Politics

Politically, I’m very liberal — about as far left as one can go without sliding into Libertarianism.

Why not?

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Abortion?: Needs to stay legal and safe — making it illegal won’t stop it, it’ll just make it unsafe.

Death Penalty?: I waffle. Most of the time, I’m anti-, though there are people (like Gary Ridgeway) that really make me question that stance.

Prostitution?: Legalize. Again, it’s not going to go away, might as well do what we can to make it safe for all parties involved.

Alcohol?: Not much of a drinker, myself — one or two drinks on the weekends when I go out. All things in moderation.

Marijuana?: If I could find one person who wanted me to sign a “legalize hemp” petition that even tried to convince me that they cared at all about hemp, I might sign it. Every one I’ve ever encountered, though, just wants to get stoned. Generally, I have less problems with pot than I do alcohol — I’ve never seen a violent stoner, but I’ve seen plenty of angry drunks — but on a personal level it bored me to tears every time I tried it (I got hungry, stupid, and sleepy, all of which I can do quite well on my own without paying \$40 an eighth for the privilege), and I’ve seen people I care about do way too much, and contrary to pro-pot propaganda, yes, it does affect you beyond just the “high”. Growing up in Alaska’s very pot-friendly environment went a long way towards souring me towards the entire “pot culture”, and it’s one of the soapboxes I can get on very easily…

Other drugs?: Only ever tried pot, acid and shrooms. Pot bored me, acid was fun for about two years, shrooms gave me one very good, intense, introspective trip — and that was the last time I did any drugs. I can’t universally condemn drug use (the right drugs in the right situations can make for anything from a fun vacation to a good amount of soul searching), but on the whole, I really don’t recommend them (the right or wrong drugs at the wrong time can be a very, very bad situation).

Gay marriage?: Why do we even have to prepend “gay” to “marriage”? Two people love each other, let them do what they want, including marriage. This shouldn’t even be an issue.

Illegal immigrants?: Not an issue I really know enough about to make an intelligent argument one way or the other. Gut feeling is that the majority of them are just people doing their best to survive in the best environment possible who for one reason or another have difficulty navigating the labyrinthine beauracracy of the US Immigration Service.

Smoking?: A bad habit I need to quit.

Drunk driving?: No excuse. Should be an automatic, permanent revocation of the drivers license.

Cloning?: Very cool. Proceed with caution.

Racism?: Stupid.

Premarital sex?: Whenever I can. ;) More seriously, sexual compatibility is far too important of an issue in a relationship to leave to chance. Not only do I not have any problems with premarital sex, at times I think it should be required. Besides, I often question whether or not I ever will get married, and as I’d rather not go the celibate route…

Religion?: Investigate the ones that interest you. Never blindly accept. Question, listen to the answers you receive, learn, make your own judgments, and form your own ideas. I was lucky enough to grow up in a very open atmosphere where discussion and questioning were not only accepted, but encouraged. My base belief structure is very much based on the Christian faith (specifically, the Episcopal church) that I grew up in, but I’ve also found much in other religions that appeals to me, and have incorporated some of them into my personal belief structure. Lastly, and most importantly, realize that for everyone, their beliefs are their own — and they have no more right to impose their beliefs on you than you do to impose yours on them.

The war in Iraq?: Mind-bogglingly stupid.

Bush?: Also mind-bogglingly stupid. Actually, realistically, that’s probably very unfair. However, I agree with few to none of this man’s viewpoints, beliefs, or actions, I think he’s doing some terrible things to our country, and his apparent insistence on combining his religious viewpoints with governing the country deeply disturbs me.

Downloading music?: Generally something I only do when searching out rare tracks that cannot be found any other way. Whenever possible I will purchase the CD — directly from the artist if possible, through a store if necessary (the artists may not get much from their contracts with the studios, but they’ll get more than if I download the track).

The legal drinking age?: No major problems with it, though I wouldn’t mind if it were the same as the smoking, voting, and military service ages. Seems more than a little silly that at 18 you can cast your vote to influence the direction and leadership of the country or get sent overseas to be killed, and at 19 you can legally poison your body with tobacco, but you can’t down a beer until you’re 21.

Porn?: In general, no issues with it whatsoever. On a personal level…an occasional thing, but nothing that’s really ever interested me that much. I toss this quote out every so often, so you may have seen it here before, but when my dad was in the military, there was one serviceman who didn’t have the porn collection that most of the other soldiers did, and he generally wouldn’t go along on the trips out to the strip joints or (ahem) “massage parlors”. When asked why, his response was simply that, “I’m not particularly interested in sex — unless it’s specifically directed at me.”

