Here’s some things as they can and ought to be.

Shared Article from CityLab

Photographing Europe's Abandoned Border Crossings

After nearly 20 years of passport-free travel in parts of Western and Central Europe, many former checkpoints resemble ghost towns.

citylab.com

People, and liberty, are more important than any nation. We don’t need any military frontiers and we don’t need any guard-posts. Every border ought to be as easy to cross as the street in front of your house or the highway from Auburn to Opelika. Abandon all the checkpoints. Open all the borders. End international apartheid, now and forever.

Actions may be legal, or they may be illegal. Whether they are moral or not is a totally separate question. (When the law is wrong, lawbreaking is the right thing to do.) But while actions may be illegal, people are not. A person's existence and life and worth aren’t reducible to the papers that they carry or the legal or political status that they have. If you’re talking about people that way, you ought to consider talking about them a different way. Referring to women or men or children or human beings by their legal status alone is dehumanizing and insulting to them; it is also coarsening and brutalizing for the person doing the referring. It encourages the worst in those who do it, and it justifies inhuman reactions toward those that it is done to. No human being is "illegal."

See also.

• GT 2011-10-24: Letter to the Editor of the Opelika-Auburn News, October 10, 2011
• GT 2007-12-17: International Apartheid in Roswell
• GT 2006-04-09: Freedom Movement Celebrity Deathmatch

Shared Article from theplainsman.com

SGA passes unisex restroom bill - A week after the Student Gover…

A week after the Student Government Association senate tabled a bill that favored the implementation of unisex restrooms in future buildings on campus…

theplainsman.com

Auburn folks: A follow-up to last week’s article about the unisex restroom bill at Auburn’s SGA: there’s been a partial victory resolution. The important part, I suppose, and the good part, is that the resolution passed and the University will make efforts to improve access to unisex restrooms across campus. The downside is that for reasons best known to them, a number of SGA senators decided to remove references to queer and trans members of the Auburn community from the resolution before they voted for it. But I am glad to see that the bill has been passed.

A week after the Student Government Association senate tabled a bill that favored the implementation of unisex restrooms in future buildings on campus, the senate revisited the matter Monday, Nov. 10 at its weekly meeting.

The bill passed.

India Napier, senator for the College of Veterinary Medicine, who sponsored the bill, cited unisex bathrooms could benefit a variety of people including families and transgender people in last week's Nov. 3 meeting.

At this senate meeting, a number of students and faculty showed up to voice their concerns and needs for unisex restrooms.

"This bill will not affect a majority of the student body," said Elizabeth Beasley, sophomore in forestry. "If anything, for the people it would affect, it is probably very important to actually have these be implemented across campus. Most of the unisex restrooms are not available to the students or if they are, they are extremely out of the way."

The Diversity and Multicultural Affairs Committee’s bill will make it University protocol to implement unisex restrooms in newly constructed buildings across the campus.

. . .

Although Napier said she is happy the bill finally passed, she expressed concern about her fellow SGA senators after they voted to remove Max Zinner, political director of Spectrum, Auburn's LGBT community, from the bill.

"I am so happy that it passed and that's all that matters, but I am disappointed with the modifications that were made," Napier said. "It was clear that the modifications, such as the lack of the gender identity line and the removal of the individual Max Zinner, really indicates that there is a discomfort in regard to gender identity with senators in SGA and that's something that they're going to have to deal with, not me."

–Ben Ruffin, SGA passes unisex restroom bill
The Auburn Plainsman 10 November 2014.

Shared Article from Business Insider

FBI Arrests Former SpaceX Employee, Alleging He Ran The 'Deep We…

The site was the deeb web's biggest drug marketplace.

James Cook @ businessinsider.com

O.K., so:

1. Frak, frak, frak. This is a shame. It’s also a sign of some things we need to get seriously careful about.

2. We need to talk about new security models for online black markets.

If the Feebs’ bill of particulars is accurate, then it’d seem that there were a lot of unforced errors here. That said, in this case it sounds like a lot of the case was allegedly built either by being in from the start and placing undercovers, or else by starting out with a series of controlled buys and then using their position over time to move on to actually infiltrating the support staff. From the looks of things their campaigns over the last year or so have been pretty aggressive. In either case, this sounds like a good reason to think that part of the security model needs to be working on ways of doing business in other ways — perhaps, in particular, through smaller federated sites and peer-to-peer relationships rather than through single clearing-house servers, — because Tor and Bitcoin at this point are not nearly enough to cope with the threat model.

Auburn folks: Spectrum at Auburn sent out this e-mail asking for folks to take a second to write their SGA Senators to vote in favor of an upcoming resolution to improve access to unisex bathrooms on campus for those who need them. A copy of E-mail follows.

Hi everyone,

In case you haven't heard yet there is currently a resolution making it's way through the SGA senate regarding the implementation of unisex restrooms. This is something that Spectrum has been working on for a long time and I probably don't need to tell you why this would be a good thing for Auburn. If you are a student please contact your senators to express support for the resolution. Contact information for all of the senators can be found here:

http://wp.auburn.edu/sga/branches/senate/

If you have nothing to do on Monday [10 November] at 7:30, you are also encouraged to come to the SGA senate meeting itself and give your own reasons for supporting this resolution during the open floor time.

Here is a letter template that you can use all you need to do is add your name and college. Of course you are free to edit it however you like:

---

Dear Senators,

My name is (insert name here) and I am a student in (insert college here). I am contacting you to express my support for the resolution regarding the implementation of unisex restrooms. This would help a wide variety of people in our community. This could be anyone from a student in a wheelchair that needs assistance from someone that may not be the same gender as they are to a transgender student who is concerned about being harassed simply for using the restroom. As the Auburn family we must strive to be inclusive. It is also important to note that the way that this resolution is written there is no cost to the student body.

Also, this resolution requests that the interactive campus map be updated with regards to unisex restrooms. Currently the map has a number of inaccuracies and misrepresents the actual number and location of unisex restrooms on campus. I believe this has been brought up with the administration but still nothing has been done. A resolution from the SGA could be the push that is necessary for the map to be updated.

For these reasons, I ask you to vote in favor of the resolution on Monday. Thank you for your time.

In related news, I just sent out more e-mails with the signature “War Eagle” in the last 5 minutes than I have done in the previous 33 years of my life.