Category: Politics

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(Really) Defending Marriage

Marriage Classique is subject to greater threats than those presented by gays tying the knot — divorce and adultery, to name two. Democratic Rep. Lincoln Davis says a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage won’t go far enough. Salon:

If the sanctity of marriage is to be preserved, Davis deadpanned, Congress should “outlaw divorce” and make adultery “a felony.” In addition, Davis said, “We should prevent those who commit adultery or get a divorce from running an office. Mr. Speaker, this House must lead by example. If we want those watching on C-SPAN to actually believe that we’re serious about protecting marriage, then we should go after the other major threats to the institution.”

At least 29 members of Congress are divorced.

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Ration Stamps

Ration6 A little Memorial Day contribution — found a book of 1943 war ration stamps in a box belonging to a passed relative. The name written on the book does not belong to my relative, so I’m not sure how they came into the family. Trying to imagine today’s war getting to the point where consumer goods were in a state of similar scarcity, or of Americans today tolerating having their bread, sugar, and gas dribbled out in thin streams by the Feds. But what really bakes my noodle is trying to imagine today’s government printing a tagline on any literature like “Be guided by the rule, ‘If you don’t need it, don’t buy it.'” Or that the U.S. Government once had an “Office of Price Administration.” The actual stamps are quite small – check the high-res versions on Flickr to see them in full glory.

Music: Bunny Wailer :: Bide
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Federal Marriage Amendment

Against all common sense and human dignity, Congress is once again considering the discriminatory and barbaric Federal Marriage Amendment. The Senate will vote June 5 whether to define marriage in the Constitution as being between a man and a woman. Once enshrined, it would be very, very difficult for states to rise above. John McCain:

The Constitutional Amendment we are debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans. It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed, and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them, and which they feel capable of resolving should it confront them, again according to local standards and customs.

The Human Rights Campaign is running a postcard campaign to counter a similar one being run by FMA supporters. Whatever you think about the efficacy of digital postcard campaigns, it’s at least worth ensuring that the numbers aren’t grossly skewed by vigorous religious campaigns. HRC also has tips on setting up a meeting with your congress critter.

Music: Velvet Underground :: Some Kinda Love

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Brain Scan for President(s)

The president of the United States has the power to destroy life on earth. It follows that we should have some assurance that the president has a healthy brain, and that the public should therefore be entitled to view brain scans of candidates.

Dr. Daniel Amen is sitting on a database of 29,000 brain scans, including those of healthy people, drug addicts, schizophrenics, liars, geniuses, alcoholics, and the mentally challenged. No one has a better picture of the connection between healthy brains and functioning humans.

In a talk he gave at Accelerating Change 2005, Amen lays out the connections in stark terms, arguing that allowing children to play tackle football or to hit soccer balls with their heads is tantamount to child abuse (from a brain health perspective), that techniques for developing and maintaining healthy brains should get more emphasis in schools than all the mundane stuff we’ll never use later in life, and that lawyers need to stop fighting to keep brain scans out of court cases for fear of muddying the prevailing idea that either we have free will or we don’t (Amen argues that brains span a huge spectrum of health levels, and that damaged brains exert less predetermined action (free will) than healthy brains).

Amen can tell at a glance how well an individual is functioning in life just by looking at their brain scan. The correlation between the appearance of the brain on a scan and the functional health of the individual is direct. So Amen also argues that Descartes — who made the point that the mind and brain were functionally separate — was wrong. In fact we now have the technology and the data to see for ourselves exactly how wrong Descartes was; the mind/brain connection is not a matter of philosophical debate, but of direct analysis.

The descriptive text at IT Conversations doesn’t do justice to the power of the talk. Juicy. Worth 45 minutes of your time.

Music: Steve Coleman :: zec
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Living With War

Lwwcover “History was a cruel judge of overconfidence / back in the days of shock and awe…” says Neil Young on his new protest album Living With War. The album – which took just three weeks to produce – was released digitally first (as a stream), then released to legal download sites for purchase, and hits record stores soon. New York Times:

“In a song whose title alone has already brought him the fury of right-wing blogs, he urges, “Let’s Impeach the President.” It ends with Mr. Young shouting, “Flip, flop,” amid contradictory sound bites of President Bush. But Mr. Young insists the album is nonpartisan.”

More on partisanship in a CNN interview. Musically and lyrically, this is not Young at his most creative – Living With War is no Greendale. But the honesty is compelling, and it’s a great example of how an artist can use technology to mobilize and distribute a message quickly.

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Where’s Tibet?

Download a copy of Google Earth, be amazed. Try to find a country or region on earth that the application / database doesn’t know about. Give up? Now try “Tibet.” Oops, no results. Zip, nada, squat.

Debate continues on whether Tibet is a country, but let’s leave the political debate about country-hood aside. Country or no, Tibet is still a region that appears on maps. But not on Google maps.

I was finally able to find a Keyhole .kmz file for Tibet, which enabled Google Earth to “see” the country / region.

When we think about Google being in bed with the Chinese government and blocking access to information about Tibet, we know it’s bad, but we also assume the censorship applies only to Google users in China. Here we have an example of Google’s complicity affecting searches conducted from anywhere in the world.

