explodedlibrary.info

afr.com follow up

[8 October 2007 update: As I find out about new stories about afr.com, I will be adding them here]

There's been a flurry of posts and articles on the future of afr.com. If they are to be believed, it's much hated flash interface will soon be abandoned. I've decided to compile a list of all this commentary which has appeared since I wrote about afr.com back in June. In roughly reverse chronological order-

• Lara Sinclair, Fairfax defends paid site, The Australian, 26 November 2007
• Miriam Steffens, Fairfax stands by Financial Review website fee, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 November 2007
• Peter Griffin, Knives out over web sales, NZ Herald, 5 October 2007
• Andrew Dodd, To pay or not to pay: the Fairfax online dilemma, Crikey, 3 October 2007
• Matthew Ricketson, Finance pages tangled as web revolution overwhelms print evolution, Melbourne Age, 3 October 2007
• Lance Wiggs, Good AFR.com news - but will they finally get it?, 25 September 2007
• Seth Yates, AFR.com site to relaunch, 25 September
• Jane Schulze, Fairfax 'got it wrong' on afr.com, The Australian, 24 September 2007
• Jesse Hogan, AFR to unveil new, less Flash website, Melbourne Age, 22 September 2007
• Sonja Koremans, Kirk admits AFR site was bungled, B & T Weekly (Australia), Sep 21, 2007. p. 3
• Mark, Will AFR.com be next to go free?, Australian Newsagency Blog, 19 September 2007
• Duncan Riley, The End Of The Pay For Content Model Is Nigh, TechCrunch, 18 September 2007
• The embarrassment of AFR.com, Crikey, 17 September 2007
• Mark, Making news free online, Australian Newsagency Blog, 9 August 2007
• Mark Day, Fairfax punts on 'different' afr.com, The Australian, 2 August 2007
• Ben Kremer, More on afr.com - a quick traffic analysis, LawFont.com, 18 June 2007
• Ben Kremer, How not to conduct an ebusiness, LawFont.com, 8 June 2007

There are just three observations I'd like to make about this.
1. As late as August, Fairfax seemed to be brushing aside all criticism, other than the obvious, that afr.com was slow and they were working on that. Now the Managing Director of Fairfax admits that "we got it wrong" and other Fairfax publications are being critical of afr.com. What caused this change? I wonder if the tipping point was the decision of the New York Times to abandon its walled-garden in mid September and the rumours that the same thing may happen at the Wall Street Journal.
2. Previously I was quite baffled by the behavior of Michael Gill, head of Fairfax Business Media. Now I think I know what he's trying to do. The idea of having a usable website for the Australian Financial Review newspaper is oh so boring, especially when he could do something amazing like turn afr.com into Bloomberg-lite. The trouble is that people don't  seem to want that. I'm not sure that Michael Gill's boss, David Kirk, wants that anymore.
3. The users of my library (business school faculty and students) seem to have got used to life without searching for or citing AFR or BRW content. The typical user reaction has been something like, “Well, that’s too bad I can’t use stuff from the Fin any more – so what else is available online?” If that’s what Michael Gill wanted, he can give himself a big pat on the back.

photos of the APEC fence

Police backed on photo ban of APEC fence, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 September 2007

Tourists forced to delete fence photos, The Australian, 2 September 2007

flickr search on the APEC fence

Fortress Sydney, Digital Photo Gallery of Ted Szukalski

John Howard Readies Fortress Sydney, Stuff-Em-Up the hill backwards

© 2007 Bruce Phelan

recommendations from the investigation of the UCLA library taser incident

As mentioned in Library Stuff and elsewhere on the web, the investigation of last year's taser incident at UCLA has been completed. The entire report is viewable at the UCLA Newsroom, the report is 117 pages and 6 MB in size.

I haven't had time to read the report in detail, but I did find the recommendations. Here they are:

RECOMMENDATION 1: UCLAPD should distinguish use of the Taser in drive stun mode from cartridge, or “probe,” mode. The device should primarily be used in cartridge mode, with the drive stun mode restricted to being a backup or when there is no alternative to using the device at close range.

