Posts Tagged ‘police powers’

It’s actually not a joke, although it’s easy to come up with a punchline

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

I’ve been quick to criticize American history for HUAC, and CoIntelPro, and the general internal espionage of the early FBI, as well not recognizing the lessons of history when they swing around again, so I should probably also point out that we do a lot of the same stuff.
As you can see in the story [...]

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Organizational Pathology

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Did you see the ACLU press release today about how the American terrorist watch list now has more than one million people on it?
“America’s new million record watch list is a perfect symbol for what’s wrong with this administration’s approach to security: it’s unfair, out-of-control, a waste of resources, treats the rights of the innocent [...]

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Putting My Own House In Order

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Or rather, bitching about my own country’s politicians for a change. It seems like I can’t turn around lately without seeing another story that just embarrasses me as a Canadian.
The classic example, which I’ve talked about here before, is the Tories’ continuing attempt to force a DCMA-style law down our throats. After getting his ass [...]

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Can Not Process Data

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

You know those hoary old SF stories where the hero defeats the robot/intelligent energy matrix/computer/whatever by giving it information that can not be logically processed–isn’t “Is the following statement true? ‘This statement is false.’” the classic one?–and thus causing the super-powerful processing of the robot/intelligent energy matrix/computer/whatever to burn out, usually accompanied by a nice [...]

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Even More Things I Did Not Know

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

Science has brought us a permanent, but easily-removable, tattooing ink. Does this change the metatext of tattooing? I mean, the pain is still there, but if the permanence isn’t part of the subtext anymore, what does that mean for the story? Is it to obvious to predict the rise of a serial-tattooing culture, or a [...]

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