Student shot with Taser by UCPD officers after failing to show ID at a random check in a UCLA computer lab.

Laila Gordy, a fourth-year economics student who was present in the library during the incident, said police officers threatened to shoot her with a Taser when she asked an officer for his name and his badge number.

It’s hard to believe, while watching what was going on, that not a single person attempted to attack the officers to stop the abuse. It reminds me of the Houston Wal-Mart case where bystanders watched as Wal-Mart employees killed a man by pressing his chest to the hot parking lot asphalt until he suffered a heart attack. How egregious does the assault have to be before we challenge an authority? How much do we have to be pushed before we push back?

More: an eyewitness account.

“This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.” Adam Curtis’s The Century Of The Self is a four-part BBC documentary about the effect one belief has had on business and politics of the 20th century: that human beings are inherently irrational beings driven by sexual and aggressive drives that must be controlled by society or else be destroyed by them.

All four hours are available for download from archive.org, as well as on Google Video:

Ars Technica has a comprehensive report on how easy it would be to steal an election in the United States by exploiting vulnerabilities in the electronic voting and optical scan voting systems in place throughout 80% of the nation’s voting precincts. By distilling hundreds of reports, videos and news stories regarding the myriad security holes present in systems like the ones Diebold is setting up across the country, Jon Stokes has painted a chilling picture of untraceable, wholesale electoral fraud:

The picture that I’ve painted here about the state of the American electoral system is bleak and depressing. Even more depressing is the fact that absolutely nothing can be done to address these vulnerabilities in any substantial way before the November midterm elections.

(…)

My own personal fear is that, by the time a whistleblower comes forth with an indisputable smoking gun—hard evidence that a large election has been stolen electronically—we will have lost control of our electoral process to the point where we will be powerless to enact meaningful change. The clock is ticking on this issue, because a party that can use these techniques to gain control of the government can also use them to maintain control in perpetuity.

Like the New Deal, but scarier. A very interesting New Yorker article on one of the architects behind the Bush administration’s stance on foreign policy and national security.

I was reading The Age Of Consent recently, and though I remain skeptical of George Monbiot’s grandiose plans for a new world order (after all, anyone who speaks of anything resembling a new world order is going to sound a bit loony), I do agree with what he says near the end of the book. It boils down to this: if my book has you nodding your head in agreement, then I have both succeeded and failed—succeeded because I’ve convinced you my proposal is the right one, and failed because your first response wasn’t immediately “what can I do now do bring about the bloodless revolution?”

Monbiot is less than satisfying on this front; he throws out some ideas for how people can turn his manifesto into reality, but everything is prefaced with the warning that those who start the revolution are rarely the ones to profit from it. Anyone who knows me knows my views on things like mass protests and consumer boycotts are dim at best. It’s not so much that they’re bad as they are distracting; the powers that be have figured out how to turn the full force of a large anti-war protest and turn it into a glancing blow. Media and politicians alike denounce violent protest as a threat, regardless of who provoked whom, and ignore peaceful protest as the words of a marginal few. Instead of reusing old tactics and rhetoric from the flower generation (protest songs? really?), it’s time to move on and figure out what new forms of action exist. What can we, as individual citizens, do to make the most impact today? What’s our best chance of affecting change, considering that many of the old ways (and even some of the new ones) are now hopelessly marginalized and neutralized? The world will not be saved by the likes of the Huffington Post; so what in its place?

Sadly, this is where I falter; I honestly don’t know. Part of the situation might be the framing of the problem; is it possible to improve the current international system of trade and justice by augmenting it here and there with charity (the classic “fly to Africa and build water pumps” scenario), or is the system hopelessly unworkable? What if you believe the latter, as an increasing number of people do these days? Are you wasting your time hoping for a revolution that will never come?

All I’ve gained thus far from Monbiot’s book is a newfound appreciation for international politics and a more acute sense of the inequalities between the developing world and the developed world. As for where I should direct my energies, I’m still as lost as I’ve always been.

