That’s the headline of the BBC News item, and I find it hopeful and moving. [Tags: GayRights]

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From Making Light:

The nine Senators who voted against the anti-torture amendment:

1. Sen. Wayne Allard [R-Colorado]
2. Sen. Kit Bond [R-Missouri]
3. Sen. Tom Coburn [R-Oklahoma]
4. Sen. Thad Cochran [R-Mississippi]
5. Sen. John Cornyn [R-Texas]
6. Sen. James Inhofe [R-Oklahoma]
7. Sen. Pat Roberts [R-Kansas]
8. Sen. Jeff Sessions [R-Alabama]
9. Sen. Ted Stevens [R-Alaska]>

Henceforth to be known as the Nazgul.

[Tags: torture politics senate]

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According to an article (link will break on Monday) by Peter J. Howe in the Boston Globe, Logan Airport argues for its monopolistic control of wifi by citing “security concerns”:

Massport spokeswoman Danny Levy said Massport’s security concerns ”are indeed accurate.” A profusion of airline-operated WiFi signals, Levy said, could jam radio frequencies used by the State Police and Transportation Security Administration.

Yikes! On busy street corners in Cambridge, there can be dozens of open wifi hotspots. It’s a miracle police cars aren’t crashing into fire engines all over the place.

Alternatively, if it just takes a terrorist with a wifi box to bring down our emergency services, maybe our emergency services should find more secure communications methods.

Logan is engaging in Terrorism Profiteering.

(That said, I’m not entirely comfortable supporting T-Mobile’s efforts to offer ridiculously over-priced wifi connectivity at Logan. But two is better than one.)

Even if there is some possibility of wifi interfering with emergency services, we shouldn’t let “security concerns” swamp all others. For example, I sat on a plane for an hour on Wednesday because the First Class toilet was broken. This was, we were told, a “security issue.”

On Monday, when I was going through US Immigration, I asked one of the officials why we’re no longer allowed to use cell phones there. “Terrorists use cell phones to set off bombs,” she said. Because I didn’t particularly want to go through a rectal exam, I did not reply, “Um, they use cell phones to set off bombs where they’re not.”

Of course there are real security concerns. I don’t want my kids to die in a terrorist attack. But we can’t let “Would you be willing to have another 9/11 in order to preserve X?” win every argument, because how many freedoms outweigh our own kid’s lives? We have to be willing to say, “There are real risks to maintaining an open society. Absolutely. We will pay a price for maintaining our freedoms. So, yes I am willing to take the risk of another 9/11 in order to preserve American freedom.” And then we can have a reasonable argument about the trade-offs.

The “Would you be willing to have another 9/11” argument plus the “The innocent have nothing to fear” argument together take us straight into a police state. Worse, we go willingly.

Resist them. [Tags: security terrorism wifi 9/11]

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Great speech by Al Gore. It’s not about the Internet, but here’s a snippet from the end:

The final point I want to make is this: We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Worldwide Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it because some of the same forces of corporate consolidation and control that have distorted the television marketplace have an interest in controlling the Internet marketplace as well. Far too much is at stake to ever allow that to happen.

Al Gore for president! [Tags: AlGore democracy media]

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I’m conflicted about blogging about this because I don’t know how to do it without sounding self-righteous. But I also think we generally need to surface stuff like this. So here goes.

Last week I was invited to attend a day of discussions about a tech topic with cultural and economic consequences. But, because I hadn’t responded to the first invitation (the msg got lost in my spam stream, I think), the organizers sent me a followup that included the list of about 20 attendees. The list of attendees is amazing. A fantastic group. I’d love to spend time with them. But everyone on the last was a man. The list wasn’t mainly or predominately male. It was 100% male. (The other attendees had not seen the list, so they did not know of its homogeneity.)

I want to go primarily because I want to meet these folks. I want to know them. I want them to know and like me. It’s the networking that attracts me. In other words, this is exactly how the old boy network is built and maintained.

When I told the organizers why I wasn’t coming, they replied that they had invited three women who turned out to be unavailable. After our conversation they have invited some more women. But, only a few because, they told me, they’re trying to keep the total number of participants down so it will be more intimate – more better bonding! I told them they could use my spot to invite another woman. Have I mentioned that this is how the old boy network is formed?

