For a few residents of a small Connecticut town, the land of the free doesn’t seem quite so free any more.
With the backing of the so-called “eminent domain” doctrine, the town of New London has decided to confiscate property from landowners near the Thames River. This would be less odious if it were for some public good, like a badly needed water purification system because everyone would otherwise die of thirst (to pick an example completely at random).
But no, the real reason:
…to clear the way for a private development project that would include a hotel, a conference center and offices. The city has argued that redeveloping 90 acres along the river and near a new Pfizer research plant would give a much-needed economic boost to the city of about 26,000 people, where the unemployment rate of 7.6% is about twice the state’s rate…
To reduce down to the essentials, private citizens are having their homes confiscated by the government in favor of corporations.
All arguments about the benefit to the town aside, this is completely unfair to the people being expelled from their homes - some “generations old” - and undoubtedly the corporate developments will gain much more out of this than the people of New London, who will have no ownership of the new developments. Smells like economic fascism to me.
I was checking my mail earlier today and I picked up an advertisement for Bell Canada’s DSL service. One of the key features was “Parental Control” - the filters that block supposedly inappropriate content from your “kids.”
Of course, no such advertisement should be without an example of the type of inappropriate content blocked. You can see for yourself at adrants - it’s the female body.
Other people have made note that this is a textbook and adrants suggests that Bell is saying education is bad. While I agree that there is this connotation, I find myself astounded that the female body would be used as an example of “inappropriate content.” C’mon people, this is not Taliban-run Afghanistan.
Now, I’m anti-censorship in any form, but it seems to me that a more suitable example of inappropriate content for children might be Neo-nazi propoganda sites, if you must have censorship. But it’s just like a major corporation to bash women - the latest statistics say that corporations still don’t have that glass ceiling problem solved yet. Way to go, morons.
So lately I’ve been really busy. Stuff on my plate:
- Been working on my new novel. It’s at ~20,000 words now. If there’s any interest, I can post a teaser chapter for you. Let me know.
- Doing another editing pass at Alice - the final one, I hope. There are a few grammar errors in there and silly spelling mistakes which I should have caught the first time around.
- The Earth: 2025 rewrite is coming along. The basic economy and war engine is done. A million little nitpicky things to do. I’m hoping to run an alpha server by the end of March.
- My first aikido test is Monday Feb. 28, and I’ll be testing for 5th kyu. Lots of turning-people-into-pretzels goodness.
Other points of note:
- My sister will be halfway through U.S. Navy bootcamp on Wednesday. Wish her the best.
- My blog is now linked at matthewgood.org - cool!
- I have three cats demanding attention. Time to run!
