Tuesday, April 29, 2003

Your chance to be sponsored to learn how to surveille better. This memo circulating about a college campus nearby:

Subject: URGENT: DHS Scholarship/Fellowships (fwd)

Please help to get the information about these scholarships disseminated around campus. There is a very short deadline!
Subject: DHS Scholarship/Fellowships

EARLY DEADLINES FOR NEW DHS FELLOWSHIP PROGRAMS
Applicants for the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) new undergraduate scholarship and graduate fellowship programs must send the department a written notification of their intention to apply by Wednesday, April 30, 2003. Applications and transcripts must be postmarked by Monday, May 19, and references sent by Tuesday, May 27. More information on the programs is available at:.
This first DHS competition for scholarships and fellowships is for study beginning fall 2003 in areas of study deemed relevant to the department's mission such as: "physical, biological, social, and behavioral sciences,
engineering, mathematics, and computer science." DHS materials describe the awards as providing "competitive stipends and tuition allowances."
When the program is fully operational, it is expected to support up to 100 new students each year at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Friday, April 25, 2003

Human Shields in Iraq. Here's an extraordinary interview with an Australian human shield, Ruth Russell, who relates, for example, the slaughter of civilians at the food silo where she was during the war. It's archived here, in the listings for Friday, April 25, 2003, but for only five days, i.e. until May 1. It's the segment "• War & Peace: Australian Human Shields..." and begins in the first hour at 30:45 of the show. Russell's urgency and frankness, talking about common decency and concern, stand in stark contrast to the fakery of the interviewer.
While you're at it, you might listen to another segment with some stunning material on a project at a women's prison, in which inmates are making quilts to commemorate the death of their children, or other children, by SIDS. It's the segment "• Street Stories - Women's Correctional Centre," again here on Friday, April 25, 2003. It starts in the second hour and runs from 9:55 to 39:30.

Wednesday, April 23, 2003

To: Hon. Peter Beattie, Premier of Queensland
April 23, 2003

Mr. Beattie,

Here in the US, I've just heard you, online, interviewed on the ABC, saying that the continued use of the word "n-----" on a cricket-ground stand in your state is not racist because it is the nickname of a Queensland sportsman of the past, a nickname that stemmed from the sportsman's preference for a brand of shoe polish whose brand name also was N-----. You argued -- and here are your crucial words -- that the term was not racist at the time it was coined, so was not racist, now.

This, surely, is a very pinched construction of what constitutes racism. The brand name, when adopted, made use of a term that was NEVER acceptable other than to the racists who used it. It was racist then, in exactly the same way that it is, now. I am confused as to how you could be confused on this point. Do you think it was a word used charitably and charmingly by beneficent, socially dominant people such as those who attached it to a boot polish, rather than as part of, and an expression of, a whole system of savage racial oppression? Are you familiar, by any chance, with the history of blackface in the United States, and its connection with shoe polish?

(The reappropriation of the epithet by some African-Americans, today, underscores the indisputable argument that no person of a white, majority population has the right to use the term today, particularly members of populations with histories of bigotry, such as were perpetrated in the US and Australia (and particularly, might I respectfully submit, your own sunny state).

I encourage you to reexamine your lamentable position.