RECOMMENDATION 2: UCLA should prohibit the use of Tasers against passive or mildly resistant persons , thereby restricting its use to violent, actively aggressive or imminently violent subjects, currently engaged in physical or active resistance, where the suspect has been given a warning and a reasonable opportunity to comply, and where milder uses of force could be reasonably judged as likely ineffective.

RECOMMENDATION 3: The department should define the terms “violent,” “active aggression,” “active physical resistance,” and “passive resistance.”

RECOMMENDATION 4: UCLAPD should develop and implement a “force options” or “force continuum” system that provides an explicit range of appropriate responses for each level of subject resistance or threat.

RECOMMENDATION 5: The UCLA Taser policy should discourage repeated use of the Taser. Following each five-second application of the Taser, officers should reevaluate the totality of the circumstances. Each additional Taser firing cycle should be subject to the same criteria for use as the first. The number of Taser applications should be restricted to the minimum number necessary to place the subject in custody.

RECOMMENDATION 6: The UCLA Taser policy should prohibit the brandishing of the Taser by officers unless there is an objective reason to believe that the use of the Taser is imminent.

RECOMMENDATION 7: The criteria for use of a Taser should include a requirement that the officer give the subject a verbal warning of the intended use of the Taser followed, it is safe to do so, by a reasonable opportunity to voluntarily comply.

RECOMMENDATION 8: UCLAPD should prohibit the use of the Taser against persons who are handcuffed or otherwise restrained absent a continuing threat and present capacity by the suspect to carry out violent or actively aggressive actions.

RECOMMENDATION 9: UCLAPD should prohibit the use of the Taser against vulnerable persons absent a continuing credible threat and present capacity by the suspect to carry out violent or actively aggressive actions. [printed pages 68-77]

I am particularly glad about recommendation 2, that tasers be prohibited against people providing only passive resistance. I wish that they had made more of recommendation 6, that brandishing a taser by offcers be curtailed. As the report says when discussing recommendation 6, "The display of a Taser is, in itself, a use of force." I was surprised that the allegations of officers threatening to tase other students who were concerned at the treatment of Tabatabainejad were not addressed in the report, so far as I have seen in my skim.

I also looked for discussion about the role of the library access policies requiring students to have student cards on their person when in the library during extended hours. The closest I could find was on printed pages 43 and 44:

The instant case was not the first interaction between a student and Community Service Officers that inspired complaint and discussion. In 2005, for example, a fourth-year UCLA student sent library personnel an email that complained about “extremely rude and mean spirited (sic)” treatment by a “security guard.” The security employee, who library staff assumed to have been a CSO, “asked to see” the student’s ID, but the student “politely told him that I had forgotten it at my apartment.” According to the student, the CSO “sternly looked at me as if I was a criminal using…intimidation tactics [and] telling me to leave.” The student offered to log into the UCLA computer system to establish status as a student, but the CSO “refused to reason with me,” “got right in my face trying to intimidate me,” and “escorted me out as if I was a common criminal there to vandalize or steal something.” The student, expressing “hope [that] this incident will result in change that will improve UCLA,” complained that the CSO was “disrespectful, callous and seemed to enjoy humiliating students.” According to internal email correspondence among library staff, the student ’s email complaint “sparked some discussion about the access procedures,” though we cannot determine whether the student ’s concerns were directly addressed via policy changes at that time. [footnotes omitted]

another tasered on campus - this time at SDSU

Originally found via the Easy Does it University blog (be careful if you're at work, this blog is NSFW). There's a statement by San Diego State University. I'm just posting this now. I have not had time to analyze this in any detail, so I'm wondering whether this is another example of tasers being used as pain compliance for non-aggressive resistance. At least this time it's not in a library. Meleggan, written by a current SDSU student, has more details.

Edit: There's more coverage in the SDSU student newspaper, the Daily Aztec. This publication says that individual in question became combative with officers, which became a physical confrontation with the officers.

random mobile phone searches in Sydney

I understand the role of SMS messages in fanning the flames of the riot and reprisals in Sydney, but I wonder, isn't this going too far?

