I’ve decided to christen a new category of blog entry — “Novel News”. Let’s just face facts, shall we? I’m a news junkie. I read various sources throughout the course of my day — progressive, left, middle of the road and yes, sometimes even conservative. I like to, nay, need to stay abreast of the day’s current events. It feels like an unhealthy compulsion at times; I’m not really sure what it really brings me other than fodder for entries like this. Occasionally, while scanning the headines, I laugh out loud, sometimes I curse, but I am always coming across interesting stories. So, in my ongoing attempts at complete disclosure, here is the the first installment of Novel News. We’ll start with a collection of some absurd news of the day.
US Group Implants Electronic Tags in Workers
“An Ohio company has embedded silicon chips in two of its employees – the first known case in which US workers have been ‘tagged’ electronically as a way of identifying them.
CityWatcher.com, a private video surveillance company, said it was testing the technology as a way of controlling access to a room where it holds security video footage for government agencies and the police…”
[LSG comment] Talk about the future, now. I’m not sure exactly how many sci-fi tales feature just this kind of scary technology on a universal scale but the number would probably fry even the circuits of HAL 9000. Let me rephrase, actually; I firmly believe that technology is value-neutral — it is the cultural values with which a technology is applied that make it scary. And, unfortunately, some scary cultural values are controlling the adoption of new technologies, especially in the “security” arena. One other note, how Orwellian does “CityWatcher” sound? Yikes.
U.S. Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil Companies
“The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.
New projections, buried in the Interior Department’s just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government…”
Sale of public lands proposed; White House hopes to replace funds lost to logging cutbacks
“The Bush administration identified Friday more than 300,000 acres of national forest, including about 85,000 acres in California, that could be sold to pay for services in rural areas across the country.
National Forest Service officials said they want to sell about 200,000 acres to raise about $800 million over the next few years to pay for schools and roads in rural counties hurt by logging cutbacks on federal land. The Bureau of Land Management has said it also plans to sell federal lands to raise an estimated $250 million over five years….”
[LSG comment] Do I have to make a connection between the last two news items or is it painfully obvious? I think the latter, but I’ll connect some dots anyway. G-d forbid “we, the people” actually tax the corporations making mad loot from the wholesale pillaging of our natural resources in order to maintain the infrastructure those very same corporations require to extract said resources in order to make their mad loot. I won’t even get into how many billions are being dropped on defense spending and reconstruction efforts abroad when we can’t even build roads here at home.
Filed under: Novel News
