Archive for May, 2003
Nader in 2004! (OK, maybe not.)
No, I’m not a big Nader fan, and I hope someone else runs in his stead, but I did vote for him in the last election. Why? Because I couldn’t find any reasons to be pro-Gore other than to be anti-Bush. And because I was voting then in New Jersey (by Absentee Ballot by the […]
Supreme Court further erodes rights
“I am dying!” Martinez cried.
“OK, yes, you are dying,” the officer said. “But tell me why you are fighting with the police.”
Not once did the police officers inform Martinez of his right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present. Instead, to try to badger him into a confession, they took advantage […]
Our friends in Central Asia.
Independent human rights groups estimate that there are more than 600 politically motivated arrests a year in Uzbekistan, and 6,500 political prisoners, some tortured to death. According to a forensic report commissioned by the British embassy, in August two prisoners were even boiled to death
And we (the US) gave them $500 million last year!
SARS door gods
BoingBoing.net has been hosting a SARS Digital folk art gallery. This one is the funniest:
Rumsfeld’s reality distortion field still going strong
“Jay Garner is doing a truly outstanding job for the nation. Any suggestion to the contrary is flat untrue and mischievous.”
–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld , May 2, 2003
“Unless we do something in the near future, it is likely to blow up in our face.”
— unnamed Administration official , commenting […]
No more Elmo … please!
An anti-Iraq war blogger, who also happens to be a writer for Sesame Street, responds to a BBC article which announces that “American interrogators have been using music from Sesame Street to “break the will” of uncooperative prisoners in Iraq.”
“Tear my fingernails off!” I can imagine the hapless captives shouting. “Beat me or prod me […]
More than they asked for…
It took a House Armed Services subcommittee a shade under 11 minutes on May 7 to approve $1.7 billion more than the Pentagon had requested in its 2004 budget for bombers, missiles, transport planes and a variety of Navy and Marine Corps programs.
As Talk Left points out, what’s $1.7 billion worth in housing, health […]
Microsoft vs. Open Source Part II
Microsoft executives no longer call open source a “cancer” and a “destroyer of intellectual property”, at least in public. But, if anything, the firm has become more aggressive in competing with Linux. Last week, Microsoft was reported to have set up a special fund to pay for deep discounts on sales of Windows, to stop […]
Sorry
FBI Apologizes to the “Evansville 8″:
As part of a national roundup in the weeks after the terrorist attacks, the “Evansville 8″ were among 50 people held as material witnesses in maximum security jails without being charged with a crime. Thousands of more men from Middle Eastern countries were questioned, some arrested and detained, allegedly for […]
Experiences from restoring OS X on a repaired Hard Drive
I just had to reinstall my computer from a backup I had made on a Firewire drive. In the process I discovered that I should have been making such backups with a program called Carbon Copy Cloner, rather than numerous other programs (PsyncX, Deja Vu, etc.) that are a little less thorough about what is […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
