Tuesday, September 10, 2002Operation Plunging Defense IndustryLink Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!) [Boing Boing Blog]Operation Nail-biting Dragon
Operation Unpleasant Venom
Operation Expansive Sucker Punch
Operation Steel Oilfield
Operation Underwear-staining Demon
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:12:26 PM -
Take over the controls of the Enterprise! Beam, Warp, and Open the Door, etc.
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 8:55:19 PM -
"Authorities are investigating a complaint that retired astronaut Buzz Aldrin punched a man in the face, because he was asked to swear on a Bible that he had been on the moon."Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!) [Boing Boing Blog]You the man, Buzz.
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 7:24:08 PM -
Rock out!
posted by Reggie452 September 10 12:09 PM | 0 comments. Kittens + The White Stripes = "Punk Kittens" I know it's not Friday yet, but I thought this was too good to wait. [MetaFilter]
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 3:27:53 PM -
It would be easy to dismiss the harm that has been done to our civil liberties in the past year. Most of us do not know anyone whose rights have been seriously curtailed. The 1,200 detainees rounded up after Sept. 11 and held in secret were mainly Muslim men with immigration problems. So were the people the government tried to deport in closed hearings. The two Americans who were labeled "enemy combatants," hustled off to military brigs and denied the right even to meet with a lawyer, are a Saudi-American man captured in Afghanistan and a onetime Chicago gang member.
There is also no denying that the need for effective law enforcement is greater than ever. The Constitution, Justice Arthur Goldberg once noted, is not a suicide pact.
And yet to curtail individual rights, as the Bush administration has done, is to draw exactly the wrong lessons from history. Every time the country has felt threatened and tightened the screws on civil liberties, it later wished it had not done so. In each case -- whether the barring of government criticism under the Sedition Act of 1798 and the Espionage Act of 1918, the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II or the McCarthyite witch hunts of the cold war -- profound regrets set in later.
When we are afraid, as we have all been this year, civil liberties can seem abstract. But they are at the core of what separates this country from nearly all others; they are what we are defending when we go to war. To slash away at liberty in order to defend it is not only illogical, it has proved to be a failure. Yet that is what has been happening.
[Privacy Digest] - Posted by Richard Chlopan - 2:20:13 PM -
