Religious Right Against RFID
March 26, 2006 | 4 Comments
In a recent Wired article titled, RFID: Sign of the (End) Times?, Katherine Albrecht’s stance against RFID is discussed. In short, she is a Christian who believes that RFID is the biblically foretold “mark of the beast” and in turn can be interpreted as the sign of the coming end of days.
I hate to find myself on the same side as someone I look at as a bit nutty, but who am I kidding, I’m just a few conspiracy theories away from wearing a tinfoil hat. Regardless of my distaste for her particular argument against RFID, hopefully it does ring true with the particularly political group of evangelical Christians who seem to have a stranglehold on the country at this point.
So if the leftist paranoid liberals hate RFID and the evangelical conservative right hate RFID, who’s out there pushing it on all of us? Oh yeah, big business…
Tags: business, conservative, evangelical, liberal, privacy, religion, religious, RFID, wired
Is Katrina Bush’s Waterloo?
September 6, 2005 | 9 Comments
A lot has been said on the topic of Bush and the nation’s failure in New Orleans. I put some blame on the shoulders of America in general because we elected Bush, twice. Sure liberals claim they voted for the other guy (me included), but are we all sure we couldn’t have done something to prevent this loon from taking office and wrecking everything this country stands for? I do mean everything. Conservatives, look at what you believe in, fundamentally, does Bush really speak for you?
Anyway, instead of me rambling on further about how terrible this all is, I’ll simply state Bush should resign in shame and just quote other people who are more eloquent than me.
New Orleans Times-PicayuneAn Open Letter to the President
Dear Mr. President:
We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, “What is not working, we’re going to make it right.”
Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.
[...]
We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame.
[...]
We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We’re no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn’t be reached.
From A Failure of Leadership by Bob Herbert, NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist (9/5)
The catastrophe in New Orleans billowed up like the howling winds of hell and was carried live and in color on television screens across the U.S. and around the world.
The Big Easy had turned into the Big Hurt, and the colossal failure of George W. Bush to intervene powerfully and immediately to rescue tens of thousands of American citizens who were suffering horribly and dying in agony was there for all the world to see.
From A Can’t Do Government by Paul Krugman, NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist (9/2)
At a fundamental level, I’d argue, our current leaders just aren’t serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don’t like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.
Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.
So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can’t-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.
From United States of Shame by Maureen Dowd, NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist (9/5)
America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it’s happening in America. [...] it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.
From The Larger Shame by Nicholas D. Kristof, NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist (9/6)
It has also underscored the Bush administration’s ongoing reluctance or ineptitude in helping the poorest Americans. The scenes in New Orleans reminded me of the suffering I saw after a similar storm killed 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991 - except that Bangladesh’s government showed more urgency in trying to save its most vulnerable citizens.
If Bush does not take any blame for any of this, everyone liberal and conservative should finally give up on this administration. The failures keep adding up: weapons of mass destruction? abu ghraib? greeted as liberators? and have we caught Osama Bin Laden yet? So many failures… Katrina may not have been directly his fault, no one controls the weather, but the causality of the poor response is clear. I hope this can be Bush’s Waterloo.
How long before the AMA lists Bush as a leading cause of death in Americans?
More resources:
Concord Monitor: “Bush: Katrina response ‘not acceptable’ He’s under fire from both parties”
Blogcritics.org: George Bush Poll: Slightly More Popular Than Hurricane Katrina
Technorati Tags: bush, bush failure, conservative, failed leader, george bush, george w bush, hurricane, hurricane katrina, katrina, liberal, lousiana, new orleans, president, waterloo
Tags: Bush, bush failure, conservative, failed leader, george bush, george w bush, hurricane, hurricane katrina, katrina, liberal, lousiana, New Orleans, president, waterloo