Jane, from Coogee, was surprised to find three police on her bus asking to inspect mobile phones. Each took a phone at random and scrolled through messages for five or ten minutes. Everyone obeyed. "The people were perfectly friendly about it," she said. "I thought it was a bit weird and a breach of privacy. But I didn't say anything. Nobody did."
[Australians are an obedient people - but for how long?, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 December 2005]

the ugliness of certain crowds

I have at times thought that flash mobs were more about people desperately trying to find a use for new technology than anything else. Now I wonder how long the innocent random chaos of the flash mob phenomenon will persist, now that there's been a foreshadowing of what a flash mob with a passionate purpose can cause.

Yesterday's race riots in Cronulla, Sydney - which spread to other suburbs such as Maroubra (close to where I work), Brighton le Sands and Rockdale and Tempe  (close to where I live) were fuelled partly by broadcast sms messages, emails and discussions on electronic forums. Of course, the role of this technology is very minor compared with the mainstream media, particularly the Daily Telegraph and talk back radio, the influence of alcohol and the usually buried but ever-simmering racial tensions in Australian society (in saying  this, I am in disagreement with our Prime Minister). I think that Australia has real racial problems, but then I think most places in the world do, it's just the problems aren't as obvious where the population is more homogenous.

A mob of 5000 is very substantial, but bear in mind that the population of Sydney is over 4 million. It looked huge on the TV, and it has shocked me and everybody else whom I've spoken to about it - but nobody has been very surprised that it happened. I wonder if there were many people who just wanted to make a non-violent but assertive stand to "reclaim the beach", as it seemed to be at the beginning, before it got out out of hand and the crowd took on an ugly life of its own. I don't excuse them, I'm sure that most knew that there was an extremely high likelihood that such a mass gathering could degenerate into violence, even if they weren't planning on throwing the first punch.

Given how much people like to talk about the wisdom of crowds, and the power of folksomonies, it's interesting to see such a graphic illustration that sometimes crowds are very destructive things. This isn't to attack the legitimacy of the whole concept, just to point out that it is not an absolute. Sometimes the crowds are wrong and sometimes they should be avoided.

Currently playing in iTunes: Jets by Decoder Ring

off-line, worries

Is it possible to blog off-line? Well I'll find out this weekend when I move and I'm temporarily without internet access. (btw, right now I don't blog from work and I don't blog about work, except in very general terms. This isn't an ideal situation, but it seems like the right approach at this moment in time)

There are a few things I've been mulling over that I will hopefully be able to draft during some off-line moments. I can store them on a CD or USB drive and upload them in one of Sydney's countless internet cafes.

Now that I've got the mundane stuff out of my system, let me get to the other point of this post. I'm quite worried about a cousin and other relatives that I have in London. In such a big city, what would be the odds? But until I hear that she's ok, it's hard not to worry. I can't even begin to say anything about what an evil, despicable crime this is.

Update: Today I learned that my cousin is OK. That's a relief, but I've also learned more about what happened - so I feel horrified.

embarrassed and ashamed by the Australian government’s continuing contempt for its human rights obligations

I’ve been meaning to write about this topic for a while, but the topic has proven quite overwhelming. Where to begin? Mandatory detention of refugees (including children) in detention centres which are effectively legal blackholes, Australia’s homegrown version of Guantanamo Bay. The threat to free speech and legitimate protest embodied in the Gunns 20 lawsuit against the Wilderness Society and other environmental activists. Australia’s ongoing disgraceful treatment of its indigenous population, including abolishing ATSIC and the NSW government’s urban renewal plans for Redfern, urban renewal being code for squeezing out the Aborigines.

Australia’s human rights record has once again been condemned by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (link to pdf of the Committee’s March 2005 report, CERD/C/AUS/CO/14).

To quote a portion of an article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald about this (David Marr, “Geneva v. Canberra,” Sydney Morning Herald, Mar. 28, 2005, at 13):

Canberra has learnt one lesson superbly. Instead of raging and complaining about Geneva's intrusion into Australia's domestic affairs, it's much better to shut up. The effort ministers put into denigrating the committee system the last time round only gave the issue more oxygen. After the latest verdict a little more than a fortnight ago, there was no thunder from Howard, Downer or Ruddock. Not even a press release. Silence effectively killed the story.

