Firms Are Asked to Stop One-Drug Malaria Therapy

What vicious nonsense! Save as many people as you can now as a) technology is continuing to improve at increasing speed; b) it is the job of health organizations to do so; c) some of those people saved may in fact be inventor of the next great cures; d) there is no hard model that shows resistance to this drug increases that rapidly if it is used alone as compared to with other drugs. On the other hand the practice of selling inadequate treatments should end as this does risk the drug becoming ineffective for little gain.

But WHO is acting much too broadly before the science is in as far as I see.

CNN.com - Gonzales defends NSA, rejects call for�prosecutor - Jan 17, 2006

Is it up to one of the people possibly subject to investigation to approve or disapprove of an investigation? Have we sunk that far? Gonzales is Bush's man. If we can only have an investigation of this or any other incident if he approves then we are lost.

CNN.com - Cheney:�Spy program�key to terror war - Jan 19, 2006

The real safeguards in the form of relevant laws were ignored. So excuse us if we aren't satisfied by empty claims after the fact that no harm was done and claims that our civil liberites were safeguarded. By definition our liberties and rights were violated and they continue to be violated by a government that believes it is outside the law and believes that anything whatsoever is more important than the rights of the people.

All international communication is potentially to Al Qaeda? Communication that is domestic could also be to Al Qaeda. does this mean that all communication should be eavesdropped on by the government? Should all Americans be assumed guilty until proven innocent?

It is time to throw these autocrats out of office and in jail where they belong. But the people are too far gone to see this or to take any such action. We are on the way down in my humble opinion.

So, let me get this straight. Justice can't investigate a sittings president for what looks like a perfecty clear violation of laws protecting the American people. But it can open an investigation (and did) to hound the people who reported this violation?

To me it looks like Justice is not in the least concerned with "justice" if it is pointed at this administration.






Watchdog can't open spy probe

Bush Defends Legality of Domestic Spy Program - New York Times

It seems to me that the press is bending over backwards to trumpet the administrations claims it did nothing wrong when it authorized domestic spying on Americans without obeying even minimal laws. Could the media outlets be frightened by the earlier ploy by the administration to take legal action against them for even bringing the matter to the attention of the American public?

This American is real tired of reading Big Lies day after day in the press. By the time Congress investigates the administration and media will have ground it into most of the public that this blatant violation and real danger to the freedoms we hold dear was simply business as usual.

Iraq's Post-Election Unrest - Forbes.com

So the election doubted as proof of the desirability of US invasion and occupation results in a clear win by Shiite Islamic fundamentalists. We impose democracy only to lend democratic credence to theocracy in Iraq. What a wonderful result!

Perhaps we will wake up to the fact that Western democratic ideals cannot be imposed on a people. But I doubt it.

CNN.com - Inquiry into leak of NSA spying program launched - Dec 30, 2005

What is this country coming to? Bush breaks the law by syping on Americans without proper authorization as mandated by FISA. Breaking these laws is a felony offense. Justice should be investigating Bush. Instead they go after those who enabled the media to tell the American peole about this outrageous behavior. This is totally inverted. What is this country coming to? It is coming to be not a nation of laws, not a nation that protects the freedom of the people, but a nation where government, especially the Executive, can do whatever it wants to the people and punish those who even inform the people as to what it is doing. Americans should rise up and tell this Beast of a government who is really boss in this supposedly free country.

Wired News: Bush OKs Smut-Stripping Tech

I see. It is quite alright to cut and paste a copyrighted work without the owner's permission as long as the result makes the government happier. It is alright to make the devices we use to find and view information and entertainment enforce government notions of what we should or should not see or hear. Do we consumers get to play? Can we remove types of comercials and political messages that offend us? No?

CNN.com - U.S., Canada eye overflight lists - Apr 22, 2005

Exactly how does this make sense? Pesumably the means employed to insure persons on planes cannot do major damage is already quite good. So how does it aid anything legitimate to also insist that planes flying over US territory must not contain any person on a US watch list? These lists are quite problematic in that the criteria for placing persons on such a list and for challenging inclusions of persons on the list has not been worked out. Persons have been put on the list and have found it very difiicult to get off the list who are no threat and who there was no reason to put on the list in the first place. Now we are asked to not only countenance such lists that provide only very marginal additional security but to apply them to all flights from all countries that overfly the US.