I’m not naming names because that’s not the point. The organizers certainly weren’t trying to create an all-boy meeting. It was bad luck that the three women they invited were unavailable. But three isn’t enough, and the fact they ended up with none didn’t strike them as a problem. And that is the problem. This isn’t a matter of quotas. It’s not about math. It’s about power. It’s about men strengthening bonds that have real consequences. The perfect gender homogeneity of this meeting is inadvertent but it’s inexcusable. We have to get to the point where this is prima facie shameful and unacceptable. We have to get to the point where this is just plain embarrassing.

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Here’s a new measure of a presidency: How many TV shows about fictitious presidents do we need to get the taste of the current one out of our mouths for at least a few minutes?

George W. Bush is, of course, the current record holder with an FPI of 2.5 (West Wing, Commander in Chief, 24).

For what it’s worth (and let me do the math for you: Nothing), I was disappointed in Commander in Chief. West Wing aspires to some level of complexity in its narrative, while CiC’s first episode promised a conflict between a good gal and a bad guy. Plus, although I usually like Gina Geena Davis’ work, I thought she was wooden in CiC. She even failed to inspire me in her set-piece speech to Congress, which she delivered with all the enthusiasm of a kid giving a book report; I was surprised it didn’t end with “This book can be found in the library.”

I mean, I’d still vote for her character or for Geena Davis the actress over Bush. But W makes me yearn for the willfully over-simplifistic, fiscally irresponsible, cold-hearted, enviro-trashing, cynically manipulative, and remarkably corrupt Reagan administration. Ah, the good old days when it was morning in America! [Tags: GeorgeBush WestWing CommanderInChief tv politics]

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Chipster has pointed out in a comment on my post about the brokenness of the Dept. of Homeland Security’s hurricane page that this other page is filled with broken links. The page lists four agencies ( working to reduce chemical and biological threats. The links to the State Department and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency are broken.

Ok, sure, pages go down and links break and usually it’s not worth a mention. My site is full of dead links. But I’m not charged with keeping the country safe in an emergency. No one depends on my site to find urgent information that could save their lives, unless it involves the incredibly rapid folding of shirts. I’d like our Department of Homeland Security to do better than a Humanities-major blogger like me. [Tags: HomelandSecurity security terrorism]

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Joi blogs a BBC report on a study that shows that a substantial number of US teens think that freedom of speech goes too far.

I’m less alarmed than the BBC article apparently thinks I should be. All my life I’ve been reading polls that show that Americans think the Bill of Rights goes too far. I assume that this is in part a trick of the way the questions are phrased and in part scarily true. So, the new study doesn’t surprise me. The question is: What’s the trend? [Tags: politics JoiIto bbc]

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Salon’s Tim Grieve has the story of the Bush administration’s appointment of a male trained as a veterinarian to head up the Office of Women’s Health, an announcement that seems to have been quickly un-announced in favor of the appointment of a woman Associate FDA Commissioner. (Ok, so Norris Alderon, the guy, has also been an FDA Asssociate Commissioner for Science. But, jeez, he’s also listed as the Federal Lbaoratory Consortium’s current Lab Representative for the Center of Veterinary Medicine. I mean, he still has one hand up a horse’s butt.)

BTW, Alderson is listed on the Health and Human Service’s official page on Women’s Health as “Acting Director, Office of Women’s Health” under the FDA. Since HHS has an Office on Women’s Health and the FDA has an Office of Women’s Health, it’s a little confusing for the likes me. I breathlessly await intricate explanations, which I also won’t understand. [Tags: politics]

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The Times has a good editorial on the normalcy of gay marriage. Apparently here in Masachusetts, a year of legalized same-sex marriage has not led us down the slippery slope of incest, child rape and bestiality. Despite the warnings of some conservatives, it turns out that we Americans are not so easily led into sin.

Of course, the United States is #42 (and falling) in the world when it comes to low infant mortality rates, so I can understand why it’s so important for the protectors of family values to focus on making sure that the reproductive equipment of loving couples meets their standards for sufficient differentiation.

[Note to the literal-minded: The above paragraph uses a familiar literary technique in which one says the opposite of what one means in order to make a point. In case you have trouble decoding sarcasm, I’m saying that there are far more important family-oriented issues than same-sex marriage. If you are still confused, please send $10 to the ACLU and they’ll be happy to explain it to you.] [Tags: gay homosexuality politics]

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