10.18.06
Posted in culture, links, outrage, patriotism, politics, relationships, sexuality, shiny at 9:56 am by Hanne Blank
Did you know that next year, the laws will change to make it necessary to have a passport to go between the USA and various nearby countries (Canada, for one), for travel that formerly did not require a passport? NYT reports that “The State Department proposed creating a wallet-size passport that Americans could use to travel to Bermuda, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. The card, which would include radio frequency coding to link it to a database of biographical data and a photograph, would be used when a new rule goes into effect next year requiring a passport for travel to those countries.”
Righty-o, then. RFID for personal ID, incidentally, has been noted to be a source of significant problems including massive potential for privacy breaches. Security expert Bruce Schneier seems fairly satisfied with the encryption/protections the USDept of State is planning to implement in its RFID for passports (or what they have indicated they will be planning, at any rate), but if you’re not as sanguine as Bruce is maybe you wanna get the fullsize passport now.
Not, of course, that this’ll keep them from RFID’ing your passport when you have to get it renewed down the line, but perhaps it will keep you from being a guinea pig for the first-gen version. Again, if you care. Which you might or might not.
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Shrub’s megalomania took a giant step forward yesterday when in the first wholesale revision to NASA/space policy in ten years, he decided that all your space is belong to us.
(Yes, I know it’s “base,” not “space,” but that doesn’t work here, see?)
Quoth the WaPo, “President Bush has signed a new National Space Policy that rejects future arms-control agreements that might limit U.S. flexibility in space and asserts a right to deny access to space to anyone ‘hostile to U.S. interests.’ ” (Link) Well done to you, George, and while I don’t think you have to worry about Al Quaeda sending up a manned explorer any time soon, I wish you good luck keeping, say, China from launching spacecraft if they damn well want to.
Whadda maroon. Someone needs to sit him down and make him watch all of TOS Star Trek. Possibly Clockwork Orange-style. ‘Cause clearly a childhood of Tom Swift and His Gigantic Space Ray of Obliterational Righteousness ‘n’ Doom has gotten far too deep into what passes for his brain. (Or has he been reading those drecky books about life apres-Armageddon that I always see heaped on the remainder table at CostCo? I can’t tell any more. Clearly he is suffering some 2-D/3-D conflict of some sort, since he’s not dealing in the World As We Know It, but what the source of his 2-D delusions is I know not.) Surely Gene Roddenberry would not object to his work being used for conscientious reprogramming purposes.
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And as your reward for reading the depressing news links, go play with this: Altar-Ations, a lovely little bit of interactive media educational art that manages to be funny, insightful, and scathing all at the same time. Brava Juliet for pulling this together.
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10.03.06
Posted in law, outrage, politics, sexuality at 3:06 pm by Hanne Blank
I’ve been struggling with this post for a day or so now. It is always difficult to carve out a middle ground in any hotly contested and powerfully polarized territory. But as I continue to observe the firestorm of news and commentary about the current events involving the inappropriate sexual behavior of former congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) in relation to certain former Capitol Hill pages, I feel that I’d be doing the wrong thing if I stayed silent.
You see, I think that people are paying way too much attention to the wrong things and going way, way too long for this particular ball.
The rest of this post gets rather lengthy, so I’m putting the rest of it behind a cut. Read at your own discretion.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in culture, outrage, violence at 7:20 am by Hanne Blank
Jeez. Turn your back for one High Holiday and the whole country goes straight into the proverbial handbasket. I’ll have more to say about the whole Foley/IM-gate thing later on, since a lot of those issues are ones I have been working with intensively for several years, but for the moment I need to vent about something else, on behalf of people whose voices and opinions will never appear in a forum like this one.
My heart aches a lot, today, for the families of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. Having spent a reasonable amount of time around an Amish community during one period of my adolescence, I am particularly outraged at anyone who would take their personal need for violence and revenge to the people who, of all the communities in the United States, participate perhaps least in such ugliness themselves. I’m also angry at the news media for their usual frenzied carrion-eating behavior over the incident. And by that I mean “much more so than usual,” because in this case, it is clear that they are opportunistically violating the normal boundaries of Amish culture just to satiate the insatiable voyeurism of the American media consumer.
What those photographs cannot tell you, because of the simple fact that the photographs themselves exist: most Old Order Amish will not, for reasons having to do with the community’s religious ideals of modesty, agree to be photographed. I cannot think that they would suspend their disagreements with being photographed now. Read the rest of this entry »
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09.29.06
Posted in outrage, patriotism, politics at 10:05 am by Hanne Blank
This is the text of a letter I am presently printing out to send to my elected representatives.
Friday, September 29, 2006
Dear [Congressman/Senator] ,
I am writing to express my profound displeasure and outrage at the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and to take you personally to task for your part in its passage.
To permit the passage of this Act, with its provisions for detainment, coercion, torture, and the legal admission of evidence obtained by these methods, is an act of moral cowardice.
Read the rest of this entry »
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