The URL for Follow Me Here is changing, to http://gelwan.com/followme.html. Thank you in advance for changing your bookmarks and spreading the word. The old ones,
http://gelwan.com/blogger.html, http://world.std.com/~emg/blogger.html, and (most ungainly of all) http://world.std.com/home/dacha/WWW/emg/public_html/blogger.html,
should still work, but will redirect you to the actual page.
Annals of the Invasion of Privacy (cont’d.): Face Scanners Turn Lens on Selves: ‘A leading maker of facial recognition software is calling for federal regulation of the controversial technology
to avoid misuse.
The technology, which converts facial images into an easily compiled and searched numerical code, has
been criticized by privacy advocates who say the scans amount to facial frisking… The technology first gained public notoriety in January, when Tampa, Florida, police used it to scan the
faces of unsuspecting football fans at the Super Bowl and compare their mugs with terrorists and other
criminals.” Wired
Fightin’ word: “It’s time for the left to reclaim the
term ‘anarchy’… It isn’t violence
that makes the anarchist; it’s the philosophy… A nuanced debate about anarchism would lend
credence to a set of ideas that challenge the status quo.” Mother Jones via wood s lot
Jeremy Rifkin makes an extraordinary observation, and an extraordinary prediction, in The Guardian. This is the age of biology, he says, and it will realign politics around shared goals that could not have been imagined a few years ago. He notes that right-to-life conservatives and left activists are finding common ground in their different, but converging, notions of reverence for life in contrast to a merely utilitarian view driven by the biotech industry and “market libertarians” who make the processes of life “amenable to design, customisation and mass production” and “available to customers as products and services.” He observes- — and I agree — that both groups share an oppositon to the granting of patents on “genes, cells, tissues, organs and organisms”; to GM foods; and to “designer babies”. However, I’m not as confident as he is that progressives are as united, and thus convergent with the right-to-lifers, as he claims they are in opposition to the cloning of embryos for research or even for clinical supply of stem cells, although of course they abhor commercialisation and corporate control of the process. The US does appear to be on the brink of a total ban on human cloning(BBC) for any purpose, as of this writing. But — more fundamentally — will positions with regard to these issues, as he proclaims, totally supplant classical political divisions organized around the industrial-age issues of control of the means of production and distribution of the fruits of labor and profit?
President Bush’s World is Turning. “The Bush administration’s alarming penchant for going it alone in world affairs could have
one unintended and salutary effect: Europe, however reluctantly, is learning how to lead.
And Europe could lead the way to a more balanced global order.” Boston Globe via Common Dreams