The Howard government is masterful in its ability to manipulate Australian public opinion and deflect all forms of criticism. But I really hope that they don’t get off the hook quite so easily on this one. To be fair to them, the Howard government isn't  causing the Gunns 20 lawsuit or the racist Redfern redevelopment plans, but they are still answerable to the international community for all human rights abuses which occur in Australia, whether committed by state governments or corporations.

By the way, I'm partially retracting some of the opinions I stated in a previous post which discussed the merits of written versus unwritten constitutions. No system is perfect, and every system can be manipulated by those in power. That said, if Australia had a written constitution with prohibitions against discrimination and guarantees of due process and freedom of speech, it is quite unlikely that these abuses would be happening in Australia today.

trivialities in times of tragedy

The scale of the tsunami disaster in the Indian Ocean is absolutely overwhelming. I cannot even process the magnitude of a tragedy that literally wipes over 60,000 people and their houses and towns off the face of the earth into the ocean.

I have had to think about how or why I can stomach to maintain this trivial blog during such a time of tragedy. The only answer for me is that these trivialities can help.

When I was visting Tasmania last week, I slept through the tremor which turned out to be the precursor to the killer quake off Sumatra. I can't help but feel that this disaster could have so easily been reversed, and so easily happened to me and my loved ones. And if not that, then some other disaster.

We  spend our whole lives next to an awful gaping and growing chasm that would consume us all. It is absolutely horrifying, and the only way we can stay sane is to cover this chasm with the insubstantial webs that we weave from less important things.

the Australian election result is NOT an endorsement of our involvement in Iraq

There will be pundits in the US who might suggest that the survival of Australia’s conservative John Howard (actually with increased support) amounts to an endorsement by voters of Australia’s involvement in Iraq. I want to make it very clear that this Australian election was fought primarily on domestic issues. Maybe if Mark Latham and the Australian Labor Party had made more of an effort to remind voters of John Howard’s dishonesty over Iraq and the shameful children overboard affair, there would have been a different result. Maybe, but the Australian electorate is very reluctant to vote a party out of office, especially when the economy is doing well. John Howard ran a very effective campaign, side-stepping the truth in government concerns, scaring voters that interest rates would rise under Labor and using lots of negative campaigning about Mark Latham’s experience. I have never seen as many negative ads in an Australian election campaign. Another of Mark Latham’s mistakes is that he didn’t do anything to counter those ads until the last week of the campaign, which was too little, too late.

I plan to write even more about my reaction to the result in ambivalenz.

fired for having a Kerry sticker on her car

More people should know about this, it's quite astonishing. It originally appeared in the Decatur Daily News.

is IP finally becoming relevant to the Australia-US FTA debate?

What an interesting development in the debate as to whether Australia should adopt the Australia-US FTA. The FTA has already been ratified by Congress and signed into law by President Bush. For a while it seemed depressingly certain that Mark Latham’s Labor Party (ALP) would capitulate to the Howard Government and the Bush Administration, passing the FTA against the will of the party’s Left, and its traditional supporters of unions and artists. Now it is now quite likely that the FTA debate won’t be resolved until after the next election and may become a real election issue in Australia. The development is Labor’s announcement that it will only support the FTA on two conditions, and that the Government has immediately rejected one of those conditions.

It is ironic that there is a chance that the FTA is being delayed by an Intellectual Property issue. I have been very concerned about the FTA’s adverse effect on Australian copyright laws (see this rather damning critique by Kim Weatherall) since the agreement was first reached. Those concerns have largely been overshadowed by some of the other ways in which this agreement is such a bad deal for Australia. It is infuriating that the copyright issue seems to get more attention in the US than in Australia.

The IP laws being debated now are patent laws. One of Mark Latham’s conditions for passing the FTA is that Australia’s patent laws must be changed, making it an offence for companies to lodge spurious patent claims. The concern is that without this change, American drug companies would be able to use “evergreening” tactics to delay drugs from becoming generic (and cheaper).