It is high time we stopped resoponding in knee jerk ways to pressings of the fear button and instead applied a bit of analysis of costs including costs in restricted freedom, loss of privacy, danger of arbitrary de facto unanswerable persecution versus actual benefit in increased safety.

tohay's Lesson:

those in authority have the right to know your every move "for your own good" of course. Teach a generation that pervasive surveillance, random searches and drug tests, police in the hallways are all normal and "necessary for your safety". Pay attention class. There will be a test.


USATODAY.com - Parents protest student computer ID tags

Microsoft takes on pirates

Brilliant. If users want Microsoft to plug the criminal number of security issues in its products then they must jump through Microsoft hoops to be sure MS has extracted its full extortionary fees. Users whose installations are not certifiable will remain infected and infect other machines. Obviously, MS does not care about security, only about its profits.

It is increasingly common that we see appeals to alter anything and everything that terrorist might be able to make use of. As any and all information services are possibly useful to some technology savvy baddie somewhere this would effectively stifle information technology and its use by the rest of us in order to keep it from being used by terrorists. We have heard such urgent appeals before with pedophiles, for instance, substituted for terrorists.

Server technology, along with many other quite useful things, is merely a tool. It can be used for good, bad or indifferent purposes just as a very low level tool like a box cutter can. Saying we must somehow make the tool able to distinquish the intentions and/or identity of the user is the way to make the tools useless and the level of prying into the lives of all users utterly odious and dangerously invasive.

The place to stop terrorism is in its planning and commission of acts of terror, not in its mere communications. Communication and information tools must be unencumbered if they are to be truly and maximally useful.

It also should raise suspicion when the very things that make governments a bit uneasy such as open internet empowerment of all the people are precisely what it declares as needing radical revision and to be under its control to "fight terrorism". Terrorism makes a convenient excuse for massive increase of governmental control (industry "policing itself" is not an really effectively different) and attendant massive decrease of individual access to information, communication and distributed computational resources.

This is certainly not remotely the answer and I frankly find it more than a little suspicious that a supposedly savvy publication like Technology Review would mostly simply parrot such a suggestion.

One of the more disturbing trends to be observed in the US media is the way that news, especially news regarding the Bush administration, is "unreported". The below article on a change to Social Security for instance never bothers to actually explain what the proposed change is. The reader is left to guess what calculating SS benefits on "inflation" instead of wages would mean. My own guess is that it would mean the government gives you whatever amount it believes a generic retiree needs based on some inflation based formula regardless of how much you may have paid in. So those who have paid the most get shafted the most. But this is only my guess. The non-news piece below doesn't actually bother to say.

White House ponders changing the way benefits are calculated - Jan. 4, 2005

Why is anyone pretending that it makes any difference from whom a question to Rumsfeld comes from if it is in fact a legitimate question? If our troops have a serious lack of adequate armor then they have a serious lack of armor regardless of who formulated the question.

This is yet another example of the insidious detailed consideration of the inconsequential taking the place of actually examining, reporting on, discussing and resolving real issues. It needs to end and quickly.


Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Pitting wits against Rumsfeld

In my opinion this is the military that we pay for intentionally being sloppy with its systems in order to claim more radio frequencies exclusively. Consumer systems are on the edge of these frequencies because Congress allowed them to be agains the military's insistence that it have exclusive huge of increasingly large ranges of frequencies. In todays world such exclusively use is not even remotely necessary. The military has some of the best knowledge around of how to tune its radio frequency gear appropriately to its needs without interference and by extension without interference with "civilian" usages.

We should demand the military we pay for which includes the military cleaning up its own messes.

CNN.com - Military signals may jam garage-door openers - Dec 6, 2004

American Born, Addicted to Happiness

The author of this piece tells the American people to not think about fixing the many wrongs, which I agree very much are wrongs, but simply "prepare to suffer". NO! It is not to late to think about a change of course that can prevent countless deaths and near-endless suffering. It is only that "can-do" spirit that can possibly be of help.

To throw away the Enlightenment principles this country was founded on with some cynical rewrite of history is beyond contemptible. As is the implicit guilting of Americans as not having had our fair share of suffering. It is true that we have caused much suffering in the world, suffering that we have ignored and not experienced ourselves. But it is time to acknowledge the suffering and do some things radically differently, not to take on great suffering ourselves.

