Wednesday, April 21, 2004
In January 2003, Congressman Rangel and Senator Hollings introduced legislation reinstating a military draft. Congressman Rangel argues that if the Bush Administration is so keen on overextending the military, which is disproportionately poor and disenfranchised, then it seems fair to draft women and the rich. Some people have taken the bills at face value, and some understand it as a political move — something that makes the Administration look very, very bad.
The DOD has stated many times that it doesn’t even want a draft — they learned from Vietnam that a fully professional force is better than conscripts in every way. Significantly, the bill offers non-military service as an alternative to the traditional draft. A good piece on the subject:
http://www.free-times.com/archive/coverstorarch/iraq_032603/cover_draft.html
The text of the bills are here:
http://www.congress.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:SN00089:
http://www.congress.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:HR00163:
Other background:
http://www.senate.gov/~hollings/press/2003127851.html
http://www.hillnews.com/news/100703/draft.aspx
Roy Parviz Mottaehdeh‘s Keeping the Shi’ites Straight is a great primer on Shi’ite history. He provides some valuable context to the Western media’s coverage of the Shi’ite uprising by describing the internal workings of the Shi’ite minority in Iraq.
This is best story about the marriage debate I’ve seen. Even though it isn’t ostensibly about the gay marriage debate. It’s about my friend Cora’s parents an their decision not to marry. Unspoken is the context that when they met, a marriage between them — a black man and a white woman — had only recently become legal in many states.
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April 4, 2004
LIVES
Not the Marrying Kind
By CORA DANIELS
found out in sixth grade. I was supposed to go to a friend’s house after school, but during lunch period, she remembered it was her parents’ wedding anniversary. I’d have to come over another afternoon. I understood. It was the divorce decade of 80′s Manhattan; we were two of the few kids in our class who even lived with both of our parents. So an anniversary wasn’t something that should pass without notice. And it got me thinking: why was it that I never made my parents an anniversary card?
Continue reading... (1013 words, estimated 4:03 mins reading time)
The EFF directs us to an article by John Phillip Sousa, warning against the evils of recorded music. The argument is eerily familiar:
“I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue — or rather by vice — of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines.”
“[F]or the life of me I am puzzled to know why the powerful corporations controlling these playing and talking machines are so totally blind to the moral and ethical questions involved. Could anything be more blamable, as a matter of principle, than to take an artist’s composition, reproduce it a thousandfold on their machines, and deny him all participation in the large financial returns…?”
I'm the Chief Technology Strategist for the Red Hat US Public Sector group, an open source and free culture advocate, a picky drinker, an amateur aesthete, and a dog enthusiast.
