politics

Today -- and every January 30th from now on -- is officially recognized as "Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution" in California, the first time in U.S. history that an Asian-American has been so honored.

If you're asking, "Who's Fred Korematsu?" then take that as evidence of the way that this nation still has not dealt with one of its most shameful acts, the internment of 110,000 innocent people of Japanese ancestry during WWII. (As an aside, the Census Bureau provided the U.S. Secret Service with information to help with the round-up -- something to consider when deciding how much of your census form to complete.)

In 1942, 22-year-old welder Fred Korematsu refused to go gently along to a concentration camp, and was arrested. In 1944, in perhaps the most disgusting Supreme Court decision of the 20th century, his "disloyalty" conviction and confinement were upheld.

After fighting the power for over forty years, Korematsu finally won exoneration in 1983 when a federal judge overturned his conviction for resisting internment. In 1988 the U.S. government finally made an official apology to internees and made a (wholly inadequate) payment of $20,000 to each surviving victim.

In 1998, President Clinton bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Korematsu.

Woody Guthrie used to have the words "This Machine Kills Fascists" on his guitar. I've often thought that that would be a fine sticker to put on Internet-connected computers. The free flow of information is anathema to authoritarians.

Need proof? Reports are coming in that Egypt has shut down all internet access, as protests continue against the U.S.-backed regime of Hosni Mubarak.

That, I think, is pretty much a sign that the cat is out of the bag, and that this regime's days are numbered. (The question, though, it whether what replaces it will be better...)

Most states have official designated state flowers, state birds, and so on. Sometimes the "official state whatever" designations can get odd; Massachusetts has the corn muffin as its official state muffin, the slinky is the official state toy of Pennsylvania, and North Carolina has designated clogging as that state's official folk dance.

Now Utah is may become the first state with an official state gun, the Browning M1911; the Utah House passed this designation yesterday. (The state's Senate still has to vote on the measure.)

There's no question that the M1911 is a classic design. Also known as the Colt 1911 or Colt .45 ACP (Colt being the leading manufacturer of Browning's design), it was the standard-issue side arm for the U.S. armed forces from 1911 to 1985, is still carried by some units, and remains a very popular civilian gun. And it heavily influenced later semi-automatic handgun designs. It probably is appropriate for the state to honor the Utah-born inventor, John Browning, behind the design; and indeed it seems they already have a "John M. Browning Day".

But, not surprisingly, coming only weeks after the Tucson shooting, the designation has kicked up controversy. State Representative Carol Moss noted during floor debate that the primary audience for official state designations is school kids. The designation of a state gun "seems insensitive at this time when people are mourning the death of six people in Tucson and the serious wounding of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords – a friend of mine," Moss said.

Opponents of the bill suggested that a statue of Browning might be a better way to honor him, but State Representative Carl Wimmer, the bill's sponsor, said that a state designation made more sense because it wouldn't cost any money.

If Utah doesn't pass an official state gun bill, Pennsylvania may become the first state to do so, with a bill to make the eighteenth-century Pennsylvania long rifle an official state symbol. Since the Pennsylvania long rifle was a muzzle-loading flintlock, unlikely to be encountered today, I suspect this would generate much less controversy.

I am a gun owner and a supporter of the right to keep and bear arms. But on the other hand, I fully agree with Lao Tzu: "Weapons are instruments of ill omen; they are not the instruments of the princely man, who uses them only when he needs must." In this imperfect world in which we dwell, weapons are tools that are sometimes necessary, but we ought to be very careful about celebrating or glorifying them.

Texas is supposed to be a tough, rugged state. But apparently someone like me might be just too tough for Texas. Why? Because I live with a pit bull mix, while Texas Senator Kevin Eltife and Representative Chuck Hopson are set to sponsor a bill pushed by attorney and former state district judge Cynthia Stevens Kent to make "ownership" of pit bull type dogs a felony -- meaning, basically, "kill all pits".

Of course any fatal dog bite is a tragic thing. But according to an oft-miscited study by the the Centers for Disease Control, "Fatal attacks represent a small proportion of dog bite injuries to humans and, therefore, should not be the primary factor driving public policy concerning dangerous dogs. Many practical alternatives to breed-specific ordinances exist and hold promise for prevention of dog bites." The push for breed-specific laws is based on several selection biases -- people who want viscous dogs are more likely to select certain breeds, leading other to become paranoid that these breeds are inherently vicious. Over the years German Shepards, Dobermans, and Rottweilers have been the target of this phenomenon.