It is laughable that by refusing to budge on this issue, John Howard is acting as if he is the staunch defender of Australia’s IP laws. As reported in the Melbourne Age, he said “We are not willing just to provide a political fix for our opponents. We are not willing to turn the patent law of this country on its head.” Never mind that he is very happy to turn Australia’s copyright law on its head by supporting significant changes to implement the FTA.

Maybe John Howard is opposing these patent law amendments so that he can keep the FTA issue alive until the election, so that he can say that the ALP is divided and Anti-American about this issue.

I would be very surprised if either leaders back down now. Mark Latham is already in enough trouble with the ALP Left that he cannot afford to snatch back this bone which he has thrown them.

I for one am very glad that the FTA is currently a victim of this brinkmanship between John Howard and Mark Latham. This gladness is likely to be short-lived, because it is still very likely that the FTA will be passed, after the election if nothing else. But every day that we aren’t living under these laws is a good day. There is always the remote chance that Howard’s gambit of making the FTA an election issue will backfire on him. People don’t like being made criminals for doing common, socially non-controversial actions which most people don’t believe to be wrong.

librarians for the forests

Tasmania’s ever-present forestry debate has recently become a lot more heated. On Saturday, I attended a rally and march for preserving what’s left of Tasmania’s old-growth forests. It was very successful, and the attendance was estimated to over 10,000 (10,000 was the most conservative estimate – I have seen other estimates of 12,000 or 15,000 people attending). This was answered by an opposing rally on Tuesday in Launceston, where up to 10,000 people gathered to support the forestry industry. Some of the people who attended the Launceston rally did so on company time – they could do their regular work or go to the rally and be paid either way. This brought accusations of “rent a crowd” by the Greens.

Digressing from the environment for a moment, I have to say that after living in the post-9/11 USA, there was something very refreshing about attending this protest. The good thing was that I was able to join a very large group in front of the Tasmanian Parliament House, make a lot of noise, and go marching through the streets of down-town Hobart without any fears of a violent police crack-down or that environmental concern would be interpreted as unpatriotic and supporting the terrorists (see this Salon.com article, Outlawing dissent).

One Tasmanian commentator has likened the ongoing environmental debate to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – because of its longevity and intractability . I don't agree with that analogy – we don’t have suicide bombers and state-sanctioned assassinations going on in Tasmania. There have been some acts of vandalism, violence and intimidation, but certainly not any wars. All that notwithstanding, this is a very deep-rooted and polarizing conflict.

Both sides claim the middle ground. Environmentalists don’t hate the workers of the forestry industry, we don’t oppose responsible and selective logging, we support the manufacture of value-added timber products in Tasmania – as opposed to just woodchipping the lot to sell for a pittance so somebody smarter can make the paper for us.

For its part, the forestry industry says that it is committed to conservation and that it has the statistics to prove it. Then the debate gets very murky, with both sides producing statistics to show there is or there is not enough protection of Tasmania’s old-growth forests.

I met somebody from Lawyers for the Forests in this rally. I gather that they provide some pro bono legal assistance for the Green movement in Tasmania, as well support the movement in other ways. I might join Lawyers for the Forests. My sister’s a member of Doctors for the Forests, a group which has been around for a little longer and has been even more effective at getting out its message.

Why isn’t there a group of Librarians for the Forests? Yes, in the eyes of the general public, librarians are a lot less important than doctors or lawyers. But who cares?! The forests are our common heritage and citizens who are librarians have just as much right to express their views about this as any one else.

Many novels and books of poetry have been inspired by forests and end up in libraries. The biodiversity of forests have produced medicines which have been written about in science journals, which end up in libraries. The library is the record of our changing perceptions of the environment, from the times when “improving land” meant chopping down and burning all of its trees, to storing information about the first environmental controversies and the development of environmental law.

I was imagining that if such a group ever happened, it could have a few different purposes. Similar to Lawyers for the Forests, Librarians for the Forests could support the Green movement with their research skills. We are trained to find all sorts of information and evaluate the sources of information. This could be very helpful.

