Category Archives: politics

Debate This

In my increasing despair about the level of political discourse (or lack thereof) being evinced in the “debates,” I’d forgotten about a piece Michael Stebbins wrote for the November/December 2007 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. ” Luckily, the Utne Reader reprinted it.

Five years into the Iraq debacle, national security has been reduced to an election slogan that pairs either pro or anti with war. Meanwhile, important issues such as nuclear proliferation, military escalation with China, and unmonitored, unhinged spending by the Defense Department don’t fuel political chatter or get the talking heads spinning. On a campaign trail paved with sound bites, they hardly merit a mention.

Last year, during the parade of primary debates, Michael Stebbins and his colleagues at the Federation of American Scientists assembled a list of pressing national security questions that voters deserve to hear answered. Though the field has narrowed, the candidates and the press continue to avoid these matters. We’ve still got time before November, though, so if a candidate comes your way, consider posing one of the federation’s questions, which Utne Reader reprints here from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Nov.-Dec. 2007), an indefatigable watchdog of the nuclear and defense arenas.

[read “Hey Candidates: Debate This!”]

(Incidentally, [tag]Michael Stebbins[/tag] is an artomatic artist)

Raging Grannies on Net Neutrality

The [tag]Raging Grannies[/tag] made a guest appearance outside the latest Net Neutrality Hearings.

Who doesn’t love the Raging Grannies? Aside from a few [tag]FCC[/tag] Commissioners. And the California National Guard. This is old news, but it still makes me shake my head in wonder:

In May 2005, a California group called the Raging Grannies ran afoul of military spies when it helped organize a peaceful Mother’s Day demonstration to protest the war in Iraq. Unbeknownst to them, their action was brought to the attention of a new intelligence unit at the California National Guard — a program that went by the cumbersome title of Information Synchronization, Knowledge Management, and Intelligence Fusion. According to internal e-mails, the Guard forwarded information about the protest “to our Intell folks who continue to monitor.”

Asked why the Guard was spying on the Grannies, a spokesman suggested that terrorists might try to take advantage of the activists. “Who knows who could infiltrate that type of group and try to stir something up?” Lt. Col. Stan Zezotarski told reporters. “After all, we live in an age of terrorism, so who knows?”

But I digress….

You should read up about [tag]Net Neutrality[/tag] at Save the Internet. They’ve got a frequently updated blog, information on how to take action or get more involved in the cause, and video and written transcripts of hearings and events like the one that just took place our at Stanford.

Canceling Your Huckalerts Subscription

Husband sent me this gem from Something Awful: “Canceling Your Huckalerts Subscription.”

It’s hard to imagine a man less-suited to wear the mantle of President of the United States of America than Mike Huckabee. The long shot Republican Presidential candidate and former Arkansas Governor is an unrepentant hillbilly who brags about cooking squirrels in popcorn poppers. He and his unspeaking wife, who looks perpetually startled, have raised a family of extremely large sons known for their largeness and propensity for torturing stray dogs.

Naturally, I love Mike Huckabee, and when I learned an acquaintance of mine by the name of Jared was an honest-to-god Huckabee supporter I felt the need to prank him. This prank represents the culmination of more than two weeks of harassing instant messages in which I impersonated a fictional Huckabee campaign update service called “Huckalerts”. I sent him approximately 30 Huckalerts over the course of those two weeks and many were received without comment from Jared.

What follows is his final battle with Huckalerts.

I have laryngitis so laughing really hard resulted in my producing painful and strange wheezing squeaky noises while tears streamed down my face. It was worth it. It was even better than “It’s Raining McCain,” which I choose to believe is real.

Cyber-Rebels in Cuba

Interesting piece in the New York Times last week about the ways that [tag]Cuban[/tag] citizens work around [tag]Cuba[/tag]’s governmental restrictions on the Internet:

A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that the official state media try to suppress.

Last month, students at a prestigious computer science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the National Assembly.

Mr. Alarcón seemed flummoxed when students grilled him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at hotels, earn better wages or use search engines like Google. The video spread like wildfire through Havana, passed from person to person, and seriously damaged Mr. Alarcón’s reputation in some circles.

Not that long ago I stumbled across an interesting Cuban blog, Generacion Y, which is mentioned in the article:

Because Ms. Sánchez, like most Cubans, can get online for only a few minutes at a time, she writes almost all her essays beforehand, then goes to the one Internet cafe, signs on, updates her Web site, copies some key pages that interest her and walks out with everything on a memory stick. Friends copy the information, and it passes from hand to hand. “It’s a solid underground,” she said. “The government cannot control the information.”

(There’s an English version of the site, but the translation is rather awkward).