Suicide?: I can’t understand it. Never have, and never will. No matter how low I get, how bad my life gets, or how depressed I get, I know that things will change. There are a lot of things in this world that I haven’t seen yet or haven’t done yet, and I don’t want to miss out on the chance to see or do a single one of them. Things are bad every so often, sure. But things are pretty damn good a lot of the time, too, and I simply cannot envision voluntarily giving all that up.

(via Mickey)

Worker loses job over photograph

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Sounds kind of familiar in these parts, doesn’t it? This time, it’s a bit more serious than a few computers, though.

Last Sunday, the Seattle Times ran this picture, taken by a civilian cargo worker based out of Kuwait:

Coffins on the way to the US

Today, the lead story in the Times was detailing how the woman who took the photograph has now lost her job because of the photo.

A military contractor has fired Tami Silicio, a Kuwait-based cargo worker whose photograph of flag-draped coffins of fallen U.S. soldiers was published in Sunday’s edition of The Seattle Times.

Silicio was let go yesterday for violating U.S. government and company regulations, said William Silva, president of Maytag Aircraft, the contractor that employed Silicio at Kuwait International Airport.

“I feel like I was hit in the chest with a steel bar and got my wind knocked out. I have to admit I liked my job, and I liked what I did,” Silicio said.

Her photograph, taken earlier this month, shows more than 20 flag-draped coffins in a cargo plane about to depart from Kuwait. Since 1991, the Pentagon has banned the media from taking pictures of caskets being returned to the United States.

The Times has a good series of articles on the controversy surrounding the publication of the photograph, including an editorial from Sunday explaining their decision to run the photo after it was submitted to the paper by a friend of the photographer.

The caller said she had a picture a friend had sent to her. “Somebody should see it,” she said.

Barry Fitzsimmons, a veteran photojournalist, has handled many of those calls and knows most of the pictures are never published. The Seattle Times photo editor also knows, “one in a thousand is a gem,” so he agreed to give this one a look.

When the photo arrived, “I just said wow,” Fitzsimmons recalls. “The picture was something we don’t have access to as the media,” and yet it seemed undeniably newsworthy.

[…]

Readers likely will have differing reactions to the photo, depending on their views of the war.

“It’s a photo that evokes an emotional response and one that people are sure to see through their own filters, political or otherwise,” said Espinoza, who is responsible for the Sunday front page.

Some readers will object to the image because the press has been largely denied access to take photos of coffins returning from war since the 1991 Gulf War.

Some will see the picture as an anti-war statement because the image is reminiscent of photos from the Vietnam era, when the press wasn’t denied such access. But that isn’t Silicio’s or The Times’ motivation.

“We’re not making a statement about the course of the war,” Fitzsimmons said. “Readers will make their own sense of the picture, their own judgment.”

One of the most interesting things to me was a poll attached to a list of reader reactions, where the Times asked whether visitors to the website supported or opposed the military’s ban on such photographs. Survey on the photo banAs of just after midnight on Friday morning, with 684 responses, the poll shows an overwhelming 86% of respondents choosing “I disagree with the ban; the public has a right to see what’s going on.”

Admittedly, Seattle tends to lean more liberal than many other places, but I was still somewhat surprised to see that the results were that heavily weighted in that direction.

I’ll freely admit that I’m one of that 86%, too. One of the things that has bothered me about this war, and that bothered me about the previous Iraq war, was how utterly impersonal it seems much of the time. While the casualties lists keep growing (706 dead, 2374 wounded and not returned to duty — and there’s a large question of just how many soldiers suffered injuries that would have killed them in earlier wars, and now, while alive, are severely disabled), we here at home see little beyond a few statistics in each day’s headlines that all too soon are buried in the onslaught of reality show wrapups, celebrity scandals, and other pablum that passes as news these days. Statistics will only really get noticed by the people that are looking for them — it’s photos such as Silico’s that will really affect the most people, whether they choose to view it as an indictment of an injust, unnecessary war, or as a comforting reminder that the dead are not forgotten and are treated with respect on their journey back home — or both.

That said, I’m not as sure as I used to be that I’d necessarily call for completely unrestricted media access to all areas of a conflict. A quote from Louisiana State University professor David Perlmutter in an article looking at the arguments for and against releasing such photographs really struck me: “The Normandy invasion was a success, but how would we have felt at the time if we had seen the pictures of all these dead American soldiers on the beaches?”