Another focus would be within the library profession. Of course libraries hold and consume a lot of paper, and I know from first-hand experience that we waste a lot of paper too. How much paper do law libraries discard from loose-leaf services alone? I’m not saying that paper loose-leaf services should be cancelled as soon as electronic alternatives are available, but that a library’s environmental footprint (which includes everything, not just paper consumption) should be a factor in its decisions. Of course, serving the information needs of our users would always be the reason for our existence, but there is no harm in trying to do this in a more environmentally friendly way. This way we will be doing our part.

moral rights and the grey album

Well this is what happens when I skip checking my aggregator for a day - I miss Grey Tuesday! See synapse's informative post about this. The New York Times also covered this.

Other than missing out an opportunity for changing this blog's colours to grey, I guess that there isn't much that I could have done *sigh* Being on a dial-up connection, it's too painfully slow to download an album, let alone host it.

It seems that today copyright is about two things: money and control. I am not so concerned about the money side of it - within reason. Artists, like anyone else, deserve to fairly compensated for their works. I will be so presumptuous to say that this part of the debate is almost over. Of course there are disagreements about what fair means in this context.

My real difficulty lies in the controlling aspect of copyright law. Like not being able to hear something like the Grey Album just because the suits at EMI don’t like it.

To play devil’s advocate for a moment, there is a reason why a copyright holder should be able control their creations and be compensated when their work is sampled or otherwise incorporated into someone else’s work.

Remember DNA’s remix of Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner? Suzanne Vega deserved to get a cut of DNA’s very successful remix. Really, all DNA did was add some beats, and a few sound effects. If Suzanne Vega hadn’t got any money or attribution for that use of Tom’s Diner, that wouldn’t seem fair.

On the other hand, it wouldn’t have been fair if her record company had arbitrarily forbidden DNA from selling and broadcasting the remix.

hoping that the Australia-US free trade agreement founders in the Australian Senate

I was planning on writing about this, but misseli beat me to it with the following fine summary (below in the Arial font).
The only reason why I'm not totally dismayed by this is not a done deal. It still needs to be ratified by the Australian Senate, which the Federal Government does not control. I'm sure that the Greens and Democrats will oppose most of this and the main opposition party, the Australian Labor Party has indicated it may oppose this as well. It's interesting how the electronic news media has portrayed the deal as being good for Australia, with the exception of the sugar industry. "It could have been a lot worse" is the main sentiment. True, at least the US is not yet forcing us to pay more for medicines, but if people knew more they'd realize that this is a lot worse than it appears.

Australia Joins the Mickey Mouse Club

Australia and the United States signed a Free Trade Agreement agreement on February 9 (Feb. 8, in this hemisphere). A lot of the press (here and abroad) is focused on opposition within Australia's agricultural sector (particularly sugar and dairy farmers) and the proposed benefits to its manufacturing sector.

However, warning bells have sounded regarding changes in copyright/IP laws and their effects on libraries. Like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Australia's copyright terms have been raised an additional 20 years. It's set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2005.

From The Age's article:

"The outcome is bad for libraries," said Colette Ormonde, copyright adviser for the Australian Library and Information Association. "It is bad for students. It is bad for researchers. It is bad for all information users."

The terms of the agreement seek to harmonize IP protections in regards to material, including digital formats ... which suggests that DMCA-type legislation is next on the agenda, if not already so.

Thanks for the 411 from /. and the chattylibrarians list-serv. [Confessions of a Mad Librarian]

ranting against French secular fundamentalism

I realize that I have a love/hate relationship with the French. In the mid-1990s, I hated them, like most other Australians, when they resumed their nuclear testing in the South Pacific. Their arrogance was so shameless and infuriating! It took me a few years to forgive them for that. Then last year, I decided to subscribe to the English language version of Le Monde diplomatique on the web. I greatly enjoyed reading that alternative perspective on world events. (This is hardly relevant, but I'll never forget watching Amelie in the cinema and being in a crowd that spontaneously clapped at the end of the film.) The high point of good feelings towards the French occured during those evil months just before the Iraq war, I was so proud of the way that at France and Germany resisted the US and the UK in the UN security council. The more that the Neocons hated the French, the more I loved them. When they childishly campaigned to have French Fries renamed as Freedom Fries, I developed a preference for Evian water and French wine.

