Month: October 2005

From Alternet.

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.

But that’s what happened on September 20.

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s-down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”

According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent. But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.

“At 1:35, the student came to me and told me that the Secret Service had taken his poster,” Jarvis says. “I didn’t believe him at first. But they had come into my room when I wasn’t there and had taken his poster, which was in a stack with all the others.”

She says the student was upset. “He was nervous, he was scared, and his parents were out of town on business,” says Jarvis. She, too, had to talk to the Secret Service.

“Halfway through my afternoon class, the assistant principal got me out of class and took me to the office conference room,” she says. “Two men from the Secret Service were there. They asked me what I knew about the student. I told them he was a great kid, that he was in the homecoming court, and that he’d never been in any trouble.”

Then they got down to his poster.

“They asked me, didn’t I think that it was suspicious,” she recalls. “I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!”

At the end of the meeting, they told her the incident “would be interpreted by the U.S. attorney, who would decide whether the student could be indicted,” she says.

The student was not indicted, and the Secret Service did not pursue the case further.

“I blame Wal-Mart more than anybody,” she says. “I was really disgusted with them. But everyone was using poor judgment, from Wal-Mart up to the Secret Service.”

When contacted, an employee in the photo department at the Wal-Mart in Kitty Hawk said, “You have to call either the home office or the authorities to get any information about that.”

Jacquie Young, a spokesperson for Wal-Mart at company headquarters, did not provide comment within a 24-hour period.

Sharon Davenport of the Kitty Hawk Police Department said, “We just handed it over” to the Secret Service. “No investigative report was filed.” Jonathan Scherry, spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington, D.C., said, “We certainly respect artistic freedom, but we also have the responsibility to look into incidents when necessary. In this case, it was brought to our attention from a private citizen, a photo lab employee.”

Jarvis uses one word to describe the whole incident: “ridiculous.”

Just “upgraded” from an Acer laptop which I got cause it was cheap, to an ebayed Thinkpad R40. Disk space of just 20 gigs — that’ll have to be changed. But oh what a nice experience with Linux. Ubuntu got sound, video, battery monitor, and internal wifi all out of the box. R0xx0r, as the kids these days are rumored to say.

Anybody know a good place to pick up a bigger HD for this beast?

W00t.

Remember Jeb Bush’s imaginary friend, Chang the Mystical Warrior?

After more than an hour of solemn ceremony naming Rep. Marco Rubio, R-West Miami, as the 2007-08 House speaker, Gov. Jeb Bush stepped to the podium in the House chamber last week and told a short story about “unleashing Chang,” his “mystical warrior” friend.

Here are Bush’s words, spoken before hundreds of lawmakers and politicians:
”Chang is a mystical warrior. Chang is somebody who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society.

”I rely on Chang with great regularity in my public life. He has been by my side and sometimes I let him down. But Chang, this mystical warrior, has never let me down.”

Bush then unsheathed a golden sword and gave it to Rubio as a gift.

”I’m going to bestow to you the sword of a great conservative warrior,” he said, as the crowd roared.

The crowd, however, could be excused for not understanding Bush’s enigmatic foray into the realm of Eastern mysticism.

We’re here to help.

In a 1989 Washington Post article on the politics of tennis, former President George Bush was quoted as threatening to ”unleash Chang” as a means of intimidating other players.

The saying was apparently quite popular with Gov. Bush’s father, and referred to a legendary warrior named Chang who was called upon to settle political disputes in Chinese dynasties of yore.

The phrase has evolved, under Gov. Jeb Bush’s use, to mean the need to fix conflicts or disagreements over an issue. Faced with a stalemate, the governor apparently “unleashes Chang” as a rhetorical device, signaling it’s time to stop arguing and start agreeing.

No word on if Rubio will unleash Chang, or the sword, as he faces squabbles in the future.

Well, that wasn’t a mythical mystical warrior the Elder Bush was talking about, it was Chiang Kai-Shek.

When George H. W. Bush in the 1970s and 1980s threatened to “unleash Chang” on his tennis opponents, he was referring to China’s onetime strongman and thereafter Taiwan’s dictator Chiang Kaishek, leader of the Nationalist Party, the man who had largely reunified China in the 1920s with his army’s “Northern Expedition,” lost the Chinese Civil War to Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party, and then taken refuge with his Guomindang party cadres on Taiwan. After the start of the Korean War, the American 7th Fleet protected Chiang (and Taiwan) from Mao’s People’s Liberation Army.

Republican wingnuts, however, pretended that the 7th Fleet actually protected Mao’s Communists (who had, after all, won the Chinese Civil War) from Chiang’s Nationalists (who had, after all, lost it) by keeping Chiang Kaishek leashed. They periodically called for the U.S. to “unleash Chiang Kaishek”–so that Chiang, you see, could invade and conquer the Chinese mainland.

When George H. W. Bush, playing tennis (and losing) in the 1970s and 1980s, would threaten to “unleash Chiang,” he was mocking the right-wing nuts of his generation.

— Brad DeLong.

OK, that’s funny on so many levels.

Via Reddit.

Steve DeKorte on AJAX as (as Bucky Fuller put it) “yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.”

There’s something to this. If AJAX-ish apps threaten Windows, it is in some ways because they are a “worse is better” (see also) solution, as Windows always has been.

Personal note: How am I supposed to get any work done when Topher instant messages me with javascript questions? It’s super fun figuring out the relatively simple javascript challenges he poses me. Javascript is actually a super fun language; you can be incredibly elegant in it (despite a few inelegances in its syntax and the like). Every time I try something in Javascript I enjoy the language more any more. Anybody want to hire me to do nothing but program fun things in Javascript all day?

Maybe I just enjoy it because browsers have evolved to the point that most of the really painful incompatibilities and ugly workarounds are things of the past.

Great post on message boards and anonymity. (via Reddit.)

Tres thought provoking.