Today in History...
You may not know a lot about Pattern Recognition…
but Pattern Recognition knows all about you…What do Santa Clara County, the Southern Pacific Railroad and today relate to one another? Think fast or it will be tomorrow... Think slow and it will be Pattern Recognition. Don’t think at all and it will be next stop Santa Clara.
Activists in 77 cities will be protesting against corporate rule and political corruption on Friday, May 10. This date marks the 127th anniversary of the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision, in which the Supreme Court first ruled that corporations are "persons,” entitled to rights under the U.S Constitution.
Tomorrow in Entropy
Robert Maclean ean is a former air marshal fired for an act of whistleblowing. He has continued to fight over seven long years for what once would have passed as simple justice: getting his job back. His is an all-too-twenty-first-century story of the extraordinary lengths to which the U.S. government is willing to go to thwart whistleblowers.
First, the government retroactively classified a previously unclassified text message to justify firing MacLean. Then it invoked arcane civil service procedures, including an “interlocutory appeal” to thwart him and, in the process, enjoyed the approval of various courts and bureaucratic boards apparently willing to stamp as “legal” anything the government could make up in its own interest.
And yet here’s the miracle at the heart of this tale: MacLean refused to quit, when ordinary mortals would have thrown in the towel. Now, with a recent semi-victory, he may not only have given himself a shot at getting his old job back, but also create a precedent for future federal whistleblowers. In the post-9/11 world, people like Robert MacLean show us how deep the Washington rabbit hole really goes.
- KBOO