The message of Banned Books Week is more than the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular. The essential message of Banned Books Week is the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them.

Read the rest at ALA.org.

A great idea for the week of September 21?28, 2002. Hey, would someone like to rig up a page pointing to booksellers based upon the lists provided?

…Bloggers shined a spot light on McKinney, then on her opponent and put helped raise this election to national prominence. Undoubtedly, this helped give Majette the national exposure she needed for fund raising, which enabled her to mount a serious campaign. Without money, Majette, running against a popular incumbent, would have found it hard to get her message out.

…The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is declaring Denise Majette the winner over Cynthia McKinney in the Democratic primary for Congress in Georgia. With 161 of the 174 precincts reporting, Majette leads McKinney by a margin of 59 percent to 41 percent.

Read the rest in The night the lights lit up in Georgia.

One nagging thought is whether the Democrats could have pulled off something like this. Is this a victory for the blogsphere? After all, I never read a damn thing in the mainstream news about here campaign contributors. Or is this simply a victory for Republicans in influencing a Democratic primary?

…FDNY Deputy Chief Charles Blaich last January conceded at a public fire-safety seminar that commanders had “lost control” of the rescue process at the World Trade Center. And in an interview with Salon, Blaich said the critical presentation has cost him a promotion.

…”The press is not doing enough to ask tough questions,” complains Sally Regenhard, whose son Christian, a rookie New York firefighter, died in the terror attack on the World Trade Center. “I’m very dissatisfied with the press — I expected so much more. Where’s ’20/20,’ or ’48 Hours,’ or ‘Frontline’ on this story? Even the New York Times, which is running all this stuff, seems to be trying not to step on toes. I wish they would step on toes. Toes are crying out to be stepped on. But there’s this aura around the Fire Department and everybody’s untouchable.”

…The findings are stunning: FDNY chiefs were working with defective radios and often could not communicate their orders to evacuate. The same radio system had failed eight years earlier, during the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Caught up in the confusion and urgency of the moment, hundreds of on- and off-duty firefighters streamed into the towers without checking in with superiors, making it virtually impossible to keep track of their locations.

And through it all, the Fire Department was not communicating with the Police Department — apparently, the fruit of an age-old turf battle. After the south tower had collapsed, NYPD officers in helicopters were relaying at 10:07 a.m. that the north tower looked like it too, was about to fall. Twenty-one minutes later it did, killing at least 120 firefighters, many of whom had no idea the south tower had fallen or that the north tower’s demise was inevitable.

“I can remember talking with a high-ranking fire officer from the West Coast, who’d been to New York, and his comment to me was, ‘The truth will probably never be known because [the rescue effort] was a such a fiasco,'” says Janet Wilmoth, editor of Fire Chief magazine.

…”Three-hundred and forty-three firefighters die” he fumes, “and nobody fucking says anything?” In several of his columns, Breslin has blamed Giuliani for not getting the Fire Department radios that worked and for not fixing the endemic communication problem between the police and fire departments.

He also blames a new generation of journalists for coverage that fails to provoke passion. “The big thing in the press is total absence of anger. They’re the best-educated people we’ve ever had but there’s nothing inside them to get mad. They’re sheep,” he said in an interview.

Read the rest in Salon. Where is the press? As the Salon story says… plenty of tears and few tough questions.

Kinda like the NEA’s lesson plans. Not one history lesson plan. Not even for High School. Why is that? Forget the fact that it’s a politically correct set of lesson plans. Just concentrate on one simple question – where is it’s history component? At least there are teachers that want to do their jobs and teach.

technologists should be doing what comes naturally: inventing technology that outpaces the law and could even make new laws irrelevant.

“They’re much better off doing what they do best, writing code,” says Sonia Arrison of the Pacific Research Institute, a free-market think tank in San Francisco. “That’s where their competitive advantage lies.”

Put another way, who made a bigger difference: Yet another letter-scribbling activist or Phil Zimmermann, who wrote the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption software? How about Shawn Fanning, the man who created Napster? Or the veterans of the Internet Engineering Task Force, which oversees the fundamental protocols of the Internet?

Read the rest in Declan McCullagh’s CNet article.

Amnesty International’s Without distinction – attacks on civilians by Palestinian armed groups via a Third Way

It’s Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations vs. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History? in this Policy Review article.

Economist.com – Globalization Has Helped Poor, Study Says

Far from creating poverty as critics claim, rapid globalization of the world economy has sliced the proportion of abject poor across the planet, according to a controversial new study released on Monday.

It says that freer commerce, epitomized by the cutting of tariffs and the lifting of trade barriers, has boosted economic growth and lifted the incomes of rich and poor alike.

Philadelphia Inquirer: Jane Eisner | Terrorism’s tenuous link to poverty

…terrorists draw their support and their human ammunition not from the most impoverished, illiterate in their societies, but from the educated and (relatively) well-off. In fact, terrorists are not motivated by a desperate, ill-informed attempt to improve living conditions, but by religious and political fanaticism bred in countries without democratic infrastructures.

Terrorism isn’t an economic crime; it’s a violent form of political engagement.

…Supporting democracy in non-Western cultures is a delicate, risky task. But in this year of terror, on this weekend of independence celebrations, it is one we should embrace with renewed passion.

A new order requires CEOs and financial chiefs at companies with more than $1.2 billion in revenue last year to swear under oath in writing that the numbers in their companies? recent financial reports are correct. Will this make a difference?

That’s what Bill shares about corporate loyalty and man is it so true. I think people need to revisit to the early nineties recession, and the corporate response to it, for where this began. IBM’s layoffs come particularly to mind.

This book excerpt looks mighty interesting.

Better yet, this Business 2.0 article from last year connects the dots.

If this sounds like deja vu all over again, it is–sort of. The 1990-91 recession introduced the notion of equal-opportunity job loss; back then, college-educated workers were among the first to be laid off. Debate raged in Washington about how to retrain white-collar workers and ready them for the new job insecurity. Companies began getting very explicit in their warnings to employees: Jobs were not for life. Harvard professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter was one of a chorus of academics and consultants arguing that since companies could no longer provide job security, they should do more to give workers “employability security” through training and skills counseling. All this prompted a 1994 FORTUNE cover story called “The New Deal” that said legions of white-collar workers were encountering the “widespread replacement of the job compact of the previous era, the one that traded loyalty for job security. That deal is virtually dead.”

It’s deader then a doornail.