I have heard the bad news. But hearing bad news doesn't mean you simply give up and "prepare to suffer". While there is any energy or opportunity to make things better at all you fight on for a different outcome.

There is nothing so negative in the current circumstances that we cannot set it right given vision and will enough. To just give up now or preach doing so to receive our "just desserts" of suffering is about as EVIL as it gets.

I do agree with the author on one thing. Total transformation is demanded of us. Unlike the author I don't believe we have to embrace a lot of suffering to get there. Given human nature it may well take that but it is not inevitable.

Where To From Here? by Ron Paul

There is much in this piece I greatly respect and agree with. But it is beyond contemptible that Ron Paul takes a simplistic line utterly against abortion or any right of women over their own bodies should they get pregnant when they did not wish to. He uses the pathetic suggestion that "an abortionist" might abort one minute before birth. Almost no abortions were ever done in the final trimester except for the most extreme of reasons. Ron Paul knows this so this is purple rhetoric unworthy of him or anyone of his stature and deserved reputation.

Calling abortion the "most important issue of our age" shows a collosal contempt for what is really important. Abortion debates hinge greatly on the undecidable question of when a collection of cells, a fetus, is a human being with full human rights. By its formulation this question is undecidable. Long arguments on both sides have not resolved it. There is one thing for sure though, the women carrying the fetuses are certainly fully human and should have rights to control their own lives. They are not slaves to a fetus within them. I am no fan of abortion. I believe instead we should perfect our birth control and thus greatly eliminate any need for such. But most of the same voices that utterly condemn abortion are against sufficient sex education and easily available birth control. This is an abomination.

Ron Paul seems also to see the rights of 10% of the nation to marry to be against good "family values" and to be a moral issue. How can a man who has fought all of his life against tyrannical government turn around and support the right of any majority to limit the happiness and life of any minority? Surely he doesn't buy into the notion that homosexuality is by its very nature immoral depravity.

That said, I deeply agree with what he has to say concerning our economy. I deeply agree with his point that we cannot claim to be motivated by morality and be involved in unjust horrid wars like Iraq. I do not agree with his claim involving "for centuries the Christian definition of a just war.. has guided many nations in making this decision." First of all, the notion of when war is just has nothing to do with being Christian. Many Hindus, Moslems, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists and so on also have this notion. Nor was it invented per se by Christians. As a matter of fact not many centuries back Christians were rather infamous for very unjust wars and international actions as well as for bloody pogroms against their own. Lastly, only a very small handful of wars were remotely "just" by any such alluded to criteria in the last few centuries.

I deeply respect Ron Paul and deeply appreciate many of his points. But this divisive mud slinging against my own people (I am lesbian) and against women making very difficult decisions is reprehensible. While I agree with most of his other points I have to speak out against "the package".

He is very right that we must speak up before this adminstration believes it has a mandate to expand war into Iran and/or Syria. We will be lucky to survive the full fallout from Iraq. Expanding the madness would be econmic, political and yes, certainly moral suicide.

Greetings from Falluja, L. Reichard White

My God! What an utterly unholy mess. As I read this I had to stop many times because I was crying to hard and I could not see out of my glasses. What can we do? How can we stop this atrocity, this senseless bloody war? That it is being done with my money makes me sick to my very soul! What can we do? How can we stop this? NOW?

Yahoo! News - 'DON'T IMPOSE YOUR VALUES' ARGUMENT IS BIGOTRY IN DISGUISE

It is not wrong to vote your moral convictions. It is unwise and irresponsible to vote as if a few issues your moral convictions make your concern are allowed to overwhelm the full context of your values and what is at stake.

We should vote our convictions, always. However this is quite different from believing we should force others to live by our moral values whether they hold the same values or not. The latter is not about freedom or conscience. It is totalitarian thinking and has absolutely no place in the political life of a free country.

Yahoo! News - THE LOSS THAT KEEPS ON GIVING!

A) Kerry may not have lost at all. Ample evidence that the election was rigged or hacked in substantial ways is emerging.

B) If the majority of the American people did in fact vote for Bush then it is certainly true that the American people did not have sufficient facts and understanding of those facts about the first Bush administration. It would be hard to conceive of an incumbent president who had more real detriments in his record than Bush had going into this election. Of course much of that never made the major media.

If the American people make crucial political decisions effecting all aspects of their lives for four years simply on hot-button issues like abortion or gay marriage then they truly are stupid. Stupid and irresponsible.