I’m so glad that Canadian politics is still provincial enough (no pun intended) that stuff like this doesn’t immediately bring on the Pundit Brigade:

Gerry Nicholls thought he was hallucinating as he kicked back in his seat to take the 35-minute GO train ride to his Oakville home.

About every three seconds, the scrolling electronic sign that usually carries transit updates and advertisements had a very different message that he just could not keep his eyes off.

“Stephen Harper Eats Babies. Stephen Harper Eats Babies. Stephen Harper Eats Babies,” the message kept repeating.

(…)

Asked about his time with Harper at the National Citizens Coalition, Nicholls said: “I worked with Stephen Harper for five years and never once did he in that time eat a baby.”

Perhaps for true bipartisanship, someone should hijack other GO Transit signs. “Jack Layton strangles puppies,” anyone?

(also see: Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, aka “reptilian kitten-eater”)

A Florida high school marching band had to turn down the chance to play in London’s New Year’s Day 2007 parade because of the danger they might be attacked by terrorists. Compare and contrast the comments of school board officials and student reaction:

What happens if kids get on a train that blows up? We don’t have trains blowing up in America.
—Herb Wiseman, high school consultant for Lee County

It’s more probable to be struck by lightning or be murdered in your sleep, than to fall prey to an attack by al-Qaeda terrorists.
—Ethan Lapham, member of the Fort Myers High School marching band

The Oil We Eat is a Harper’s article by Richard Manning based on a book he’s written, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization. Both the book and the article discuss the increasing toll modern agricultural techniques are taking on our ecosystem and on our dwindling fossil fuels. In short, it is another sign of the apocalypse—so to speak.

(more…)

We thought you could hardly find an audience that was more appreciative of the threat posed by people who are trying to kill us than the devotees of ‘24.’ Minor spoilers in the above link.

Scare ads targeting Republican senators advocating stronger civil liberties protections in the Patriot Act have begun airing during episodes of 24. The first ad, featuring a widower of the September 11th attacks asking “what if they’re wrong?” and ending with the tagline “our lives depend on it,” aired just after a pivotal moment in the last episode, when Jack Bauer threatened to cut someone’s eyes out in order to glean information from him.

Surprisingly, compared to previous seasons, season 5 of 24 has been relatively even-handed in both its political outlook and its use of torture as an intelligence tool. This season has certainly not been up to the caliber of season 2, when the use of torture was given a great deal of consideration and painted as a complicated issue with many downsides. But compared to last season, when torture was basically used as a pseudo deus-ex-machina device by the writers to give CTU information without doing any actual investigative work, it’s somewhat amazing that we’re five episodes in and this is the first time Jack’s tried to coerce information using the threat of pain.

Obviously, however, conservatives were paying close attention to the torture debate last season, and must have come to the same conclusion as those on the other side of the issue: 24’s gratuitous use of torture has made it acceptable in the eyes of its viewers, no longer a taboo method prone to failure but in fact a tidy and reliable method of intelligence gathering when time is critical. The fact that the red-herring “ticking bomb” scenario always comes up now when torture is discussed in the media is almost entirely thanks to 24; before the show’s existence, most people probably thought of a ticking bomb as the sort of thing Boris and Natasha might plan to foil Moose and Squirrel.

The dreaded Broadcast flag is a technology designed to regulate the use of digital content on your electronic equipment—everything from computers to televisions to MP3 players. The idea is that unless you’re authorized to watch that DVD on your TV or rip that copy-protected CD to your computer, you won’t be able to do it—and you wouldn’t be able to buy equipment that didn’t recognize the broadcast flag or hack around it, because the RIAA, MPAA and other related lobby groups want to make the broadcast flag part of American federal law.

But two U.S. senators have done the unthinkable: they’ve made informed comments about legislation regarding new technology! And wait until you find out who’s decided the Broadcast flag legislation isn’t a good idea: John Sununu (R-New Hampshire) and the infamous Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). Yeah, the guy who wants so badly to drill in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge also wants to be able to record radio shows and listen to them on his iPod, broadcast flag be damned.

I’m so conflicted. ANWR on the one hand, anti-copy-protection on the other… Ted Stevens, I wish I knew how to quit you.