Palau

That’s Not Plastique, It’s Silicone.

Raw Story finds this report in USA Today about the latest generation of Homeland Security devices:

Screeners plan to test the “backscatter” machines at several U.S. airports, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) says. The refrigerator-sized machines are considered a breakthrough in scanning technology but have been labeled “a virtual strip search” by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Security workers using the machines can see through clothes and peer at whatever may be hidden in undergarments, shirts or pants. The images also paint a revealing picture of a person’s nude body.

The devices can potentially be used to screen hundreds of millions of air travelers each year, although TSA says more study is needed to determine how the devices may be used at U.S. airports. The agency declined to say when and where it expects to test the machines.

Yes, knowing that minimum wage airport-security can see you naked on demand – that will really reassure the average traveller. Next? The soul-scanner, to check you’re ‘saved’ before you can travel.

Shock Horror! NYT in US Class System Probe!

The New York Times has finally noticed that there might just be this little thing in the US called a class system, and that it might have an adverse affect on people’s life chances…

Today, the country has gone a long way toward an appearance of classlessness. Americans of all sorts are awash in luxuries that would have dazzled their grandparents. Social diversity has erased many of the old markers. It has become harder to read people’s status in the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the votes they cast, the god they worship, the color of their skin. The contours of class have blurred; some say they have disappeared.

But class is still a powerful force in American life. Over the past three decades, it has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways. At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more. At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening.

This is where I bang my head on the kb. Well DUH. It’s all very well the NYT deigning to notice that poorer people don’t do so well and the mega-rich get all the breaks, but Grey Lady maintains its de haut en bas attitude, that ‘oh dear, isn’t it terrible for those poor people’ frame of mind, knowing it’s not a problem for the Times staff themselves (well, other than for the immigrant janitors that clean the newsroom). Thus it tries to stick to the classic US journalism point of view, ie no point of view at all. Just the usual ‘he said, they said’, supposedly fair and balanced hear-from-both-sides article that obfuscates rather than illuminates any issue. If it takes any point of view at all, it’s the panglossian perspective. There is social mobility, be all you can be, everything is for the best. It’s a bit hard for some people, but on the whole, the US is A-OK. Maintain the status quo and we’ll all be fine.

Bollocks to that.

Carnival Of The Uncapitalists No. 7

Carnival Of The Uncapitalists is up at Lenin’s Tomb, featuring, amongst others, Bionic Octopus on the ‘right to return’, Left I on the Cuban health system, Freiheit un Wissen on CAFTA, Agitprop on mass media v blogging, and Lenin himself on ‘Reforming the British State’.

A must-read.

Exxon, Weaving A Web Of Untruth

Want to know who it is that pushing the meme that climate change is a myth?

Courtesy of Mother Jones via Kos, comes this brilliant piece of research that explores the web of Big Oil-funded ‘think-tanks’ that Exxon has created to obscure the truth about climate change and the coming ecological catastrophe.

Step forward… wait for it…. Exxon Mobil. Well, there’s a surprise.

The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Activist Judges

Jeanne at Body & Soul picks up the story that exposes, better than any rant of mine, the morally bankrupt, activist ‘judges’ Bush is trying to impose on America. The truth speaks for itself.

In brief, a case was taken against Ford for supplying a defective pickup in which a child was injured, leading to his becoming a paraplegic, dependent on a ventilator. The child was awarded $30 million. Ford appealed on a point of law and the case came before Bush nominee Priscilla Owen:

Two years after the lawyers representing Willie Searcy and the lawyers representing Ford had requested an expedited hearing, Owen wrote the majority opinion. A process that could have been completed within months of the oral argument in November 1996 dragged on until Owen completed her opinion in March 1998.

Her opinion was stunning. Not because it ruled against Willie Searcy and his mother, Susan Miles, but because of how it ruled against them. Owens ruled the case would have to be retried in Dallas because it was initially filed in the wrong venue. Yet venue was not among the issues, or “points of error,” the court said it would consider two years earlier when it took up the case. “We felt like we got ambushed,” said Ayres. A lawyer who had worked at the court at the time agreed: “If venue wasn’t in the points of error, it is unusual that the court addressed it. If the justices decide they want the court to address something not in the points of error, they would ask for additional briefing. They send letters to the parties and ask for briefing.” There had been no letters and no requests.

It would be another three years before the Dallas Court of Appeals handed down a ruling giving Willie Searcy’s family money to care for him. But it was too late. Four days after the ruling, his ventilator stopped working during the night. When his mother went into his room at 5 a.m., he was dead.

He was 21 years old.

Res ipsa loquitor.