Bits and pieces

The Internet's great. Enjoy it while it lasts.

The Nation has a very alarming story on potential end of the Internet. I heard a similar story on Radio New Zealand. The idea of the Internet as a neutral platform where you could seek whatever you wanted would be eliminated. Now, we're not talking about individual websites but the neutrality of the Internet Service Providers.

Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets--corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers--would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.

Adding that...

As Ed Whitacre, chairman and CEO of AT&T, told Business Week in November, "Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"

Free?

That's odd. As someone with a math degree, I can categorically state that $44.99 a month does not qualify as free! That $540 a year (per person) has to pay for something!


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A commentary on Alternet wonders: If students during the '60s had been saddled with the debts our present-day young people carry, there might not have been a civil rights movement.

Of course, some would've preferred that blacks, women and gays returned to the place they occupied before the evil 60s. That is, the fields, the kitchen and the closet respectively. But the piece makes you wonder which social advances aren't being agitated for because of this.

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Another Alternet piece declares quite plainly: There is no immigration crisis -- other than the one created by a small but vocal stripe of opportunist politicians, media demagogues and freelance xenophobes.

The situation is hardly new.

The Script is as old as the Mayflower: A false alarm is sounded that the values, wages and safety of the current roster of credentialed Americans are jeopardized by the "flood" or "tidal wave" or "river" sneaking across our porous borders -- be they Irish, Chinese, Jewish, Russian, Mexican or even the freed slaves seeking to earn an honest living in Northern cities after the Civil War. Any and all manner of societal problems are to be laid on these scapegoats, and the same simplistic solution offered: Find and deport them, and don't let any more in.


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Three years ago, the high court in Massachussetts ruled that gay marriage must be legalized, according to the commonwealth's constitution. A feature on Minnesota Public Radio looks at how the decision has changed the Bay State. The answer, sure to disappoint ideologues, is shockingly little. The sky hasn't fallen. Gay parents aren't 'converting' their children. Families aren't disintegrating any faster. In fact, families are being strengthed because now, both of a child's de facto parents have that legal status.

Echoing the most common anti-gay marriage arguments, one legislator opposes gay marriage because he believes heterosexual marriage is the glue that holds society together. He says the sole purpose of marriage is for the creation of children. He also insists that gay marriage and civil unions will erode the standard of marriage and says the children of gay and lesbian parents will be "unhealthy."

Totally ignoring the absurd last part of his argument, the middle part interests me.

If the sole purpose of marriage is for pro-creation, then why doesn't he introduce a law requiring that when a man and woman want to marry, they must sign an oath promising to have at least one child? Maybe a couple shouldn't be allowed to divorce before having children because failing to procreate would be a breach of their public obligation to add to the population.

Yeah, that's 'healthy.'

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Every winter, you hear a lot about a mythical 'war on Christmas.' It usually involves anecdotes or urban legends about a town not letting someone put up a manger scene in a public park (even though they could put the mangers in their front lawns), schools holding 'holiday' parties instead of 'Christmas' parties or some other atrocity probably defended by ACLU Nazis. These incidents are passed off as proof of the impending genocide against continually oppressed American Christians.

There is real religious persecution in the world, but it's been trivialized by such non-issues like that.

Take the Afghan man to be prosecuted for being a Christian.

In the Afghanistan 'liberated' from Taliban theocracy by American dollars and blood, it is a crime to abandon Islam, a crime punishable by death.

Fortunately, the man was granted asylum in Italy by his fellow Christian Silvio of Nazareth.

So the next you think someone saying 'Happy Holidays' is a sign of Christian Armageddon, remember this case and get a clue.

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Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice told a British audience that her government has no desire to be "the world's jailer."

(Pause for laughter to die down)

She added, "We want the terrorists that we capture to stand trial for their crimes."

Perhaps she could start with the kidnapees held at Guantanamo Bay for years in a legality-free vacuum.

Trials in open court of these folks should be a propaganda coup for the Bush administration. The evidence presented would prove to the world beyond any shadow of a doubt that the reactionaires really are trying to kill us. It would present in great detail exactly how they intended to do harm. That the Bush administration refuses to try these guys in open court, thus denying them the rule of law, due process and fairness that democracies are supposed to embody, it makes the rest of the world (and millions of Americans) wonder what the administration has to hide.

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In the aftermath of the arrest of the world's worst war criminal, this piece from TIME magazine's archives reminds us just why Charles Taylor deserves that title.

How bad was the carnage? Over 10,000 lives had been lost when this 1990 article was printed, after only ten months of conflict. The two civil wars involving Taylor's forces lasted a combined nine years.

Both Liberian civil wars started in order to overthrow terrible dictators. But the carnage was far worse than anything either autocratic regime perpetrated on its own. And the country will take years (decades) to recover from teh trauma.

As in so many other wars, the law of unintended consequences took over and the dictatorship of a despot was replaced with the dictatorship of chaos. The Liberia disaster demonstrates why war should always be an absolute last resort.