Apr 302009
The Raleigh News and Observer reports in “Protest stops Tancredo’s UNC speech“:
CHAPEL HILL — UNC-CH police released pepper spray and threatened to use a Taser on student protesters Tuesday evening when a crowd disrupted a speech by former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo opposing in-state tuition benefits to unauthorized immigrants.
Hundreds of protesters converged on Bingham Hall, shouting profanities and accusations of racism while Tancredo and the student who introduced him tried to speak. Minutes into the speech, a protester pounded a window of the classroom until the glass shattered, prompting Tancredo to flee and campus police to shut down the event.
And further into the story:
Before the event, campus security removed two women who delayed Tancredo’s speech by stretching a 12-foot banner across the front of the classroom. It read, “No dialogue with hate.”
Police escorted the women into the hallway, amid more than 30 protesters who clashed with the officers trying to keep them out of the overcrowded classroom. After police released pepper spray and threatened the crowd with a Taser, the protesters gathered outside Bingham Hall.
And more examples:
Inside the classroom, several student protesters screamed curses at Tancredo and Riley Matheson, president of the UNC-Chapel Hill chapter of Youth for Western Civilization.
Someone needs to teach these kids about Free Speech and engaging in discussion and debate rather than this sort of childish behavior. These UNC students ought to be ashamed.
Some video from the event
Apr 112009
The international version of Speigel Online had arecent article titled, “Fearing Uprising, Russia Backs Moldova’s Communists” about the student uprisings in in Moldova to protest the Communist rule of that country.
Similar to other uprisings in the region, these appear to be student and citizen uprisings against the corruption in the government. One of the notable things about these recent protests is how effectively Twitter was used to both communicate among the protesters and to communicate events to the rest of the world.
Riot police took back the Moldovan parliament and presidential buildings on Wednesday, and Thursday was calm in Chisinau. But a large protest in the capital was brewing on Friday — organized on a Twitter stream tagged #pman, which stands for the initials of Chisinau’s biggest square– with protesters claiming the government would use the threat of a Romanian coup as a reason to arrest people illegally.
“Communists block students in their classrooms and threaten them with exmatriculation if they protest,” claimed one Twitterer on Friday. “Somebody help Moldova pleaseeee,” wrote another.
This sort of thing is getting more and more common. As Spiegel notes:
In the West, the uprising looked like another post-Soviet “color” revolution, a people’s movement against an old-guard Communist regime, such as Georgia’s 2003 “Rose Revolution” or Ukraine’s 2004 “Orange Revolution.” From Moscow’s perspective, that’s exactly the problem. “The Moscow authorities are afraid of spontaneous mass protests in the regions … and, for this reason, Russian television is showing what is happening in an exclusively negative light,” Dmitry Oreshkin, a Moscow-based political analyst, told Reuters. “It is beneficial for the Kremlin to show the consequences of peoples’ protests to justify why it needs to be tough.”
It will be interesting to see how authoritarian governments react to these tactics. The United States Government is already starting to go down that path. The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 would federalize control over the nation’s internet infrstructure and according to the EFF:
“One proposed provision gives the President unfettered authority to shut down Internet traffic in an emergency and disconnect critical infrastructure systems on national security grounds.”
Maybe there are good points in the Cybersecurity Act. But we also have to be careful to give the government a tool for shutting down dissent on the internet.
As the Moldova protests show, telecommunications and internet infrastrcuture are becoming crucial tools for bringing about political change and giving oppressed people hope.
Apr 102009
From Yahoo news, I saw an article titled, “Wells Fargo projects record $3 billion 1Q profit.”
I guess that’s good news. Maybe. The news article talks about how their stock price surged and the overall market was up 159 points.
But then in the 4th paragraph, you read:
San Francisco-based Wells Fargo, which has received $25 billion in funds as part of the government’s bank bailout plan, anticipates earnings after preferred dividends of about 55 cents per share. Revenue for the period ended March 31 is expected to climb 16 percent to $20 billion.
So let’s see, what if we take away the government bail out money. Let me see if I can do this math,
$3 billion – $25 billion = -$22 billion
So without the bailout money, they would have recorded a $22Billion dollar loss?
That would have been a huge loss, back in the days before Obama’s proposed 10 year 9.3 Trillion dollar deficit.