Casualties are, of course, one of the many very sad side effects of a military conflict. Speaking generally, and not just about the current war in Iraq, I don’t believe that we should be shielded from that fact through media blackouts instituted by a government afraid of letting the public see anything outside the accepted party line of America the Saviour — the costs of war should be as publicly accepted and known as the possible benefits in order for people to decide where they stand for themselves. Those costs, though, should not be the only things reported (unless that is all there is to report) — the unquestioning presentation of only one side of any story is little more than propaganda.

The current war has, until recently, seemed to be presented to the American public as just that kind of unquestioning propaganda, unfortunately. That seems to be changing as the casualties mount, and while it’s a sad thing that it took this long for the media to start to attempt to break free of the “everything’s fine” face the Bush administration seems to want to present, at least it’s starting to happen.

Kudos to the Times for presenting the photo, for doing their best to present it without an overt editorial slant, and for exploring the controversy around its publication. Best of luck, also, to Tami Silicio and her husband (who was also dismissed from his job, a decision that I don’t understand, and isn’t explained in the articles) as they return home and face the prospects of finding work again.

(On a side note, I suppose it was inevitable: my situation was brought up in the Daily Kos discussion thread about this.)

Safer nuclear missiles

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Thank god for small favors — at least when Bush finally flips his lid and the nukes start flying, we won’t be damaging our atmosphere…

In order to comply with EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) regulations, and at a cost of about \$5.2 million per ICBM, the rocket motors on 500 Minuteman III missiles will be replaced with new ones. These rockets will emit less toxic chemicals when used. But the new, environmentally correct rockets will be heavier than the old ones, and will thus  have a shorter range than the original motors. The actual range of the  Minuteman III  has been classified, but is thought to be nearly 10,000 kilometers, based on where the missiles are stationed and where the original Russian targets were.  Thus, if the Minuteman III ICBMs have to be used in some future nuclear war, their rocket motors will not pollute the atmosphere. EPA regulations do not apply in foreign countries, so no changes are being made to reduce the harmful environmental effects of the nuclear warheads.

(via Boing Boing)

iTunes: “Killin’ Time (Hot Tracks)” by Cousins, Tina from the album Roadkill! 2.18 (1999, 6:29).

Speak English, George!

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I’m so glad I didn’t bother trying to watch Bush’s national address the other night on television. I would have been so busy cringing at his first sentence — “This has been tough weeks in that country.” — to even pay attention to the amazing hypnotic tie.

(via MeFi)

iTunes: “Annihilate” by Major North from the album Junior Vasquez, Vol. 2 (1997, 5:20).

National ID not a good idea

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One of the many ideas being bandied about in the post-9/11 era has been that of a single national ID card, to replace the various forms of ID we carry around now (state IDs or driver’s licenses, military IDs, company ID badges, etc.). Bruce Schneier points out that this might not be a good idea…

…my primary objection isn’t the totalitarian potential of national IDs, nor the likelihood that they’ll create a whole immense new class of social and economic dislocations. Nor is it the opportunities they will create for colossal boondoggles by government contractors. My objection to the national ID card, at least for the purposes of this essay, is much simpler:

It won’t work. It won’t make us more secure.

In fact, everything I’ve learned about security over the last 20 years tells me that once it is put in place, a national ID card program will actually make us less secure.

Definitely worth reading, especially if the national ID program was sounding like a good idea.

(via Boing Boing)

iTunes: “District Sleeps Alone Tonight, The” by Postal Service, The from the album Give Up (2002, 4:44).

Bush: ‘…the PDB was no indication of a terrorist threat.’

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What?

I challenge anyone to explain to me how this isn’t just flat-out idiotic. From a press conference with President Bush yesterday:

Q Mr. President, could you tell us, did you see the presidential — the President’s Daily Brief from August of ’01 as a warning —

THE PRESIDENT: Did I see it? Of course I saw it; I asked for it.

Q No, no, I’m sorry — did you see it as a warning of hijackers? And how did you respond to that?

THE PRESIDENT: My response was exactly like then as it is today, that I asked for the Central Intelligence Agency to give me an update on any terrorist threats. And the PDB was no indication of a terrorist threat. There was not a time and place of an attack. It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. What I wanted to know was, is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we needed to react to?

