Keys Corner

The lengths the US government goes to, to try and convince its subjects that they are under threat from dark forces is truly incredible:

My father, a Palestinian professor named Sami Al-Arian, was arrested over four years ago on trumped-up terrorism charges and submitted to a prosecution over the course of six months that bordered on the farcical. Though he was ultimately acquitted by a jury of the most serious charges against him, the Bush administration has prolonged his imprisonment indefinitely. My father now languishes in a Virginia jail, another victim of the demagogic politics of the so-called war on terror.

Many have wondered why my father would be targeted so vigorously, especially after the government lost a case that cost $50 million…

...When my father’s trial finally began in June 2005, the government presented 71 witnesses, including nearly two dozen from Israel, paraded before the jury for sheer emotional effect. Four hundred phone calls out of half a million the government recorded during a decade of relentless, indiscriminate surveillance of my family were also presented. The prosecutors acted out the phone calls on the 13th floor of a courtroom in downtown Tampa, giving new meaning to the phrase political theater…

I spent some time in the 1980’s regreting that I hasn’t tried to get a job in the USA - I worked on a project which involved regular trips to different parts of the country – including both US coasts, and several cities in the middle of the country, and was very impressed with both the spectacular landscapes and the friendly American people. We know several Brits who did move to the USA and took American citizenship, but now I am really glad we never got our act together. As Naomi Wolf pointed out in the Guardian a couple of days ago, they are already well down the road to having a fascist government.

One of the brilliant pictures in Nick Garrod’s Flickr photostream – take a look.

NB: Studio produced a large map of London using only the words of the names of locations for the exhibition My London / My City, which was part of the London Design Festival 2006. Called London’s Kerning, it won the Design Week Award in February this year. They are selling a limited edition of 60×40” prints of the map.

(Via swissmiss)

Note to self:
From some time in May, iTunes should be offering DRM-free tracks from EMI. Here’s a list of artists who are signed up with EMI.

Gill gave us a G.W. Bush calendar last Christmas, which has been a source of much amusement so far – each day’s sheet has a quotation from the US President. However, if you don’t have the calendar, it’s OK - the White House web site is also a good source for his quotes. Like this one, for example, taken from a speech made a couple of days ago in Ohio:

My job is a job to make decisions. I’m a decision—if the job description were, what do you do—it’s decision-maker. And I make a lot of big ones, and I make a lot of little ones.

Interestingly enough, the first decision I made happened right before I got sworn in as President. I was at the Blair House, which is across the street from the White House, getting ready to give my inaugural address. And the phone rang, and the head usher at the White House said, “President-elect Bush.” I said, “Yes.” He said, “What color rug do you want in the Oval Office?” (Laughter.) I said, this is going to be a decision-making experience. (Laughter.)

In the Guardian today:

Electronic signatures scanned on to driving licences and passports differ so much from people’s usual signatures that they may not guard against fraud, it has been claimed.

Well, that’s hardly surprising – instead of your normal signature, you usually have to squeeze it into a little box which is too small and that results in bits of the signature landing outside the box. Then the whole thing gets reduced in size when it gets printed onto the document which in some cases is no larger than a credit card.

On the other hand, passports these days are full of other biometric data, so it really shouldn’t be a problem for the governments, and as far as fraud is concerned, I’d have thought signatures on credit cards would be of more concern (if anyone in the shops actually looked at them!). These are even more problematic, since in addition to being restricted in space, you are often compelled to try and write them on a piece of slippery plastic, with the result that the signature looks nothing like your usual squiggle any way.

One law for Wolfowitz, and another for the third world. What a pity the same standards don’t apply in both cases.

It could be summer today – over 22°C and a completely blue sky. Lovely.

Matthias Wandel likes building Lego™ machines. So he used Lego to test this pager when he was working on a project in 1998 at RIM (Research in Motion, who you probably have heard of as the makers of the Blackberry phone/communications device) and billed the Lego bricks to the project!

If you have any plans to visit the spectacular Grand Canyon Skywalk, you will probably be interested to read this article first – here’s the salient point:

We walked in to get the tickets and met a very long line of people waiting to do the same. After 10 minutes of waiting, a “Question Answerer” came by and made it clear why it was taking so long: the sales people had to explain the “packages” and pricing to each and every person in the line. This was not because the package was that complex, but because each person in the line thought they were going to be paying $25 per person. In reality, the tribe was charging another $50 on top of the $25 for each person. You read that right, 75 bucks a pop. The “Question Answerer” explained it to us:

“The investor wants to get his, that’s the $25. But it’s our land, and we don’t get any of that $25, so we have to get ours too, you know?”

On top of the $75 you need to add tax, making $83 per person. For that price, by the way, you are not allowed to take your camera onto the Skywalk.