book-burning and more importantly, book-re-writing has been used throughout the rein of man to erase the collective knowledge and to curb dangerous thoughts and direct society. This infamous technique for hiding knowledge continues unabated today in Texas. Dubya and the ideologues (sounds like a great rock band title), continue to push their ideological and theological [...]
I’m doing my part to join the enblogment exercise started by Larry Lessig. Everybody should link back (trackback) to their candidate of choice. The trackbacks will be analyzed against the election results to see if there is any correlation at all. Here is my vote for Kerry.
The transcript from Al-Jazeera is here. Some interesting comments. In short, OBL blames American/Israeli bombing of Lebanon for being the root cause of his revenge. Another interesting point is that he says four years have passed and the roots of the problem (Israeli/Palestinian relations) still have not changed. He makes no comment on Saudi Arabia [...]
Here they are: The Economist: The Incompetent or the Incoherent? Lawrence Lessig: Enblogment: For KerryThe New Yorker: The Choice is Kerry John Perry Barlow: How to Overthow the Government Mark Morford: Get Out and Vote and Scream
Thanks to Scott Rosenberg at Salon for the links to this amazing set of articles at the New York Times covering Bush’s catastrophic failures in Iraq on the military front as well as on the legal front. I took the three long military articles from the New York Times and converted them to a PDF [...]
This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.
“The vast majority of people are computer-generated. Some are very complicated and consume a whole Pentium by themselves. Some are so simple, you can run a few hundred on a computer.” - Bob Lucas, division Director, California’s Information Sciences Institute, talking about the game he helped port to Linux called “Urban Resolve” that is being [...]
Fred Wilson over at the A VC blog originally noted sometime back in September that Philadelphia had launched an initiative to provide wireless internet access across their entire city. Now he has written about San Francisco undertaking a similar venture. I think that this is something that Vancouver, Canada should absolutely launch. Having wireless internet [...]
I thought housing prices here in Vancouver were crazy but a fellow in New York city just bought a taxi license for $360,000 USD. That would be about $470,000 CDN. That would buy a townhouse here in downtown – albeit a small one. Or at least a 1-2 bedroom condo. Of course there is no [...]
Declan McCullagh, chief political correspondent for CNET News, covers the next degree of heat in the boiling frog pot otherwise known as the American government’s plan to track every American citizen’s communications, travel, finances, relationships, and lives from cradle to grave. This time, One section of the new proposed legislation: “…anticipates storing the ‘lifetime travel [...]
I have followed John Perry Barlow’s writings for many years, starting with the formation of the EFF. He has a great blog posting called Exit Strategies about a discussion he recently had with a highly experienced mercenary with significant experience in many global conflicts. It’s worth a read. In short, the fellow in question said [...]
William Gibson is blogging again. Sort of. His blog has no ability to directly respond to comments. Also, there are no permalinks to each posting. And even the archive is listed in date order as opposed to reverse date order. In short, it is a home-built blog app that defies most current blogging conventions. However, [...]
More election humour from the U.S. (Thanks Dan Gillmor for the tip.)
Check out Global Vote 2004, a (purportedly) non-partisan, (purportedly) non-spamming simple voting site designed to allow the rest of the world to vote on the US election, since we’re all going to be affected by it anyway. They are planning on releasing the vote count to the media 48 hours before the election. UPDATE Nov. [...]
Okay, so it has to use human poop to attract the flies and it still can’t actually catch the flies – it has to have them fed to it’s little mouth – but all the same, the interesting parts of this equation are: • it is self-powered • it uses microbial fuel cells to generate [...]
This new 2 minute clip on how the Republicans have managed to distract Americans despite an entire four years of failure is almost as brilliant as This Land. Look for web-reports that the author of this will surely exceed bandwidth limits on his/her Earthlink site soon.
What a nightmare this year’s election is going to be in Florida. For any of you who are interested, I HIGHLY recommend reading this very long article at the Independent.co.uk website on the state of the Florida election systems. It’s absurd.
I love this article from the Age news in Australia that discusses the unilateral nature of the Bush administration and the global impact that his Presidency has had over these past four years. The author raises a great question — if the world is going to have to pay the consequences of an all powerful [...]
Thanks to Fred Wilson for pointing out this NYT article that documents the direct mail campaign that the Republicans used in Arkansas and West Virginia – traditionally religious states. QUOTE mailings include images of the Bible labeled “banned” and of a gay marriage proposal labeled “allowed.” A mailing to Arkansas residents warns: “This will be [...]
Thanks Jon for pointing out this incredible article by Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
An …
Bruce Schneier comments on the new “Trusted Traveller” program. Also, who’s creating all of the Orwellian program names in the U.S. government?
I highly recommend reading this open letter from Curt Goering, Senior Deputy Executive Director of Amnesty International, on the results of their first ever racial profiling report on the U.S. Mr. Goering powerfully states that the results of racial profiling are not helping and indeed are hindering the war on terrorism, and that like so [...]
Cheney is trying to weasel out of his comments the other day where he said that if Americans vote for Bush, they will be safe, but if they vote for Kerry, they will likely get attacked again. Now he is saying that what he meant to say was the Bush and Kerry would RESPOND differently [...]
The American government’s penchance for secrecy above all continues unabated. Defense Tech news reports that a bill has now passed, which puts all remote sensing data into the hands solely of the U.S. Government and its allies, where allies is defined in the law itself. So, the data is not classified and it is not [...]
