Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1957 Editor's Choice: 19
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Say it aint so
[Read the article: Back to the future]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I had an art professor once who said that the primary defining characteristic of the Americans was that their mythology was in the future: it described where they were going, not where they had come from.
The real thing that changed was that somewhere in the 70's, information and marketing got so good that commercialism, which used to wreck counterculture bursts of creativity about a year or two into their development, began to cash in and chase any new thing as it occured instead. The bohemian side of society became a place where nothing could build or evolve. New ideas went straight to market, musicians and bands were built by the record companies using studio talent and pretty faces. Styles, which had been wrested away from the fashion industry for cyclic periods of time were now fully in control, endlessly precessing through the same old ideas because they had killed off the element of surprise that led to anything new.
I watch Sci-Fi both for enjoyment and to see what others think the future should be, in part so I can help create it. Lately, it hasn't been as jam packed with anything new. It's too bad, we risk losing what my professor said was our defining quality, all because it's too hard to be sure you can make a ton of money if you have to wait to see what happens next.
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You had to know the media would resurrect Hitchens
[Read the article: God grief]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The big liberal took a big fall by being superhawk on Iraq -- even proclaiming that it was the job of the press to prepare the nation for war, not to criticize the administration as it sent the troops abroad.
He lost his liberal friends, moped around, gained weight (or maybe drank a lot) and generally whined about how great a mover and shaker he was supposed to be.
So after a regulation 40 days in the wilderness, the press brings back one of their own, by hawking his book. I have now seen or heard 4 interviews with the guy, he has very little to say, and no one dares ask him about the recent past. Doesn't believe in the Almighty? Not unless you're refering to the chattering classes, whose members should never be cast out of heaven like Lucifer on a permanent basis. Evidently, his peers agree.
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It's easy to miss the point
[Read the article: PBS's "Frontline: Spying on the Home Front"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Congress now seems to me to be at fault not for failing to investigate but for being complicit in denying citizens information both on the program itself and on the congressional oversight of it.Lisa S.
For the very simple reason that if one chooses to weight openess over security, one has to admit to choosing "acceptable" numbers of deaths over doing everything possible to limit those deaths. In other words, Democrats have no plan "B", just criticisms of Plan "A".shooter242
Just a comment on the point of vigilance in defending freedom: Lisa S. is correct that Congress is complicit in the information dearth, but not quite damning enough. Congress is complicit for not stopping the programs. Congressional oversight, media outrage, and public response forced the Bush administration to terminate the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program run by Iran-Contra criminal John Poindexter.
But that didn't do what people thought oversight and public attention thought it would do: stop the abuse. What happened next was that the Bush Administration opened up the TALON program in the Defense Department, a seemingly less intrusive program, which then got intrusive, got reported on in January, and the DOD announced that it too would shut down. Just keep one step ahead and we keep them out of surveillance, right?
Not exactly. When brought to public attention in January TALON was already plenty abusive. But it is, in some respects, a diversion. Because what really happened is that the Bush Administration went looking for someplace to put TIA, and found a willing client in the intelligence services of Singapore. They grew and expanded the TIA in Singapore, under direction of some of America's biggest defense contractors (Boeing, Lockheed, etc.) and others, and American "advisors". Suddenly, last week, news breaks that the NSA has been engaged in really big domestic data mining, and has constructed the largest database in the history of the planet, mostly consisting of data on American citizens (looking for the link, I saw it in the paper in the past week). I guess we can console ourselves that a high-tech business that had offshored to the Far East is now a domestic industry again? Anybody remember this phrase and who was creating it?
Off the shelf, self financing, independent covert operations capability' outside the checks and balances of executive and congressional oversight, for the purpose of...
On to shooter's comment. Ever heard of Lagrange multipliers and optimization shooter? When you have two variables, in this case openness and security, or as us liberals would put it, civil liberties vs. security, it sets up a curve, usually a first-quadrant hyperbola along which moving in one direction increases civil liberties at the expense of security, in the other, increases security at the expense of civil liberties. What most people fail to realize is that the curve is one of a family of such curves, and there is one highest up in the quadrant that marks the curve in which everything has been moved to its maximum efficiency. Along that particular curve (the optimal curve) it is inevitable that any gain in security must be paid for by a decrease in civil liberties and vice versa. Along any other curve in the family, one always has the choice of looking for a way to move closer to the optimal, and so the choice is a phony one. If you and your precious Bush Administration cannot prove that you are on the optimal curve, then any scary scenarios that pretend that we need to give up civil liberties, or openness as you call it, are demagogery and unnecessary treasons against a free society.