segovius
06-02-2005, 03:40 PM
The CIA have come up with a brilliant new scheme (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4603271.stm) that pushes the forgotten concept of freedom even further back into the dark ages.
This crackpot scheme involves planting spies in universities to pose as anthropologists - well actually to qualify as anthropologists. They will be paid$50,000 (£27,500) a year and have to use the techniques of academic "fieldwork" to gather political and cultural details on other countries.
They are not allowed to tell anyone they are spies of course, nor allowed to disclose the source of their funding to the university and will generally pose as academics.
Ho hum - of course this plan will go tits up when they all fail their initial exams but whatever.
In other news, a Jewish man who fled for his life from the Nazis in Germany in 1938 has realised to his shock and horror that he has once more to flee the oppression of the fascist jackboot -this time from America (http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=21363&mode=nested&order=0):
Those were the magic words of the time: "Papiere, Bitte." (Translation: "Papers, Please.") Hearing those words, even now, causes dull echoes of sounds akin to bodies hitting dirt, or bullets penetrating flesh to thud into my mind. Because, if those papers weren't correctly in order, or, if you were a Jew sneakily present in any place (including the grocery store) which displayed the usual "NO JEWS OR DOGS ALLOWED" sign, you were dead meat--literally. And, yes, of course I'm talking about my childhood as a little Jewish kid in Nazi Germany.
And, that's what's happening now. I smell the long-forgotten skunk, the long-forgotten rot of fascism. What is happening all around can no longer be denied. What I ran away from so desperately in 1938 is coming back full circle. Only the jack-boots have not yet arrived.
And as if to confirm this chilling warning from an eyewitness to an evil we thought we had defeated forever a 57 year-old grandmother (http://www.komotv.com/stories/37150.htm) from Des Moines has been branded a terrorist, fined and placed on a sinister Orwellian 'watch list'.
Cecelia Beaman, a school head, was taking her schoolkids on a trip to Disneyland. She had packed some knives to make sandwiches with and even alerted the security checkers at the airport of this.
But to no avail. The security guards found the knife - Beaman told them it was a mistake but they continued to stare icily cold and robotically inhuman:
"You've committed a felony," Beaman says a security screener announced. "And you're considered a terrorist."
Beaman says she was told her name would go on a terrorist watch-list and that she would have to pay a $500 fine.
"I'm a 57-year-old woman who is taking care of 37 kids," she told them. "I'm not gonna commit a terrorist act." Beaman says they took information from her Washington drivers license and confiscated and photographed the knife according to standard operating procedure.
She says screeners refused to give her paperwork or documentation of her violation, documentation of the pending fine, or a copy of the photograph of the knife.
"They said 'no' and they said it's a national security issue. And I said what about my constitutional rights? And they said 'not at this point ... you don't have any'."
That about sums it up for this month: your rights - at this point you don't have any.......
This crackpot scheme involves planting spies in universities to pose as anthropologists - well actually to qualify as anthropologists. They will be paid$50,000 (£27,500) a year and have to use the techniques of academic "fieldwork" to gather political and cultural details on other countries.
They are not allowed to tell anyone they are spies of course, nor allowed to disclose the source of their funding to the university and will generally pose as academics.
Ho hum - of course this plan will go tits up when they all fail their initial exams but whatever.
In other news, a Jewish man who fled for his life from the Nazis in Germany in 1938 has realised to his shock and horror that he has once more to flee the oppression of the fascist jackboot -this time from America (http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=21363&mode=nested&order=0):
Those were the magic words of the time: "Papiere, Bitte." (Translation: "Papers, Please.") Hearing those words, even now, causes dull echoes of sounds akin to bodies hitting dirt, or bullets penetrating flesh to thud into my mind. Because, if those papers weren't correctly in order, or, if you were a Jew sneakily present in any place (including the grocery store) which displayed the usual "NO JEWS OR DOGS ALLOWED" sign, you were dead meat--literally. And, yes, of course I'm talking about my childhood as a little Jewish kid in Nazi Germany.
And, that's what's happening now. I smell the long-forgotten skunk, the long-forgotten rot of fascism. What is happening all around can no longer be denied. What I ran away from so desperately in 1938 is coming back full circle. Only the jack-boots have not yet arrived.
And as if to confirm this chilling warning from an eyewitness to an evil we thought we had defeated forever a 57 year-old grandmother (http://www.komotv.com/stories/37150.htm) from Des Moines has been branded a terrorist, fined and placed on a sinister Orwellian 'watch list'.
Cecelia Beaman, a school head, was taking her schoolkids on a trip to Disneyland. She had packed some knives to make sandwiches with and even alerted the security checkers at the airport of this.
But to no avail. The security guards found the knife - Beaman told them it was a mistake but they continued to stare icily cold and robotically inhuman:
"You've committed a felony," Beaman says a security screener announced. "And you're considered a terrorist."
Beaman says she was told her name would go on a terrorist watch-list and that she would have to pay a $500 fine.
"I'm a 57-year-old woman who is taking care of 37 kids," she told them. "I'm not gonna commit a terrorist act." Beaman says they took information from her Washington drivers license and confiscated and photographed the knife according to standard operating procedure.
She says screeners refused to give her paperwork or documentation of her violation, documentation of the pending fine, or a copy of the photograph of the knife.
"They said 'no' and they said it's a national security issue. And I said what about my constitutional rights? And they said 'not at this point ... you don't have any'."
That about sums it up for this month: your rights - at this point you don't have any.......