But now things are changing again. I am absolutely appalled by the French Government's plans to ban the wearing of head scarves by Muslim schoolgirls. Do they think that this help French Muslims to be better integrated in French society? It will do the opposite, and will drive Muslims out of public schools into private schools.

I worry that the following is going to be a little controversial, but I'm a blogger, not a politician or journalist, so I'm just going to write what I'm thinking. ...

I've finally deciphered the code! Now I understand Bushspeak

For a such long time I did not see rhyme or reason in any of the words coming out of the Bush Administration. But now I've learned to find the truth in them. It's so simple - just turn the words on their head!

Clear Skies = Dirtier Skies
Mission Accomplished = Mission not yet accomplished
No Child Left Behind = All Children Left Behind (as we create more unfunded mandates)
Prescription Drug Benefit for Seniors = Prescription Drug Benefit for Health Insurance Companies
I've done more for human rights than every other President = I've done less for human rights than any other President

I'm sure that there are plenty of other examples.

It was thinking about this which gave me the initial insight:
Bush said that the UN must allow the US to invade Iraq or the UN will fade into history as an ineffective, irrelevant debating society. In fact, only by rubber-stamping the US' every demand would the UN fade into history as an ineffective, irrelevant debating society.

This Modern World on dangerous reference books

I don't have anything new to say on the topic of almanacs, but I wanted to link to This Modern World's take on this absurdity.

It makes me wonder - by dignifying the suspicion about almanacs etc. with a response, am I playing into the hands of those who cast these aspersions? It's hard to know, but I think that one of the few defences against the Bush Administration's Big Lie tactic is for many people to challenge the falsehood early, loudly and unambiguously.

more about the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004

Wired News has another article about the stealth passage of elements of the Patriot Act II.

$15 for the Fifteen

Jason Lefkowitz has also been following the story about how the Bush administration outmaneuvered opponents of the Patriot Act II by incorporating some of its elements into Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal 2004 and so avoid public debate about its controversial changes. Jason hasn't just got angry about it - he's set up a fund to reward the 15 House Republicans who crossed the floor and voted against this legislation. He is using PayDemocracy host the $15 for Fifteen campaign.

With Republicans in control of the Presidency, Congress and Supreme Court (most of the time), it is important to realize that they are not a monolithic group and that not all Republican members of Congress are like Tom DeLay.

New York Times on Diebold

It was interesting to read this article from today's New York Times. Here are a couple of thoughts about it:
- Had Diebold not cracked down in such an unethical way on their legitimate critics, this controversy would not have grown in the way that it has - and the New York Times certainly would not have printed today's story. In the same way that Fox's laughable lawsuit only served to boost the sales of Al Franken's book, Diebold's copyright cudgel has been a PR nightmare for them. When will people and companies learn not to make this mistake again and again?
- This ultimately comes down to constitutional law. Both copyright and freedom of speech are grounded in the US constitution. If I were a hard core DMCA supporter, I'd also be very mad at Diebold. Their actions are hastening a collision between the DMCA and the First Amendment. If the DMCA is going to be used in this manner to stifle legitimate debate about the heart of the political process (voting), there is a chance that it will be held unconstitutional. Maybe this is a slim chance, maybe not, but if I were one of the DMCA's beneficiaries, I'd be worried about this gamble. So long as the debate about the DMCA was framed as whether people should be able to download music for free - it was never really going to get anywhere. But this Diebold case is different - in the post Florida 2000 world, it's really struck a nerve.

interesting posts by Aaron Swartz

Take a look at Shades of Gray (not about the recently recalled Governor of California) and the follow-up.

He mentions O'Reilly's appearance on Fresh Air, Dave Winer's "funky RSS" comments, and takes the media to task for giving the Bushies a free ride over the most outrageous claims - and wonders why this might be. He uses the RIAA as an example of using the media to popularize outrageous claims.

