Things may be changing in Washington. Not only did the house Democrats, unlike their spineless Senate colleagues, not cave to the torturers-in-chief on warantless surveillance, but, Silvestre Reyes, the Chair of the House Intell Committee wrote President Bush, saying he won’t cave in to the bully:
“I , for one, do not intend to back down – not to the terrorists and not to anyone, including a President, who wants Americans to cower in fear.
We are a strong nation. We cannot allow ourselves to be scared into suspending the Constitution. If we do that, we might as well call the terrorists and tell them that they have won.”
It’s been a long time since anyone with any power in Washington spoke to the bully that way. Let’s hope he means it.
February 16th, 2008
Revere at Effect Measure reports that Harvard is now mandating that all faculty research in the School of Arts & Sciences be made available to the public immediately.
“The Harvard requirement mandates immediate free publication online in a Harvard hosted repository, searchable by Google and other search engines. Thus Harvard authors are not supposed to publish from now on in some extremely high profile journals like Nature and Science who prohibit fee access of papers for a period of time after publication. Whether these journals will publish Harvard papers under these conditions now is a question we don’t know the answer to. It could get very, very interesting.”
This is good news for Open Access, which I support in principle. But there is a problem. Many of us do much of our research and writing without funding. Open Access generally works by having the authors pay. When there is a funded grant, this is fine. But for some of us in smaller institutions which won’t pay te cost, this is a disincentive. I imagine that scholars in third world countries will also have problems with cost. Some mechanism needs to be developed to distinguish between funded and non-funded research.
February 16th, 2008
Commenting on Steven Bradbury’s awful testimony defending waterboarding and why this torture really isn’t “torture” Scott Horton accuses Bradbury of “participation in a criminal conspiracy to introduce a regime of torture as defined in American and international law”:
“Bradbury has no business serving in the Justice Department or in any other public office. He should now be the target of a criminal investigation, together with the other policy-level figures who drove the introduction and propagation of this torture regime. Indeed, beyond their essential criminality, no group of people have done more in the last seven years to undermine the security of every American citizen than these shadowy, ethically-challenged figures who seem propelled by the credo that they stand above the law because they can twist it to say whatever they want.”
February 16th, 2008