There are so many untold stories about people who fight for liberty everyday in the world. Here are just five that were listed on
The Daily Bailout email update. THE DAILY BAILOUT is still under construction but will be a website dedicated to making local news global and making global news local. Heroes are all around us. Just read:
1. Minister imprisoned for anti-war beliefs: Clarence Waldron, pastor of First Baptist Church in Windsor, Vermont, was fired by his church board, then convicted of violating Congress's "patriotic" act to protect Americans. He was sentenced to 15 years in jail. Although the year was 1918, Waldron was victim of another kind of Patriot Act called the Espionage Act. Unfortunately, hundreds of Americans were unjustly jailed under this Act. How many will be unjustly jailed under Patriot Act II?
- Making millions of books searchable online: Along with New York Public Library, Google will commit the next decade uploading books from these university libraries - Stanford, Harvard, Michigan, & Oxford. Google is now the most popular web search engine. It was started in 1998 by two Stanford grad students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
- Recycling buildings and making them light: The unbearable lightness of being refers to not only the weight of materials used in building, but also the natural illumination of the design. Architect John F. Shaw turns old places into new environmentally sound buildings. Designing schools, churches, or jails, Shaw succeeds at creating buildings with lots of natural light and using materials that already exist within our ecology. He is a LEED-certified architect. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.
- Fighting for cognitive freedom & the right to neuroprivacy: Wrye Sententia (yes, as in "sentential") of the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics (CCLE) is preparing us for the future by fighting today. For example, she is fighting brain fingerprinting as a tool for law enforcement, a technique becoming widespread. Others Sententia warns against their pervasiveness: preventative mental health, neuromarketing, nanotechnology, and germ lines. Your brain may be your last private space to own. However, there's that pesky dark side of the brain too; as Hamlet says, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
- First Muslim woman to win Nobel Peace Prize battles for freedom in America: Iranian dissident Shirin Ebadi's memoirs cannot be published in country that lauds her work against the tyranny of Iran. But the Bush administration won't allow it because that would be "trading with the enemy." And here we have the heart of the matter: Freedom & Peace vs. Fascism & War. We may be more like Iran than we would like to think.