Fresh Air fails O'Reilly's "fair and balanced" test

I actually heard the interview and spat between Bill O'Reilly and Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air last night. This was not a hatchet job on O'Reilly. He wasted this opportunity for him to have a genuine dialogue with some of his critics on the left ...

more doublespeak from Ashcroft

Ashcroft denounces Patriot Act "hysteria"

In a speech Monday to an American Restaurant Association conference, Ashcroft said people are being wrongly led to believe that libraries have been "surrounded by the FBI," with agents "dressed in raincoats, dark suits and sunglasses. They stop everyone and interrogate everyone like Joe Friday.

"Now, you may have thought with all this hysteria and hyperbole, something had to be wrong," Ashcroft said. "Do we at the Justice Department really care what you are reading? No." [AP as reported in Salon]

Basically, this is John Ashcroft saying, "trust us, we're neither able or willing to track what everyone reads." This is meant to be comforting, I suppose. That if you're a normal law-abiding citizen, you don't have anything to worry about. But the devil is in the details. I bet that in Ashcroft's book, Muslims aren't normal Americans, neither are recent immigrants (especially from the Middle East), nor peace activists or other left-wing activists. So already the scope of who may be spied upon is greater than it appeared from Ashcroft's words.

It's true that your average suburban Republican-voting church-attending family of 2.4 probably doesn't have a thing to worry about - yet. Civil liberties are first eroded on the fringes, not in the middle. It's easier that way, because it's someone else's problem. But that doesn't mean that it's going to stop there. What about political opponents?

John Ashcroft, if you really want to reassure people, give us the numbers of how often you use these expanded police powers in libraries. Make it so that there's real judicial oversight based on a standard of at least probable cause. Ensure that there's accountability when these powers are abused. Or if libraries are really so unimportant in the War Against Terror, and these powers so insignificant, then drop them altogether!

11 September 1803, 1973, 2001 + why do things fade into history?

September 11. This automatically bring most of us back to the terrorist attacks of 2001. It seems that this is not just a day, but a shared emotion and the beginning of a new epoch.

But this is not universal. For the supporters of those responsible for the atrocity, this day is a glorious victory.

And for others, 11 September 2001 is dwarfed by what happened on that same day in other years.

There's 11 September 1973. Thirty-years ago, Chile's democratically-elected leader Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup staged by Augusto Pinochet. The coup was supported by the Nixon administration, and led to Pinochet's 16.5 years of harsh dictatorship, during which time over 3,000 citizens were killed for political reasons and many others were tortured.

For the Tasmanian aborigines, 11 September 1803 is remembered as the day that whites first settled in Tasmania, which lead to one of the most devastating attempts of genocide made against any people.

musing about the role of erosion and cataclysm in history

There's a danger in dividing events between what's current/relevant and what's historic/old, because really everything should be in the past tense, whether in an event is only seconds old, or hours, years or centuries old. Also, everything in the past is somehow relevant to the present, in some way or another.

Still, people tend to forget and ignore the past, and focus on current events So even if it's not the best way of viewing happenings, I want to explore how "news" becomes "history."

So when does an important event become relegated to history? Although it happened two years ago, 11 September 2001 seems very much like a present event, because it was the cause of so much that is happening in the world right now. What started on that day is still playing out right now.

What about the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989? I imagine that its impact would be more enduring and relevant to people in the former Eastern bloc, because that was when their world underwent a seizmic shift and it hasn't really changed to such an extent since then.

But as the strains in the trans-Atlantic alliances between the US and Western Europe are showing, World War Two seems like a long time ago now. Was this caused by the passing of time or the end of communism - or both?

I want to explore this geological view of history for a moment. Most of the time, the landscape is continually being changed by gradual erosion. But every so often, an extraordinary event happens such as an earthquake, volcano, meteorite which tears up the existing landscape and remakes it in its own image. The impact of this event will persist until the next extraordinary event happens, or if enough time passes to allow erosion to erase almost all of its traces.

Applying this to history, an extraordinary event like 11 September 2001 will stay current and relevant until the next cataclysmic occurence or enough time passes (50 years? 100 years?) to wear down its importance and relevance.

Just as in geology, what's relevant and current will vary from place to place. The big event of one place is not going to be the big event of another place. It's the same with people and history.