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 Wednesday, July 17, 2002
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Great editorial by the Boston Globe on the TIPS program
The Boston Globe says:
...Ashcroft's informant corps is a vile idea not merely because it violates civil liberties in a narrow legal sense or because it will sabotage genuine efforts to prevent terrorism by overloading law enforcement officials with irrelevant reports about Americans who have nothing to do with terrorists. Operation TIPS should be stopped because it is utterly anti-American. It would give Stalin and the KGB a delayed triumph in the Cold War - in the name of the Bush administration's war against terrorism...
Ashcroft and Bush are so tone deaf to the totalitarian sounds of the rhetoric they employ. I worry that it is because they are totally comfortable with totalitarianism, as long as they are the rulers.
Tip o the hat to Robert K. Brown for the link.
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The universe is stranger that we can imagine
The Cellar's image of the date site led me to this photo on the Hubble Space Telescope site.
This is apparently the remnants of the explosion of the star Cassiopeia A.
If this is what the universe looks like, than I agree with the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, who said "not only is the universe stranger than we imagine , it is stranger than we can imagine."
(It may have been J. B. S. Haldane who said it first, I have seen both citations. I remember it from reading the science fiction of Arthur C Clarke).
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Image of the day
I seem to be into images today.
I just rediscovered the Cellar's image of the day site. Fun stuff. Today had a cool bug, yesterday had something truly strange. The site is worth checking out.
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Too funny - Even more on the Citizen Spy Corps
From the Politech mailing list, Brad Templeton suggests:
We just need operation TIPS-TIPS. A network of people to spot and identify possible TIPSters, to put up lists of their names, routes and addresses, and possibly to put chalk marks on their vehicles, homes and even clothes so we can spot them coming, avoid socializing with them, refuse them entry onto our land. Perhaps like "No Solicitors" or gates could have signs saying "No TIPS informants". If the power company wants to read my meter, they should send a non-informant.
This whole thing would be funnier if the whole thing weren't so scary. I got some email from an Arab-American acquaintance who is imagining what it will be like for him and for people like him when meter readers and moving people use something like TIPS every time they get aggravated with someone with a "foreign" name.
*sigh*.
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More news on Citizen Spy Corps
Courtesy of Declan McCullah of Politechbot, we have the DOJ "clarification" of the TIPS program:
"First and foremost, Operation TIPS is a program under development, and its blueprint is not yet finalized. The Operation TIPS reporting system was announced in concept six months ago, and we look forward to its rollout in the late summer or early fall. Operation TIPS is simply a reporting system - not a membership organization or recruiting activity"
And someone who is organizing a petition against TIPS, at http://www.PetitionOnline.com/NoTIPS/petition.html
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9-11 apparently gives the Navy the right to kill whales
I have a confession to make upfront. I am a whale lover. I thought that they were amazing and special creatures as a kid, and I still do. I think that it is a crime against the planet that we are killing them.
According to this article from the Washington Post, the Navy has been granted permission to use this new sonar, even though it is known to injure and possibly kill whales:
"The new sonar system creates a noise roughly equivalent to that of a Boeing 747 engine at takeoff, and would clearly injure many marine mammals if they were close by.... The permit issued yesterday gives the Navy permission to injure some whales and other ocean mammals should its monitoring system fail....NOAA officials acknowledged they still don't have answers to some key questions regarding how the sonar system will affect these whales and their long-term behavior.
The Bush administration has been exploring legislation to make sure that environmental and animal protection rules not be allowed to supersede military preparedness."
Without 9-11, and with a reasonable administration, the Navy wouldn't be allowed to use its newest toy to kill whales as a "by-product" of its search for Russian or Chinese submarines, at least not in peacetime. But with Bush's continual attempt to wrap himself in the flag and in the military, he is eager to give them everything that they want, even if it has nothing to do with the war on Terrorism. At least I hadn't heard anything about Osman bin Laden procuring one of the newest quiet nuclear submarines.
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© Copyright 2002 Tim Bishop aka Geodog.
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