If you live in Texas, please write your representatives in opposition to this attempt to exterminate innocent dogs. I thank you, and Ringo thanks you.

Fandimo.com
Ohms Gifts Inc.
13724 Prairie Ave
Hawthorne, California 90250
info@fandimo.com

Dear Fandimo:

While searching eBay for a new business card case, I noticed that your store carried several models of what seemed to be quality products at good prices. After some comparison, I was all set to make a purchase from you -- until I found this:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Confederate-Flag-Business-Card-Cigarette-Case-Mtl-07269-/300510062699?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item45f7cba86b

I fully support the right of free speech, and would oppose any effort to legally restrict what images or logos might appear on the products you sell. However, I will not do business with a company that features products promoting the logos of violent terrorist organizations -- and that includes the anti-American, pro-slavery nineteenth-century terrorist organization that styled itself the "Confederate States Of America."

This product is not only offensive to the millions of Americans who are the descendants of the slaves that the "Confederacy" fought to keep shackled, it is offensive to every American who understands history.

Again, I support your legal right to choose the products that you offer. But I wanted you to know why you lost my business, and why I will be urging others to take their business elsewhere.

Very truly yours,

Tom Swiss

In the Star Trek (original series) episode "The Omega Glory", Kirk, Spock, and the gang find a planet inhabited by two warring tribes, the "Yangs" and the "Kohms". It turns out that these tribes are devolved remnants of American -- "Yanks" -- and Asian Communist -- "Comms" -- societies.

(Are the Kohms Chinese? Vietnamese? Korean? It's left as an unspecified yellow peril. And how did these tribes get there? Presumably either from Earth via an early space colonization effort, or by the same sort of parallel planetary evolution that gave us a planet with a technologically sophisticated Roman Empire in another episode. They never say, and it's really not important to this anvilicious tale.)

One of the chief holy relics of the Yangs is a copy of the U.S. Constitution. Problem is, the Yangs are an illiterate tribe, with no idea what the Constitution says or means. They refer to the Constitution as the "Ee'd Plebnista" (some sources render this as "E Pleb Neesta" or "E Plebnista") -- their butchered rendering of "We The People", the opening words of that document. Kirk proves to the Yangs that God is on his side by emerging victorious in single combat, and then endeavors to set them straight about The American Way, telling them "That which you call Ee’d Plebnista was not written for the chiefs or the kings or the warriors or the rich and powerful, but for all the people!...These words and the words that follow were not written only for the Yangs, but for the Kohms as well!...They must apply to everyone or they mean nothing!" You can probably picture the Shatner delivery even if you've never seen the episode.

Geraldine Doyle was the model for the "We Can Do It!" WWII poster that became a feminist icon. She died Sunday, aged 86.

A photo of Doyle taken by a UPI photographer was used as a model (just for the face, not the muscular arm) by Westinghouse graphic artist J. Howard Miller when he created the poster, which was originally aimed at deterring strikes and absenteeism. Doyle herself didn't know about the poster until the 1980s, when it became a icon of the women's movement.

The character in the image is often called "Rosie the Riveter", a name that comes from stems from a 1942 song. The song was inspired by Rosalind P. Walter, and Rose Will Monroe became the best-known "Rosie" after she was featured in a wartime promotional film. But the image modeled on Doyle -- though never originally associaited with the Rosie name -- perhaps proved to have more staying power, after it was re-discovered in the 1970s or 80s.

According to Doyle's daughter, Doyle was quick to correct people who thought she was the original Rosie the Riveter: "She would say that she was the 'We Can Do It!" girl...She never wanted to take anything away from the other Rosies."

Amazon -- the company, not the river -- has been on my shit list since they became patent-abusing bastards. But their recent actions have moved them up the list.

Most troubling is the sudden removal of WikiLeaks's content from Amazon Web Services. There was much speculation that the U.S. government put pressure on Amazon to make this happen -- but just a few weeks later, Amazon was bragging that the federal government is one of its biggest customers. This suggests that the pressure involved was good ol' money: piss of one of AWS's big customers, and Amazon will pull the plug on you.