Google is probably the single most-used information source in the world, and that source has disappeared an entire region / culture / people. Tibet was an autonomous kingdom until it was forcibly invaded and occupied by China. Since that time, the Chinese have destroyed hundreds of Buddhist temples, killed around a million citizens, and forces Tibetan children to speak Chinese in schools (see freetibet.org for info). Now the world’s most important information source won’t even show you where Tibet is on a map. The “do no evil” monolith has disappeared an entire country — not just for Chinese citizens, but for everyone — for profit.

The China fun continues this week, as one of the sites we host at the J-School, China Digital Times, found itself inaccessible from within China in early March. Today we learned that the censors have blocked not just the domain, but the entire IP address of the server. Meaning that the main J-School web site, as well as other domains we host, are all inaccessible from within China as well. I’m currently in the process of sorting out the mess, moving CDT and the other sites onto independent IPs to future-proof against this kind of side-effect.

In the process of trying to explore the extent of the damage, I found that online blockage testing tools such as Harvard’s were nearly worthless, since they themselves were being foiled by Chinese counter measures.

Switching the default search engine in Firefox from Google to Yahoo only took a second. It’s a bit trickier to do in Safari. If I used Explorer + Google Toolbar, I’d be ripping it out right now.

Here is a study examining the impact the latest update to the Great Firewall had on the reliability of VPNs at bypassing local restrictions and protecting users against wiretapping by the Chinese government.

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Tapped

Tapped Caught this stickered pay phone with my cell (can you tell I’m dying for a phone with a better lens?) while racing to catch a train tonight — a reference to Bushco’s wiretapping compulsion. “Your conversation is being monitored by the U.S. government courtesy of the U.S. Patriot Act of 2001, Sec. 216, which permits all phone calls to be recorded without a warrant or notification. For more information, visit crimethinc.com.” Apparently these have been available for a while, though it was my first encounter. Effective culture jam.

Music: Lagbaja :: Mummy Hi
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Cost of War, Revised

Back in December ’04, I embedded a JavaScript counter tallying the cost of war in Iraq, which continues to tick away at a rate of around $2,000/second. The topic came up with friends the other night, triggering another look into the topic. nationalpriorities.org provides a very well annotated and sourced database comparing the cost of war in Iraq to the costs of other national expenses. The trade-offs below are based on a projected total cost of $315.8 billion for the war in Iraq, which would be equivalent to:

71,717,012 People Receiving Health Care or
5,472,330 Elementary School Teachers or
41,823,351 Head Start Places for Children or
185,783,623 Children Receiving Health Care or
2,843,180 Affordable Housing Units or
37,159 New Elementary Schools or
61,230,780 Scholarships for University Students or
5,441,915 Music and Arts Teachers or
7,114,877 Public Safety Officers or
558,642,585 Homes with Renewable Electricity or
4,946,324 Port Container Inspectors

Unfortunately, the database sessions at the site time out, making the reports  tough to link to. For a current report, click Tradeoffs, then select United States | Cost of War | All.

Thanks baald

Music: Pete Townshend :: Parvardigar
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The Myth of Disarray

Bathroom Remodel 1 We’re at it again — this time ripping out the small “ship’s head” bathroom to replace sub-floor and joists. Years of water damage (thanks previous owner!) have finally caught up with the house. But happy to say that for this round, we’re paying for the work rather than doing it ourselves (thanks home equity line!). Last summer’s remodel of the main bathroom dragged on for six months, squeezing tasks into spare hours here and there – will be great to have this whole thing done in a few weeks.

Speaking of disarray, just listening to a radio pundit (missed the name) commenting on the usual bromides about how the Democratic party is in disarray, and thought he made a really good point: The semantic loop-de-loop is in the definition of “array”: The normal state of any political party is to have an array of viewpoints, with some loose unification. We don’t say that major league baseball is in disarray just because some teams are winning and others losing. An array of competing views represents health for a system, just like bio-diversity represents the health of an ecosystem. You could say that any political system is in disarray, when what you really mean is that its members aren’t robotically aligned on every point.

Somehow, the myth of disarray doesn’t quite map onto the situation in our small bathroom.

Music: Tom Tom Club :: Lorelei
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Impeaching W

Now that the possibility of impeachment is finally on the table, the only question is, will it matter? The incriminations are certainly sufficient to justify impeachment (Alternet):

There is no shortage of diligent documentation of this president’s violation of laws and misleading of the public — from the 1,284-page Torture Papers to congressman John Conyers’ 273-page compilation [PDF] of the lies leading to the Iraq war. But behind this incredible ongoing compendium of evidence against President Bush lurks the realization that publicly pointing to criminal behavior is not synonymous with bringing it to an end.

Pushing impeachment through a Republican Congress is going to be no small feat. And the public, bizarrely enough, doesn’t seem to care all that much (insufficient salaciousness?) And then there’s the question of whether it will make any difference — if the mindset of the administration doesn’t change, what will we have gained?

Music: Sun Ra :: Daddy’s Gonna Tell You No Lie