Year: 2006

05/15/2006

According to today’s Denver Post, the city of Boulder is considering a taxpayer-funded “hate hotline”. This hotline will allow residents of Boulder to call and report racist language. Apparently they think that will put a damper on “hate speech” or something.

Yeah, so if I’m standing on the Pearl Street Mall and some guy is shouting epithets about blacks, Jews, Hindis, Republicans, short people, panhandlers, or whatever, I guess I’m supposed to whip out my cell phone and call the hotline. I’m sure it’ll stop him cold when he realizes what I’m doing. And I’m sure the police will drop everything to rush to the Mall and cuff this guy.

As David Harsanyi, the Denver Post columnist says,

The council should realize, however ugly it may be, Americans still have the constitutional right to be racist, homophobic, Jew-hating or even to make bad jokes.

Even more to the point, he goes on to say

Phillip Martinez beat up a 22-year-old African-American mechanical-engineering student named Andrew Sterling last year in Boulder. He was sentenced to the maximum of 16 years in prison. The jury wisely decided to drop “ethnic intimidation” charges.

Would a hate-line have helped Sterling? Martinez was from Lafayette, not Boulder. He was drunk. He may not have even cared that Sterling was black.

Should everyone keep the hate-line number on their cellphone speed dial from now on? And remember, only call if your attacker uses racist or insensitive language while beating you to a pulp. After all, according to hate-law advocates, it’s not genuine hate unless the perpetrator makes fun of your heritage.

I guess we’ll see how the city council vote goes tomorrow. For now, I just shake my head and wonder who comes up with this stuff.

05/13/2006

In a rousing discussion on Slashdot about whether the government should be permitted to compile a DNA database of all citizens for criminal investigations, one comment caught my eye.

The problem here is that we can’t trust the government. We already know that. They said that the SSN would only be used for social security. They said that there would be no new taxes. They said that there were weapons of mass destruction. They said that eminent domain was a tool never to be used for commercial interests. They said that no citizen could be held without a right to a hearing or the ability to contact a lawyer. They said that no person’s privacy could be invaded without a warrant. They said the patriot act was only to fight terrorism. They said that they would make no law regarding the establishment of religion. They say that intrastate commerce is magically interstate commerce. I could go on for pages.

They lie. They lie all the time. They’re not lying for our benefit, either– they lie to do us harm, to hide things from us, to get certain people into office (or keep them there), they lie to take our property, our freedom, to erode our rights, and to diminish our ability to hold them accountable.

Anything you do to extend the power of the government will be misused. Anything. Our government is completely, utterly, absolutely out of control.

05/13/2006

Today’s spam message (only one!) was the usual source of “enhancement” drugs, but I thought it was interesting that the dummy text used to fool the spam filters was a little snippit from The Hobbit. To stoop so low…

05/12/2006

So just for kicks, I created a login on the RNC web site under the pretense of hosting a crazy GOP House Party. Here’s the e-mail message I received after I completed the registration:

Welcome to the GOP Team! GOP Team Members are empowered to share the Party’s message with friends, neighbors, elected officials and the media as well as garner support for candidates and the President’s and our Party’s agenda.

Stay tuned– we’ll be in touch shortly. With your help, we’ll bring new faces and new voices into the Republican Party and maintain our majority for years to come.

Awesome. I’m “empowered to share the Party’s message”.

For some reason, though, seeing Party capitalized like that makes me think of the Communist Party, and suddenly I feel like I’m the propaganda minister for Red China or something. Now I have to go wash my hands.

05/12/2006

Hey kids, if you’re bored this weekend, why not host a GOP House Party?

According to this page on the Republican National Committee’s official web site, you can quickly and easily organize a party for all of the people “who support the President and the Republican ticket”. Of course, with the latest polls showing Bush’s approval rating at 29%, and Congress sitting at a juicy 18%, it will probably be a fairly small party.

But that’s not all! If you tell the RNC about your party, you’re entered into a drawing for a Special Edition iPod. I kid you not. Here’s the shot from the web site:

05/12/2006

From a discussion on Slashdot today:

I’ve come up with a way to reduce– perhaps even eliminate– our dependence on foreign oil as an energy source. As more and more civil liberties are trampled upon, faster and faster will the Founding Fathers spin in their respective graves.

If we attach magnets to each Founding Father, then wrap copper wire around each of them, we should have a potentially unlimited energy source. Well, at least until the Libertarians get elected in significant numbers– so yeah, come to think of it, it truly is unlimited.

05/12/2006

Apple has a new set of ads comparing Windows computers to Macs. They’re quite funny, but I think the best comparison is simply in the image they use on the page. It makes a great distinction between the kinds of people who use Windows and the kinds of people who use Macs.

(I shudder to think what the Linux guy would look like, but maybe Red Hat or someone will make some ads too.)

05/11/2006

Like many people in the Denver area, I gripe about Qwest and their terrible customer service, installation hassles, and unasked-for packages on my bill. But today I can cheer for them, as it’s been revealed they were the only one of the four major telecommunications carriers who stood up to the NSA in late 2001 by refusing to hand over a database containing call records for everyone on their network.

Last December we all learned that Bush had been authorizing warrantless (ahem, illegal) wiretaps on American citizens. I’m still waiting for that story to play out in court– although most likely it won’t. At the time, he made it abundantly clear that the NSA was only investigating international calls, because everyone knows that’s where the terrorists are. I guess we were all supposed to feel better that people calling Pakistan and Afghanistan got a little extra love from the NSA, but the rest of us were free from Big Brother.

Not so. Now we learn that the NSA has been collecting call records (number called, time, and duration) for 200 million Americans since fall 2001. It’s the largest single database in the world, and they’re doing it all because they want us to be safer from terrorists. Keep in mind that domestic surveillance of this nature is almost certainly illegal, although cynics like me know the Bush administration will find some way to spin it as a legal move because the President can do whatever he wants in a “time of war”.

In any case, it turns out that when the NSA came a-knocking, three of the major phone providers– AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth– opened right up and handed over their confidential customer information. They’ve continued doing so for the past four and a half years, providing the NSA with periodic updates so the database is complete.

Well, not quite complete. Qwest told the NSA to blow it out their ears, and not to come back without a court order. The NSA made some thinly-veiled threats, waved the banner of patriotism, and invoked the tired “national security” argument… all to no avail. Qwest refused to hand over their data, and after almost three years of negotiations, finally broke off all talks with the NSA. Now, a few years after that, they remain the lone holdout.

Good for them. At least the list of the thousands of phone calls I’ve made for the past four years isn’t sitting in an NSA computer somewhere.