(no subject)

A six year old girl is on the CAPPS list and cannot travel on an airplane without being pulled out of line, frisked, and having her luggage opened and inspected.

In related news, Chuck Schumer is raising the point that we're not doing jack shit to monitor who enters the country on boats the way we are on airplanes.

Do you feel secure yet? I ask because they're going to keep going through the motions of these bullshit CAPPS lists, threat alerts and what ever other theatrics they can come up with to make you think they have a clue how to stop a repeat of the last attack -- never mind how to stop the next attack.

---

Remember Afghanistan? You know, where Al Qaida and the Taliban is?

Remember how happy you're supposed to feel that we "liberated" the country, and now they're going to have an enlightened democracy where women are liberated and all that good stuff?

The Chief Justice had this to say about yesterday's landmark first woman singing on TV since the Taliban came to power:

"We are opposed to women singing and dancing as a whole. This is totally against the decisions of the Supreme Court and it has to be stopped."

Meet the new boss...

---

I think there's a good discussion underway about the interaction of what seem to be esoteric political topics like industry deregulation, agency funding, tort liability, corporate and personal accountability and whether or not you can get food for your children that doesn't poison them.

Jim Hightower reports a new food to avoid if you're not into poisoning your children: lettuce.

Indeed, organic baby lettuce is one of the surprising places that the Environmental Working Group recently found perchlorate, having run scientific tests on 22 types of lettuce being sold in California supermarkets. Perchlorate is not something you want to find in your salad or on your BLT. It's a rocket-fuel ingredient. It's known to cause brain damage and other health problems, especially in children, even when exposed only to trace amounts.

The tests found way more than traces, however – one-fifth of the lettuces tested contained at least five times the amount of perchlorate that's considered safe.


Anyone want to bet that this administration, which has already announced that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant will soon reveal to us that rocket fuel isn't so bad for you after all?

I make specific mention of this because it raises another aspect of the interaction between what seems to be a distant political issue and what affects what you feed yourself and your children. That perchlorate didn't just magically appear in the lettuce beds. Read on:

How did perchlorate end up in our lettuce? It came from a former rocket-fuel factory located down at the tip of Nevada. The toxic chemical leached from the factory into the nearby Colorado River, which then carried it miles away through farmlands in Arizona and California – where 70 percent of our country's winter lettuce is grown. The farmers draw their irrigation water from the contaminated Colorado, and the lettuce sucks up both the water and perchlorate. Then the lettuce is harvested and shipped hundreds of miles to supermarkets, where you buy it and take it into your home to serve to family – unaware that it comes pre-dressed with toxic rocket fuel.

The Man Who Sold Out The Moon

When the President announced that he wanted to go to Mars, I like many others thought, "only if you take Rove, Cheney, Pearle, Ashcroft, and the rest of the freak show with you."

I figured that it was simply empty talk because he needs some feel-good stuff to talk about as we're coming into election season full bore and it's dawning on more and more of the minority that voted for him last time that "jobless recovery" means the billionaires recover and everyone else gets sold up the river. Hell, even Greenspan is coming right out and boasting about how "Not one bank has collapsed under this deregulated system," because they can now pass the risk along to pension funds and insurers.

I've known better than to feel good about it, though. For the last 3 years, the most chilling words in the English language have been "Bush has a plan."

And now the other shoe's been dropped. While he talks abouit going to the moon in 2015 and mars someday, he's talking about pulling the plug on the Shuttle and the International Space Station by 2010 in order to divert the funding to the Moon and Mars.

Back in his father's day, they talked about the Superconducting Supercollider, and diverted most of the rest of America's physics research dollars into that project. Then they cut that project, and didn't restore that funding to the rest of physics... which is why there are now more physicists working for options trading firms as analysts than there are working in physics. (OK, that may be hyperbole, but there was a mass exodus from physics because there was no work available.)

An open letter

Dear people at fandom_scruples,

Your words and your deeds do not match. You claim:

We are asking those listed below to please lock down their fic. Nothing else.

Yet you maintain a black list headed with the words, Please don't read these author's works.

Blacklists and boycotts go well beyond "asking." "Asking" involves being willing to accept "no" for an answer. More accurate terms would be "demanding," "pressuring," and "attempting to force."

You say,

It's not about censorship.

yet you also say

There was some controversy about ivyblossom being on the list as she locks down her fics on her website. While we applaud her doing this, we've browsed several fics on her LJ containing what we consider to be adult content and she will remain on the list until those things are locked down.

You have set yourself up as the arbiter of what "ought" be locked away from minors. That makes you a censor, and what you are doing censorship.

Regards,

Dan