WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

A violation of human rights waiting to happen [SocioPolitico]

So far I have resisted commenting on John Poindexter's new Information Awareness Office in the US (too easy a target, obviously a violation of human rights waiting to happen), but Tom Tomorrow has it on the nose.

Of course, this may be an concealed opportunity to establish decent privacy legislation in the US - as long as there is an outcry for it to be regulated. I'd strongly recommend Simson Garfinkle's book 'Database Nation' [US|UK] on this subject - he maintains that the reason the US is infested with junk mail is that the government funked out over a central database once before...

posted at 8:17 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Underestimating Bush [SocioPolitico]

It's tempting to view the current US President as a bumbling puppet of a right-wing sect. But exposure to intelligent people in the public eye often reveals that the persona they project is actually calculated and created from deeper, more long-term motives. In his insightful piece in the New York Times yesterday (sorry, you need to register), Paul Krugman makes the frightening suggestion that the callous actions they are taking

House Republicans recently refused to extend unemployment insurance. Their inaction means that later this month more than 800,000 workers will receive Merry Christmas letters from the government, telling them that their benefits have been cut off.

are not being take in ignorance of the harm they do to the disadvantaged but specifically because of that harm. He suggests this is in pursuit of a long-term far-right libertarian agenda to make people hate being governed, so that future governments of whatever complexion find it hard to construct legislation. Bush is in fact playing the bumbling role (it may be method acting...) to further an agenda of distrust.

It's not so much about cutting taxes for the rich - that is a side benefit - as about ensuring the people eventually distrustfully place such barriers in the path of legislators that no social agenda can be followed without either moving heaven and earth or invoking 'national security'. And guess which party is most adept at the latter...?

posted at 10:54 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Religious Seasoning [PsychoReligio]

Dr Ronald Gray is lucky that Christendom does not have the equivalent of a fatwa, at least not outside the circles Jerry Falwell inhabits. In what appears to be his first published work (at least outside what seems to be his specialist area of German studies), an article in the Guardian this Monday entitled 'What Jesus Really Said', he touts the old canard about the inaccuracy of the Bible and suggests Salman Rushdie's explanation of them being 'satanic verses' - added by a scribe.

It's a canard, of course, because it relies on an interpretation and explanation of the Bible that treats all content as if it were purely intended for the reporting of facts. That's a dangerous enough assertion when you're considering newspaper reports, but when it comes to a written work created by cultures with totally different lives, assumptions, world-views and ways of expressing high intelligence, it's especially naive. Dr Gray gives superficial interpretations of a number of interesting Gospel verses and concludes with the extract from a (sadly unidentified) Stevie Smith poem that evidently inspired the article.

It's this superficiality that makes me suspicious. I obviously am not privy to Dr Gray's motives, but I suspect he's out to stick pins in religious belief as a counterbalance to the pseudo-emphasis it receives at this time of year. But if he's actually a serious seeker, I'd recommend he follow the well-trodden paths of others wanting to understand what's really going on here, such as those that led to 'The Lost Gospel Q: The Original Sayings of Jesus' [USA|UK].

For myself, reading three books by Marcus Borg - 'Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time' [USA|UK], 'The God We Never Knew' [US|UK]and most relevantly 'Reading the Bible Again for the First Time' [USA|UK] was mind-transforming. I'd suggest they would offer a much better starting point than the approach, perhaps sniggeringly inspired over academic coffee in Cambridge, that Dr Gray has used.

posted at 6:21 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Way Cool! [TechnoGizmo]

Always wished I had something like a microwave oven but that chilled things instead of heating them up. Well, this isn't it, but it's a start - cooling with intense sound waves. So intense, in fact that they

would cause a person's hair to catch fire from the frictional heating caused by air undergoing such intense compression and expansion

Now that should discourage people from raiding the fridge in the middle of the night...

posted at 4:56 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

American Desaparecidos? [SocioPolitico]

Yesterday's lead in the Washington Post (if you need a log-in to read it, try the printer version) makes for terrifying reading. Try this for size:

For example, under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen's home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it.

and:

Probably the most hotly disputed element of the administration's approach is its contention that the president alone can designate individuals, including U.S. citizens, as enemy combatants, who can be detained with no access to lawyers or family members unless and until the president determines, in effect, that hostilities between the United States and that individual have ended.

Now, the paranoid amongst us have already been noting the accumulating evidence that the Bush administration wants to act like 007 (except without the sophistication or, indeed, the martinis) or Blofeld. But what's especially frightening about this report is that, for the first time that I've seen, the admininistration has gone on the record describing and defending the actions instead of pretending that any evidence for their use is exceptional or exaggerated. This seems to put the US one step away from finally trashing Franklin's comment that "They that give up liberty for safety deserve neither" and creating more American Desaparecidos. Meanwhile, while making the law more exacting in some areas, the US Attorney-General is encouraging government officials to bend and break it when the Freedom of information act is involved.

posted at 4:53 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Guided Cranes [SocioPolitico]

What a remarkable story! It seems that Whooping Cranes, on the endangered list in the USA since the 40s, have been gently nurtured over many years by a devoted team of ornithologists. The birds used to winter in Texas, but hunting and loss of habitat nearly wiped them out. The human team identified a suitable new wintering ground in Florida and have undertaken the incredible task of training these wild birds to fly to Florida and not to Texas from their summer home in Wisconsin. As if that wasn't remarkable enough, the migration has been lead by humans flying micro-light aircraft. I am in awe of the achievement of these conservationists, which seems to me exceptional. Plenty more at the web site for Operation Migration and in the stories that are all over Google News tonight - look especially at the incredible photo on CNN. Mean while a bird in the Bush...

posted at 3:40 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |