Chief Justice dead

Chief Justice William Rehnquist died this evening.

"We are you."

Anne Rice's NY Times statement, here.

Among other things, she says:

I know that New Orleans will win its fight in the end. I was born in the city and lived there for many years. It shaped who and what I am. Never have I experienced a place where people knew more about love, about family, about loyalty and about getting along than the people of New Orleans. It is perhaps their very gentleness that gives them their endurance.

They will rebuild as they have after storms of the past; and they will stay in New Orleans because it is where they have always lived, where their mothers and their fathers lived, where their churches were built by their ancestors, where their family graves carry names that go back 200 years. They will stay in New Orleans where they can enjoy a sweetness of family life that other communities lost long ago.

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs.

Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.

I don't have any links for this

My housemate (she's a dialysis and critical care nurse) just informed me that a doctor has managed to procure a New Orleans area Wa* Mart. He's setting it up to help the most medically compromised, out of that facility.

He only has five staffing volunteers so far, but she signed up to go. She goes on the hero list, too.

This is what it's going to take. We are going to have to do this ourselves.

I weep for New Orleans

Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Making Light point out this story, at Respectful of Otters.

Why The Aid Wasn't There

The Red Cross has been ordered not to enter New Orleans with relief.

Hurricane Katrina: Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?

• Acess to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.


• The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

"Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city." See, and here you thought that tens of thousands of people spent the last few days trapped in the Superdome or the Convention Center without food, water, medical care, electric power, or basic sanitation, in constant fear of violence, surrounded by the unburied corpses of their fellow victims, because they couldn't evacuate. But all this time, they've been there by choice. If they had a Red Cross station distributing fresh water and sandwiches, they'd choose to stay in their fetid, corpse-riddled, life-threatening, lawless swamp of a city indefinitely. You know what those people are like, always sitting around waiting for a handout. Humanitarian aid just encourages them.

Yes, clearly, it's far better to evacuate Katrina's victims than to leave them in place in New Orleans. But when you can't get them all out right away - and they haven't even been able to finish evacuating the hospitals, much less the lower-priority evacuees - you need to provide aid in place. Immediately, not five days later. To willfully withhold basic life support from tens of thousands of desperate people because you think it will discourage evacuation is - actually, I have no words strong enough for what it is. Unconscionable. Morally depraved. A crime against humanity. Nothing seems strong enough.

How about "murder"?

One of the commenters at Making Light pointed out this report of people TRYING to evacuate...but being turned back.

So, what do we call it when thousands of people are trapped in a box, and we don't let them out, and we don't give them any food or water...?

*update: Feds refuse aid from Chicago, too. Reported from Talk Left.
**new update: Daily Kos has some frightening things to say about what begins to look less like incompetence, and more like systematic obstructionism.

Meanwhile...

Remember all those reports of widespread violence? Remember how it just wasn't safe to try and rescue or take relief into the city?

From Canada's The Globe and Mail:
"Everywhere Fred and I went yesterday, people came running up to us. They knew, by Fred's cameras, we were press. They knew we couldn't help. But they were so grateful that their story might be told (and, I believe, to see a couple of white people who were not afraid of them because of their skin colour) that they embraced us like friends.

Most of them were brought here, or told to come here, from the safe high ground of local highways where many of them spent days waiting for buses and help, after they were rescued from roofs and attics.

Nothing happens. Nothing changes. And yet as each new rumour arises of an army of buses on its way, they line up, orderly-like, their old people and babies up front and wait."

"Let Them Eat Cake..."

"Out of the rubble of Trent Lott's house -- he lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." --George W. Bush, quoted in the Washington Post.

Rolling up our sleeves

New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin said last night:

...we authorized $8 billion to go to Iraq, lickety-quick. After 9/11, we gave the president unprecedented powers -- lickety-quick -- to take care of New York and other places. Now you mean to tell me that a place where most of the oil is coming through... a place that is so unique, when you mention New Orleans anywhere around the world, everybody's eyes light up... you mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands people that have died, and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can't figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need? Come on, man.

You know I'm not one of those drug addicts, I am thinking very clearly. And I don't know whose problem it is. I don't know whether it's the governor's problem, I don't know whether it's the president's problem. But somebody needs to get their ass on a plane, and sit down, the two of them, and figure this out right now."

The transcript is here--(from Friday, September 2.)

You can listen to the interview here, or if you have trouble with that link, the CNN link is here.

It is obvious at this point that our federal government is fucking useless, worthless, incompetent, and callous-to-the-point of criminality.

The Rude Pundit has this to say about the situation: "But the Bush adminstration has broken the basic social contract in New Orleans, the one that goes all the way back to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the one that says we adhere to laws because you agree to protect us, and thus the city and its citizens have returned to the state of nature, which is to survive, motherfuckers, just survive."

He's absolutely, succinctly correct.

That observation isn't going to help a single human being, though. Moreover, it's no surprise.The help that has arrived in the Gulf Coast region is too fucking little, too fucking late, and god bless the men and women on the ground, there, doing the best they can with little support and apparently no effective command structure.

That means Americans are going to have to help each other as best we can, and deal with the massive, tragic, and internationally embarrassing failings of the Bush Administration later.

Right now, our own desperately need help.

The American Red Cross donation site

The American Red Cross volunteer match site

http://www.volunteermatch.org/

Network for Good: resources for non-profit organizations

USA Freedom Corps--volunteer network

WorldVision.org

Northwest Medical Teams, international

Very likely, local organizations in your own community are also mounting relief efforts. Please get involved. If you can't give money, or space in your house, give an hour or two of your time.

____________

Another "I'm okay" registry some of these sites really need to combine their efforts. There are just too many to keep track of, of perform effectively.


Katrina Information map--this is an interactive and ongoing project.

Just a few disorganized thoughts.

The more I find out about just how very many people are affected by the hurricane disaster, the more I deeply believe that this moment in history will define us for a very long time to come--the same way the War Between the States defined generations of Americans, continuing all the way to the present.

This moment--more than 9/11 or Iraq, more than the Clinton impeachment, more than any thing that's happened since Vietnam--will determine more than we realize about what this country becomes in the future.

Now. What the fuck do we do about it?

Listen up!

From Chuck Taggart's blog, Looka
"Listen to "Down Home" with me tonight.

I have to go into KCSN tonight and do a radio show that consists primarily of New Orleans music. [snip]

I'll have some New Orleans friends with me, and that'll be a comfort. And it'll be additionally comforting to know that some of my friends out there are listening too. Tune in at 7pm Pacific Time, locally at 88.5 FM or via the webcast at kcsn.org. We'll let Kermit do the talking, all about "what is New Orleans"; we'll listen to Jack Fine and his Palmetto Bug Stompers; we'll listen to Louis singing about knowing what it means to miss New Orleans. Let's do it together."

So if y'all are somewhere you can listen to a webcast tonight--the party's at kcsn.org.

Cheers for Houston's citizens

From NewsFlash:
"Standing in the Rose Garden, Bush said, "This recovery will take a long time. This recovery will take years."

He said buses were on the way to help take thousands of storm survivors from the overwhelmed Superdome in New Orleans to the Astrodome in Houston."

Meanwhile, from assorted word-of-mouth sources, rumor has it the bulldozers and earth-movers are already rolling on neighborhoods, but I've yet to be able to confirm that.

David Benzion* of The Lone Star Times, blogging from the Holiday Inn at the Astrodome, says:

"In a stunning and completely inexplicable display of compassion and generosity, citizens of Houston have begun to offer assistance to arriving refugees without ever having been directed to do so by a properly authorized governmental authority.

Your reporter witnessed this bizarre behavior principally in the Fiesta parking lot across from the Astrodome at Kirby and La Concha. Throughout the evening, several hundred refugees attempted to enter the Astrodome parking lot in crammed and crowded cars, only to be told that they would not be allowed in, since they hadn’t been part of the "official" Superdome caravan and the necessary supplies could not be guaranteed.

Ignoring their lack of proper bureaucratic classification, the plight of these "renegade refugees" was soon alleviated by a steady stream of private individuals and groups who gathered together in the above mentioned parking lot and began to offer assistance. It is not clear when, if ever, this parking lot was designated by federal officials to serve as a "refugee relocation and relief" zone.

One local anarchist boldly grilled and handed out upwards of 400 pounds of free hot dogs, knowingly flouting his lack of public food preparation permits."
*advisory: this blog tends to be over-sensational, with a right-wing agenda I dislike intensely. He was the only eyewitness-on-the-web I could find (so far) posting about the Astrodome situation.

Basin Street Blues, Louis Armstrong

Won't you come and go with me
Down that Mississippi
We'll take a boat to the land of dreams
Come along with me on, down to New Orleans

Now the band's there to greet us
Old friends will meet us
Where all them folks goin to the St. Louis Cemetary meet
Heaven on earth.... they call it Basin Street

I'm tellin' ya, Basin Street...... is the street
Where all them characters from the First street they meet
New Orleans..... land of dreams
you'll never miss them rice and beans
Way down south in New Orleans

They'll be huggin'.... and a kissin'
That's what I been missin'
And all that music....lord, if you just listen'
New Orleans....I got them Basin Street Blues

(instrumental break)

Now ain't you glad you went with me
On down that Mississippi
We took a boat to the land of dreams
Heaven on earth...they call it Basin Street


More images.

More Check-in Links

If you're in the hurricane aftermath zone, let someone know you're okay. There are also areas for discussion of the hurricane and aftermath at the following links.

craigslist>New Orleans>lost & found (Again, with thanks and a nod to TNH at Making Light.)

Katrina Check-In

NOLA refugees.com check-in site

Patrick Connors' check-in site, now automated

Jim Macdonald's check-in site

Responses are beginning to trickle in. There are an enormous number of people missing and unaccounted-for.

Another way to help: Send a flood-bucket.

The sheer magnitude of human suffering as a direct result of this catastrophe cannot even be estimated, yet. Tens of thousands--perhaps more--have lost everything. Many of those people abruptly no longer have jobs, while they begin to face rebuilding.

This is an old, old story for the inhabitants of the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi River flood plains. There's an rich tradition of music and culture and cuisine unique to the region, stemming directly from its mixed and painful history.

If anyone in the world can rebuild--these people can. They will. I have complete faith.

Look, maybe I seem a little obsessive about this. Hell, I probably am. There's a reason for that. My experience of New Orleans--especially the neighborhoods in and around the Quarter--is that reality is a bit suspended, there.

For the rest of my life I will remember walking home from the New Orleans French Quarter in the fog, at around 4:30 in the morning, singing "Stand By Me"--really belting it out. From a balcony maybe a block away, a woman with a gorgeous voice picked up the harmonies on the chorus, weaving in and out around the melody. Then, somewhere else in the fog, a guy picked up the bass line.

The friend I was walking with stopped walking, and later swore that he stopped breathing to listen.

I know I was a little drunk--but every note was pure, and dead-on. There was a weird . . . synergy. The song ended all at once, as if we'd rehearsed it. Something about the acoustics of the streets, in the fog--you could still hear the last notes ringing overhead.

There's not much I can do, from here. I can go to the Red Cross site and donate money. I can spread the word about check-in sites. You can do those things, too.

Katrina Links

Swiped from "Making Light":

Katrina
(Posted by TNH at 12:59 AM)

"Check-in pages: let people know you’re okay, and where you are.

Jim Macdonald’s page at SFF Net.

Patrick Connors’ check-in page.

Basic info and primary data:

NOAA/NWS’s National Hurricane Center website.

The National Weather Service Telecommunication Operations Center, the National Weather Service Forecast Office for New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and the NWS Nonprecipitation Warnings. Even the weather junkies amongst us have never seen the NWS use language like they’ve used tonight. It’s terrifying.

Wikipedia is doing a magnificent job of collecting and compiling information on Katrina.

New Orleans webcams. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006666.html#006666

More NOLA webcams.

Even more NOLA webcams. There’s some overlap from site to site.

Brian Robak has a spectacular collection of animated and still radar and satellite images.

A satellite image of New Orleans, for reference.

The concise New Orleans Hurricane Impact Study Area page, with assorted useful links, maps, and charts, including a shaded wireframe map of areas of New Orleans that are below sea level.

News compilers and knowledgeable watchers:

Jeff Masters’ extremely knowledgeable Weather Underground site.

Steve Gregory’s Weather Underground page.

Stormtrack: Frequent updates, bleakly humorous titles.

New Orleans Metroblog is collecting storm reports and substantial first-person accounts.

So is the NOLA View weblog.

MetaFilter is accumulating material as usual: much signal, much noise.

Insomnia is collecting storm reports at his Live Journal.

Background articles

Hurricane Risk for New Orleans: one of the two prescient articles everyone’s quoting.

Chris Mooney’s Thinking Big about Hurricanes: the other prescient and much-quoted article.

And another bit from Chris Mooney.

An old Making Light post about New Orleans’ vulnerability.

Popular Mechanics published an article on what could happen if New Orleans gets hit by a Cat. 5 hurricane. The article might have gotten more attention if it hadn’t been published 9/11/01." (end quote)

________________________________________________________________

They're having a terrific ongoing discussion over there.

Also, blogs out of New Orleans:
Looka! I Am Dubious

WSDU Katrina Blog

Polimom--Algiers and East Bank update
________________________________________________________________

How you can help:

DisasterHelp
Salvation Army
Red Cross

The More Things Change...

When the Levee Breaks ("Kansas" Joe McCoy, 1929)

If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break (2x)
And the water gonna come in, have no place to stay

Well all last night I sat on the levee and moan (2x)
Thinkin' 'bout my baby and my happy home

If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break (2x)
And all these people have no place to stay

Now look here mama what am I to do (2x)
I ain't got nobody to tell my troubles to

I works on the levee mama both night and day (2x)
I ain't got nobody, keep the water away

Oh cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do no good (2x)
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to lose

I works on the levee, mama both night and day (2x)
I works so hard, to keep the water away

I had a woman, she wouldn't do for me (2x)
I'm goin' back to my used to be

I's a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan (2x)
Gonna leave my baby, and my happy home

Last night, I overheard someone point out that Katrina hit
the Gulf Coast at the end of the month.  I suspect a number
of those folks who "chose" to stay and ride it out actually
just flat couldn't afford to evacuate.

Meanwhile I'm watching a dumbass news story about a
vacationing family that couldn't find a car to rent, so they
took a limo--all the way back to Chicago.

Katrina's Aftermath

The worst weather is over, from this storm. For the next several weeks or even months, people will be digging out, rebuilding, putting in new plate glass, and so on.

There's going to be some loss of life. How much remains to be seen.

You might offer a silent thought, positive energy, or even a prayer to the higher-power of your choice, for the people in the path of this storm.

Remember the "Redneck" discussion?

Pete just posted this in the comments on the Redneck entry.
I think it's fucking brilliant.

I'm especially impressed that he managed to read the damn thing, in its current state of template-mucking garish bright-yellow-on-light-gray semi-invisibility.

Pete said...

> You might be a redneck if: It never occurred to you to be offended by the
> phrase, "One nation, under God."

You might be a liberal if: You respect Americans of all cultures.

> You might be a redneck if: You've never protested about seeing the 10
> Commandments posted in public places.

You might be a liberal if: You believe passionately in your own faith, but would never dream of pushing it on someone else.

> You might be a redneck if: You still say "Christmas" instead of "Winter
> Festival."

You might be a liberal if: You know that it doesn't matter what you call it, it's about love, family and giving.

> You might be a redneck if: You bow your head when someone prays.

You might be a liberal if: You bow your head when a Christian prays, you turn to face Mecca when a Muslim prays, and you respect people who don't want to pray at all.

> You might be a redneck if: You stand and place your hand over your heart
> when they play the National Anthem.

You might be a liberal if: You have such a strong sense of pride in your country that you don't get upset if people don't do things your way.

> You might be a redneck if: You treat Viet Nam vets with great respect, and
> always have.

You might be a liberal if: You are proud of the men and women who fought for America, and allow yourself to question whether they needed to die.

> You might be a redneck if: You've never burned an American flag.

You might be a liberal if: You believe the part in the Bible about idol worship, and understand that the flag is just a symbol.

> You might be a redneck if: You know what you believe and you aren't afraid
> to say so, no matter who is listening.

You might be a liberal if: You have enough humility to listen to other people's opinions and aren't afraid when they're different from yours.

> You might be a redneck if: You respect your elders and expect your
> kids to do the same.

You might be a liberal if: You respect people of all ages and expect your kids to do the same.

> You might be a redneck if: You'd give your last dollar to a friend.

You might be a liberal if: You actually have given money to a friend in the last week.

Thanks, Pete.

How Do You Feel About...

So here's a little anecdote about Mac's sordid past.

Years ago, as a frequently-drunken undergraduate working too many jobs to pay for my education, I was sitting in a dorm lounge with some friends late one weekend night.