As you might recall, there was some specific threats for overseas that we reacted to. And as the President, I wanted to know whether there was anything, any actionable intelligence. And I looked at the August 6th briefing, I was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into. But that PDB said nothing about an attack on America. It talked about intentions, about somebody who hated America — well, we knew that.

This would be the PDB entitled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US“, by the way.

You’ll have to excuse me for a moment, but…could we please get this fucking imbecile out of the Oval Office?

I cannot believe the hubris, the monomaniacal egotism of Bush and his cronies. Because there wasn’t a time and dated marked on a calendar and circled in bright red ink, they think they’re absolved of any responsibility in preventing the attack.

This makes me sick.

David Sirota is fact-checking Bush also:

Not only is Bush lying, but he’s making a ridiculous argument: he’s essentially saying that because he did not know terrorists would attack at a specific time, place he is absolved from his gross negligence in failing to ratchet up homeland security and counterterrorism before 9/11. It is like saying that while you know a car accident can kill you and your family, it is OK to not strap yourself and your kids in because you don’t know exactly when and where you might get into an accident.

(via Atrios)

President’s Daily Briefing, August 6 2001

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The Memo has been released.

Here it is (216k PDF file).

Declassified and Approved for Release, 10 April 2004

Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Ladin implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America.”

After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a [CENSORED] service.

An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [CENSORED] service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.

The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Laden’s first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Ladin lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.

Ressam says Bin Laden was aware of the Los Angeles operation.

Although Bin Laden has not succeeded, his attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepared operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Ladin associates surveilled our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.

Al-Qa’ida members — including some who are US citizens — have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qa’ida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.

A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [CENSORED] service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Shaykh” ‘Umar’ Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patters of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.

For the President Only
6 August 2001
Declassified and Approved for Release, 10 April 2004

(via Daily Kos)

Congratulations Dan Savage and Amy Jenniges!

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About a month ago, Dan Savage wrote a column for The Stranger explaining just how he, a gay man, was able to get a legal marriage license in the city of Seattle. It was pretty simple, actually.

He applied for, and was granted, a license to marry his lesbian friend.

The clerk called over her manager, a nice older white man, who explained that Amy and Sonia couldn’t have a marriage license. So I asked if Amy and I could have one–even though I’m gay and live with my boyfriend, and Amy’s a lesbian and lives with her girlfriend. We emphasized to the clerk and her manager that Amy and I don’t live together, we don’t love each other, we don’t plan to have kids together, and we’re going to go on living and sleeping with our same-sex partners after we get married. So could we still get a marriage license?

“Sure,” the license-department manager said, “If you’ve got \$54, you can have a marriage license.”

…Amy can’t marry Sonia, I can’t marry Terry–why? Because the sanctity of marriage must be protected from the queers! But Amy and I can get a marriage license–and into a sham marriage, if we care to, a joke marriage, one that I promise you won’t produce children. And we can do this with the state’s blessing–why? Because one of us is a man and one of us is a woman. Who cares that one of us is a gay man and one of us is a lesbian? So marriage is to be protected from the homos–unless the homos marry each other.

Is it putting too fine a point on it to say that this is a pretty fucked-up situation?

Dan and Amy got their license, and last week, they got married.

Savage and Jennigs got a marriage license, got married by a minister of the Universal Life Church and plan to file their license with King County, making the marriage legal.

Afterwards the [couple] plan an immediate divorce.

“We are going to try and stay married for about 55 hours and 10 minutes. We are going to just best Britney Spears,” he laughed.

So, congratulations Dan and Amy!

The situation provoked a very interesting discussion on Metafilter which I’ve just spent much of the evening reading through. Lots of well-reasoned, well thought out, intelligent, and passionate arguments in favor of allowing anyone to marry the people they love regardless of which way their genitalia point, and only a couple of people trying to make reasonable arguments against gay marriage (and not doing a very good job, in my opinion). I believe this was one of my favorite posts:

There’s a large set of psychological reactions we have to an associate’s mate. Take the earlier example of a male corporate executive’s partner of twenty five years dying, and the guy having to suffer in silence. It’s not about the time off. It really is about condolences, the understanding, the empathy. You can’t use semantics to erase this; this is a fight for empathy. Gay people are insisting that other humans respect their capacity for deep, abiding love — and those other humans are protesting, because “they’d never marry such a person”.

We cannot have an honest debate without admitting openly that it’s not just about legal rights and that it’s not merely about what a church feels. You can’t legislate condolences — but you can remove the legal rubric that says it’s OK to ignore the love of another.

