Motley Moose – Archive

In 1989 the Chinese government had enough of the protesters occupying a huge square in the middle of its national capital, so they kicked out the foreign press, shut down communications and rolled in the tanks.

Well, they almost shut down communications…

In 2009 the Iranian government tried the same thing.  It didn’t work any better.

Arbor Networks provides a good view on Iran’s connection to the Internet via the Internet Observatory.  The fat healthy traffic to the left of the dropoff is what Iranian Internet traffic looks like at normal times, the cliff denotes the election and to the right of that you see traffic increasingly “leaking” past the imposed restrictions.

I’m still trying to figure out how I missed this last week.

For those of us who had allowed the unfortunate continued existence of hatemonger Fred Phelps, Pastor of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, to momentarily sink below our radar, his “organization” made itself all too visible on February 5, 2009 when anti-gay protesters descended upon Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, Kansas. The school was targeted because it has formed what it refers to as a “Gay and Straight Alliance,” and because the students elected an openly gay homecoming king in 2007. But this time, when Phelps’ dozen or so protesters appeared to shout and harass the public, they were not met by the Patriot Guard. They were confronted instead by hundreds of students, parents, and school staff who gathered outside the school to counter-protest.

Photo Credit: Tammy Ljungblad/The Kansas City Star 

Over at Mudflats is a great story about a one-man protest at the Juneau Docks.

The huge Anti-Palin rally in Anchorage last weekend got a tremendous amount of media coverage, and support from around the nation. People needed to know that not all Alaskans support Palin as the VP nominee, or share her values.  Some may even like Palin as a governor, but find her completely inappropriate on the national (nevermind international) stage. Huge rallies are great, but sometimes a powerful statement can be made by just one person. Here’s a wonderful story sent to me from Doug, a Mudflatter in Juneau, Alaska.

Thanks for standing up and speaking out when it was not easy or comfortable to do so.

I agree – thank you, Doug!

Mudflats, a blog by Alaskan AKMuckraker has an article today about a rally – organized by eight women over coffee – held to counter the event welcoming Gov. Palin home from her ordeal answering questions for the first time since being nominated by the GOP for President (er: *Vice* President).  The turnout dwarfed the Pro-Palin rally yesterday.

Alaskan Women Reject Palin was, by this account, the *”biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state”*.  At least 1,400 people showed up, and to put that in perspective that would be akin to 100,000 New Yorker women showing up to a political rally in New York City (we can be fairly certain no-one took the train from New Jersey to Anchorage or drove up from Philadelphia for the event).  This compares to perhaps 1,000 Palin fans who showed up for her event that same day.

Alaska Daily News also has an article with 50 more first-hand pics.