Now, my 19-year-old self knew just exactly how very clever I was, on the one hand--but also, my 19-year-old-self was doing some struggling with gender-identity and feminist issues. I'd been raised in a magnificently repressive fundamentalist Christian home and church-culture. I knew without any discussion or articulation that all queers went straight to hell, do not pass go, do NOT collect two hundred dollars. Queers die, get hauled straight to the basement, and popped in a kind of torpedo tube direct to the underworld, right? So my 19-year-old self had never so much as kissed a girl, and I certainly couldn't directly confront the odd...longings...starting to manifest themselves.

But I could and did approach the snarly problem from a feminist perspective. That approach was, in fact, quite encouraged in this particular little liberal-arts institution. I don't know why it was all right for me to first address the problems of misogyny in fundamentalist Christianity--but I suspect it was because my mother was a sort of underground feminist, in her more lucid and rebellious moments. She'd planted seeds of questions and anger about the injustices of misogyny that were more approachable to me than were questions of personal sexual identity.

So here I was with a group of similarly beginning-to-seek-enlightenment friends--both male* and female--sitting in a dorm late one Friday or Saturday night, probably a bit drunk. So the whole topic of female bodies comes up, and the upshot of the whole discussion leads us to decide we must conduct an impromptu and unscientific survey, right then, of whoever happened to walk through the lounge on their way to their room.

The survey questions were simple: "How do you feel about your breasts? Do you like them? Why or why not?"

This led, quite predictably, to a fairly wide variety of responses. Lots of the young women we asked promptly grabbed their own breasts, and put an exaggeratedly thoughtful look on their faces, and answered with a wide range of mostly very positive observations.

More than one guy grabbed his girlfriend's breasts, then grabbed his own chest in comparison, to offer his input, as well.

A couple of girls just averted their faces and fled for their rooms.

Meanwhile, almost twenty years later, I still recall this episode with disturbing clarity. Because it seems to me what we were really asking is something akin to, "how do you feel about the sex of your body--outside of normal gender conventions, if you can go there; or inside those conventions, if you cannot."

So I want to ask it again. In a more thoughtful and less drunken way, this time. How do you feel about your breasts? (Or your vagina, for that matter--but we just weren't goin' there, that night. We weren't that brave and clever.)

More specifically, how do you feel about the condition of being a woman, in a woman's body? And for the guys out there reading this (you know who you are...) I'd like to broaden that question to include you, as well. How do you feel about your male body? What do you think about the condition of being a man in a man's body?

How does this shape who we are--which is so much more than either just our brains or just our bodies, but seems to me to be a synergistic sum?

Because the harder I look at those questions, the more I realize how right we almost got it, that night so long ago. So very much of our personal identity is wrapped up in our sexual identifiers. Which explains an awful lot about interpersonal dynamics, when we damn well ought to know better by now.

*Interesting side-note: two of the three guys involved in this event later came out gay.

"We Have Met the Enemy..."

No, I'm not going to bitch about Iraq. Promise. Well, probably not, anyway.

I was thinking about build-it-yourself boogeymen, though. You know what I mean, right? Those terrors that assume gargantuan proportions in our own minds--then when we face them, the reality seems oddly anticlimactic.

And something more than the everyday neurosis--I'm not talking about run-of-the mill hypochondria, for instance. I mean something more on the order of Stephen King's The Dark Half...

Take, for example, the troubling idea of tulpa creation. Essentially, the idea is continued focus brings a being to life. From the site linked:

When Alexandra David-Neel journeyed through Tibet, one of the many mystical techniques she studied was that of tulpa creation. A tulpa, according to traditional Tibetan doctrines, is an entity created by an act of imagination, rather like the fictional characters of a novelist, except that tulpas are not written down. David-Neel became so interested in the concept that she decided to try to create one.

Yep. On purpose.
But wait! It gets even better!

In time the vision grew in clarity and substance until it was indistinguishable from physical reality-a sort of self-induced hallucination. But the day came when the hallucination slipped from her conscious control. She discovered that the monk would appear from time to time when she had not willed it. Furthermore her friendly little figure was slimming down and taking on a distinctly sinister aspect.

Eventually her companions, who where unaware of the mental disciplines she was practicing, began to ask about the "stranger" who had turned up in their camp-a clear indication that a creature which was no more that solidified imagination had definite objective reality.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...

If I may direct your attention...

I'm home from a weekend tramping through the woods on horseback, leaving me sunburnt, tired and grimy. So I'm just going to direct your attention to Kira's blog, Loving Twilight.

She has an excellent post about the new Dove ads, and female body-images: good, bad, and other fucked-uppedness...