[…]

If you really want to talk religion, The Creator of the Universe saw fit to breathe the binding fire of love into all mankind — He did not restrict it as a special gift to straights, any more than he did for whites (which would make whites more special) or English speakers (which would make English speakers more special) or the rich. You are familiar with the phrase that God is Love. You need to take a good long hard look at the fact that every time you reject gay marriage, you are denying a love so powerful it is willing to be martyred. That’s far more God-rejecting than anything two people in Love could ever do.

But I don’t really want to talk religion here. Look. I know my viewpoint doesn’t fall into the nice, neat categories of “keep your religion out of my life” vs. “that’s unholy”. But we really need to be honest here — this is a fight for the tiny respects, not just the grandiose ones. It’s a fight for humanization, and it’s one that naturally fought by every single second class citizen throughout history.

iTunes: “Hello I Am Your Heart” by Hickman, Sara from the album Rubáiyát: Elektra’s 40th Anniversary (1990, 2:44).

Racism and broadband…what?

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So Phil was bouncing around the ‘net, trying to find Sonnet Technology’s website (which is right here, by the way). On one attempt, he made the guess of www.sonnet.com. Turns out that that’s actually the home of Sonnet Networking — “Your neighbors on the ‘net.”

Well, as long as you aren’t Mexican, at least.

Mexico invading United States

Quite frankly, I was more than a little taken aback by this. There’s a certain almost surreal incongruency in the combination of banner ads promoting wireless networking and DSL-based broadband and the blatant racism plastered across the top of the page. New AztlanThere’s even a handy “Invasion Map” showing how much of the southwest has become overrun by Mexicans (this map appears to have been taken from La Voz de Aztlan, an independent Mexican-American news and opinion site based out of Los Angeles, which in turn seems to lean fairly anti-semetic…).

In the left-hand sidebar of the page, underneath links to Disney and Google is a link simply titled “Defending Citizenship” that goes into more detail about this “invasion”.

In the schools of Mexico, students are taught that the southwestern USA belongs to Mexico, an area called Aztlan, and that one day Mexico will reconquer it. For political reasons, the Mexican government encourages Mexicans to invade our country, relieving Mexico of its poor, and generating a stream of \$14.5 billion into Mexico every year. This is money that should be spent in local businesses, but instead becomes Mexico’s second largest source of foreign income. And so the invasion continues, and their vision of reconquista becomes real.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census Bureau, 96.8 percent of the population in East Los Angeles, Calif., was Hispanic/Mexican. Stockton, Calif. was recently featured in a Wall Street Journal story about the exploding Mexican illegal alien problem. A dead crack-mama Mexican with 9 children on welfare and father on workers comp disability was on the front page of the Modesto Bee just before Christmas. This problem is on our doorstep today.

It’s hard for me to come up with any other description for this than “disgusting.” Bad enough that there are people who feel this way, but to make such hateful views a large part of a corporate website?

Is this even legal? Wouldn’t anti-discrimination laws prohibit things like this? If nothing else, I’d think that the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Laws would make this display illegal…at least, if I were of Hispanic descent, I know that I would think twice about applying for a job with a company promoting such beliefs on their public website. What do you really think the chances are of anyone from Mexico, Spain, Peru, Portugal, or any similar heritage getting hired by this company? How about their customers — do service requests called in by someone with a Spanish accent get resolved with the same politeness, speed, and efficiency as requests called in by someone without an accent?

Admittedly, it’s something of a Catch-22, but I’ve often found that the one thing I’m steadfastly intolerant of is intolerance. There is no justifiable excuse for any company to be so blatantly racist.

Should you be so moved, here’s the contact page for Sonnet Networking. I’ve rapidly reached the point where I’m out of anything more to say while remaining coherent.

Condi under oath

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So National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared under oath before the 9-11 commission this morning. While I haven’t had the opportunity to go through the transcript, the Center for American Progress issued a statement regarding the contents of her deposition, and posted a page fact-checking some of Condi’s claims against prior news reports, government documents, and even some of Condi’s own statements:

CLAIM: There was “nothing about the threat of attack in the U.S.” in the Presidential Daily Briefing the President received on August 6th. [responding to Ben Veniste]

FACT: Rice herself confirmed that “the title [of the PDB] was, ‘Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.'” [Source: Condoleezza Rice, 4/8/04]

(via Atrios)