Tag Archives: human rights

Huckaphobia

As you know, I developed Huckaphobia almost 2 years ago. You might think it would have abated by now, but you’d be thinking wrong.

Monday night I happened to send Samer the link to Huckalerts, a prank which still makes me laugh until I cry. This is good because I was then able to use it to inoculate myself while watching Huckabee’s appearance on the Daily Show last night.

It was a long interview, a two-parter. The topic I wish to fuss about is in the second half of the interview:

Sure, Jon Stewart gave him what-for, but it’s still chilling to watch because Huckabee is a personable, relatable guy who has the attention of a lot of moderates who don’t feel personally connected to this issue. (I hate using the word “issue”, I feel like “human right” or even just “right” is a better term, but I’ll use issue because that’s the context for the discussion).

It boils down to this: You people are not spending enough time worrying about Mike Huckabee and it’s going to come back to bite us all.

p.s. I hope I haven’t been causing your feed readers to freak out, I’ve been cleaning up some of the old mangled code from the import to this site and sometimes when I update old posts it notifies people and then they get annoyed. Sorry.

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)

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).

Free Burma: International Bloggers' Day for Burma


Free Burma!

I know that Free Burma, who’ve organized the “one blog post” campaign, want participants to post the graphic in lieu of a real post today, but I’m not very good at following directions so I’d like to direct you to the website of the [tag]U.S. Campaign for Burma[/tag], which I believe is one of the best informational site about the human rights situation in [tag]Burma[/tag].

(Disclaimer: Husband’s school-friend Jeremy runs this organization, but I’d be deeply impressed with their work even if we didn’t know them).