She writes:

"I'd seen the ads in magazines, and I found them so refreshing I showed them to every woman in my office one day. Even the size 1 pixie with the glittery nails--and Ms. Glittery even commented that the women looked like real women.

Finally, I thought. Real hips on billboards! The world was a little better the day those Dove ads came out.

And then I read the post. It was written by a woman. In one sentence she undid all the praise she had for Dove.

"Thank God I'm skinnier than those women," she wrote.

Wham. All that hope of liberating the feminine ideal was dashed in one afterthought.

We can hate those other ads, with their images and ideals of the 95-pound blond in 5-inch heels all we want, but as long as we identify with said blond in our hearts, we have gained no ground."

The rest of the post is excellent, too. Go, read. I'll just grab a shower and a cold beer, and I'll be back in a wee while...

New Look

I've been tweaking the template a bit, trying to find something easier to read than the light text/dark background. When I started this blog, I liked the simplicity of this template's layout--and honestly, I just didn't realize how hard on the eyes it was going to be.

Let me know if you hate the changes too much.

Or if you like the changes, for that matter.

Everyone in the world knows more about CSS and html, than I do. I've come to terms with that--heh, and I still have lots of fun mucking about. I'll try not to lose the entire thing somewhere in the ether.

Thanks for your patience.

Blogger CYA

Dawno brought this up.

She says:

"I get CNet news alerts in my email daily. I feel a need to stay on top of certain techie news because of my job at a high tech company. Today I got a news alert and the headline was "Blogging to be Free" by Curt Hopkins, director and founder of the Committee to Protect Bloggers.

I found my self nodding my head when I read, "Newspapers, even individual Web sites, are relatively easy to shut down. But what can't be shut down is a self-perpetuating system like the blogosphere. What our experience has shown is not that a single organization, the Committee to Protect Bloggers, is a threat to tyrants, but that blogging itself is. Blogging's culture of sharing, quoting and linking has created a radical redundancy for powerful ideas." I've mentioned here and there about my fascination with the communities of interest being built in the blogosphere and even though my circle of online acquaintances, i.e. my community, might be somewhat small they have online friends who blog who have online friends who blog, etc., nearly ad infinitum."

Curt Hopkins, in C-Net's "Blogging to be Free", asserts:

"Iran has imprisoned more than 20 bloggers in the last six to eight months. But it is hardly the only villain. Bahrain, a relatively liberal country for a hereditary Persian Gulf monarchy, imprisoned three moderators of BahrainOnline, a bulletin board service, including the chief, a blogger named Ali Abdulemam. Ali and his two co-moderators were also subsequently released on their own recognizance after a similar effort by Bahraini bloggers and the CPB. China has a huge number of cyberdissidents behind bars. Security police in Malaysia and Syria have hauled bloggers in for interrogation."

It's not quite that bad, here in the States.

However, blogging in the Free World is not without risks, or sometimes consequences.
There seems to be a pretty common perception that blogging is becoming a risky thing to do.
Google turns up a ton of news articles about all this.

Then there was the whole nanny-getting-fired thing, not so long ago. I sort of followed the story in Making Light and Bitch Ph.D.

The recently infamous Dr. Richard Scott Nokes*, of Unlocked Wordhoard, discussed blogging as an academic.

It's been discussed widely elsewhere, too. There's already a Legal Guide for Bloggers, online.

I'm not sure what to make of all this. My instincts suggest that perhaps there's more going on with these employer/employee relationships than the employee's blog--but perhaps not. Keeping your job is powerful motivation to keep your mouth shut--and it always has been.

Staying out of prison is much more powerful motivation, as is avoiding torture.

Perhaps it's all been discussed to death, already. That's okay. It never hurts to float the issue across the surface of our thoughts now and then, especially in the context of the ongoing discussion we've been recently having, regarding technology, community, and interpersonal dynamics--perhaps it will serve to prevent us from becoming smug and complacent.


(*ed note: Dr. Nokes thinks The Silmarillion is boring. This pronouncement resulted in worldwide virtual protests....or, well, actually a couple of other bloggers and commenters took mild issue. Dr. Taylor at PoliBlog comes to Dr. Nokes' defense. To be perfectly honest, I've never been able to force myself all the way through the Sil--I keep falling asleep and having to start all over. I'm keeping my head down about that, though. Meanwhile, it's all been triffic good fun to watch.)