The Null Device

2000/8/26

This blog will probably be a bit quiet this weekend, as I won't be spending much time at an Internet-connected computer. I am typing this on a laptop connected to a borrowed modem at the premises I'm moving to; I won't have my usual facilities here until next weekend, most probably. Until then, things may be a bit sporadic here.

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A Scottish surgeon was denied permission to amputate a healthy limb from a private patient who wanted it removed. The patient, American Greg Furth, suffers from body dysmorphic disorder, a condition which affects his perception of his own body.

He has felt his right leg was not part of his body since he was a child. He says it is neither a sexual fetish, as some people believe, nor a mental illness.

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More reasons to use Linux: A laptop stolen in London was found abandoned on the Tube and returned to its owner, because the thief couldn't figure out what to do with it. When he turned it on, the Linux login prompt threw him.

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The local Murdoch rag has this scare piece about the evil S11 radicals luring innocent children into their web of terrorism. Meanwhile, The Age has this balanced look at the S11 movement and some of the people behind it. All things considered, the scary thing is the World Economic Forum and the agendas it pushes of allowing multinational corporations to override national sovereignty and relegating human beings to mere worker/consumer units. If there isn't broad enough resistance to prevent vested interests from painting the demonstrators as a small hard core of misguided terrorists, the laws and treaties these people will push for will turn us all into serfs in a global corporate feudalism, and render democracy impotent.

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