Mission Accomplished flushed down the Memory Hole

How curious. The giant "Mission Accomplished" banner from Bush's 2003 aircraft carrier speech is no longer visible in the official Whitehouse video.

Not that the White House would try to edit history. It must be one of those coincidences...

Banned books

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Banned Books Week, Google Books is highlighting some of the classics of 20th century literature which, at one time or another, have been banned or challenged.

Doctrine of Ignorance

The Seattle Times has a powerful piece about the Bush Doctrine of Ignorance. The Bush administration is perhaps the most pointlessly secretive administration the US has ever seen, to the point of "locking the barn after the horse has escaped -- and died of old age", as the editorial describes the re-censoring of fifty-year old public documents dealing with the Cold War, documents which were innoculous enough to have been made available even to the Soviet Union, and which have been openly cited in government heaings, reported on by the media, and even written up in history books.

Anyone who doesn't see a pattern here has not been paying attention. From its 18-hour blackout of news that the vice president had shot a man, to its paying a newspaper columnist to write favorable pieces, to its habit of putting out video press releases disguised as TV news, to its penchant for stamping top secret on anything that doesn't move fast enough, this administration has repeatedly shown contempt for the right of the people to know what's going on. At a time when information is more readily available than ever, this government is working like 1952 to enforce ignorance.

And the people, too many of them, shrug and say okey-dokey. As if we learned nothing from Abscam, Iran-contra, Vietnam and Watergate. As if it's OK for an arrogant and paternalistic government to decide for us what we get to know.

Well, it's not. An informed electorate is the lifeblood of democracy, the ultimate check on despotic ambitions.

Help ban this offensive book from Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart has, in the past, banned books from their shelves if they have contained offensive, objectionable content. Unfortunately, they have missed a truly repulsive example of a book containing the most horribly offensive passages. This work of depravity:

• calls for discrimination against women and the disabled


• endorses slavery and the treatment of human beings as property


• incites hate crimes against American citizens


• encourages rape and murder of children


• calls for the murder of religious people and the destruction of their cities


• and, in what I would have thought should be of particular concern to Wal-Mart, demands the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of Wal-Mart employees merely for doing their jobs

When you consider the hateful views espoused in this book, I'm shocked that Wal-Mart would allow that book to be sold in its stores.

That book is the Holy Bible, and there is a petition for Wal-Mart to remove the book from their shelves.

(I've written about a related matter before.)

China criminalises journalism

Seems that China is about to criminalise the reporting of news without government permission.

Didn't the Soviet Union try that? How did it go for them?

Censorship, here and there

Two reports on Internet censorship from Boing Boing:

The first discusses censorship in China. Ben Lehman, who lives in Shanghai, discusses the widely variable, inconsistent censorship of the Internet within China:

The insidious thing about this is not the censorship [...] but the fact that most Chinese people don't even know its there. Almost no one I've talked to even understands that government censorship happens at all -- it just looks to them like the internet has a lot more "dead links" and, if that's all you're used to, there's no reason to expect otherwise.

Techies and geeks often suggest that Internet censorship doesn't matter, because it is easy to get around. Easy for some, perhaps, not so easy for others -- but as Lehman suggests, the biggest problem is that people don't even know they are being censored. If web pages came up with great big CENSORED it wouldn't matter -- people would know when they were having things hidden from them, and make their decisions accordingly. What hurts us is not so much the lies we know about, as those we don't know about.

(Censorship is a lie -- it tells us that something doesn't exist when it does.)

Meanwhile, back in Australia... our government has stepped back from the threatened compulsory Internet filters, and is offering free Internet filters to anyone stupid enough to ask for one.

Why stupid? Because censorware filters are unreliable, biased, and capricious. (The full report by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU is here.)

David Cake from Electronic Frontiers Australia writes:

With the conservative government being heavily lobbied by conservative Christian groups and others calling for opt-out ISP level filtering, and a misguided opposition supporting them, a proposal that takes ISP level filtering off the table and replaces it with opt-in PC filtering has actually improved the political outlook here quite a bit.

With the current state of politics, the rise of conservative Fundamentalism, and the selling of government to the all-mighty corporate dollar, it is a good day when my tax dollars are merely going to be wasted on doing harm to a minority of volunteers who opt-in to censorware. Good news indeed.