But wait -- there's more. Rather like the rat bastards at Apple, Amazon's censorship of WikiLeaks goes along with a pattern of censorship of sexually explicit material.

It's not as if they don't know what they're doing. When people objected to a book with the (disgusting, to be sure) title Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure showing up the Kindle store, Amazon said, "Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable. Amazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions." That's a wonderful statement -- but Amazon then caved in and removed the book.

Amazon is now removing erotic incest fantasy fiction and works that portray homosexual rape -- and not just removing such stories from further sales, but deleting stories from purchaser's Kindles. Amazon was famously sued over such remote deletion last year, and supposedly set a policy which limited its use.

Amazon now says that the recent retroactive deletion was due to a "technical issue". Ha.

As you may have gathered from my last post about them, I am not a fan of Steve Jobs and Apple; they've been on my shit list since the infamous look and feel lawsuits of the late 80s and early 90s. But I am a fan of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. "Woz", as many know him, is pretty much the anti-Jobs: he was the engineering genius behind Apple's early success, back in the pre-Mac days when functionality and openness were Apple's virtues. He was the sole developer of the hardware, circuit board designs, and operating system for the Apple I, and did the vast majority of the design and development for the Apple II. Many technophiles have contrasted the openness and elegance of Woz's work with the closed, walled-garden, and pretty but technologically deficient designs pushed by Jobs.

Before Apple, Woz founded a Dial-a-Joke line; after Apple, he spent almost a decade teaching computer science, without pay, for public schools in Los Gatos. When Apple went public, Woz shared his stock options with employees he though had been unfairly left out. Wired columnist Leander Kahney calls Woz "a man who has lived his life according to deeply geeky and humanistic principles," which seems to me like a correct description and a high complement.

So when Woz talks about something with both technological and humanistic implications, like network neutrality, the wise pay heed:

The early Internet was so accidental, it also was free and open in this sense. The Internet has become as important as anything man has ever created. But those freedoms are being chipped away. Please, I beg you, open your senses to the will of the people to keep the Internet as free as possible. Local ISP's should provide connection to the Internet but then it should be treated as though you own those wires and can choose what to do with them when and how you want to, as long as you don't destruct them. I don't want to feel that whichever content supplier had the best government connections or paid the most money determined what I can watch and for how much. This is the monopolistic approach and not representative of a truly free market in the case of today's Internet.

Imagine that when we started Apple we set things up so that we could charge purchasers of our computers by the number of bits they use. The personal computer revolution would have been delayed a decade or more. If I had to pay for each bit I used on my 6502 microprocessor, I would not have been able to build my own computers anyway.

To regs@dhmh.state.md.us:

Dear Ms. Phinney:

It has been brought to my attention that that Board of Chiropractic and Massage Therapy Examiners is considering changes to Maryland's massage therapy regulations. As a Licensed Massage Therapist I find the elements of the proposal dealing with continuing education to be deeply disturbing.

The most troubling change is that which requires the State Board of Chiropractic and Massage Therapy Examiners to pre-approve all continuing education courses. Under this plan, the board will no longer accept courses that are approved by the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork (NCBTMB) -- even though NCBTMB certification is the dominant credential used for licensing in the first place. (Certification from the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (NCCAOM) is also recognized for licensure, and as an Asian Bodywork Therapist I believe that is very important.)

This will reduce the quality of continuing education available to LMTs in Maryland. I have received much of my continuing education at the national conventions of the American Organization for Bodywork Therapies of Asia (AOBTA), traveling as far as California to receive instruction from the best teachers available. AOBTA is an NCBTMB certified provider, but if each individual state were to require approval of continuing education courses, such national providers would find it difficult or impossible to continue.

The proposal states that it "has no economic impact" and "has minimal or no economic impact on small businesses." This is a stunningly inaccurate statement. Many, if not most, massage therapists work for small businesses or are sole proprietors themselves, and continuing education makes up a significant outlay. And this proposal would heavily impact continuing education providers both in Maryland and across the nation.

This proposal is not in the best interests of the public, and I strongly urge DHMH to reject it. Thank you.

Very truly yours,

Tom Swiss
Dipl. A.B.T. (NCCAOM), AOBTA-CP, LMT
tms@EarthTouchShiatsu.com